Numlock Sunday: Christie Aschwanden on uncertainty
Numlock Sunday: Christie Aschwanden on uncertainty
By Walt Hickey
Welcome to the Numlock Sunday edition.
This week, I spoke to Christie Aschwanden, who hosts the brand-new podcast Uncertain for Scientific American.
Christie and I go way back to FiveThirtyEight together, I think she’s brilliant and one of the level best science writers out there, she’s responsible for some of my favorite journalism about the practice of science and when I heard she’s got a new five-episode podcast all about uncertainty, well, I just had to have her on.
We spoke about humanity’s relationship with uncertainty, science as an ongoing process, and how not knowing can be as inspiring as it is frightening.
Aschwanden can be found at Emerging Form and Scientific American. The podcast, Uncertain, is available wherever you get podcasts, and will be publishing every Wednesday over the next several weeks.
This interview has been condensed and edited.
Christie, thank you so much for coming back on. It is always a delight to talk to you.
It’s a pleasure! I always love talking with you as well. It's just like old times.
I am a gigantic fan of Emerging Form, which is a really delightful newsletter and podcast that you work on with your friend Rosemerry. I wanted to have you on because you have a brand-new miniseries podcast running with Scientific American right now called Uncertain. I am just so excited for this. I love whenever you talk about science and the bigger ideas behind it. This feels made exactly for me.
That's great. I'm happy to hear that.
Can you tell me how it came together?
Yeah. Actually, you will appreciate this. This all started when I got a message from our friend Anna Barry-Jester, a former colleague at FiveThirtyEight. She sent me this note that said something like, someone created a grant for you. What? And she was like, this thing is tailor-made for you. You have to apply. And I'm like, huh.
The grant was interesting. It was a one-time deal. The grant was being administered through Greater Good Science Center at University of California, Berkeley, and the money came to them from the Templeton Foundation. But the money was basically for reporting projects on intellectual humility. If you're not familiar with that term, it basically refers to holding in your mind this idea that you can be wrong, that perhaps you are wrong, and just keeping that wrongness in mind. It’s navigating the world with a certain type of humility and being open to changing your mind as facts change and all that.
The reason why Anna thought this was such a perfect topic for me is that I have this large body of work and reporting on scientific process and how things work, how they break down, but I've become pretty obsessed with uncertainty over the years. The aspect of this that really interests me when I'm looking at it in terms of science is that I’ve come to believe that the public doesn’t have the best relationship with uncertainty. I think it's human nature for all of us that we don't naturally like uncertainty. It feels scary. We want to know what's going to happen. I think during the pandemic, this really came to the forefront where people were like, oh my God, what do I do now? I thought I knew what I was doing tomorrow and now I don't.
But when it comes to science, I think where this misalignment really comes up is that the public often thinks of science as something that provides an answer and something that tells us facts and figures and all that. And science does do that; that's not entirely untrue. The problem is that the actual science that scientists are doing, when you're looking at the forefront — for instance, when we're in this global pandemic and everything's new and scientists are trying to understand what's happening in that role — science isn't an answer. It's a process. It's a process of uncertainty reduction, and it's really feeling things out.
So if you are thinking of science as this thing that provides absolute answers, you're going to get turned around during something like the pandemic, because the scientific understanding of things is going to evolve and shift as more information comes to light, as people do more experiments, more studies, looking at it. Our understanding of COVID-19 really moved a lot. Remember those early days when people were washing their groceries because we didn't know better?
Our understanding of things really evolved, and that's science working as it should. Scientists change their minds all the time, and that's good. That means that they're doing it right. But I think what can easily happen is the public says, oh, wait, I can't trust this anymore because they're changing their mind. Or, wait a minute, you told me this, and now you're telling me this other thing; I thought that was for sure. Well, that's not how science works.
