From the Vault: The Devil You Know, Part 2

In this classic episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Robert and Joe discuss the psychological, economic and decision theory phenomenon known as ambiguity aversion. Find out how it relates to the Ellsberg paradox, madman theory and the balance of power in our world. (orignally published 8/28/2025)

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:06):
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. Today is Saturday.
We have a vault episode for you. This is going
to be The Devil You Know Part 2, and it
originally published 8-28-2025. Let's dig into it. Welcome to Stuff
to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio. Hey, welcome

(00:31):
to Step to Blow Your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb.

Speaker 2 (00:34):
And I am Joe McCormick. And we're back with part
two in our series called The Devil You Know, which
is about ambiguity aversion. That's the observation that we prefer
risks with known probabilities over risks with unknown probabilities. Even
if you have no reason for thinking that the unknown

(00:54):
risks will be worse. This preference is captured by the
folk saying, better the devil you know than the devil
you don't. For the most part, people don't like taking
bets when they don't know what the odds are and
will pay up just to avoid having to deal with ambiguity.
And this is funny in a way because almost all

(01:14):
of the decisions that we make in our actual lives
are made with incomplete knowledge and some significant amount of
uncertainty about our likelihood of success. Very few things in
reality have clear objective odds, like a fair coin flip
or a dice roll. However, it's pretty well established that
most people most of the time do not like making

(01:36):
decisions under ambiguous conditions, and we will go to great
lengths to avoid taking risks with unknown probabilities. So in
the last episode, after we introduced the concept, we talked
a good bit about the original piece of writing that
made ambiguity aversion famous. This was a 1961 paper that
by the American economist, anti-war activist, and whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg.

(02:00):
The paper was called Risk, Ambiguity, and the Savage Axioms,
published in the Quarterly Journal of Economics. And to briefly recap,
this paper proposed the concept of ambiguity aversion using a
number of thought experiments where you could take different bets
based on which color ball you would draw by chance

(02:20):
out of an urn, Ellsberg's point was that people would
tend to prefer bets with clear odds of winning, say
a 1 in 3 chance, over bets with unknown odds,
where you could have anywhere between a 0% chance or
a 2 out of 3 chance. Ellsberg's intuition here has
been broadly supported by real-world experiments. There are a few exceptions,

(02:44):
but most of the time, most people would rather take
bets with clear odds. even in ways that end up
implying self-contradictory assumptions about the unknown odds. This was an
important discovery in the economic field known as decision theory
because it violated a framework known as Savage's Axioms, which
were widely used to model how people make decisions in

(03:07):
situations of uncertainty or ambiguity. And this self-contradictory behavior is
now known as the Ellsberg Paradox. And then finally, in
the last episode, after talking about the theoretical origins of
ambiguity aversion, we also talked about this phenomenon in practice
in the real world. And our main example here was

(03:27):
the negotiation strategy famously associated with the Nixon White House
known as madman theory, a strategy where you intentionally cultivate
a reputation for volatility and unpredictability. In essence, you make
your peers and your counterparties worry that you are a
madman who is capable of anything. And the, the idea here, we,

(03:50):
we ended up talking about a lot of reasons for
thinking that this is actually not a good strategy, but
the idea here is that you will exploit their natural
ambiguity aversion to get them to make concessions. They would
not make otherwise. And then we did get into some
international relations, uh, research on madman theory, uh, reasons why
it might not actually be a good strategy, especially for

(04:12):
achieving long-term goals. In fact, I think in the long term,
most experts seem to agree that it is harmful to
everyone involved, including the practitioner. But again, the reason it
may sometimes work for achieving short-term wins is by taking
advantage of this fear people have of ambiguity. The fact
that a lot of people would rather just take a
bad deal than keep negotiating with somebody who is highly unpredictable.

Speaker 1 (04:37):
You know, I was thinking after our recording that another
often cited bit of supposed wisdom along these lines is
the idea, and generally you'll see this referenced out of context.
So someone will not be talking about actually going to prison.
They'll be talking about your first day at a new

(04:57):
school or something. And they'll jokingly say, well, you know
what you're supposed to do? You're supposed to go up
to the biggest person around and hit them with a
steel chair. And then everyone will be like, whoa, that
guy's crazy. We better not mess with him. It seems
to follow similar logic and also seem equally, if not more,
flawed in its approach. It does not sound like a

(05:18):
tactic that would actually generate long-term benefits.

Speaker 2 (05:22):
It's one of those pieces of advice that is probably...
more often repeated because it's like memorable and funny and
makes for a good story than because that many people
would think it's actually good advice, especially if you have
relevant experience. I don't know. I mean, I don't know
a lot about like prison strategy, but that does seem
like you could have some real downsides. I, you know,

(05:43):
it makes me think of the, you know, the, the, the, the,
another bit of wisdom, another nugget that's often dished out
in that is, getting into the philosophy of Nietzsche, you know,
that which doesn't kill us makes us stronger.

Speaker 1 (05:56):
But I forget who it was who did a spin
on this and said, well, that which doesn't kill us
nearly kills us. And that should be a reason to
give us pause.

Speaker 2 (06:06):
That's funny because that Nietzsche saying is also one. I
know this has come up on the show before. I
know like in a huge number of cases, that's not true. Yeah.
Like sometimes it makes us stronger. Like we do sometimes
learn and grow and gain strength from adversity, but that's
like some subset of adversities. A lot of adversities leave
us much weaker and deeply shaken.

Speaker 1 (06:26):
Yeah, shaken or less trusting or just completely weakened. An
illness may weaken us. We survive it, but it's weakened
our system, and then we're more susceptible to the next
thing and so forth. So, yeah, I mean, it's great
to take solace in some of these sayings, but you
can only take them so far, really.

