Insight - Tasting Uncertainty; Learning To Love Doubt

Why managed outcomes in politics and companies are killing creativity

Aug 12, 2021

Would they have the confidence to create it today? By Ashley Pomeroy

What's the one piece of information that would settle your doubts about this crisis? A document written at the highest levels, a vial of LNP mRNA from 2010, a signed confession — or would the tone matter more: the anodyne academic being more persuasive than the politician or an independent journalist on a crusade?

It you are a persuasive type who likes to change minds, what is the single artifact or ‘boom’ that would convert your listeners? What would convince them to hang on your every word?

Would a bullet do? It did, for the U.S. government's Warren Commission. It yielded up the magic round that explained away all the inconsistencies surrounding the shooting of President John F Kennedy.

Humanity tends to like its proofs wrapped in a bow. We clamour for the magical powers of a Harry Potter, the revelatory claims of a Dan Brown. People will climb stairs on their knees to view a relic in a church. They feel too lowly to doubt the provenance of Moon rock.

They gravitate towards impressive claims. Nothing would provoke frenzy like the announcement that Adolf Hitler's diaries had been located — though last time was an embarrassment all round. Yet when a relic as big as the Titanic is found, rather than put the mystery to rest it spawns half a dozen new spectres.

It seems that one of the roles of proof is to be unobtainable. "You are Lobby Lud and I claim my five pounds." In the holiday quest to identify the representative of the Westminster Gazette and win the prize the joke was on the reader: Lud didn't exist. The representative was fictitious, the daily accounts of his changing appearance in seaside towns a way to sell newspapers in the summer lull.

Mr Lud, short for Ludgate, the historical hub of London's newspapers, was as elusive as a smoking gun. For if you were close enough to see the smoking barrel, surely you would have witnessed the crime itself. A smoking gun, by definition, is made of unobtanium.

For years criminal cases were settled by DNA analysis. Strands of hair from the scene were used to convict the accused until the crime lab scandal. Forensic scientists on both sides of the Atlantic were found to be frauds. They supplied the police with testimony they knew to be false. Quite likely the police did, too.

Is the real scandal that lab researchers were willing to see innocent people jailed for profit and career advancement or is the dirty secret that DNA analysis is not as accurate as we wish to believe — there are doubts about that, too.

If so, then we have unreasonable expectations of certitude.

Creative Uncertainty

Certainty depends on our ability to perceive, analyse and solve a problem and that often depends on creativity.

The economist Albert Hirschman said we would never undertake a project that depended on the surety of creativity, because creativity comes to us on a wing and a prayer or like the muse, in his own time. So it's desirable that we underestimate the difficulty of creative projects. He called this the Hidden Hand Principle, the hand blinding our eyes to the difficulties, ensuring we are confident enough to go ahead.

Put another way, those who doubt their creativity are less likely to take risks and are more likely to require reassurance, advance knowledge and the guidance of others before they begin. Lacking such assurances they will sit on their hands or pick a less challenging task.

This is not so different to making up one's mind in the face of conflicting information. The creative person may take a gamble on his ability to identify and resolve apparent incompatibilities in an argument. The insecure will simply not go there.

One of those who objected to Hirschman’s thesis was Cass Sunstein, an academic and advisor to governments on behavioural manipulation or nudge theory. Sunstein said there is not one hiding hand but two, a beneficent and a malevolent. One throws petals in our path and the other manure. He said that planning so often goes wrong because people are blind to the presence of malevolent forces.

Sunstein extended this idea to encompass conspiracy theories, arguing that confidence in the veracity of narratives becomes self-sealing, so that claims to the contrary are taken as further proof of the plot.

If one combines the ideas of Hirschman and Sunstein it still seems that tolerance for uncertainty is essential to unleash the creative powers necessary to understand and resolve a problem.

You simply cannot solve a problem with Sunstein's negatives, although awareness of the malevolent hand may make it less likely that we are misled. This is the kernel of the censorship, the Stalinist claims of disinformation, the insistence on globally-coordinated messaging, the "online harms" legislation, the relentless uniformity of the media... and the nudging, nudging, nudging.

It is more important to conquer our fear of uncertainty than to guard against missteps. The roles are different: uncertainty to the engineer, the need for surety to the accountant.