The other thing that's happened — and I actually wrote a piece about this when I was at FiveThirtyEight, with the headline “There's No Such Thing as ‘Sound Science’” — is that we're living in an environment where we have nefarious interests who are weaponizing uncertainty, and they're really turning it against science. Basically, the idea here is that they tell people, well, scientists aren't sure. Therefore, they don't know, and therefore we can't know anything. A lot of times, this is a delay tactic. It's about undermining the things that we do know. It's about undermining trust in scientists and science.
One of the things that I explore in the podcast is this paradox that science always has an element of uncertainty. If something is absolutely certain, it's not science. Uncertainty underlies everything. At the same time, it's still possible to know things. In fact, science is the very best way that we have to know things and to understand the world. Making sense of that paradox was really my ambition with the podcast, and what I hope that people will take away from it.
I love that. It feels like something innate about humans to not like uncertainty. You and I have had this conversation, about how we also worked at a website that somewhat notoriously assigned probabilities to things that gave people comfort and attempted to reduce uncertainty in their mind for potentially good or bad. One thing that we found is that people aren't really good with probabilities that aren't 0 percent, 50 percent or 100 percent. There’s that corridor of 30 percent chance and 70 percent chance that people don't like and it makes them very, very uncomfortable.
Do you get into much of the emotional origins of uncertainty and why people are sometimes perturbed by something like that?
That's interesting. That's an interesting question. What you just said reminded me about how before the 2016 election, when we were working at FiveThirtyEight, I really wanted to write a story that explained probability, like what does this forecast mean with this probability? What does that actually mean, because I think people don't understand that very well. And I got shot down because our editors thought, oh, people understand that. And I'm like, no, they don't. Anyway, you could be the judge of whether I was vindicated on that.
But to get back to your question, there’s some emotional confluence. The first episode actually makes the case of flipping it around, to be honest. I think the human tendency is to not like uncertainty, to want to make it go away. This is why people are so vulnerable to these purveyors of nonsense, because the purveyors of this crap are providing certainty, and they're giving people this thing that they want.
That's why they do so well, and actually succeed and make a lot of money. And there are so many podcasts. I wrote a book about exercise recovery, and there are so many podcasts with men, usually men, talking about research on this stuff that's just nonsense. But what they're doing is they're taking small studies, preliminary work, and just way overextending it, overapplying it, overgeneralizing it to give people answers that they want on questions that may not have a hard and fast answer. But people want that. So they get lots of listeners, and they sell lots of these bullshit supplements, because people want that certainty.
I'm pushing back against that a little bit. The first episode of the podcast is actually turning us around and saying, hey, uncertainty is really cool. Uncertainty is where creativity comes from; it's where learning comes from. You can’t learn something about something you already know. You can't make a scientific discovery on something that's already very certain. This is really the realm where the magic happens, whether it's something creative or something scientific. And creativity is a part of science. That's something that I’ve found scientists are really excited to talk about, actually.
There is something fun about uncertainty, where not knowing is its own kind of thrill. The truth is still out there.
Right? Who wants to live in a world where you know everything in advance?
What kinds of scientists did you talk to over the course of the podcast? How many episodes have you got?
It’s five episodes and it has a sort of narrative arc. It was really interesting, I've never done a project quite like this before. I applied for and got the grant, and then I proposed it to Scientific American, and they agreed to publish it.
The first episode is the shortest, it's an intro, but they're about 30 minutes each. I really wanted to be sure that it wasn't just about one type of science, so we've got an ecologist; we've got someone who works in the medical field; I've got a couple people who work in risk management; there's an astrophysicist; there are actually several physicists, some math-type people; there are several psychologists; there's a political scientist. I think that's about it. But I wanted to cover a broad range of science because these issues exist in all sciences.
And I think some types of science have more uncertainty than others. That’s another important thing that I'd like the public to understand more. You and I did that fun group project together at FiveThirtyEight looking at nutrition studies, investigating and trying to explain to readers why they're so terrible and why that data and those conclusions are so shoddy. The reason is that it's just very difficult to collect good data on that stuff, and there are some important reasons why that is that are hard to overcome. By nature, those studies are going to be less reliable and less generalizable than we would like, compared to studies in some other fields.
