Uncertainty as the Human Condition (Part 2)

 

Uncertainty as the Human Condition (Part 2)

"The quest for certainty blocks the search for meaning.  Uncertainty is the very condition to compel man to unfold his powers."

                                                                --Erich Fromm, social psychologist

Margaret J. Wheatley, management expert, had this to say about the effect of uncertainty on leadership and global politics: “I’m sad to report that in the past few years, ever since uncertainty became our insistent 21^st century companion, leadership has taken a great leap backwards to the familiar territory of command and control.”

Uncertainty means never having perfect information, or even anything approaching the information we want to be sure of in making decisions, especially those with long-term outcomes.  The disturbing truth about our choices is that we can never be sure we made the right one, or even a decent one.  And so, of course, our ability to learn from competing options is quite limited. Choices move around a flow chart, each new one dependent on previous choices. There may have been a much better field of options for any given choice, but what will ever remain unclear is whether, given the limited facts available about the choice, we chose the right ones to pay attention to.  At the same time, we also may be ignoring an entire set that was never even allowed into our line of sight. 

Businesses hate uncertainty and would rather take no action and make no investments in the face of it. A current example is the tariff mandates by the President, which change with each diplomatic negotiation.  No one knows how to price inputs and outputs.  No responsible manager can commit themselves to any kind of plan, even the briefest of holding actions, except for the default plan, which is inaction.  This uncertainty response gives the tariff initiative power to paralyze the entire economy.  This is one outcome, management expert Wheatley reports, of the fact that uncertainty has boosted leadership of the command-and control kind, which gives the illusion of assurance of knowledge, safety, and protection in unsure times.  In fact, its main outcome is more uncertainty.

We routinely rely on old information, bad assumptions, partial truths, or information that proves us right (confirmation bias), or on no research at all, but simply habits buried in time or custom or groupthink.  In addition, life doesn’t often give us the ability to do scientific research on our own beliefs and behavior.  There is no way to compare options not taken--because we can’t create a control that compares choices evenly based on lived experience—whether our choice of College A versus College B, of spouse A or B, or career choices, has delivered the better result.  We would need to live multiple lives to make this comparison work.

This is why, when a family friend asked me if I believed in the perfect soulmate being out there somewhere for each of us, I couldn’t give her an answer.  Her own husband, who she thought was so perfect, was her model for the ideal match.  But this wonderful guy could have been down the list of best choices—I didn’t want to break that news to her.  There is no way to show that she made the perfect or even best choice; there are just too many alternatives around.  However, she is forever certain that there was no other choice, that he was “the one” (especially now he’s deceased).   Unprovable, but likely to hold the key to much happiness.  All I could say was, “This is a more complex question than it appears.”  She was puzzled that I didn’t immediately agree with her romantic beliefs—and maybe thought I had given up on the game myself or had a shocking lack of beautiful ideals to live by.

Somehow every person must learn to live with the curse humans have always lived under:  lack of complete information, unsure outcomes for any situation, and the universality of the laws of change.  This is why the habitual college admissions prompt, “Describe a challenge you faced, what decision you had to make, and what you learned from it,” is such a thorny one to figure out.  We just have to take the track of the novelist and create an arc with an internal theme that seems logical or shows the logic of emotions.  The person who made the decision is also then a person changed by acting on that choice-- and so has a problem with objectively analyzing the outcome.

We become instantly attached to decisions we have already made, so that we can’t evaluate them with any objective fairness. Therefore not much can be learned from them—because the overtly successful ones don’t have much to tell us. Mistakes and bad calls carry more intelligence. So we learn little from success, an eternal conundrum that must be lived with in every moment.  While our future is a touchstone of hope, it is at the same time the wellspring of all our fears and the core of anxiety gnawing away at that hope. 

Uncertainty Bias and How to Cope (Part 1)

 

 

Uncertainty Bias and How to Cope (Part 1)

 

I think that when we know that we actually do live in uncertainty, then we ought to admit it; it is of great value to realize that we do not know the answers to different questions. This attitude of mind - this attitude of uncertainty - is vital to the scientist, and it is this attitude of mind which the student must first acquire.

-- Richard P. Feynman, physicist

What is psychological uncertainty?

