Yeah, one of my favorite studies that I quote in the book, the researchers gave participants either a 50% chance of receiving a very painful electric shock or an 100% chance of receiving a painful electric shock.

And what they found is those with a 50% chance were far more anxious and stressed than those with 100% chance.

We would somehow rather be certain that a bad thing is going to happen to us

than have to grapple with the uncertainty of not knowing.

What do you mean by uncertainty?

The definition I like best comes from these two psychologists who said,

uncertainty is a sense of doubt that prevents you from making progress.

And I don't think that's an exhaustive answer.

But what I like about it is that

sometimes when people are faced with uncertainty, it paralyzes them. And so my goal of the book

is to sort of reframe uncertainty, not necessarily as a threat or something that we should be fearful

of, but actually as something that is the precursor to learning. Before you can know something,

you have to not know that thing.

In order to be a human, in order to continue to live, you have to be able to make choices

in spite of uncertainty.

If you're very intolerant of uncertainty, there's two main tendencies that he observes.

One is people become sort of obsessive information gatherers, where they try and research every

single plastic water bottle on Amazon to try and find the best pick. Or they become extremely

impulsive, and they sort of buy the first thing that they see. And you see them both as

avoidance techniques. A more adaptive perspective might be to try a few wider bottles and then

gather some information and then make your choice.

The average expert is roughly as accurate as a dart-throwing chimpanzee.

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