Speaker 2 (06:42):
So anyway, we're back today to talk about some more
angles on ambiguity aversion. And one of the first things
I want to get into is that in the last episode,
we did talk a bit about the distinction that Daniel
Ellsberg tried to make between ambiguity and risk. But I
think one thing that's really important to point out that
we didn't get into last time. is the distinction between

(07:05):
ambiguity aversion and risk aversion. I think risk aversion is
a concept more people are probably familiar with that comes
up in conversation sometimes. These are not the same thing.
A person who is risk averse doesn't like to make bets.
They would prefer a sure thing, even if the sure

(07:26):
thing is statistically less valuable than the risk. So, for example,
Imagine a fair coin flip game. We stipulate that this
is a fair coin. There's no cheating involved. And on
each round, when I flip the coin, I can either
just give you $ 40 no matter how the coin lands,
or I could give you $ 100 every time it lands

(07:47):
heads and nothing every time it lands tails. So with
the gambling condition here, you will on average win $ 50
per round. It's a 50-50 chance of winning, and the
payout is $ 100. So the odds here are clear. If
you play this game a thousand times in a row,
you will make more money by gambling than by taking

(08:07):
the guaranteed $ 40 every time. It's statistically all but a
sure thing. But still, some people would rather just take
the actual sure thing. They would rather just take the $ 40.
And that is risk aversion. It is a psychological tendency
to dislike and avoid taking a stake in uncertain outcomes,

(08:29):
even if you know the exact odds of those outcomes,
and potentially even if those odds will statistically bring you
more benefit than the sure thing. And another way of
thinking about risk aversion is that sometimes, to some people,
the feeling of security that you get from taking the
sure thing is actually more valuable than the money. It's

(08:49):
more valuable than the extra money that you would take
home on average if by placing a bet with a
higher expected value. And this emphasizes something that is true
in decision theory and economics. Value isn't just about getting
or keeping money. We use money because it's an easy
way to quantify value in experiments. But sometimes we would

(09:11):
pay money just to feel certainty and comfort. That feeling
is of higher value to us than the money is.
But then, of course, again, other other people at other
times would not pay that. Some people love the feeling
of risk. I mean, people gamble for pleasure.

Speaker 1 (09:25):
Yeah, absolutely. But yeah, but other times it's like I
just don't I just don't want to take a chance
on this. I'd rather just go for what's going to
be straightforward and guaranteed.

Speaker 2 (09:35):
Right. So that's risk and risk aversion. Ambiguity aversion is
different from risk aversion because it is not about a
dislike of risk, but specifically a desire to avoid ambiguous
risks with unclear odds. You might love gambling on a
50-50 coin toss, but you might not want to play
the game where you have to guess how many black

(09:55):
balls or yellow balls there are and there's no way
to know. So a person could... technically be not very
risk-averse at all, but highly averse to ambiguity. Though the interaction,
the more I thought about it, the more I thought
that the interaction between these two tendencies in real life
is interesting because I think to many of us, it's

(10:17):
not always clear if a fear or a hesitancy we're
experiencing about making a decision is rooted in risk aversion
or ambiguity aversion. For instance, this came up because I
was trying to think of examples of risk aversion. And
I thought of the idea of what to do with savings.

(10:37):
Imagine you save up a little bit of extra money
at work from your paycheck, and you want to put
that toward retirement. And you have multiple options of what
to do with that money. Imagine a person's in that
scenario and they discover that they would really feel better
just keeping the money in a bank account, earning a
relatively low rate of interest rather than investing it in

(10:58):
like a stock market index fund where with the index fund,
it is commonly assumed it is standard financial wisdom that
the balance will grow at a faster rate than it
will just sitting in a savings account. And you will
end up with more money years down the road if
you put it in the index fund. This pattern of
behavior could be taken as an example of risk aversion,

(11:19):
because it's like, I would choose to probably end up
with less money just so I can avoid taking risks
with what I have. But then I thought, well, no,
not necessarily. What if that same impulse is actually a
better example of ambiguity aversion than risk aversion? Because how

(11:39):
do we actually know that a stock market index fund
will grow more over time than the balance of a
savings account? The answer is historical patterns. It's like statistically
true over the last hundred years or so, you know,
within certain economies, in living memory. But it's not actually
like a fixed odds casino game or a lab experiment

(12:00):
where the odds of winning are fair axiomatically. In the
real world, as the fine print always says, investing involves risk,
including loss of principal. and past performance does not guarantee
future returns. So maybe actually preferring the savings account is
a form of ambiguity aversion rather than risk aversion, responding

(12:21):
to the idea that, well, what are the odds that
suddenly somehow investing in the stock market becomes a bad
idea in a way that it has not within living memory?
It's hard to understand what the odds of something like
that are. It seems pretty unlikely, but it's fundamentally ambiguous.
You just can't say what the objective odds are. There's

(12:42):
really no way to calculate them. So sometimes there's actually
ambiguity about whether there is ambiguity, you know, because like
I think an invest an investment advisor might tell you
on one hand, like, well, you know, historical performance of
the stock market, you can pretty much depend on that.
That's a known risk when, you know, you have you
have statistics that tell you that you'll most likely get

(13:05):
this rate of return on average. And you just don't
know how seriously to take the possibility that the future
will not be like the past.

Speaker 1 (13:13):
Yeah, absolutely. And another angle that I was looking at
here on all of this is that it's not just
the ambiguity and risk, but it's perceptions of ambiguity and risk. So,
you know, it ultimately isn't necessarily coming down as much
to like, what are actually the hard probabilities here? It
can skew greatly depending on what a particular individual's worldview is.

(13:34):
So you could have somebody like, You could have like
a Washington Bartholomew hog wallop figure. And he's decided not
only is he not going to invest in the stock market,
he's not even going to put his money in the bank.
It's better off in the tin can buried in his backyard.

Speaker 2 (13:49):
Yeah, there you go.

Speaker 1 (13:50):
Even though there may be very good statistics that show
that is less safe and that is a greater risk,
your worldview and perception could be, oh, no, absolutely. You
can't trust the banks at all. I can only trust myself,
and therefore it's safer in my yard with me standing
over it with a shotgun.

Speaker 2 (14:19):
But anyway, so this all brings us back to this
distinction between risk aversion and ambiguity aversion, and how difficult
it can be to tell the difference between the two.
Like when we feel aversion to making a bet of
some kind, which by way of analogy, that doesn't have
to mean literally a bet with money, but just any
important decision in our lives. When we feel that fear, hesitancy,

(14:43):
or resistance, we often think of this as risk aversion,
but could it actually be more often ambiguity aversion, that
we're responding subconsciously to the fact that we don't know
how to calculate the odds for the decision we're about
to make, and that makes us uncomfortable. Now, one of
the big things we left open after we introduced the

(15:04):
concept of ambiguity aversion in the last episode is, how
is decision theory supposed to make sense of this finding,
of like the Ellsberg Paradox? And there has been a
great amount of ink spilled in answering this question in
the 50-something years since Ellsberg. I don't think I can
even attempt to cover the whole landscape of responses here.