Uncertainty is the inability to make sense of, assign value to, or predict the outcomes of events (Charles Berger, about Uncertainty Reduction Theory).  Uncertainty takes away assurance, confidence, optimism, timely decision-making, and faith in the future.  It reduces ability to invest in a future that can’t be determined, well defined, or trusted. Berger’s work centers around mitigating these effects in order to allow a stable functioning life without chronic anxiety as the emotional theme. 

All self-management is an effort to prevent or stem uncertain outcomes, as all planning is intended to make life less uncertain.  Most of our time is spent anticipating, mitigating, managing, fearing, and combating our collective bias against being unable to predict the future. 

The late Dale E. Brashers, who developed Uncertainty Management Theory (2001) describes how uncertainty exists ”When details of situations are ambiguous, complex, unpredictable, or probabilistic; when information is unavailable or inconsistent; and when people feel insecure in their own state of knowledge or state of knowledge in general” Still, Brashers’ work took the theme that this condition is still manageable, using a “management by objective” approach to customize behaviors like avoidance, adapting, and support-seeking to individual needs – especially in the arena of uncertain health outcomes and their psychological dynamics.

Chronic anxiety disorders are the most common mental illness in the US today, affecting over 40 million adults, and more women than men.  The largest growth cohort is now the 15% of 18–25-year-olds, which doubled during the pandemic and is considered a public health crisis that must be addressed as such.  Cultural commentator David Brooks describes anxiety as “an unfocused form of fear,” manifested by worry and stress, anticipation of fearful events and situations that will prove beyond one’s coping ability.  The worldview stretches out into a future that is uncertain, unpredictable, unsure, insecure, and scary. 

The racing rate of change in events, understandings, and social relationships has increased the sensation of uncertainty in the past decades, creating a steady state of anxiety shared across generations, the age averaging younger by the year. For the cohort 21 to 60 years, work is an especially stressed environment, in competitive industries in particular, since employees spend the main part of their life as colleagues—even more time than is spent with friends and family.

There is survival value, however, in concern about potential problems—we have an inbuilt alarm system, fueled by an anxious imagination, that does prevent harm by making us naturally cautious about situations and decisions.  In short-term bursts, this mind-set protects us by making us vigilant.  But for many individuals, the price is an ongoing state of dread that saps our energy, growth, and ability to carry on in a sane and safe mode of operation.  The sad joke is that the overanxious woman tells her friends that her constant worrying actually prevents bad outcomes from happening.  “Worrying works!  More than 90% of the things I worry about never happen.”  And as a commentor on that claim could say, “Try telling my brain that!”

Certainty is an uncertain thing, but humans definitely need it.  We rely on our sense of certainty in every area: from global affairs to our relationships to our abilities to take on entirely new ways of thinking, or, with luck, and beat the house in Las Vegas.  Overconfidence in what we think we can be sure of is the core thinking and intuition bias, the one that drives all others.  We are so fixed on it that we risk making all sorts of errors in the name of the security of feeling sure.  We need a sense of certainty to make decisions – thousands of them in a month, major to minor.  Never mind that many will be unsuitable, unsafe, unsuccessful; we can always justify our thinking in hindsight.   It has even been shown that people prefer to receive bad news over no news because even unwelcome news can give the security of knowing where we stand, thus reducing anxiety.  Doomscrolling, the act of consuming negative news continuously, is an example of dopamine-seeking by confronting disturbing information. 

The problem is that we don’t just occasionally procrastinate, lash out, feel the loss of self-esteem, and realize we’re under too much control of the amygdala, the stress response center.  Rather than reset the brain once a direct threat has subsided, uncertainty anxiety becomes a chronic state, making the prefrontal cortex’s job, that of our higher brain function, more difficult.  Coping is compromised when so much energy and attention is pulled down to the more basic levels that deal with fear, focused on fear of an unknowable future state.  This endemic stress response is always “on,” and this mood is infectious, spreading through groups who begin to react anxiously to a wide radius of perceived threats with negative thinking, conflict acting, and toxic relating (see the latest gun news).  Very soon this begins to look like broad-based burnout, seen first in the workplace and home office where the best part of our time is spent.  

