The Word Ambiguity Is Ambiguous. Curious? Read This Post

A lot of people simply can't sit with not knowing. That inability might explain why the country feels so split right now, left against right, the people who can't stand Trump against the people who back him. When every answer has to be certain, the gray space in between becomes unbearable.

Yet ambiguity is usually the honest description of what we actually know. We rarely get a clean view of how things really are, and the moment we think we do, a new piece of information shows up and muddies it again. People in their twenties tend to find this especially hard to stomach, and that discomfort is part of what draws some of them toward cults that promise every answer is already sorted out, Scientology being one obvious example.

I've made my peace with not having all the answers. Some things will probably never come into sharp focus, though they may get a little clearer as years pass. I don't expect to understand everything in this lifetime, and I'm fine with that. The people who make me uneasy are the ones who are certain they've got it all figured out, because I rarely agree completely with anyone, and nobody agrees completely with me.

When I was in college, students were pushed to argue, to take opposing sides, to pick apart a point from several angles. That's different from what I see now, where too often the reward goes to students who absorb and repeat whatever a professor who holds the approved opinions happens to teach.

Learning ought to produce surprises and open doors to ideas you hadn't considered, not just confirm whatever you walked in believing. Science is supposed to keep poking at its own conclusions, re-examining what past experiments and current ones seem to prove. A lot of researchers now skip the step where they build a plain, grounded familiarity with whatever they've decided to study. That step used to mean getting personal experience with the thing itself. Anthropologists did it for generations, moving in with the people they intended to understand. Direct contact can teach you more than any book will.

Think about how many child psychologists have actually raised children, or spent real time playing with a kid since they themselves were in high school or college. Sitting on the floor and stepping into a child's made-up world is a completely different thing from watching from across the room and recording measurements. One of my favorite approaches is to ask a child to have me draw a picture of something that happened to them. And a business suit, or a tight skirt and heels, tends to get in the way of that kind of observation.

Years ago I helped set up an experiment on snake phobia. I wasn't especially nervous, because I assumed they wouldn't use live snakes, and I never mentioned that I was snake phobic myself, since telling them would have invited exactly the kind of surprise I dreaded. I'd already learned the warning sign: whenever someone walked through the rooms with the study carrels carrying a shoe box, there was usually a snake inside, and I would quietly get up and leave.

Then I got strapped into a recliner, wired with leads to track my physical responses, in a windowless room with the only door directly behind me. They showed me slides of snakes and then explained that this was the point where the real snake, in a glass tank, would be carried in from behind me. Had that actually happened, I, or any genuine snake phobic, would have completely lost it, which would have ended the experiment on the spot and probably started a lawsuit, assuming everyone involved came through it alive.

Nobody knows everything, and nobody ever will. We're stuck living with ambiguity whether we like it or not. Some people crave solid, fixed knowledge and insist they possess it, but that kind of certainty usually doesn't survive contact with how things really are.

Color is another thing people treat as fixed that really isn't. There's hardly ever such a thing as a pure color, and the way trends shift in fashion and interior design proves it. A shade of green that's everywhere in knitting and crochet yarn one season falls out of favor and ends up on the clearance rack. Someone making goods from that yarn to sell at a craft fair might find almost no takers, because that green has gone stale. Or buy an old handmade throw at a flea market and discover it clashes with everything in the room where you meant to put it. Even green, even a primary color, turns out to be slippery.

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