(15:24):
So I want to be clear, this will not be
a comprehensive technical survey of the ambiguity aversion literature. I'm
just going to mention a couple of broad trends and
then a few ideas within each. So within the responses,
there are two main categories of thought. One assumes that
ambiguity aversion is actually a component of rational decision-making and

(15:47):
that it is, in a subjective sense, wise to avoid ambiguity,
even when you can't really prove that the ambiguous bets
will generally turn out bad. The other main way of
thinking is that ambiguity aversion is some type of error
or cognitive bias. And here I'm going to mention a
couple of sources. The first one I cited in our

(16:09):
last episode, that is a book chapter by Mark J.
Machina and Marciano Siniscalci, called Ambiguity and Ambiguity Aversion in
the Handbook of Economics of Risk and Uncertainty, published in 2014.
And then the second source I want to mention here
is by Nabeel I. Al-Najjar and Jonathan Weinstein, published in

(16:30):
the Journal of Economics and Philosophy, called The Ambiguity Aversion Literature,
a Critical Assessment. This one is more in that second
category I mentioned. It's an approach arguing that ambiguity aversion
is actually just a type of error, basically. So first,
I want to look at what are some of the
ways that ambiguity aversion and like the Ellsberg paradox might

(16:52):
actually be a form of rational, self-consistent decision making. One
theory here can be called the multiple priors model, also
known as Max-Min expected utility. Max-Min is M-A-X-M-I-N. Max-Min expected
utility or M-E-U. let's think about it like this. Imagine
you are asked to make a bet involving ambiguous odds.

(17:16):
Like we'll go back to the balls in the urn
example from the first episode. So am I more likely
to pull a red ball or a black ball out
of this urn? And so to remember the details there,
the three color urn experiment was that inside this urn,
you can't see inside. You don't know what, what color
you're reaching into grab, but there are exactly 30 red
balls inside. and then 60 balls that could be any

(17:39):
mix of yellow and black. So they could be 0
yellow and 60 black, 60 yellow and 0 black, 30
and 30, or anything in between. You have no way
of knowing the mix in advance. In these situations, Maxman
expected utility theory would say that instead of forming one
consistent belief about the number of black balls inside and

(18:01):
then placing bets according to that prediction, we allow ourselves
to consider multiple different probabilities, and we apply those probabilities
to different bets pessimistically. So essentially, for each new bet
that requires us to guess the number of black balls,
we ask ourselves, what would be the worst case scenario

(18:22):
for me here? And then we assume those worst case
odds when considering the bet. So if you're asked to
choose between black and red, There could be anywhere between
zero and 60 black balls. You just assume there are
zero and you bet on red. I tried to come
up with a real life decision sequence that might help
the contradictory behavior under MEU make sense. So here's what

(18:45):
I've got. Imagine this. You're making plans for the afternoon
and you don't know what the weather is going to be.
It might rain. It might not. Don't know how to
calculate that. You were thinking about maybe going out for
a walk. But then again, considering that it might rain,
you don't want to be caught out in a storm,
so you decide instead to stay home and do some

(19:06):
indoor activities. At the same time, you are also deciding
what to do about the flowers on your front porch.
They're drooping and they need some water. Now, it might rain,
and then they would get all the water they need
from that. But then again, it might not rain, so
you decide to make time to fill up a watering
can and water them manually. This could appear inconsistent because

(19:28):
you've made two different decisions, both on the bet that
it will rain in one case and on the bet
that it won't rain in the other case. It's possible
that that's just self-contradictory, or it could be perfectly self-consistent
and logical if you are considering a range of different
probabilities of rain for the afternoon and then applying the

(19:50):
most pessimistic one to each decision, rather than just assuming
one probability that applies to all decisions. Does that make sense?

Speaker 1 (19:58):
Yeah, yeah, I think so.

Speaker 2 (20:00):
And to be clear, there's no guarantee here that the
pessimistic assumptions will be correct, because again, the information environment
is truly ambiguous. You just can't know. That's what ambiguity is.
But considering multiple probabilities and acting according to the most
pessimistic one for each decision is theoretically a logical and
consistent strategy. So the authors that support this model argue

(20:24):
that it is actually a rational way ambiguity aversion might
produce the apparently self-contradictory results we observe. Like the apparent
contradiction comes from the fact that we're sort of coming
up with different predictions for each bet and instead of
one prediction for the actual full state of affairs.

Speaker 1 (20:42):
Yeah, though, of course, making all your decisions based on
worst-case scenarios, not a great way to live your life.

Speaker 2 (20:47):
Right, and I'm going to come back to that in
a minute, because that is part of the critical assessment.
Another theory that would make the Ellsberg paradox behavior rational
is what's known as Choquet expected utility, or CEU. And
the Choquet there, that's a French name. It's C-H-O-Q-U-E-T, Choquet.

Speaker 1 (21:06):
Sounds delicious. Oh, yeah.

Speaker 2 (21:08):
So Choquet expected utility is the idea that when we
evaluate a bet and the odds are ambiguous, we basically
we do come up with a single internal belief about probability,
but it takes a weird form. Instead of a probability,
we use what the literature calls a capacity. So most

(21:29):
of the time when we're trying to judge how likely
something is to happen. Together, the likelihood of that event
and the likelihood of its negation of not that event
have to sum up to 100 percent.

Speaker 1 (21:42):
Right.

Speaker 2 (21:42):
So like under normal probability, if there is a one
third chance a ball will be read, there is a
two thirds chance the ball will not be read. These
complementary probabilities should always sum to one or if expressed
as percentages up to 100 percent. CEU theory says that
our internal representation of likelihoods for ambiguous events is not

(22:07):
like this. Instead, when the odds are ambiguous, we operate
on the basis of a capacity, which mathematically incorporates our
lack of confidence in the situation by representing the chance
of an outcome and its negation together in a way
that does not have to add up to 100%. And

(22:28):
I apologize to the more informed people. I'm skipping over
some mathematical complexity here. But this is the simplified version
is if you take the example of the three color urn,
a person might begin with the objective information that, you know, 30,
one third of the balls are red. So, you know,
you actually have a one third chance that the ball
you draw is red. And then for the yellow and

(22:50):
black balls, instead of coming up with with guesses that
sum up to two thirds, which would be the actual
sort of objective probability, whatever the mix is, you pick
some smaller probabilities like you add in a maybe a
one fifth chance that the ball is yellow and a
one fifth chance that the ball is black. Obviously, these
these cannot be the real objective odds, again, with the

(23:12):
caveat on what are actually objective odds. But They can't
be the real they can't represent reality because they don't
add up to one and there are no other colors
in there. But again, the values we come up with
in these kinds of decision making processes don't have to
be perfect at predicting real outcomes. And in fact, they
can't be because we are missing information. That is the ambiguity.