Lateral Thinking Principles

 

Lateral Thinking Principles                 

 

“If you want to think what nobody else thinks, ask a question that nobody else asks.” 

                                                                --Paul Sloane, lateral thinking expert

 

Lateral thinking is a problem-solving approach designed to encourage creative outside-the-box solutions to difficult problems.  Developed by Edward de Bono in the 1960s, it is based on four principles: recognizing assumptions and challenging dominant ideas; searching for alternatives (asking better questions; challenging assumptions, and generating innovative, non-logical solutions. 

Principles

Recognizing dominant ideas, or conventional ways of looking at problems, is the way to begin to see them in a new light—but the conventions need to be identified in order to steer around or away from them.  Searching for alternatives refers to finding new ways of seeing, so that problems can be redefined or defined within a novel context, one that may be quite distant from its ordinary surrounding assumptions. Challenging assumptions is when the ordinary thinking patterns can be left behind, as sub-optimal traps, by contrarian thinking.  An entirely unexpected point of view yields entirely new insights not available by conventional means.

This is because the usual ways of framing and breaking out of the frame in group thinking have been tried and found less than successful—merely extending existing assumptions isn’t the answer.  Generating novel solutions gives a new lease to open-mindedness in developing new thinking styles with a sharper turning ratio (this is the strength of the cheetah, angling its top speed as the fastest land animal).

The innovative, non-logical (non-vertical) solutions come from looking at the same problem from different angles, seemingly so different and distant that they can’t fit the problem at hand.  So the very nature of the problem is reconsidered across these four stages as well as, of course, novel options that can serve as solutions.  Robert Pirsig, author of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974), says

Lateral knowledge is knowledge that’s from a wholly unexpected direction, from a direction that is not even understood as a direction until the knowledge forces itself upon one.  Lateral truths point to the falseness of axioms and postulates underlying one’s existing system of getting at truth.

Here is an example of a lateral thinking question, based on minimal information:

 If Chinese men eat more rice than Japanese men, why is this true? 

Lateral questions 

Does this mean that each individual consumes more rice, or that the total number of people do?  There are many times more Chinese men than Japanese men (over 11 times more) – the aggregate number presents the simplest answer making the fewest assumptions.  Often in lateral thought (also called horizontal thinking), the most straightforward answer is the best one, bypassing more elaborate pre-assumptions.  Therefore, the lateral approach finds ways to escape thinking that is anchored in context, or a context we believe is necessary to both problem and solution.  In the best solution-finding, the anchor is a false security; only our thinking about its nature is limited.  Immediate circumstances, even if they exist only in the mind, constrain our thinking.  That narrowed thought process will constrain the solution—just when it doesn’t need to be constrained by vertical thinking but released from invisible barriers to yield a far superior resolution from the side.    

The nine-dot problem is a classic example.  The challenge is to connect with four straight lines every dot--without lifting your pencil or retracing any lines.  This puzzle is the classic think-outside-the-box example (see solution at the end).

Lateral thinking is the mainstay of working out solutions to hard-to-solve mysteries, real as well as fictional.  The detective must recognize a clue as having a sideways, non-obvious entry into revelation of the truth of the crime / puzzle.  This recognition factor is the power behind the lateral approach.  This skill is the soul of the fictional sleuth Sherlock Holmes.

Lateral analysis over AI

“As AI is getting smarter, young college grads may be getting dumber.  They can regurgitate information and ideas but struggle to come up with novel insights or analyze issues from different directions.  They don’t learn how to think through, express, or defend ideas,” says Allysia Findley in The Wall Street Journal.  Fluid recognition is key to what humans are good at, even though we don’t always allow ourselves to flex that imaginative power.  We prefer the safety of vertical thinking one step at a time, each building on the last.  We also prefer well-defined problems, meaning those that are so straightforward that the answer is contained in the question itself.  Think of the way an algebra problem lays out X, the unknown, so that the rest of the equation can work up the solution from the knowns.  

But a lateral exercise in problem definition is in riddles, where the reworking of language as word definition and re-defining holds the solution.   Here’s one for kids: “What is always coming, but never arrives?”  Answer: Tomorrow.  “Arriving” happens in time, not space.

