Ambiguity

With a title like Nonsense: The Power of Not Knowing, it’s hard not to be curious about this book by Jamie Holmes. The main thrust of the book is ambiguity – where it may be important and how to use it to your advantage. The ambiguous title is fitting. How can Not Knowing (Ignorance, perhaps) be powerful in a positive way? It sounds like Nonsense. In my previous post, I highlighted the BBC documentary about the Michel Thomas method. I learned about it in Holmes’ book. Even the book cover looks intriguing (shown below).

Holmes starts out by discussing puzzles. I happen to enjoy puzzles tremendously! Every day I faithfully work on the New York Times (NYT) crossword puzzle. When I first started, I could occasionally finish the Monday puzzle, but even then I sometimes needed help (from my spouse). After about a couple of years I could consistently finish the Monday through Wednesday puzzles relatively quickly without assistance. Now I can consistently finish the puzzle every day although the Friday and Saturday puzzles can be stumpers without a guiding theme. I will also happily work on logic puzzles, rebus puzzles, jigsaw puzzles, and more. However with limited time and energy, the crossword has been my mainstay.

Puzzles tickle the brain, and the NYT puzzle is cool because there are some rather interesting themes and variations. The Monday through Wednesday puzzles, and the Sunday puzzle, have relatively strong themes. Some of them are quite clever. I also find delight in the ambiguity of the clues – they could mean one thing, but they could mean another thing, or if you twist your mind around maybe yet a different thing. The question mark in a clue alerts you that there is a twist. The answer is not likely the first common thing that comes to mind. The Thursday puzzle is where you get some very creative and interesting variations. The first time I encountered a puzzle that had multiple letters in a box as part of the theme, I was actually offended. I thought it “should not be allowed by the rules”. (I found this out when I looked at the answer the next day after failing to solve the puzzle.) The irritation however gave way quickly to admiration. I started looking forward to Thursday puzzles and their brain-tickling twists. There’s a pleasure to it. Holmes classifies it as the pleasure of ambiguity. It’s hard to explain but there is something humorous about putting together things that normally don’t go together. Holmes cites the popularity of the game Mad Libs as a first among many examples.

According to Holmes, it is important to learn to live with some level of ambiguity, and not seek closure to quickly. A number of psychology experiments have shown that those who have low tolerance for ambiguity try to reduce the “uncertain feeling” by being decisive even in an area that may not be connected directly to the ambiguity. For example, data show that in the one-year period following a natural disaster there is a spike in the number of marriages and also the number of divorces in that specific area compared to non-disaster years. The most sobering story that Holmes details is the Waco standoff. While the chief negotiator, with a high tolerance for ambiguity, was attempting to get more Branch Davidians to leave the compound, uncertain and ambiguous actions by David Koresh, led the tactical team to push for more decisive action (by charging in). Much loss of life might have been prevented, although we won’t know exactly what might have been, if different choices were made.

In the final section of his book, Holmes outlines strategies of Embracing Uncertainty. He praises tolerance for ambiguity because it can lead to creativity. Apparently being fluent in a second language can be correlated to creative solutions (on standard psychological tests). Holmes describes how bilinguals find delight in juxtaposing words from different languages whose meaning might differ. Being multilingual, I can attest to this – I get a strange amusement in a Mad Libs way by mixing up or translating phrases from different languages so they sound silly. I wonder if I’m above average in creativity, but I haven’t taken one of the standard tests yet.

There is a small section on higher education. Holmes writes: “In the typical college classroom… the teacher runs through the material using clear, declarative statements. Lectures are not usually designed to help students grapple with ambiguous problems. Professors don’t generally include games in logic for students to fill in, or contradictions to work out, or pauses that encourage students to reflect. Most lecturers do ask questions to engage students, but their questions are too often rhetorical. That’s because teachers get nervous or impatient and then answer their own queries… Traditional lecturing, more importantly, encourages an approach increasingly at odds with the challenges graduates face. Have you ever had a lecturer highlight the necessity of stumbling, errors, and luck in developing breakthrough innovations?”

I believe there’s a benefit in clear lecturing in short bursts. One also needs to strike a balance between working on ambiguous problems (in the sciences) and providing enough structure so that the student isn’t completely flailing. Finding that sweet spot in the zone of proximal development is not easy, and it changes from year-to-year with a different class of students. Contradictions are an important part of my class although I warn the students beforehand. I sometimes respond to a student answer (to a question I posed) with “I’m going to try and distract you” at which point I come up with a spurious explanation that contains some half-truths, and let the students puzzle this out. It sharpens their thinking so they can drill down beyond an initial vague but “on the right track” solution. In my first year of teaching at my present institution, I sat in on many of my colleagues’ classes. In one of them, my very experienced colleague posed a question and was greeted by silence. This was early in the semester so no surprise there. He simply told the class that he was willing to wait, and leaned against the wall patiently. And eventually the silence broke. Since then I’ve done the same thing.

Overall I found parts of the book quite interesting, while other parts felt more like pop psychology. Let me include one last vignette that I found intriguing based on studies by Piotr Winkielman and others. They found that “when people were in a bad mood they found comfort in the familiar.” When happy, however, they quickly get bored with the familiar and seek novelty. Holmes writes: “Novelty was threatening only when the adults were in a defensive state of mind. An upbeat mood can apparently turn a confusing idea into an interesting one. By rebranding failure and confusion as not merely normal but also indispensable, teachers can go a long way toward changing students’ emotional attitude towards uncertainty.” It seems as if he’s implying that creativity and innovate thinking can be catalyzed by a good mood. I wonder how that plays out in the classroom. Inject small jolts of humor perhaps? Or is this all just nonsense?