Like you were talking about with being humble about what we know and what we don’t, with so much of that, there’s a real urge to want to know, and it’s hard to go through life at odds with that. It’s just so cool that in every single science you can think of, you do have to be somewhat complacent with some degree of uncertainty.
Obviously, a big part of what folks do is find ways to quantify uncertainty. You wrote one of the best pieces that FiveThirtyEight ever published, I think, all about essentially P values and how people have trouble with them intuitively, but they’re somewhat critical. I think it’s very interesting that everybody has the same problem here, and a lot of it is just that one needs to get a little bit more psychologically down with not knowing things. And whether or not you can pull that off comes down to how it feels to be alive.
I agree with that. And I like this framing of learning to feel comfortable with uncertainty, making peace with it, learning to sit with it. Maybe have fewer value judgments about it.
For me, one of the things that has really helped and that I've learned over time is that you can look at uncertainty as scary. Sure, bad things can happen. But you can also look at it as opportunity and possibility. The future isn't set. I'm still worried about the scary outcome, but maybe there is a happier one or a better one that's still possible.
I think that's something that sometimes gets lost. And I think we're living in sort of scary times, with the election coming up; it's a frightening time in our history. There’s a lot of uncertainty. But one thing to keep in mind is that that future is not set yet. Yes, all things are possible, but we can work toward the future that we want that's still a possibility.
How did making this change the way that you yourself contend with uncertainty?
It’s just made me much more open to it and more comfortable with sitting with it. And it's helped me to maybe quiet, not mute, but maybe reduce the volume on this impulse to want it to go away. Just being able to say, yep, this is the human condition; here's my existential state of unknowing. And not knowing can sometimes be a little bit delightful on some things. It's like, I don't know what's going to happen. Wow, there are a lot of possibilities. What am I not seeing?
That's another thing, when things are uncertain, is that it opens up possibilities that you may not have considered, versus when we're feeling very deterministic about things. Like, okay, I know tomorrow the sun's going to rise in the east and set in the west, and some things will happen in between, versus being in a situation where you're like, I don't know what's going to happen. Let's see. It could be exciting.
I didn’t come into this conversation expecting how much of it would be about how uncertainty is almost an outgrowth of perspective, and the human element of the world. Like, probability is an inherent factor of the universe, right? But uncertainty is an emotion about that. And the more we've been talking, I've been intrigued by how much of this sounds like how one has to greet the world and not lose one's mind.
Absolutely. Yeah.
I am so excited for this podcast. Five episodes is such a great length for folks who want to dip their toes in.
Your work is obviously phenomenal, and can be found all over. I'll make sure to link it out. But why don't you tell folks where they can find the podcast, how they can best support it, and where to find you?
I appreciate that. Probably the easiest way to find it is at Scientific American, or you can search for “Scientific American Uncertainty” wherever you get your podcasts. It's in all the usual spots, but it does have a landing page at Scientific American.
You can find me on my website, christieaschwanden.com, which I promised myself I would update. It's kind of sad at the moment that you and I are talking. It's still trapped in amber from late 2019. It still has the book tour dates that came out in 2019, but I'm going to be updating that soon.
And you can find me on Instagram, Bluesky and Mastodon at @cragcrest. I am no longer on the evil site. Not going to give that boy any of my money or attention.
Completely understandable. To that point about the website, somebody came up with the idea of an email debt forgiveness day a few years ago, and I think we just need a national holiday where we all update our websites.
I know. The problem is that as soon as you update it, it's out of date again. I figured now I have a nice project that I can put up there. I don’t know, there's just no way I'm going to be able to update it with all the work I've done since then, but we'll see. I'll at least have the calendar updated or something.
Yes. It's uncertain whether or not your website will be up to date by the time folks click on it, but a link will stand here nevertheless.
That’s right. I appreciate it. Thank you.
Thank you.
Edited by Susie Stark.