 

Solution: The lines extend beyond the framework of the square, which is the only way the solution can be achieved—by thinking outside the box.  There was no rule stating that this method is not allowed.  The restriction is only a mental one.  Or a cultural barrier so thick that we don’t even realize it’s there. 

Sideways Intelligence: Lateral thinking

 

Photo: Pixabay

“Lateral knowledge is knowledge that is from a wholly unexpected direction, from a direction that is not even understood as a direction until the knowledge forces itself upon one. Lateral truths point to the falseness of axioms and postulates underlying one’s existing system of getting at truth.”

 -- Robert Pirsig, writer and philosopher

 

Here is a minimal-information problem, challenging assumptions about the possible. 

A man living in a 30-story building decides to jump from his living-room window.  After doing                this, he survives the fall with no injuries.  How could this happen? 

Answer:  Although the man may live in a tall building, he jumped from a first-floor window.  No problem at all.  His fall and the building’s height aren’t related.

Puzzles

Another classical lateral thinking puzzle involves a driver and three potential passengers.  On a windy stormy night, you are driving your two-seater car in the far suburbs when you spot three people waiting at a bus stop outside the city.  One is an old lady looking like she is about to die.  One is a friend who once saved your life.  The third is the perfect romantic partner you’ve been dreaming about for years.  Your car can take just one passenger.  Who gets a ride from you? 

This scenario challenges your assumptions.  It looks as though you will be forced to let people down by excluding two of the three from your car.  But how about rethinking your assumptions – that you must pick up just one passenger?  Maybe you don’t have to pick one at all – just speed up and keep on driving past.  But that creates a social problem as well as leaving behind social capital to be mined. 

However, there is an answer in the lateral (side-ways) direction.  How about this: give your car keys to your important friend and ask him to drive the old lady to a hospital or help center.  This allows you to maximize the crisis in seating space by waiting with the perfect partner potential to catch the next bus together, with ample opportunity to chat and connect. 

By flexing the requirements of the situation, an elegant solution is allowed to emerge.  Taking this advantage is an example of sideways intelligence—a turnaround of the vertical, straight-on mode.  Now you can consider other “irrelevant” potentials looking 360 degrees to think about definitions and relationships you might not have thought about before.  As in another classic puzzle, “Would you jump from an airplane?”  “Question:  Is the airplane parked on the ground, or in flight?”  Not too different from the high-rise question above. Such minimal-information questions are typical of the Wally problem-solving test, which assesses children’s ability to solve problems using indirect approaches.

Lateral thinking, developed by psychologist Edward de Bono, involves examining problematic situations from unexpected angles to discover unsuspected creative solutions (The Use of Lateral Thinking, 1967).  Rather than following the logic of “vertical thinking,” each step following from the last in sequence, it approaches things from the outside, from other domains, entering from the side (lateral dimension).  Lateral thought does this by eclectically gathering ideas from outside the box, seeing what might be productive solutions by looking at other fields with far off-center definitions and associations.  De Bono termed this ability “displacement,” meaning to shift perspective to reveal an entirely new landscape of possibility.  He has cited the exemplar case of King Soloman from the Old Testament.  Faced with two women who each claimed a baby was theirs, the king proposed cutting the child in half—and revealed the true mother, who offered to give up her claim in order to save him.   

Examples

As one example, Uber rideshare was not developed by taxi companies.  It was the outcome of looking at consumer needs, computer programming, and cars and the drivers who owned them as a giant untapped resource. At a conference in Paris where taxis were hard to find, Travis Kalanick asked himself why this resource couldn’t be leveraged to the advantage of both passenger and driver. Uber didn’t own a single taxi and had nothing but criticism to offer as knowledge of the taxi business.   Another instance is that YouTube was originally launched as a dating site through home films.  And this: the Jacuzzi water massage tub was a therapy device until it was recognized and positioned as a luxury in-home spa. 

When Art Fry at 3M “discovered” Post-it notes, he was taking a failed experiment in adhesives that the company considered a failure.  He fiddled with the potential of some hard-to-attached but easy to detach slips of paper to explore their potential.  Then he explored the potential of his own situation in 3M, which involved the secretarial ranks.  He began to distribute these “loose adhesion” products around the office, and the clerical staff did the rest, making proof of concept up front for an accidental product.  With the usefulness of these notes established, it was then quick work to sell the concept to upper management, which greenlighted this famous invention to let it loose on the world.  What would we do without our Post-its?  Go back to paper clips holding paper scraps?

