The Virtues of Doubt

Doubt-fullness has it perks

A small recollection of doubt-full moments in the past few months:

• I spent 30 minutes at World Market choosing snacks. I walked the Japanese aisle ten times, picked and unpicked three different types of chips, until my own exhaustion led me to settle for the cacio e pepe puffs. “What if I choose the wrong snack?”

• A woman sat across from me at a coffee shop. Our eyes met enough times that I suspected that, maybe, she was interested. I fell into the quicksand of questions: what to say, whether approaching her would seem weird, whether I’d misread the signals entirely. I said nothing. “What if she thinks I’m a creep?”

• A startup posted a role that seemed great—interesting work, good pay, solid team. While I spiraled about whether I was qualified enough, the position was filled. “Would they even consider me?”

Doubt often bogs me down in moments mundane and important alike. The search for certainty, “the right decision,” becomes a siren song that casts me adrift. I’ve written many pieces documenting situations where the obvious retort is “stop doubting yourself!” Trust me, I’m trying.

But I’ve also been exploring an alternative lens to doubt. One that is not as fatalistic, that recognizes that while doubt can paralyze, it can also clarify. Doubt is the stage name for “uncertainty,” but it’s also the stage name for “curiosity.”

Doubt has its virtues. And based on the world we live in, they’ve never been more valuable.

What is real?

This is the world we live in: We drown in information. Billions of ad dollars are contingent on grabbing our attention. Misinformation has become easier than fact-checking—every fake video cutting through the fabric of our collective reality. Charlatans visit our screens and peddle certainty. They know in the digital realm, confidence brings the riches.

Doubt emerges as a necessary bullshit detector. Being fooled is no longer a matter of age. We can’t pretend that only the naïve youth or technology-challenged elders will fall for deepfakes. Misinformation will only become more sophisticated; the only way to combat it is to take everything we hear, see, read with a grain of salt, to fact-check early and often, and to continually ask ourselves how we know that what we think is true is in fact true.

Just this week, the President of the United States shared a convincing AI-generated video promoting a technology (MedBeds) that doesn’t exist, as if it were a pillar of his healthcare policy.¹ The means for this kind of misinformation have been commoditized by companies like OpenAI, and while we may enjoy the whimsy of being able to create videos of SpongeBob coming out of our TVs or Sam Altman tasting clouds, the stakes for misinformation will get higher.

Not casting doubt on all the information we consume will lead to further polarization, incorrect assumptions about how things around us work, and beyond making us look like idiots, it can swing the fate of a society.

The dot at the bottom of the question mark

You know the question mark?² Well, the squiggly line wouldn’t mean a thing without the dot at the bottom. That’s what doubt is: the foundation of the question.

The question doesn’t exist without doubt. If you are certain about something, you have no need to question it. When was the last time you’ve questioned whether water is wet?

Questions are one of the most beautiful and interesting human characteristics. All the knowledge and art and beauty that humans have created has emerged from the question.

Therefore, a doubt-full mind can be a boon for curiosity and seeing the world with the eyes of an explorer. It’s also an antidote to hubris. And the best role models, those who earnestly embrace doubt, are children.

Children will ask you the most random things: “what’s the opposite of a sandwich?” “what is thinking?” or “why do we have breakfast for dinner but not dinner for breakfast?”³ They use questions to construct reality; it’s their way of reaching for the walls in a pitch black room, slowly gaining consciousness of their boundaries. The best part is that many of these children, those who had their curiosity nurtured, go on to ask questions that allow them to break the boundaries that we know (e.g. can humans fly? can we cure AIDS? can we connect the world through bytes and wires?)

Far more than being a handy weapon against misinformation, doubt is what powers curiosity. And outside of love, I can’t think of a more constructive life force than curiosity.

Maybe this is just a cope?

I will readily concede that this reflection is all one big cope that seeks to justify a character trait that has probably cost me a few great opportunities and experiences. I will also concede that my sense of doubt is not evenly applied in all areas of my life. I tend to be too gullible and naive about people; I naturally see the best in others, which tends to lead to idolization and ignoring flaws that most people would see. I take people at their word far too often.

Notwithstanding my own personal relationship with doubt, the virtues are clear and urgent. Milan Kundera wrote that “modern stupidity means not ignorance but the nonthought of received ideas.” And I fear a world where modern stupidity is the default state,⁴ not necessarily because we are all morons, but because the volume of ideas we receive is so vast and packaged concretely to be taken at face value, that vetting every idea becomes a Sisyphean task. We risk becoming stupid by sheer overwhelm. Doubt receives ideas with thought. It’s an antidote to stupidity.

But, hey, what do I know?

1. The fact that the only concrete healthcare policy this administration has offered is a fake video of an inexistent technology is damning. But what do I know…I’m just a man, waiting for something more than “concepts of a plan” for our healthcare mess.

2. Also called an eroteme.

3. All these questions were taken from this delightful Instagram post from Drbeckyatgoodinside.

4. We are trending in that direction.