Possibility: Uncertainty Is the Fuel of Meaning

One of the most interesting settings of our universe—one could say the only setting that makes it interesting—is that it possesses “uncertainty.” This realization will be a key cornerstone of your worldview.

People often loathe uncertainty.

Imagine you are a smart and responsible person. At a young age, you have a good model of the world; you know what is right and what is wrong. Life was originally a series of justified actions, navigated with ease and leisure. But as you reach middle age, your responsibilities grow, your burdens increase, and you feel an ever-growing sense of passivity.

Perhaps one day your father falls ill; another day, something goes wrong with your child at school; a few days later, a pipe at home leaks. Before these are handled, a colleague makes a massive mistake and shifts the blame to you. You didn’t do anything wrong, yet various troubles automatically find you… You lament that you truly don’t know which will come first, tomorrow or an accident, and you wish life would run as stably as a machine.

“I don’t seek great wealth; I just want a peaceful, quiet life. Is that too much to ask?”

The world doesn’t like giving you “peace and quiet.” It is full of uncertainty.

And “quiet” isn’t necessarily “good.”

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Let’s not get into too many technical details. Simply put, there are five types of uncertainty that we cannot avoid no matter what.

The first is “Chaos,” which is the sensitivity of complex systems [1]. For example, the weather in a region: how it evolves is highly sensitive to initial conditions. A tiny difference in initial parameters can turn a calm day into a massive storm. Our measurements of initial states always have some error, so you can only reliably predict evolution for a short period; beyond that, it becomes a mess… Even the smallest error is rapidly amplified, so the limit for weather forecasting is only about 14 days [2].

The second is “Computational Irreducibility” [3], which means “you can’t calculate it fast.” This is Stephen Wolfram’s signature theory: some systems (like the “Game of Life”) look very simple, have no measurement errors, and follow simple rules, yet there is no shortcut to calculate the result in advance—you must let it evolve step by step. In computer science, the famous “Halting Problem” can be seen as a special case of computational irreducibility; you might not even be able to determine in advance whether an algorithm will ever finish.

Both Chaos and Computational Irreducibility are mathematical in nature. You might say, “The future is actually determined; we just can’t know it in advance.” Scientists a hundred years ago thought so too… until they encountered quantum mechanics.

The third is “Quantum Randomness,” or “the universe inherently rolling dice.” This is the inherent uncertainty of the world [4]: whether this atomic nucleus will decay in the next second, or whether that electron will hit the screen slightly to the left or right—until it happens, not only do you not know, and I don’t know, but nature itself doesn’t know.

Physicists still haven’t reconciled with this uncertainty of quantum mechanics: the world is not only fundamentally unpredictable, but many things in it happen for no reason at all… We have discussed this extensively in the “Elite Daily Class” column.

You might say that even with so much uncertainty, there must be a probability, right? As long as we know the probabilities, we can manage uncertainty—like buying insurance—and still have a peaceful life.

But sometimes, even probability is a luxury.

The fourth is model uncertainty, also called “Knightian Uncertainty,” named after economist Frank H. Knight [5]. For instance, you could predict the probability that a leading smartphone brand will still lead its competitors in five years—but if a completely different communication device appears by then, making people stop using phones altogether, the whole game changes, and your prediction becomes meaningless. That thing wasn’t even in your model, so how can you talk about probability?

Only a time traveler could tell you that kind of future.

The fifth type of uncertainty can even make a time traveler’s prediction fail: “Strategic Uncertainty,” or “Reflexivity.” This is a theory favored by financial speculator George Soros, meaning that once you speak the future, you change the future. If someone traveled back and told us that a global stock market crash would happen on September 6, 2030, investors certainly wouldn’t wait until that day to sell—they would act in advance. Their premature actions would change when, or even if, the crash occurs.

Because of these five types of uncertainty, I am very certain that this world is unpredictable in almost every aspect.

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Of course, this doesn’t mean everything must be left to fate. After all, daily life is generally stable and learnable; otherwise, why would we study models? But people underestimate the impact of uncertainty.