Disney’s Imagineering team created a completely novel public artform that was first conceived by Walt as a travelling educational museum of American folklore and heroes.  There was no precedent for it, and it did not derive from the amusement park model, which Disney despised and succeeded at replacing with a new-school idea.  Theme parks have far more to do with animation and filmmaking than with the carnival midway.    

Challenging assumptions is not only good therapy for the mind and the boardroom.  It is a way forward by indirection, “from the side,” a new route forward that can open vistas for problem-solving that have not been tried.  Disney’s Imagineering team called this blue-sky thinking, and it has been a model for creativity enhancement for thousands of organizations since the 1950s when practiced at the Burbank studios.  It turns out that avoiding straight-forward thinking has many benefits just not visible from the vertical-thinking perspective. 

Lateralism takes “outside” information inside to provoke a new but not yet stable structuring of the situation—the solution isn’t yet clear or determined.  Only then does this thinking attempt to develop outside insight into a solution that is fitting and actionable.  The highly popular “I Love Lucy” reversed the paradigm of the sitcom: the unruly husband fighting for control with a sensible wife.  Instead, Lucille Ball was the chaotic (but charming) wife at odds with Desi Arnaz as the voice of reason--switching the character of their real-life relationship). 

“Themeatics: The Art of Hyperreality” JPC, February-April 2025.

 Image: Statue of Liberty at New York New York hotel casino in Las Vegas

                                                        (Photo: J.G. O’Boyle)

Abstract

Since Disney Imagineering introduced the theme park in 1955, themeatics has ruled public space, becoming a mixed reality of virtual and nonvirtual, media and built design, as hyperreality. This “unified field theory” of the arts consolidates many styles and disciplines as mixed media, conferring meaning and engaging attention in immersive experiences that readily embody innovation. Through hyperreality, themeatics works as the dominant aesthetic now merging imagination with the experienced world. The fit between art-informed places like theme parks and the brain expands the life of the mind in culture through the scope of lived and virtual experience alike.

King, M. J. (2025). Themeatics: The art of hyperreality. Journal of Popular Culture, 58 (1-2), 7-25.

Table of contents

link to JPC article 

Mobility Equals Freedom, Part 2: Driving and Quality of Life

“Everything in life is somewhere else—and you get there in a car.”  -- E.B. White

“Twentieth-century urban America didn’t belong to the skyscraper; it belonged to the car.  Transportation technologies have always determined urban form.”

– Edward Glaeser, Triumph of the City (2011)

 

The following are factors that diminish quality of life as listed in the Pennsylvania Advance Health Care Directive.  The lead question is this: “When you think about the following scenarios, what would be considered an unacceptable quality of life?”

                         

Not being able to drive a car                 

Not being able to get out of bed

Not being able to leave the house or move around and interact with people (e.g., a coma state)    

 Not being able to have meaningful relationships or recognize family or friends

*

Not being able to think for myself or make my own decisions

In other words, not being able to drive is incompatible with quality of life: If I can’t drive, living is no longer worthwhile.   Losing the driving license is the lead-in to a dependent life.  And for Americans, loss of independent mobility equates to a severely compromised state of being. 

The way people move around, and for what reasons, has much to say about opportunity.  How that opportunity is recognized and acted upon, in turn, provides clues about what cultural values are, how they act as deep motives, and how change is seen - as enhancing or blocking the top operating values.  The ability to drive is considered the gateway to many opportunities, and especially to the ability to hold a job—even with remote work as an option. 

In the US, staying put is not regarded as advantageous to individual development.  We all know that to progress, go to a decent school, build a career, get a family started, meet partners and leverage relationships, use marriage as a driver of social capital, we have to seek out new places.  Our country was founded on these tenets as Europe looked west to the new world to realize freedoms not to be found in locked-in Old World centers. 

License to move

The driver’s license is a rite of passage in the US, marking the start of true independence away from the family and obligations to parents.  Independence is the American measure of mental and physical well-being, and also, in a seeming contradiction, the basis for social health and upward mobility.  Independence is a signal of intelligence and social viability through mobility, and the car provides that most effectively.  

