"I'm not sure": using uncertainty to our advantage

"I'm not sure": using uncertainty to our advantage

Just as we have problems with resulting and hindsight bias, when we evaluate decisions solely on how they turn out, we have a mirror-image problem in making prospective decisions. We get only one try at any given decision—one flip of the coin—and that puts great pressure on us to feel we have to be certain before acting, a certainty that necessarily will overlook the influences of hidden information and luck.

Famed novelist and screenwriter William Goldman (who wrote The Princess Bride, as well as Misery and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid) reflected on his experiences working with actors like Robert Redford, Steve McQueen, Dustin Hoffman, and Paul Newman at the height of their successful careers. What did it mean to be a "movie star"? He quoted an actor who explained the type of characters he wanted to play: "I don’t want to be the man who learns. I want to be the man who knows."

We are discouraged from saying "I don't know" or "I'm not sure." We regard those expressions as vague, unhelpful, and even evasive. But getting comfortable with "I'm not sure" is a vital step to being a better decision-maker. We have to make peace with not knowing.

Embracing "I'm not sure" is difficult. We are trained in school that saying "I don't know" is a bad thing. Not knowing in school is considered a failure of learning. Write "I don't know" as an answer on a test and your answer will be marked wrong.

Admitting that we don't know has an undeservedly bad reputation. Of course, we want to encourage acquiring knowledge, but the first step is understanding what we don't know. Neuroscientist Stuart Firestein's book Ignorance: How It Drives Science champions the virtue of recognizing the limits of our knowledge. (You can get a taste of the book by watching his TED Talk, "The Pursuit of Ignorance.") In the book and the talk, Firestein points out that in science, "I don't know" is not a failure but a necessary step toward enlightenment. He backs this up with a great quote from physicist James Clerk Maxwell: "Thoroughly conscious ignorance is the prelude to every real advance in science." I would add that this is a prelude to every great decision that has ever been made.

What makes a decision great is not that it has a great outcome. A great decision is the result of a good process, and that process must include an attempt to accurately represent our own state of knowledge. That state of knowledge, in turn, is some variation of "I'm not sure."

"I'm not sure" does not mean that there is no objective truth. Firestein's point is, in fact, that acknowledging uncertainty is the first step in executing on our goal to get closer to what is objectively true. To do this, we need to stop treating "I don't know" and "I'm not sure" like strings of dirty words.

What if we shifted our definition of "I don't know" from the negative frame ("I have no idea" or "I know nothing about that," which feels like we lack competence or confidence) to a more neutral frame? What if we thought about it as recognizing that, although we might know something about the chances of some event occurring, we are still not sure how things will turn out in any given instance? That is just the truth. If we accept that, "I'm not sure" might not feel so bad.

What good poker players and good decision-makers have in common is their comfort with the world being an uncertain and unpredictable place. They understand that they can almost never know exactly how something will turn out. They embrace that uncertainty and, instead of focusing on being sure, they try to figure out how unsure they are, making their best guess at the chances that different outcomes will occur. The accuracy of those guesses will depend on how much information they have and how experienced they are at making such guesses. This is part of the basis of all bets.

To be sure, an experienced poker player is more likely to make a better guess than a novice player at determining the chances they will win or lose a hand. The experienced player knows the math better and is better able to narrow down what their opponents' cards might be based on how players behave with certain types of hands. They will also be better at figuring out the choices their opponents are likely to make with those cards. So, yes, more experience will allow the player to narrow down the possibilities. None of that experience, however, makes it possible for a poker player to know how any given hand will turn out.

This is true in any field. An expert trial lawyer will be better than a new lawyer at guessing the likelihood of success of different strategies and picking a strategy on this basis. Negotiating against an adversary whom we have previously encountered gives us a better guess at what our strategy should be. An expert in any field will have an advantage over a rookie. But neither the veteran nor the rookie can be sure what the next flip will look like. The veteran will just have a better guess.

It is often the case that our best choice doesn't even have a particularly high likelihood of succeeding. A trial lawyer with a tough case could be choosing among strategies that are all more likely to fail than to succeed. The goal of a lawyer in that situation is to identify the different possible strategies, figure out their best guess of the chance of success for each unpromising alternative, and pick the least awful one to maximize the quality of the outcome for their client. That's true in any business. Start-ups have very low chances of succeeding but they try nonetheless, attempting to find the best strategy to achieve the big win, even though none of the strategies is highly likely to create success for the company. This is still worthwhile because the payoff can be so large.

There are many reasons why wrapping our arms around uncertainty and giving it a big hug will help us become better decision-makers. Here are two of them. First, "I'm not sure" is simply a more accurate representation of the world. Second, and related, when we accept that we can't be sure, we are less likely to fall into the trap of black-and-white thinking.

Imagine you're stepping on a traditional medical scale. It has two weight bars, one with notches at fifty-pound intervals and the other with notches at one-pound intervals. This allows the user to measure their weight down to the pound. What would happen if your doctor used a scale with only one bar with just two notches, one at fifty pounds and one at five hundred pounds, with no way to measure anything in between? Good luck getting medical advice after the person weighing you writes one or the other on your chart. You could only be morbidly obese or severely underweight. It would be impossible to make good decisions about your weight with such a poor model.

The same holds true for just about all of our decisions. If we misrepresent the world at the extremes of right and wrong, with no shades of grey in between, our ability to make good choices—choices about how we are supposed to be allocating our resources, what kind of decisions we are supposed to be making, and what kind of actions we are supposed to be taking—will suffer.

The secret is to make peace with walking around in a world where we recognize that we are not sure and that's okay. As we learn more about how our brains operate, we recognize that we don't perceive the world objectively. But our goal should be to try.