The cost of uncertainty

There is a reason why Homo sapiens dislike uncertainty. Their early days were replete with uncertainty with only a single tool available to counteract it, guessing. Those who guessed wrong perished and those who survived saw the perils of guessing wrong. Uncertainty has always been costly for humans, something they learned to avoid. Even managers of modern firms pay to avoid uncertainty, to the detriment of their shareholders, for we have many tools to manage it today.

Uncertainty in society, however, has huge cognitive costs with little benefits. One tool the modern human has invented to cope with uncertainty is conspiracy theories. When information is insufficient to make a decision, the natural instinct of a human is to create a story, something that provides a structure to diminish the uncertainty. The veracity of the story is of little importance, for the story provides a level of comfort and an alleviation of the issue at hand. Logic and incomplete data, thus, will always fail in the presence of uncertainty because of the cognitive cost and the delay in the resolution. A conspiracy theory or a manufactured story will always dominate any scientific process as the latter, by definition, will not resolve the uncertainty completely.

This has many policy implications and even for the design of modern societies. As the society splits into two halves, one that is comfortable with manufactured theories to diminish uncertainty at hand quickly, and the other attempting to incrementally explain it through data, a slow process, it is clear that the former suffers less cognitive cost and will be preferred by a larger percentage of the population.

Those comfortable with conspiracy theories to counteract uncertainty will continue to multiply and in a larger context, this may mean that humans are on their way back to their origins. There does not appear to be anything that will prevent it. As science and technology become less approachable for more and more people, it appears that we will slowly devolve into a society that would rather have manufactured stories to explain uncertainty to the anguish of the miniscule and likely irrelevant part of the population.