What about public transit?  Five percent or less of the American public use commuter trains and buses; even Washington D.C.’s excellent Metro system has just a 10% ridership.  High usage correlates with population density, as in Japan, Hong Kong, New York City, and much of Europe. Edward Glaeser estimates that commutes by public transit are twice that of cars, 48 minutes against 24 minutes, which is why 86% of US commuters opt for the time-saving route.  He gauges the best commute as the brief walk of 15 minutes, less than a mile (Triumph of the City, p. 13).  The time burden is independent of actual distance: “The problem with public transportation is the time involved in getting to the bus or subway stop, waiting to be picked up, and then getting from the final stop to one’s ultimate destination” (179).    

In between is the hybrid of semi-private car services such as Uber and Lyft and vans powered by smart phones at rates closer to taxis than buses.  For most middle-class Americans—and 95% call ourselves middle-class—the price of public transit is not the ticket but the stress of riding with below-middle classes than we’d like to see around us.  In Honolulu, with one of the leading bus systems island-wide, class-mixing is less an issue in the nation’s most diverse state with more equal incomes, but tourists still favor car rentals.  Wills Eye Hospital, in its literature on “Preparing for Hospital Discharge,” warns that “Public transport is not an acceptable form of transportation home from the hospital.”  You need access to a private car and driver just to return home from your treatment.

Mass transit leaves the rider dependent on schedules and stop locations, going against the autonomy principle that one should be able to go wherever and whenever they want, one of our leading cultural core values.  The need to live by someone else’s schedule, often requiring transfers to other parts of the routing, takes a toll on the rider’s time, and this is the core of the problem.  Even waiting in traffic is seen as an acceptable exchange for the ability to travel point to point once the blockage clears.  It is the main advantage of an Uber ride. 

Since Ford’s Model A, cars took off, making the ability to travel long distances the hallmark of the free life.  The driver’s license is the turning point for adolescents into independence and autonomy.  Car ownership makes independence possible.  One car per family of two employed adults is considered a disabled system, just waiting to finance the second car.  Losing that license is the start-point of life’s end, giving up independence to rely on the wheels of others.  For these nondrivers, a city’s dependence on cars is the leading factor for livability.  Los Angles is famous as its own car culture, because of the far-spread geography, but Florida is just as car-centric, as are Seattle and Washington, DC., and even the sprawling Las Vegas strip.   

Quality of life   

In summary, the Pennsylvania’s Advance Health Care Directive (above) features a listing of quality-of-life factors (quality of life being a major measure of wellness in medicine).  Each factor is to be checked only if it is a deal-breaker in end-of-life quality so that the Power of Attorney can see what the patient has determined he/she can’t tolerate.  The list includes: “Not being able to move around and interact with people (such as in a coma)”; “Not being able to think for myself or make my own decisions”; “Living in a nursing home”; “Living in constant severe pain,” or--wait for it-- “Not being able to drive a car.” 

This is in line with other measures of life quality.  The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) qualifies inability to drive for medical reasons as a disability if it limits performing a major life activity, such as working or engaging in daily tasks.  For a broad class of jobs (including driving itself), driving is a major life activity.  The largest class of male workers are those employed in driving activities.

The car question is the only item on the list of 13 that is not a medical issue, including “Not being able to live on my own.”  And, in deference to the American bias toward independence, “being able to live on my own” is the last right the aging population is willing to give up, the strong bias being independence, as in "aging in place."  In many cultures, this would be a highly unwanted state of things--being unable to live with relatives would be the non-starter.  For Americans, NOT living alone and not driving to and from that home are the deal-breakers.  But before independent living, independent driving takes first place in defining quality of life.  Even teens of driving age can create a world of their own away from the family home.

In a world increasingly urban and densely populated, and in the face of climate change, the power of the automobile to dictate mobility and housing options is coming under increasing pressure to resolve the issues of cultural values: autonomy and independence.  Already these issues are showing high costs to society as well as the individual.  What eventual solutions can be devised to resolve the pragmatic costs that threaten our embedded beliefs?

* Images from KODA, Pennsylvania Advance Health Care Directive (2024)