(23:34):
The point is that this is another self-consistent way our
minds could work while producing the behaviors observed in these experiments,
like the missing percentage of of likely outcomes in the
calculation is missing to reflect the level of ambiguity we
feel about the bet. So that's two main models. And
there are other models for making sense of the Ellsberg

(23:54):
paradox behavior in these sorts of ways. But I think
these give you a general idea of how this strain
of thinking works. The other main way of thinking about
ambiguity aversion is that it is not actually rational. Like
you don't need to find a way of making rational
sense of it. Instead, it is a form of error
or cognitive bias. And this is the thrust of the

(24:17):
paper that I mentioned earlier from 2009 by Al-Najjar and Weinstein.
The authors here argue, in short, that ambiguity aversion is
actually a misapplied heuristic, meaning it's a mental shortcut that
might be truly useful in some scenarios. For example, in
situations where we need to be cautious to avoid being

(24:39):
scammed or manipulated. But this shortcut gets mistakenly applied to
scenarios where it is not helpful. And misapplying the ambiguity
version heuristic like this, they say, could cause you to, like,
make different bets about the same thing when conditions are
the same and no new information has been learned. So,

(25:00):
you know, like that's producing this contradictory or apparently irrational behavior.
Or it could cause you to treat non-informative information as informative.
They also argue that relying on heuristics like pessimism, coming
back to your comment earlier, Rob, again, that's always assuming
the worst case scenario for ambiguous bets. If you actually

(25:22):
do this, if you rely on a pessimistic heuristic in
real life, this will systematically produce incorrect predictions and bad outcomes.
It's actually not a good strategy to follow. Failure to
make bets or decisions in the presence of ambiguity also
means causes us to never gain useful information because a

(25:43):
lot of times we can only learn more about what
the real odds are by making decisions in ambiguous conditions.
You know, like past bets on ambiguity lead to more
informed bets with higher certainty in the future because the
previous bets and their outcomes are information-gathering tools.

Speaker 1 (26:02):
Yeah, and of course we see this played out in
the simplified world of games. If you want to get
good at a particular card game or chess or anything
like that, you need to be prepared to be beat
a lot. You know, I mean, that's part of learning
what your odds are with a native in play.

Speaker 2 (26:20):
That's right. So this strain of thinking says, no, ambiguity
aversion is not a rational strategy for making decisions. Instead,
it's more like an emotional bias that causes us to
act on, yes, self-contradictory beliefs and to make bad decisions
because we do not like the feeling of ambiguity. And honestly,

(26:40):
I'm not sure which strain of thinking is more on track.
I've been reading about these and I'm not I don't
know who's more convincing that like that it's part of
rationality overall or that it's not. The whole thing about ambiguity,
of course, is that it's ambiguous whether or not you
should bet on it. So there really is no objective answer.

(27:01):
But I think the I mean, what we're instead looking
for is. What is the most consistent way to explain
the subjective behavior rather than who's actually right about the
ambiguous outcomes? Because there's no way to know them in
advance by definition. I do think the critical assessment makes

(27:21):
a really good point about learning. You really do often
have to be bold and make decisions in the face
of ambiguity. so that there will be more information and
less ambiguity in future decisions. That seems like a highly
salient point to me.

Speaker 1 (27:37):
Yeah, yeah. And would you say, based on what you
were looking at, that it sounds like ambiguity aversion is
itself adaptive in the grand scheme of things? Maybe it's
one of these situations like type 1 errors in cognition,
false positives versus type 2 errors in cognition, false negatives,

(27:58):
where in sort of the hypothetical tigers hiding in the
bushes scenario, this is absolutely adaptive. But then when taken
into other aspects of life, especially modern life and all
its complexity, it's not necessarily useful.

Speaker 2 (28:12):
Well, I mean, I think you could think of it
that way. And that might be one way of approaching
the error theory, right? That it's a mental shortcut that
is useful in some scenarios, again, especially when you're like,
trying to avoid being tricked or trying to avoid being
taken advantage of by somebody who has superior information to you.
But then you're misapplying it to scenarios where that's not

(28:35):
really the case. You're, you're just like, you're using a
defensive mental shortcut in a case where you don't really
need to. And it's causing you to act with unnecessary
levels of defense, which produce irrational behavior. And we've talked
about other ways that that can be true. So I
think that fits more with the error way of thinking.
I think the other way of thinking would just say that, yeah,

(28:56):
I mean, this would probably assume, it doesn't really comment
on this, but it would just assume probably that it's
adaptive because it is just part of our consistent decision-making toolkit.
And it's just the same way that our brains decide
that it's better to take a bet with a 90%
chance of winning than a 10% chance of winning. It

(29:18):
also has this other function, which is this ambiguity aversion function.

Speaker 1 (29:21):
Yeah, and like any toolkit, You want to use multiple
tools depending on the actual situation. If you have an
expansive toolkit and it's the screwdriver every time, even when
you need to hammer a nail, yeah, that's probably not
going to work out too well. But when you got
to screw a screw in. you know, you're golden. Assuming

(29:42):
it's the right doodad at the end and not one,
it's not the star.

Speaker 2 (29:46):
Do you go through the same one-two process every time
you find a sharp screw out on the road or
on the sidewalk where like, I hit the same two
thoughts every time and be like, first of all, it's like, ooh,
I pick it up glad somebody a child didn't step
on this or a car hit this with their tire
and then the second thing is what did this come
out of was it holding something important together.

Speaker 1 (30:06):
Oh i never do the second step i'm i always
just stick at the first step where i'm like oh
glad nobody stepped on that or got that in their
tire i have saved the day and then i carry on.

Speaker 2 (30:15):
I sometimes if it's like near my house i like
look at my house and i'm like it's just holding
something on i don't know If.

Speaker 1 (30:23):
It's in the house, definitely. And I guess if it's
in close proximity to the house. But if it's in
the road, I'm just assuming, you know, I don't know.
I just never think about it falling out of a
vehicle in a dangerous capacity. But maybe I should. Maybe
that's an additional level of worry that I should begin
to employ.

Speaker 2 (30:41):
I didn't mean a vehicle specifically. I mean, it might
be or a house or anything. There are all kinds
of things that really need to remain stuck together.

