It can feel extremely satisfying to classify something into a bucket. In doing so, you can tap into any preexisting knowledge you may have in that category. You don’t have to start learning from scratch. In fact, identifying patterns and using heuristics are essential to making sense of the world. However, these shortcuts won’t always lead to an optimal outcome. The more nuanced and idiosyncratic a topic at hand, the less reliable any single heuristic will be in optimizing the outcome.
When I’m faced with an unfamiliar situation or am learning something new, this is a principle I try to be cognizant of. The obvious downside of this approach is that it’s time-consuming and the benefits are uncertain when you start. Additionally, it can be overwhelming to learn something without leveraging prior knowledge. In a lot of scenarios, the outcome might not even be meaningfully better. For instance, you can derive the constant, pi, independently, but the approximation of 3.14 is likely sufficiently informative.
When diving deep into an important topic, however, I selectively use this mindset of embracing amguiguity. That way, I find that I can decrease the likelihood of hitting a local maximum. A common example of this is using principles from one sport to inform your approach to a similar sport. When I first started playing squash, I used my knowledge of basic racquetball techniques to guide my approach. Initially, my game improved, but eventually, it hit a plateau until I learned techniques more specific to squash from observation and research (i.e. youtube). As a consequence, I had to change aspects of my gameplay in ways that felt unintuitive. After the initial hump though, I got better and now enjoy the sport more than ever. This doesn’t mean I’ve reached my maximum potential, but I did reach a level that wasn’t possible before.
All this to say, it can be hard to overcome our heuristics and to accept the ambiguity that comes with it. However, it can enable us to unlock insights that we couldn’t have accessed before and that’s rewarding. This is the reason to selectively (but wholeheartedly) embrace ambiguity.