Yesterday Daniel Gilbert argued in the NYT: "What You Don’t Know Makes You Nervous." Here are some key grafs:
one knows. I don’t mean that no one knows the answer to this question.
I mean that the answer to this question is that no one knows — and not
knowing is making us sick….
That’s because people feel worse when something bad might occur than when something bad will
occur. Most of us aren’t losing sleep and sucking down Marlboros
because the Dow is going to fall another thousand points, but because
we don’t know whether it will fall or not — and human beings find
uncertainty more painful than the things they’re uncertain about….
Our national gloom is real enough, but it isn’t a matter of
insufficient funds. It’s a matter of insufficient certainty. Americans
have been perfectly happy with far less wealth than most of us have
now, and we could quickly become those Americans again — if only we
knew we had to.
I am thinking of the Daoist response here. And I think it would run something like this: when faced with uncertainty the best response, the approach that will yield the least worry and misery, is not to strive for greater certainty, but to give up on the notion of certainty altogether. Way is vast. It is beyond our human capacities of understanding. We can never know, with certitude, how Way will unfold. All we can do is go along for the ride. The opening lines of passage 20 of the Daodejing come to mind here:
If you give up learning, troubles end.
How much difference is there between yes and no? And is there a difference between lovely and ugly?
If we can't stop fearing those things people fear, it's pure confusion, never-ending confusion….
If we don't expect certainty or utility or efficiency, we won't be upset when they fail to appear. Uncertainty is out inevitable condition….
The Useless Tree 
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