Speaker 1 (30:48):
Yeah, I guess I just assume it's like it's work vehicles.
They have surplus screws rolling around and they're just rolling
out onto the road.

Speaker 2 (30:55):
Let's hope that's the case most of the time. But
I'm glad I could share that anxiety.

Speaker 1 (31:09):
All right. A few other angles we want to touch
on here. This first one, I'm not going to go
in super deep on this one because this one is
another highly economic topic. But there's what's known as the
competence effect. So we've already touched on the basics of
this a little bit, but this is the term for
the phenomenon by which we tend to be more ambiguity-averse

(31:30):
in fields where we feel we lack experience or expertise.
In economics and finance, this manifests in investors who are
more willing to invest in familiar domestic stocks rather than
complex foreign markets. And if you're like me, that sentence
is like, yeah, well, I'm uncomfortable with either. I don't
know my way. I don't know one from the other.
So just mark me down as ambiguity averse to either.

(31:53):
Seems to be making the point, yeah. But this is
apparently a thing. I believe this was first looked at
in a paper by Chip Heath and Amos Tversky titled
Preference and Competence in Choice Under Uncertainty, published in the
Journal of Risk and Uncertainty in 1991. And this found
that people tended to stick to gut instincts in a

(32:14):
familiar area versus even against a rational, diversified approach that
gets into areas they're not that familiar with.

Speaker 2 (32:21):
This rings true for me. I know I am more
ambiguity averse in domains of life that I don't understand
very well, which is funny because we have to make
decisions with ambiguous odds of success in both unfamiliar and
in familiar domains. I mean, ambiguity does not leave reality

(32:42):
just because you know what you're doing in a certain
knowledge domain or hobby area or something like that. Having experience,
you can have all the experience in the world and
still there are things where it's just like you don't
know what your odds are. So I think maybe the
explanation for this difference is that in the unfamiliar domains,
I'm more likely to worry that ambiguity is artificial and

(33:07):
that I am being pricked or manipulated by someone who
has superior knowledge of that domain. Whereas in familiar situations,
I understand what amount of information it is normal to have,
and thus how much ambiguity is just natural and unavoidable,
and thus the ambiguity that is there becomes easier to embrace.

(33:30):
Does that make sense?

Speaker 1 (33:31):
Yeah, yeah. And of course, all of this ends up
coming back to the topic of Not only like what
do you know? But what do you not know and
what do you think that you know that you actually
don't know? Yeah And we've talked about this before on
the show and it always reminds me of a line
I had to look this up. I'd forgotten the source,
but it was from the movie body heat You have
a character played by Mickey Rourke. He says it and

(33:53):
this is a I'm gonna paraphrase the quote a little
bit He says anytime you try to commit a crime
there are about 50 ways that you could mess up
and if you can think of 25 of them you're
a genius and Now, I don't know if those numbers
are exact, but I like the spirit of the thing.
Like he's saying, you're going into a situation and you
have this great degree of overconfidence. You don't realize all

(34:16):
of the ways you could potentially fail. And nobody can
have perfect knowledge. This is a quote that does recognize
that there will always be a certain amount of ambiguity.
But if you have expertise, that sort of cloud of
ambiguity is going to be smaller. It's not going to
go away. completely, but it will be smaller.

Speaker 2 (34:35):
Well, I think, yeah. And I think this, yeah, the
spirit of the quote is that like people often go
into a crime thinking they're betting on red, that they're
taking a known risk when in fact they're actually, they're
going into an ambiguous risk where they don't understand how
much risk there is.

Speaker 1 (34:51):
So anyway, minor, minor cinematic diversion there. Now, another higher
stakes area for the individual concerning ambiguity and ambiguity aversion
is is how ambiguity often factors into the healthcare experience.
I was reading about this. So there are two broad
categories within healthcare. There's diagnostic ambiguity. This is where the

(35:13):
underlying disease, there's ambiguity surrounding the underlying disease and how
it works. And then there's therapeutic ambiguity, like how do
we treat it or even cure it? And I imagine
a lot of you out there have encountered examples of this.
And these different ambiguities can lead to rather opposite choices.
But due to ambiguity aversion, a patient might choose a

(35:34):
treatment with known but terrible side effects over one with
a chance of, say, a better outcome, but also unknown risks.

Speaker 2 (35:42):
Or because of ambiguity aversion, I think very often in
health care, we'll gravitate towards someone who offers them false
certainty versus someone who is honestly communicating like unknowns about
the level of risk.

Speaker 1 (35:57):
Yeah, communication is key, and this becomes important in a
number of different ways. It has an impact, of course,
on public health and highlights the importance of science communication
in health care, as well as the dangers of medical
misinformation and conspiracy thinking. For instance, in the context of vaccination,
ambiguity aversion can definitely take the form of vaccine hesitancy.

(36:22):
And I want to stress again here that the ambiguity
need only be perceived ambiguity. So if one has already
bought into such statement says, well, no one really knows
what these vaccines are or no one really knows how
they work. Just assuming that those statements are true, there's
some large degree of truth to them, then there may

(36:42):
be well enough ambiguity, subjective ambiguity in place in the
individual's mind to make them rather adverse to this perceived
ambiguity and more likely to choose options that bring with
them greater risk. but more of a communicated idea of certainty,
like dubious alternative preventative and treatment methods, or just the

(37:04):
idea of doing nothing at all.

Speaker 2 (37:05):
The body knows how to take care of itself, that
kind of thinking. Yeah. Which sounds very certain when delivered
by a confident and charismatic speaker. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (37:13):
I was looking at a paper in behavioral medicine from
earlier this year, testing psychological correlates of ambiguity aversion in
the contest of COVID-19 vaccination. And this was by Simonovic
et al. And they found four different major takeaways here
that I thought were interesting. They found that Americans who

(37:34):
perceived higher ambiguity about COVID-19 vaccines reported lower worry and
lower perceived severity of COVID-19, which were each associated with
lower vaccination intentions and lower information seeking about vaccines. COVID-19 vaccines.

Speaker 2 (37:49):
OK, so if I'm understanding that right, Americans who had
lower confidence in the efficacy and safety of COVID vaccines
were also, for whatever reason, less worried about COVID infection.

Speaker 1 (38:03):
Right. But at the same time, they were also just
they were and this is kind of a no brainer.

Speaker 2 (38:08):
Right.

Speaker 1 (38:08):
It would seem to follow they would be less inclined
to have any intention of being vaccinated. And then would
be less inclined to seek out any information about said
vaccinations because, you know, their mind at this point is
already kind of made up.

