Walking in the Dark, or How to Make Decisions in Uncertainty
The original (Spanish) version of this post can be found here.
About a year ago, I wrote a thread on Twitter that went viral within minutes. It talked about how the President of the Spanish government and other contemporary politicians no longer think like chess players, but like basketball players.
I think it resonated because we need new ways to explain a world we understand less and less. The feeling that reality is becoming more complex and harder to grasp—and therefore harder to control—is distressing. Because how do you make decisions without knowing? How do you think without knowing what’s going to happen?
This article is the first in a short series in which I’ll share some underlying ideas that floated beneath that thread. I believe they are useful not only to understand the world but also to navigate life.
This first one is about how to navigate uncertainty.
The 20th century was the era of strategic thinkers. Keynes and Marx wrote boldly about what the world would be like in 100 years. The world was seen as an ordered place, governed by constants—like class struggle or the law of supply and demand—that determined what would happen.
In the last years of that orderly world, the British newspaper The Guardian released an ad that illustrates this idea very well.
In 1986, reality was something certain that could be understood once you had “the whole picture,” once you had seen all the perspectives. Well-informed people, who made an effort to access quality information, could understand everything. And they could make decisions and understand the decisions of others—even for the next 100 years.
This is the framework that many people who felt bewildered are still operating within. If they were well-informed, if they were good analysts, how could it be that they didn’t understand anything?
The thing is, the world has changed. In 2012, The Guardian released another ad:
This clip about the little pigs won the Cannes advertising festival that year. It’s a brilliant portrayal of complexity. If anything, it might be accused of falling short—of still believing that we can understand the world in that way, that there’s still a “whole picture” that will make everything clear.
But the world has revealed itself to be extraordinarily complex, so multipolar, that it’s absurd to keep thinking everything happens on a regulated board that works in turns, like in chess.
And maybe it never really was like a chessboard. That moment in the 20th century when everything seemed orderly and predictable was a mirage, created by an overwhelming concentration of power in the hands of the same elites (the media, the state, politics, and para-state structures like lawyers or the third sector), a concentration that began with the printing press and ended with Facebook.
It’s quite likely that if you asked someone outside those elites—an immigrant, for example—they wouldn’t share that same sense of an orderly world.
But as social media has allowed each person to become a micro-media outlet and to gather around narratives different from the mainstream, this status quo has inevitably disintegrated. What follows is a world far more complex than we can comprehend, and a battalion of analysts left disoriented.
Because that very notion—of not understanding—is unbearable. Hence the success of the Twitter thread.
How do you make decisions in uncertainty? The same way you walk in the dark: by feeling your way.
Imagine you were in a dark room and wanted to get to the door. If there were light, your mind would plan a path, avoiding obstacles, and you’d be able to explain how you were going to move from point A to B before taking a single step. But in the dark, that’s impossible.
Our frustration comes from having the light turned off. We still want to know, before we start walking, how to get from A to B. We want to map out a route—but we can’t, and we won’t be able to. It’s not a lack of analytical capacity or perspectives. We need to learn to move by feeling.
It’s about walking by recognizing the immediate terrain, the one we need for the next step. For that, instead of planning, what works in uncertainty is experimenting and learning from the information that experimentation yields.
In the software world—which has operated this way for many years—the major websites you know, like Netflix or Airbnb, have long worked like this: not by crafting grand strategic plans, but by running countless small tests on users.
In politics—to bring this back to the example in the Twitter thread—this means shifting away from relying on opinion polls and instead drawing insights from how messages perform on social media. What messages are understood and which aren’t? What other mental frameworks do the messages you’re sending evoke? What do people actually hear when you say something? How is public opinion shifting? Do we talk more about mental health after Pedro’s five days? Do we talk more about disinformation? Test, collect data, refine the test, test again. And gradually, begin to feel your way into a relationship with the world.
The hardest part is changing your mindset and letting go of the idea of understanding the whole world—and controlling it. Letting go of long-term analysis. Indeed, around any corner there may be a monster, a setback, a collapse, or an accident (this has always been the case), and there are so many players involved that we can’t calculate what will happen.
It’s hard to let go because we think the right way to think is the one that grasps “the whole picture.” But feeling your way through the dark isn’t so different from how we approach the unknown in other fields—especially in science.
Just as a scientist embarking on research doesn’t know how the path will end and experiments to gain more information, in the 21st century we should apply the scientific method to nearly everything in life.
The good news is that once you flip the switch and start thinking in this new way, suddenly—you can navigate in the dark! You regain the tools to learn and the ability to make decisions that you might feel you’ve lost. Your sense of smell and hearing sharpen, and even other senses you didn’t know you had develop.
And you no longer need the light to be on.