So Much Info, So Much Ambiguity

Seth Godin calls it the “essential skill of thriving in a world that's changing fast”:

“Flip, the ability, when confronted with a world that doesn't match the world in your head, to say, “wait, maybe I was wrong.”

Or as David Foster Wallace wrote:

“To really try to be informed and literate today is to feel stupid nearly all the time... (one should be willing to deal) with massive, high-entropy amounts of info and ambiguity and conflict and flux.”

That, of course, can be exhausting. Which is probably why at times, many envy what Wallace calls “the “moral clarity” of the immature”!

If you don’t try to keep upto date with all that changing info, then you could end up being wrong for the reason that Paul Graham cites:

“When experts are wrong, it's often because they're experts on an earlier version of the world.”

Even if you’re trying to get all that info, Wallace reminds us of:

“How much subcontracting and outsourcing and submitting to other Deciders we’re all now forced to do.”

By “Deciders”, he means the Google’s and Facebook’s of the world.

Too much info causes analysis paralysis in some. Which is why Roger Martin writes in his book, Diaminds: Decoding the Mental Habits of Successful Thinkers:

“Successful thinking integrates several radically different models while preserving the thinker’s ability to act decisively.”

Martin, in another book, Opposable Mind: Winning Through Integrative Thinking, says opposing ideas don’t have to force us to an either/or choice:

“The ability to face constructively the tension of opposing ideas and, instead of choosing one at the expense of the other, generate a creative resolution of the tension in the form of a new idea that contains elements of the opposing ideas but is superior to each.”

That sounds so…exhausting! So I’ll concede the desirability of everything quoted above and yet revert to Calvin’s stance:

“That's a lot more mature than I think I care to be.”