For example, we previously mentioned that wealth in the world follows a heavy-tail distribution, where a tiny minority owns far more than everyone else. Yet, human IQ clearly follows a normal distribution; the differences aren’t that extreme. So, why are some people unable to, while that minority is able to join the “multiplicative world,” reap positive feedback, and accumulate so much wealth?

Their biographies all say it’s because of ability, but it’s actually because of luck.

Economist Robert H. Frank’s book Success and Luck explained this long ago [6]. A more direct proof I saw was a 2018 simulation experiment by Italian scientists [7]. Researchers used a normal distribution to generate a large group of people—meaning their abilities varied but weren’t extreme—and let each person strive for forty years. These people were randomly assigned lucky and unlucky events during their careers: some found great jobs or succeeded instantly in entrepreneurship, while others hit a bad economic environment, lost their jobs, or failed in business due to chance. The results were highly similar to the real world: their final wealth followed a heavy-tail distribution.

So, guess if the wealthiest people in the experiment were the most capable ones at the start?

No. They were relatively smart, but they weren’t the smartest group. They were the luckiest group. They encountered the most lucky events and the fewest unlucky ones.

There might have been a guy smarter than Jack Ma who also saw e-commerce as a huge opportunity and had a plan to start a business… but he had poor health and couldn’t sustain high-intensity work.

Luck is much more important than ability. This study even suggested that to increase the output rate of new scientific discoveries, research funding shouldn’t be allocated based on so-called “ability” to a few top scientists. Instead, the correct approach is to distribute it randomly or equally among all scientists above a certain level, allowing luck to play its full role. And some countries are already doing this! Germany, Switzerland, and New Zealand have experimented with lotteries for research funding [8].

If you still think ability is more important, I must say that ability itself is a form of luck.

Your IQ is the product of a random combination of your parents’ genes. You were born with an interest in this craft rather than that one, and this era just happens to allow that craft to make money. You happened to encounter a book that influenced your growth, were able to read it, and were able to apply it. Isn’t all of this brought about by a series of luck—genes, environment, and experience?

Your so-called peaceful life is also the result of countless chance opportunities working together. There are many people more capable than you who didn’t have your advantageous conditions.

You feel this is ordinary and that is an accident because your vision is limited to this scope. Expand the model a bit, and the accident is the ordinary.

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Facing uncertainty, people have two negative attitudes and one positive attitude.

The first negative attitude is a longing for certainty. I might have pursued novelty and excitement when I was young, but now that I have a family and a career, I just want to work for a salary and go home to hug my kids. No need for new challenges; I don’t want to learn new technologies. I just want to live stably like this—between “development” and “stability,” I firmly choose stability.

…If you find this attitude absurd, it’s because you haven’t experienced the sense of loss of control during life’s ups and downs. In times of war and chaos, people will tolerate tyranny and turn to superstition for even a sliver of certainty. The less control people feel, the more they need compensation—even if it’s bad or false certainty. You wish for a strongman or a deity to take the helm for you. This is called “Compensatory Control” [9].

People who have experienced chaos crave order so much that they are hostile toward anything that might make the country “chaotic.” To them, “freedom” and “democracy” are dirty words, and they even think that any controversy is wrong… Even if the current order is unfavorable to them, they instinctively defend it.

And this provides a channel for ambitious people to harvest power and faith. You just need to exaggerate the world’s uncertainty first and then promise to provide a sense of certainty: “The outside world is full of danger; you must follow me to have safety and stability!”

In Robert Greene’s The 48 Laws of Power [10], several methods of using uncertainty to gain power are listed:

• Occasionally doing something unexpected to create suspense and unpredictability, keeping people in awe of you.
• Using people’s pursuit of faith to build your own cult-like followers.
• Making people work for you for the sake of a fantasy.
• Desperately guarding your reputation…

In short, whoever provides a sense of certainty gains power, and whoever craves a sense of certainty surrenders power to others. What is selling anxiety compared to this? Those who sell certainty are the true threat to the throne.

I used to be angry at those who prostrated themselves before power for their lack of struggle, but now I feel sympathy. Greene said, “The craving for certainty is the greatest disease facing the mind.”

