{
  "id": "stay-with-not-knowing",
  "number": "018",
  "edition": "Ideas",
  "title": "Stay with not knowing",
  "standfirst": "An unresolved question can be more productive than a premature answer.",
  "when": "You are rushing to decide because uncertainty feels like a failure to progress.",
  "way": "Approximate answers, degrees of certainty and open questions can remain useful without being resolved. Not knowing does not have to stop inquiry. It can keep a situation alive long enough for a better account to emerge.",
  "tryThis": "Write three possible explanations for what is happening. Give each a confidence level. Spend one more round gathering evidence before choosing among them.",
  "notice": "What becomes possible when certainty is not required yet?",
  "person": "Richard Feynman",
  "source": "The Contemporary Blueprint archive",
  "quote": "I can live with doubt and uncertainty and not knowing. I think it’s much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers which might be wrong. I have approximate answers and possible beliefs and different degrees of certainty about different things, but I’m not absolutely sure of anything, and there are many things I don’t know anything about, such as whether it means anything to ask why we’re here and what the question might mean. I might think about it a little bit—if I can’t figure it out, then I go to something else. I don’t have to know an answer. I don’t feel frightened by not knowing things, by being lost in the mysterious universe without having any purpose, which is the way it really is as far as I can tell. Possibly it doesn’t frighten me.",
  "sourceUrl": "https://youtu.be/QkhBcLk_8f0",
  "contexts": [
    "begin",
    "decide",
    "perspective"
  ],
  "free": true,
  "related": [
    "reverse-the-premise",
    "follow-the-resistance",
    "make-ten-possibilities"
  ],
  "sourceArchive": "The Contemporary Blueprint",
  "referenceKind": "quotation",
  "referenceExcerpt": "I can live with doubt and uncertainty and not knowing. I think it’s much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers which might be wrong."
}