Speaker 2 (38:20):
Well, I think that's right. But it's also interesting to
note like the counterintuitive ways, forms that having your mind
made up in this way can take, because sometimes the
way that I think that is expressed is like sometimes
it's just a statement of like, oh, yeah, nobody knows.
Nobody can know about the vaccines. And so it just
becomes like this. infinitely and unsolvably dangerous thing out there

(38:43):
that you can never really have confidence in. Your mind
is made up about it, but it's made up in
a way that always just sort of like holds it
as an unresolved danger. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1 (38:55):
And I'm sure that individuals on that side of the
argument might well make the counter argument that like, okay, well,
people who trust in the vaccine, they trust blindly. They've
just made up their mind and they're not going to
listen to any of the The criticisms. And I mean,
I disagree with that. But on the other hand, you know,
I feel like speaking personally, like I can't be like

(39:17):
I'm not going to pretend to be like Dr. Robert
all the time where I'm making all of all of these.
I'm doing all my own research on on, you know,
like health and dental concerns. Like ultimately, I have to
trust in a professional who. knows what they're doing and
is certified in what they're doing and leave it to
them to tell me what I should do because I

(39:38):
don't want to have all these decisions on me. I
don't want to do my own research on everything. I've
got enough research to do in and out during the week.

Speaker 2 (39:45):
Well, I mean, about medical matters, When people say do
your own research, 99 point whatever percent of the time,
somebody who says that either is not doing any research
at all. And that just means go with your gut feeling.
Or if they are doing research, it just means doing
very bad research. It means relying on sources that you
have no objective reason for thinking or giving you good

(40:08):
information and probably are just confirming your priors.

Speaker 1 (40:11):
Yeah, like I choose to research my health topic by
picking up Chariots of the Gods.

Speaker 2 (40:17):
Yeah, I mean, I would argue, of course, like doctors
and health care professionals can be wrong. That's possible and
happens all the time. But I think on average, you're
going to do a lot better just like listening to
doctors than than like reading a Facebook post and then
making up your own mind about medicine. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (40:34):
So this particular paper, I'm going to breeze through the
other main bullet point. Basically, they came down to people
who perceived higher ambiguity about COVID-19 vaccines. They reported higher
anger about the COVID-19 vaccines. which was associated with lower
perceived severity of COVID-19. They reported lower happiness about the vaccines,
which was associated with both lower worry and lower perceived

(40:55):
severity of COVID-19. And they also found that both Americans
and Israelis who were looked at in the study who
received higher ambiguity about COVID-19 vaccines reported lower feelings of
relaxation from the COVID-19 vaccine, which was associated with lower
perceived severity of the illness itself.

Speaker 2 (41:12):
So you have these constellations of different tendencies acting together.
You've got like a lower confidence or lower trust in a, uh,
in a healthcare treatment that, uh, also seems to go
along with having, uh, uh, lower concern or, or, uh,
lower level of seriousness about the condition that that treatment
is supposed to treat less emotional positivity about the idea

(41:36):
of taking the treatment and, uh, and all of this together.
So it, I mean, well, one thing this sort of
suggests to me is that, uh, Of course, this is obvious,
but it just reminds us that when we are making decisions,
we do to some extent try to make rational decisions
based on our beliefs. But we're also just like highly

(41:56):
emotional creatures and our decision making is deeply entangled with
feelings we have about the things we're making decisions about.
You know, it's not really possible for us to approach
every decision in life. as just purely odds and benefit
maximizing machines. We have feelings about things, and those feelings,

(42:16):
whether we want them to or not, do influence the
way we make decisions.

Speaker 1 (42:19):
Yeah, and they will override reason. And all of this
is susceptible to this sort of thing. But yeah, another
way that I think it's interesting and dreadful to think
about all of this is that, again, there's generally some
degree of ambiguity with both medical diagnosis and medical treatment.
And I can speak from experience, and again, most of

(42:42):
you can relate to this as well. It can be
frustrating when you go to a doctor and instead of
a clear course of action that you might want or
a definite solution that you're seeking, you instead get a
certain amount of ambiguity about what might be wrong and
how it might be addressed. Because at the end of
the day, I think we all want the Star Trek
medical tricorder experience where someone's able to just scan us,

(43:05):
perfect scan, see what ails us, and then tell us
exactly what they need to do to fix this, probably
with another device that they just kind of run up
and down our body. But even with today's technology, it's
more complex than that in most cases. Meanwhile, where do
we actually encounter this lack of ambiguity in the messaging? Again,
it comes generally in different forms of alternative medicine or

(43:27):
in snake oils or conspiracy thinking, because none of these
voices ever says, look, there's absolutely no evidence this works,
but give it a shot, or We can't know for
sure if lizard people run a secret government in Antarctica. But,
you know, there's always plenty of ambiguity in their evidence,
of course, if supplied at all. But you'll often find

(43:48):
them maneuvering around that in their messaging, which, again, is
low on ambiguity and high uncertainty. And like you mentioned earlier,
when it comes to legitimate medical messaging, it tends to
communicate both probability and risk. You'll get that list of
fast talk side effects at the end of of your
advertisement for an actual certified medication. And again, this is

(44:12):
just the inherent uncertainty in even very modern medicine. Another
paper I looked at was 2022's Vaccine Hesitancy and Cognitive
Biases by Casagliani et al. And this points out that

(44:33):
vaccination education strategies long followed a fact-based approach. But given
our aversion to ambiguity, along with bias and other heuristics,
these various cognitive biases in messaging have to be factored
into the outreach. And of course, this gets into the
complex way in which public health and vaccine messaging have

(44:53):
to attempt to counteract all the noise, sometimes by leaning
more on empathetic and audience-based approaches rather than fact-based debates.
Because again, in many cases, the actual medical facts have
baked in ambiguity while the non-scientific counterclaims do not. Again,
this is absolutely frustrating and increasingly dangerous, an increasingly dangerous

(45:16):
part of our reality. But yeah, the voice saying that
the vaccine has microchips in it that will turn you
into robots. There's no ambiguity to that statement. They're very clear,
they're very certain. Whereas, again, actual medical facts and actual

(45:37):
medicine-based arguments are going to have some level of ambiguity
in their messaging.