In the car the engineer takes the wheel. The accountant helps keep the car on the road but he is neither driver nor navigator, for his eye at all times is on the rear-view mirror to see how we got to this point, while wear and tear and the fuel gauge are his guide to the future.

In our era of not-so-passive aggression we must have confidence to contend with the unknown. The need in advance for a smoking gun is a weakness in our powers of perception. It is neither a rigorous desire for scientific proof nor verified provenance — which in most cases does not exist if the gun was not glimpsed in the first act. Rather it is the pleading of someone who lacks creative abilities to solve a problem.

This amounts to a kind of dangerous insecurity. It cannot live with the uncertainty that is essential to discovery.

Chocolate Inspiration

The writer and motivator Malcolm Gladwell calls this the uncertainty problem. On the one hand we we have a desire to impose certainty on something that is inherently uncertain. On the other we see uncertainty as an obstacle when it is the solution.

This is much more significant than solving crimes, mysteries or so-called conspiracy theories. It concerns the entire direction of our culture and what I think is a crisis of confidence.

Years ago the Financial Times bemoaned the decline of creative innovation, even in an area like candies: Polo, the mint with the hole, and Toblerone, the triangular chocolate, would not be invented today, it said. No-one would take the career risk. No corporation would stake its reputation on such wilful and spirited deviations from the norm.

I wrote in this article that we live in an age of managed outcomes. Public policy is no longer a process of discovery, proposition, trial and error. The solution is prescribed — normally in partnership with a corporation that sells said solution — and the media nudges the people towards it.

Numerous documents confirm this, including Cass Sunstein’s own publication, Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness (2009) and the Mindspace document published in 2010 by the UK's Institute for Government. Psychologists have played a prominent role in Event Covid discussing how to use social pressure and fear to achieve certain ends, as UK government scientists have admitted. Journalists have been a willing conduit for this fear.

Like Covid, so climate. The BBC's own guide for reporting on climate change, recently leaked to The Spectator, contains a graph in which the BBC charts two axes of people's emotion — solidarity and fear — which it uses to work out how to persuade the public.

You read that correctly. The BBC is not doing journalism. It is campaigning. It is not challenging facts but analysing the public mind and weighing how to propagandise it.

The public discourse is petrified — not only terrorized with fear but also turned to stone. The natural to and fro of debate is silenced in Medusa’s glare. Government departments no longer rival each other but conspire through the Fusion Doctrine. Everything is one message, one intent, one act, one nudge. Rapid Response Units ensure the same policy is applied across continents.

The topic of this article is how to raise questions, weigh information and satisfy your doubts. If the press won’t ask questions, who then?

Cass Sunstein says people should beware of self-sealing narratives. The New York Times in Feb, 2021 even published an article Don’t Go Down the Rabbit Hole: Critical thinking, as we’re taught to do it, isn’t helping in the fight against misinformation.

No-one it seems, is allowed to ask questions. Perhaps we’ve answered them all. Or is there, seeping out of Sunstein's ideas, something sour and mawkish? A pusillanimous tendency that has a very negative impact on society.

Take the creative mind that sculpted Toblerone and contrast that free spirit with those narrow obsessions of public policy — solidarity and fear.

Has something happened to the public mind in academia, the corporate world and government? I think it has. We are in the presence of a terrible fear. What is its source?

Lying and fear of being lied to is the crisis of our time — at least for the people. But the people did not create this society, however much the media blame us. Those responsible are the focus of my series Rivals for Power: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5.

It is true that there is a crisis of truth or truthiness and its root lies in confidence. One cause is declining educational standards. Students are taught to cite and repeat instead of expressing their opinions with confidence, how to construct an argument and own it, how to follow an idea to its conclusion and defend it.

The pineal gland is clogged. Intuition is lazy, nous has vanished. The ability to challenge and hold accountable is replaced on the one hand with blanket cynicism (what youngsters mislabel irony) — and blind trust on the other. Into this cranial void steps the fact cheka, the policeman and your choice of corporatist fist.

It’s no pattern for life. We must trust but verify — and also tend, as with a Toblerone bar, to the delightful, multiple positive facets of uncertainty.

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