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The second negative attitude is slightly better: since it’s unavoidable, one might as well accept uncertainty calmly. There’s a saying, “Allow everything to happen.” The underlying theory might be a form of dialectics: misfortune is where fortune hides, and fortune is where misfortune lurks—maybe a bad thing is actually a good thing?

A high-level version of this attitude is “Everything that happens is for my benefit,” or even “Everything is the best arrangement.” Some people truly believe this, but to me, this is equivalent to handing over your initiative: if everything is the best arrangement, doesn’t that mean you’re fine with however others arrange things for you?

The positive attitude is to rationally analyze different types of uncertainty: I’ll find ways to manage the bad ones and actively embrace the good ones. Nassim Nicholas Taleb is a master of this. He first told the world “how bad the worst uncertainty can be” in The Black Swan, and then explained “how some uncertainty is good” in Antifragile.

Whether uncertainty is good or bad depends on the shape of your payoff function… There are great thinking tools here, including how to manage it, which we’ll discuss later. For now, you just need a more positive intuition:

Resisting uncertainty is inferior to accepting it; accepting it is inferior to embracing it; embracing it is inferior to creating it.

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But GPT has an even deeper insight.

Once I asked GPT, “Do you have any insights about us humans that we ourselves haven’t realized?” It mentioned uncertainty. It said the human brain inherently craves certainty, but if humans actually achieved absolute certainty—the future perfectly predictable, everyone’s fate revealed in advance—you would find it unbearably tedious and suffocating.

GPT said: “What humans truly like is not certainty itself, but the mental pleasure and excitement brought by the process of pursuing certainty.”

Think about it: isn’t that true? Even those who are set on entering “the system” for a “iron rice bowl” don’t like an unchanging life. They also want to travel, to develop hobbies that involve some risk. They want to make part of their life certain so they can free up their hands to pursue the uncertainty of another part.

What we love most is that moment of “turning uncertainty into certainty.” We love listening to stories and organizing life with “narratives” because they are composed of moments where uncertainty becomes certainty.

In this sense, uncertainty is actually the fuel for processing “meaning.” Even if this particular uncertainty is bad, it provides meaning to the narrative. Precisely because the world still has uncertainty, we are driven to explore, to fight, to live, and to think; only then can we be full of vitality.

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Viewing uncertainty as the fuel of meaning—with this worldview, your outlook on life becomes clear:

• Too much fuel is overwhelming, too little is boring; so you hope to face just the right amount of uncertainty—ideally “a large chunk of the familiar + a small piece of the unexpected” [11].
• Fuel is an objective thing, so uncertainty shouldn’t be an emotional problem but an information problem.
• Fuel has a heating value, so the greater the uncertainty you resolve, the higher the reward—as the saying goes, “The bigger the storm, the more expensive the fish.”
• Fuel can be stored before burning, so you hope to have as much available uncertainty as possible. Thus, your actions should open up new possibilities for yourself rather than eliminate them…

Footnotes

[1] Primary Doubt 1: Stable Era and Chaotic Era. [2] Primary Doubt 2: Turbulence and Butterflies. [3] The Worldview of a God-like Man. [4] Quantum Mechanics 5: Heisenberg on Uncertainty. [5] What Exactly Is “Profit”? [6] Interpretation of Success and Luck 1: Luck Dynamics. [7] Emerging Technology from the arXiv. “If You’re So Smart, Why Aren’t You Rich? Turns Out It’s Just Chance.” MIT Technology Review, March 1, 2018. Paper: Pluchino, Alessandro, Alessio E. Biondo, and Andrea Rapisarda. “Talent vs Luck: The Role of Randomness in Success and Failure.” arXiv preprint, 2018. [8] Barnett, Adrian, et al. “Impact of Winning Funding on Researcher Productivity: Results from a Randomized Trial.” Science and Public Policy 51, no. 6 (2024): 1042–1056. [9] Kay, Aaron C., Jennifer A. Whitson, Danielle Gaucher, and Adam D. Galinsky. “Compensatory Control: Achieving Order Through the Mind, Our Institutions, and the Heavens.” Current Directions in Psychological Science 18, no. 5 (2009): 264–268. [10] Greene, Robert. The 48 Laws of Power. London: Profile Books, 1998. [11] Liking = Familiarity + Unexpectedness.