Speaker 2 (45:42):
This is one of the things that makes communication about
science generally, but especially about something very high stakes like
medical science, medical treatments, makes it so difficult is because
you have to You have to find this very difficult
balance of like you are compelled ethically to be forthright
and honest about what you know. But you also have

(46:05):
to wait to find a way to present that truth
in a way that will be rhetorically effective and hit correctly.
And and that's so like you are balancing things that
somebody who is not bound by an obligation to be
ethical and honest is not bound like they can only
focus on the rhetorical part of the appeal. Like, all

(46:25):
they have to worry about is what I'm saying exciting
and charismatic and convincing. They don't have the other side
of the scale to balance.

Speaker 1 (46:34):
That's right. That's right. And obviously this easily spills over
into other areas, you know, pseudo-archaeology, pseudo-paleontology, other pseudosciences, alternative history, ufology,
and more. Because as we, I think, really strive to
drive home in related episodes on this show, actual history

(46:55):
and archaeology inherently contain ambiguity. All histories are, to some
degree or another, imperfect. Some are just more imperfect than others.
As much as we know about certain periods of the
past and certain individuals and events, we still have gaps.
We have disagreements about interpretations. We have uncertainties. And then
I'm reminded, too, of particularly Alan Moore's use of the

(47:21):
Cox snowflake. That's K-O-C-H. in 1989's From Hell, his graphic
novel about Jack the Ripper. So the Koch snowflake is
a fractal curve that was first described by Niels Fabian
Helge von Koch in 1904. The idea here is that
it has a finite area, but an infinitely long perimeter.

(47:43):
So lots of crinulations. And Moore's treatment of this is
that history has a shape with infinite perimeter and finite area.
a labyrinth of connections and repeated patterns that we never
fully comprehend.

Speaker 2 (48:00):
Ah, that's interesting. So if I understand that right, it
sort of explains why, as you read more about history
and learn more about history, you can, by incorporating more
and more knowledge and holding it parallel in your mind,
you can have in some ways a stronger and realer
picture of the past, but also the increasing informational complexity

(48:23):
it makes everything increasingly blurry as well like it you're
always finding it becomes harder to have uh it becomes
harder to have like causal through lines and clear narratives
about why history happens because the more you know the
more other causal factors you can consider when thinking about
like why something happened in history and ultimately it gets

(48:46):
to the point where it's so complex that it's like
who knows why anything happened.

Speaker 1 (48:50):
Right right and that was his point about like who
was jack the ripper You know, we end up with
all of these, just so many books, so many theories,
so much literature and writing and conspiracy theories and so forth.
And for the most part, it's all within the confines
of that snowflake. The actual answer is outside the snowflake.
We can never actually determine it with any degree of accuracy.

(49:14):
It would just be conjecture. So, you know, at the
same time, time, conspiracy thinking itself engages in something akin
to the Cox snowflake, you know, because it's often an
infinite search for hidden details, whether those details are there
or not. But still, the basic premise holds true. Actual
history is complex, while the narrative provided by conspiracy thinking

(49:36):
is generally simple and single track. leading to a singular
force at the center of the entire conspiracy. It will
be more akin to like, why did this happen? Well,
it's this evil cabal or this evil corporation leader and
so forth, as opposed to, well, there are multiple societal
factors and historical anomalies that play into this particular reality.

(50:00):
And again, more ambiguity in real life, less ambiguity or
no ambiguity at all in the conspiracy argument.

Speaker 2 (50:08):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (50:10):
It comes back to, it's like stocks, you know, I
don't know anything about stocks, but I know that when
I see that little advertisement at the bottom of a
blog where, you know, and there's a picture of like
an old person smiling and it's like, this is a
surefire bet stock that so-and-so has just identified. It's like,
I'm instantly suspicious because it seems a little bit too

(50:30):
good to be true. It seems like there's not much
ambiguity to this particular suggestion. Would be a risky click.
All right, one more area I want to touch here
because I was looking at a really recent paper on
ambiguity aversion. Okay, here's a hypothetical scenario. You're considering a
couple of vacation options, and we'll assume for the purposes

(50:50):
of this experiment that the cost and other matters are
equal here. One is a trip to a family vacation
destination that you've visited numerous times before, and the other
is an entirely new experience. Maybe it's visiting a country
you've never traveled to or something of that nature. And
then as you're making up your mind, what do you do? Oh,
you flip on the news. And surprise, surprise, it's all negative.

(51:14):
It's all troubling. Would this exposure to negative news influence
your decision making and push you toward the less ambiguous choice?
Or would you still basically make your decision as if
you would have if you didn't watch the news at all?

Speaker 2 (51:30):
Well, I guess it could go multiple ways. But yeah,
I would tend to assume that increasing my anxiety would
make me more ambiguity averse and that I would be
seeking more known odds and familiar experiences if my anxiety
levels are higher.

Speaker 1 (51:47):
Yeah, yeah. You know, prior to reading this paper, I
might have jumped at this thinking as well. I've very
rarely altered travel plans due to something I saw in
the news, but I'll be the first to admit that
news items can rattle my resolve a bit. You know,
they can make me more anxious. So I would have guessed, yeah,
negative news can surely push one away from risk, away

(52:07):
from ambiguity, and back into the familiar, and more to
the point, might be likely to do so on the whole.

Speaker 2 (52:14):
Now, one of the only things I would think that
might push me back in the other direction is a
finding we talked about in the previous episode where essentially
if the known odds are bad, people's ambiguity aversion to
take the other bet lessens, right? So like in the
three color urn experiment, if instead of 30 red balls,

(52:36):
there were like five red balls, people at that point
become more likely to bet on black because it's like, well,
the odds of the thing you know about are terrible.
So why not take a gamble on something else? So
I wonder maybe if that could push you back the
other way. Like my intuition is that anxiety makes you

(52:58):
more ambiguity averse and just want to go with something
where the odds are clear. But maybe anxiety makes you
believe that, like, essentially the odds of stasis are really bad,
and thus you might as well take a gamble on
something different. Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1 (53:14):
You know, we also have to acknowledge that news reporting
can certainly change the perceived odds of something happening. Like,
if you were to watch a news network, a hypothetical
news network that was just 24-hour coverage of snakebites, that's
all they covered. Anytime, anywhere in the world someone is

(53:35):
bitten by a snake, they are there to cover it
in full. This would maybe give you certainly a heightened
awareness of maybe the legitimate risks of snakebite, but also
maybe an inflated feeling about your personal risks of snakebite.

Speaker 2 (53:49):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (53:49):
Okay.

Speaker 2 (53:49):
So that's different in that what I was just talking
about was like just how general emotional affect could affect
the way you reason, but it could also be content specific.
You're right.

