Certainty

I have a habit of qualifying my statements with estimated likelihoods and error bars. “I think about ten people are coming, plus or minus two.” “I’m, like, eighty percent sure that it runs on Windows.” I worry that it comes off as an affectation, but I also worry that I’m not conveying my level of certainty effectively. I know how certain I am, and it pains me when that information gets lost to the ambiguities and inefficiencies of the English language. (I’m told that qualification by certainty is built into Lojban, which I believe with 99% certainty.) When I send my female friends cover letters and grant proposals, they strike out words like “I think” and “I believe” and “probably” and “try”. I let them do it - we all know that there’s a confidence gap that disadvantages women - but it chafes. Aside from dangly earrings, uncertainty is the aspect of femininity I am most comfortable with. Perhaps too comfortable.

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There is one line in particular from this thoroughly memorable poem that I cannot get out of my head:

I asked five questions in genetics class today and all of them started with the word “sorry”.

My least favorite thing about blogging is the authoritative tone that nearly all bloggers adopt. To avoid it, I center myself and my experiences, about which I am actually the authority. Then my writing seems self-involved. (A lot of women essayists and authors are ridiculed as self-involved. But on what other topics are they allowed to speak with authority?) I would rather just qualify everything I say. I’ve thought about using hover text for this purpose, or color-coding my sentences to reflect just how confident I am in them:

My least favorite thing about blogging is the authoritative tone that nearly all bloggers adopt. To avoid it, I center myself and my experiences, about which I am actually the authority. Then my writing seems self-involved. (A lot of women essayists and authors are ridiculed as self-involved. But on what other topics are they allowed to speak with authority?)

But you can’t color-code the spoken word - you can’t color-code most of your life - and you can’t shrink down when somebody else is waiting to take your space.  David Dunning writes that “I don’t know” should be “an enviable success, a crucial signpost that shows us we are traveling in the right direction toward the truth” but for now it is disregard, devalued, and feminized. What can we do about it?  I don’t know.  I don’t know I don’t know I don’t know I don’t know. Which leaves me here, with my self-involved writing and my error bars, trying to be taken seriously, but not with certainty.