The Blessings of Unanswered Questions

Isidor Isaac Rabi was a Nobel laureate physicist recognized for his discovery of nuclear magnetic resonance, used the world over in MRI machines. He was born into a religious Jewish family in Hungary and came to the US as a young child. A letter to the New York Times in 1988, published shortly after he died, tells an amazing story.

Rabi was once asked, “Why did you become a scientist, rather than a doctor or lawyer or businessman, like the other immigrant kids in your neighborhood?”

Rabi answered, “My mother made me a scientist without ever intending it. Every other Jewish mother in Brooklyn would ask her child after school: ‘So? Did you learn anything today?’ But not my mother. She always asked me a different question. ‘Izzy,’ she would say, ‘did you ask a good question today?’ That difference — asking good questions — made me become a scientist.”

In our day and age, there is no shortage of good questions. The world is only getting more complicated and confusing with each passing day. And yet, despite the complexity of the questions we face, and regardless of our own ignorance or illiteracy on any given subject, we want to give the answer. We don’t hesitate to weigh in or stake out a position.

Technology is opening doors to more information and answers, but it’s also giving us a gross case of overconfidence.

And the truth is, it is no wonder. We live in the information age, with access to terabytes of information at our fingertips offering answers to almost anything in milliseconds. We can consult  videos found online and repair our own cars, install our own home alarm systems, replace the control board on a clothes dryer, or design incredibly complex spreadsheets. It shouldn’t come as a surprise that we feel capable and entitled to understanding any issue and having answers to everything.

But the truth is that while technology may be opening doors to more information, more accessible instructions, and even answers, it is also giving us a gross case of overconfidence.

A 2015 study found that recent college graduates vastly overestimated how much they knew about their area of concentrated study, and dramatically underestimated just how much they had already forgotten. Social psychologists call that the “illusion of explanatory depth”: assuming you can write or speak extensively about a particular subject, when in fact you can barely scratch the surface. Another contributor is the Dunning-Kruger Effect, a cognitive bias that tricks people into believing they are smarter and more skilled than they actually are.

In his 2011 book, Thinking Fast and Slow, Nobel Prize–winning economist Daniel Kahneman called overconfidence “the most significant of the cognitive biases.” Indeed, Kahneman singles out overconfidence as the first bias he would eliminate if he “had a magic wand.” It has been blamed for the sinking of the Titanic, the nuclear accident at Chernobyl, the losses of the space shuttles Challenger and Columbia, the 2008 subprime mortgage crisis, the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, and much more.

Overconfidence has been blamed for the sinking of the Titanic, the nuclear accident at Chernobyl, the 2008 subprime mortgage crisis, and much more.

Overconfidence is not only responsible for natural disasters and large calamities; it’s also a core cause of broken relationships, failed dreams, and struggles in faith for countless individuals. If someone believes and behaves as if he has a monopoly on truth and positions himself as the source of all answers, he will alienate all those around him, be they friends, study partners, colleagues, or, most significantly, his spouse and children. Genuine and healthy relationships require humility and modesty, openness to being influenced, and a commitment to understand others as much as to be understood by them.

Mark Twain once said: “It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.” A smart person isn’t one who knows the most but one who knows how little he knows. “Who is the wise man?” the Mishna asks. “The one who learns from every person.” The smartest person in the room is the one who knows he has something to learn from everyone else in the room.

Knowing that the answer to almost anything is a simple Google search away conditions us to feel far more knowledgeable than we are, far more self-assured than we should be.

The test of our generation is to avoid feeling arrogant, smug, or overly confident in understanding of politics, policies, religion, and life. When we fail that test, the impact is felt in marriages, in learning, and in faith.

I Don’t Know

King Solomon describes his efforts to explore, understand, and have the answers to everything. “I said I will be wise, but it remained elusive to me.” Solomon confesses that he tried, analyzed, contemplated, but at the end of the day, he came up short; despite being the wisest of all men, complete understanding was beyond his grasp.

The reality is that there are some questions we simply aren’t capable of answering. Some questions aren’t for us to answer. We need to learn to concurrently foster curiosity, inquisitiveness, interest, and the pursuit of answers, while also reinforcing the importance of understanding our place, and appreciating that we must not have the chutzpah to feel entitled or even able to understand everything, and that sometimes there is not only nothing wrong with living with and grappling with a question we cannot answer. Indeed, there is something very beautiful and magical about it.

The Talmud (Berachos 4a) states, “Teach your tongue to say ‘I do not know,’ lest you become entangled in a web of deceit.”

Our greatest scholars didn’t hesitate to say “I don’t know,” causing us to think more rather than less of them, and to place greater confidence in the things they did purport to know.

Sometimes the best response to a perplexing theological challenge is that we don’t yet know, we can’t yet answer, the matter is unresolved. We need to inculcate the humility to admit that we don’t know and live with the tension of an unresolved question.

If we want healthy and functional relationships in our lives, if we want to succeed in our dreams and ambitions, if we want to live with faith, we must recognize that confidence is a virtue, but overconfidence is a dangerous vice. As we confront difficult dilemmas and circumstances, as we try to make sense of complicated issues and topics, let’s let in some light by spending time sitting on the question and appreciating its light, and not hurrying to extinguish it by running to provide answers.