You are uncertain

[tbailen]

Human minds crave a particular amount of certainty. Certainty means we have a good grip on reality and that our mental model of the world is accurate. If I lived by myself, and I came home to a giant dwarf statue sitting in my living room, I would be freaked out. Have you ever had that happen to you? You notice something unexpected out of the corner of your eye and it startles you? It's unpleasant. Your mind likes to be certain.

Do you agree with me that the amount of certainty we have tells us how good our mental models of the world are? Since dwarfs DON'T randomly pop into my experience, I feel pretty good about my grip on reality.

So I have good certainty when it comes to things like objects, and how objects move, and the weather, and the sun coming up every day and stuff like that. Other people seem to be the notable exception. You can never predict what another person is going to do or say! But we have trained our minds to be certain that other people are uncertain. And that makes other people less scary to us.

Still, I wonder- since you can't be certain about other people, does that mean that our mental model of reality is somehow flawed?

(my ideas in this blog post are heavily colored by podcast #8 - Overcoming Fear)