Dance with Uncertainty
This was my last post in 2020 — a really magic year for all of us. If someone asks me about my greatest gain this year, I will definitely answer with “dance with uncertainty.” This year was filled with uncertainties. At first, I was really mad at that, mad at most things around me. I witnessed how COVID-19 destroyed each person’s plans and how most countries suffered from this disaster. All the failures once again evoked my strong willingness to make this world better and to solve some problems that already exist. All these unprecedented things really ruined my plans, as well as my moods. But later I just found out that only adaptability is the solution.
Since COVID-19, I have paid more attention to uncertainty in everyday life. It lies everywhere actually — you will never know whether a stock will rise or fall, or who will be the next president. Although you can try your best to find out which is most likely to come out, each choice you make, each bet you have, just involves uncertainty. From a scientific point of view, this is due to “the error bar.” Such errors, or uncertainty, may come from biases in the way you are thinking (systematic errors) or just from random things which cannot be controlled and predicted. In a word, such uncertainty can either rise from your mistakes in making plans or be just randomly distributed accidents.
In reality, when someone predicts that Trump has a 51% probability to win, he/she omits the uncertainty value. Maybe he/she should put it this way: “Trump has 49% to win and the error bar might be 5%.” He/she neglects the uncertainty either by accident or on purpose to achieve a goal.
Right now, when I make plans, choices, or bets, I tell myself there must be uncertainties. I cannot make perfect plans. I cannot know everything in advance. Therefore, when unexpected things show up, I won’t be that crazy. Besides, I make myself consider what I am going to do if something not in my plan happens. Although I couldn’t come up with a Plan B for every accident, these Plans B still help a lot when accidents really appear. At last, if some huge accidents which are also hard to predict come out, like COVID-19, the ultimate solution is just to adapt to it, roll with it, and have upbeat moods to make changes happen.
Revisited 2026 — what I’d add now.
When 2020-me talked about “error bars,” it was a metaphor. When 2026-me uses it, it is daily research practice — nuclear-winter LES ensembles, satellite MCMC posteriors, the prior/regularization/cross-validation triad of the inverse problem. “Honest X plus Y error bar” has become a workflow, not just a year-end aphorism.
Looking back, I am still glad: the intuition was already in place. The 2020-me had only the intuition; the 2026-me holds the tools that let the intuition do real work.