During the course of 2020, I wrote a book with the same title as this newsletter. It was the early days of the pandemic, and I was working from home while helping to look after (and largely failing to educate) my son and daughter. Here’s how I began the first chapter:
As I type these words, it’s Thursday 26 March 2020. I am seated at my desk, at home, in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic. It’s a time of tremendous fear and uncertainty, but I’m one of the lucky ones: my family and I are well, so far, and able to self-isolate at home, on the edge of a small town about 30 miles outside London…
And here is how I moved from the particulars of my situation towards larger themes:
I find it hard to imagine what it will be like to read back these words as this moment recedes and whatever is going to happen happens, but I know that it will be difficult to recapture the depths of the uncertainty that I and the rest of the world are currently facing… Yet this is just an extreme version of something that is always true: human understanding is always both provisional and belated. Many things that appear obvious in retrospect were anything but obvious at the time, because the clarity we experience when looking back in time is utterly unlike the cloud of uncertainty that surrounds day-to-day existence. The world is far more complex than any stories we can tell about it; far more mysterious, far harder to predict. Our capacity to tidy things up into tales of cause and consequence is at once an astonishing and a dangerous talent.
Much of what I thought and wrote at the start of 2020 now feels dated. For instance, it took some effort for me not to swap the phrase “in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic” for something more prophetic. Did I really think, back in March 2020, that we’d reached the middle of anything? Was I hoping it would all be over by Easter?
The themes of uncertainty and self-deception still resonate, however. I continue to be surprised by how many people have strong, clear views about wickedly complex, unfolding phenomena, whether these are political, economic or technological. At the same time, I understand how useful such narratives can be—at least when it comes to looking decisive and defeating rival perspectives. Doubt is painful, effortful and preoccupying; certainty is aligned with action, confidence and impact. As the American pragmatist philosopher John Dewey put it in his 1910 book How We Think:
Reflective thinking is always more or less troublesome because it involves overcoming the inertia that inclines one to accept suggestions at their face value; it involves willingness to endure a condition of mental unrest and disturbance. Reflective thinking, in short, means judgment suspended during further inquiry; and suspense is likely to be somewhat painful … To maintain the state of doubt and to carry on systematic and protracted inquiry—these are the essentials of thinking.
Here, then, are four practical thoughts about doubt; and, in particular, about how and why it’s precious to maintain a state of constructive uncertainty when all around you are leaping to praise or condemn:
There are few things that any of us have enough knowledge and experience of to be able to deal with entirely unassisted: much of the great power of human thinking comes from collaboration and communication. In order to start learning, you need to think as clearly as possible about the gaps in your knowledge, experience and expertise—and what you need to find out in order to redress these.
When our knowledge is uncertain or provisional, the evolving nature of this uncertainty itself becomes the truth it is our duty to communicate with as much integrity as possible. Cultivate the language of reasoned uncertainty in yourself, and beware of certainty in the absence of evidence among others.
It’s vastly more comfortable to assume that our emotional intuitions can be translated into hard-and-fast rules about the world than it is to assume that they are, at best, useful in some circumstances. To constructively challenge an assumption, you need to reinstate difficult questions in the place of over-simplifications.
It is possible endlessly to confirm anything you wish to believe if all you do is look for examples that support it. By contrast, attempting to falsify an explanation can provide a test allowing you to compare it to other explanations and determine which is better. Wherever possible, seek falsification over confirmation; and don’t be seduced by a theory that it’s impossible to disprove. To explain everything is to explain nothing.
These are hardly revolutionary recommendations, especially if you’ve read your Popper. But they are difficult in ways that, I believe, are particularly significant if you already know all about the scientific method, cognitive bias and Popper—and may be inclined to dismiss the views of those who don’t. As I put it in my final chapter:
In the end, perhaps the most important thing we can do is keep talking to one another, and trying truly to listen to what is being said in response… Almost all worthwhile writing is bound up with reading and re-writing; and almost all worthwhile thinking with reflection and re-thinking. Words are slippery, remarkable, exquisite things. And perhaps the most remarkable fact of all is that they can, like many of our creations, sometimes become better and wiser than the people they begin with—and help them to become better in turn.
With apologies for quoting myself quite so much, I hope that these thoughts resonate in 2023; and that you’ll feel free to share your own in response.