As written in The Conversation by Aleeza Gerstein, associate professor in Microbiology and Statistics and Michelle Driedger, professor at the College of Community and Global Health.
Earlier this summer, the four of us spent three days in a room with a dozen others whose jobs sound nothing like ours, or like each other’s: a cosmologist, an emergency management scholar, a genetic counselor, a hydrologist, a neuropsychologist, a health risk communication scholar, a cognitive neuroscientist, a theater director, an investigative journalist and a meteorologist. We’re also from four different disciplines: a sociologist, a human rights scholar, an Indigenous community health scholar and a microbial geneticist.
We had convened through CIFAR, a research organization that interdisciplinary groups to work on hard questions, for a workshop on a challenge that none of our fields can solve alone: how to grapple with, and communicate about, uncertainty in research.
To start, we each brought an object that captured our own struggle with representing uncertainty clearly. One of us brought a handheld weather monitor. Another brought a blank flip chart. A third brought a gachapon, the prize from a Japanese capsule-toy vending machine, which you buy without knowing which toy you’ll get. After the show-and-tell exercise, it was obvious we were all circling the same problem.
The instinct for many researchers is to treat uncertainty as a failing, something to paper over before anyone notices. Our conversation suggested the opposite: that uncertainty is everywhere in every field, and it is worth naming out loud rather than hiding. It is not the absence of knowledge or a lack of results – it is a generative space where curiosity, learning and new understanding are possible.
Most of us also agreed that our struggle to articulate uncertainty makes it harder to share our work clearly with the public, and that glossing over it can damage public trust when people later discover the doubt we left out.
Every field is in the uncertainty business
Uncertainty is not a problem to be solved. Navigating uncertainty is the job, and it never fully goes away.
What do researchers mean by uncertainty? Broadly: Everything we don’t yet know about the thing we are trying to describe, and how much that missing knowledge could change the answer.
Read the full story at The Conversation.
