The Wisdom of Uncertainty

This is an edition of The Wonder Reader, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a set of stories to spark your curiosity and fill you with delight.

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How comfortable are you with saying, “I don’t know”? Most of us spend our lives trying to know more.

We look things up, seek expert advice, and gather information before making decisions.

In many cases when we disagree with someone, we assume that if we could just establish the facts, one of us would turn out to be right.

We accumulate knowledge until, we hope, the uncertainty disappears.

But what if uncertainty never fully goes away? In a recent Atlantic essay, the physicist Carlo Rovelli argues that modern science complicates the idea that we can ever arrive at a completely objective description of reality.

Even physics suggests that what we see can depend on the relationship between the observer and what they’re looking at.

We are not standing outside the world looking in, Rovelli writes.

We are part of the world we are trying to understand.

That doesn’t mean that facts don’t exist or that knowledge is useless.

Rovelli points out that we make decisions without absolute certainty all the time, and science works much the same way: It can give us extraordinarily reliable knowledge without perfect certainty.

The same idea can be freeing in everyday life: We can hold convictions without assuming that our understanding is complete, and approach other perspectives with curiosity rather than immediately dismissing them.

Today’s newsletter explores the value of leaving room for uncertainty.