Certainty is one of those facets of human cognition that isn’t actually what it seems.
Certainty entails feeling that some notion is very probable, accurate, and precise, so we might be tempted to intuit that it’s an actual measure of those things.
What else is there, when we have finished examining a truth claim or piece of reasoning, if not certainty that it is either correct or wrong in some way, or uncertainty about it?
Yet we feel just as certain about our wrong conclusions and positions and logic as we do about the correct ones, because they are the best we’ve reached so far.
So in a way, certainty is just generally not an accurate barometer of correctness. And in my experience I’ve seen the amount of certainty correlate more to a person’s personality and other in-the-moment aspects of cognition than to how reliably the person reaches sound conclusions.
It seems like the better we get at thinking soundly, pursuing knowledge, and integrating our past and present experiences, our relative certainty in a thing should presumably start to more accurately match how likely we are to be correct.
But then we’re just doing what everyone who is certain does, aren’t we? - feeling certain in our ability to reach correct conclusions on the matter. We are certain we have more evidence and sound reasons to be certain, and I think there can be truth in that, but it has a fundamental subjectivity that makes it hard to give constructive, actionable advice on how to deal with certainty in our cognition flows - when to trust it and when to challenge it.
No matter how much evidence in my rightness I have, certainty’s main effect is to make me unreceptive to ideas I already disagree with, and it has taken me some effort to learn to “step around” my certainty to engage with ideas beyond that.
Conversely, I’ve seen countless suboptimal outcomes from being uncertain, actions not taken at the right moment because indecision or other cognition flows that suppressed action were able to thrive in an environment of uncertainty. People often don’t intervene in unethical actions, people often stay in unhealthy relationships, because of uncertainty.
From a cognetic perspective, I’m tempted to view certainty as serving the function that mutation-correcting genes serve - it suppresses the growth or activation of cognemes different than the already established ones, which is useful more often than it is harmful.
My tentative conclusion is that whether or not it’s right to be certain it depends less on what you’d be certain about and how right you are, and more on what situation you’re in.
Figure out what cognition undermines your certainty and what cognition reinforces it, and get good at thinking the thoughts that get you there on demand. Raise certainty when you need to act, and drop it when you need to evaluate ideas.
This isn’t a complete solution to any situation by itself, and there’s a closely related open problem of deciding when it’s time to switch from evaluation to action. But I think this clarifies the role of certainty in cognition.
Certainty is not actually a measuring stick - it’s a foundation for motivation.