Speaker 1 (53:58):
Yeah. But anyway, mostly what we're dealing here with is
the effect here. So a recent study from Adelphi University
looked into this. It was published in Frontiers in Psychology
entitled Negative News Exposure Does Not Affect Risk or Ambiguity Aversion.
So their answer is pretty much in the headline there,
as is often the case. Now, this is another one

(54:19):
of those small studies. I believe they worked with groups
here of like 84 and 229. So, you know, as always,
more research is required. This is not something you can
just take to the bank, but it's an interesting possibility.
The authors point out that while studies have found that
negative effect can increase risk aversion and ambiguity aversion, we

(54:40):
didn't know if, quote, these effects generalize to more realistic
negative stimuli, such as watching the news.

Speaker 2 (54:48):
Oh, OK. So maybe in previous studies, it's been found
that negative emotions can increase ambiguity aversion and risk aversion.
And so you would just assume that stimuli like watching
the news would also increase those aversions, but maybe it doesn't.

Speaker 1 (55:06):
Yeah. And you can see why this would be something
worth knowing. I mean, not only from a general standpoint
of understanding, you know, how people make choices based on
their mood and what influences their mood. That's certainly valid.
And I imagine that's the main point of the research here.
But also you can imagine it being very A very
interesting topic for individuals buying advertisement time on, say, a

(55:28):
24-hour news network, especially if they want to have an
advertisement for some sort of adventure travel or something of
that nature. Bungee cords, I don't know, whatever you happen
to be selling. So in this particular study, one group
was exposed to negative news. And in this case, it
was like news about a car crash. And the other

(55:49):
group was exposed to neutral news. So not great news,
not good news, not like a real fluff piece, but
just something about train schedules, something nice and boring. And
maybe it's a little interesting. And they found that although
participants who watched negative news reported a significant increase in
negative effect, they did not differ from the neutral news
group in their risk or ambiguity preferences.

Speaker 2 (56:11):
Interesting. OK, so they said past studies had found negative
effect increases ambiguity aversion. They showed people bad news, and
it did increase negative affect, but did not increase ambiguity aversion. Right, right.

Speaker 1 (56:27):
So I don't think it means go ahead and consume
all the negative news you want. It's not going to
impact you. Like, no, it can and will impact you.
But what the studies seem to be suggesting, rather, is
that sort of incidental or realistic consumption of negative news
that exposure is not going to be enough of a

(56:48):
force in and of itself to move the scale and
actually impact your decision-making process. Again, on the whole, this
would be a generalization, and again, it's based on a
smaller study, and there's so many factors on top of
this that you could throw into the scenario. But both
groups were equally likely to choose a certain gamble over
an ambiguous one following the consumption of their meat.

Speaker 2 (57:12):
Oh, well, some just occurred to me. I have no
reason to think this is really true, because I'm sure
the authors would have done a pretty good job of
planning this out. But what if the control group, the
train schedule news, was actually pretty demoralizing? It was supposed
to be a neutral control, but actually that made people
equally ambiguity-averse.

Speaker 1 (57:32):
That would have been an interesting outcome. No, no, no.
But my understanding is that basically the normal parameters... of
ambiguity aversion were in place. So people were still averse
to ambiguity, but in equal measure, whether they had just
learned about a car crash or about the exciting world
of train schedules.

Speaker 2 (57:51):
Yeah, so they basically just conformed roughly to Ellsberg's predictions. Yes, exactly.

Speaker 1 (57:57):
But again, so many studies come out about this. There
are new ones all the time. It's just such a
fascinating way to sort of get in and crunch how
we make decisions in life based on how we deal
with ambiguity and the inherent ambiguity of life.

Speaker 2 (58:16):
Yeah. Again, I can't emphasize this enough. Because these studies
want to quantify the effect, they need to use these
fixed games that include certain odds and risk conditions where
the odds are very clear. But In real life, you're
dealing with basically top-to-bottom ambiguity. It's real ambiguity all the time. Like,

(58:38):
really rarely do we encounter decisions where our probability of
success is absolutely clear. It's clearer than others. Some decisions
have clearer odds than others, but you never really know
what your odds are.

Speaker 1 (58:53):
Yeah, I mean, that's one of the reasons we've talked
about this before on the show. It's one of the
reasons we like things like zombie apocalypse scenarios. Not because
we necessarily like the idea of the world ending. or
of the dead coming back to life and trying to
eat our brains. But baked into those scenarios, there's often
like a simple of how the world works, a removal

(59:13):
of some degree of the ambiguity. And there's often still
in any good fiction, I think you're going to have
a contemplation of ambiguity as well. But in broad strokes,
you might have a scenario boiled down to like, OK, well,
now it's the living versus the dead. Now it's the
clear good guys versus the bad guys. And what is
the answer? Well, it's always blasting it with a shotgun, right?

Speaker 2 (59:35):
Isn't it interesting how in most stories, any major change
that happens to the characters is because of whatever the
struggle in the story is about? It's not like totally random,
out of nowhere, exogenous events come in and completely change
the story. Occasionally that happens. And people, I think, often
find that quite interesting in storytelling because it's pretty rare.

Speaker 1 (59:58):
Where the cause of the scenario is ambiguous, you mean?

Speaker 2 (01:00:02):
Where like a major change maybe comes in the middle
of the story and it has nothing to do with
what the main struggle or plot of the story is.
It just comes out of nowhere. Yeah. I can't think
of an example off the top of my head, but
I know there are some like this. Write in with
your example.

Speaker 1 (01:00:16):
All right. We're going to go and close up this episode,
but we'd love to hear from everyone out there. We
know that everyone has experience with ambiguity in life, judging it,
being adverse to it, rolling the dice anyway, and so forth.
So write in. We would love to hear from you.
Just a reminder that Stuff to Build Your Mind is
primarily a science and culture podcast with core episodes on
Tuesdays and Thursdays, short-form episodes on Wednesdays, and on Fridays

(01:00:36):
we set aside most serious concerns to just talk about
a weird film on Weird House Cinema.

Speaker 2 (01:00:41):
Huge thanks, as always, to our excellent audio producer, J.J. Posway.
If you would like to get in touch with us
with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest
a topic for the future, or just to say hello...
you can email us at contact at stufftoblowyourmind.com. Stuff to

(01:01:03):
Blow Your Mind is a production of iHeartRadio.

Speaker 1 (01:01:05):
For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app. Apple
Podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

Speaker 2 (01:01:20):
Thank you.