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The Value of Vagueness (2014 Spring Commencement Ceremony Sunday Afternoon)

  • Date: 05/11/2014
  • Author: Dr. Luis M. Proenza (President, The University of Akron)
  • Location: E.J. Thomas Performing Arts Hall

  • Today you complete an important chapter of your life. Next month I shall also, as I complete my presidency here. And so, as we both contemplate our futures, allow me to offer you one final University of Akron lesson. This one is on me.

    The end has finally come.

    This Sunday afternoon I am giving my final commencement address.

    Well, that’s not quite right. I’m doing another one next Sunday for the School of Law. After that – I am done.

    Unless . . .

    . . . my successor or some other institution invites me to do the honors.

    Enough about me. We are gathered here to talk about you, and to congratulate you upon the completion of your college careers.

    Unless . . .

    . . . you decide to continue on to graduate school. Or you need certifications. Or you switch careers. You might want to keep track of your transcripts.

    Well then, can we at least say with real certitude that you are about to begin your professional careers?

    What if you win the lottery next week and fly off to the Bahamas? Or decide after a few years to leave the field you have prepared for and go into a completely new direction?

    Perhaps we should keep the language vague and simply say, congratulations on what you’ve done and good luck with whatever comes next.

    Isn’t it interesting? We crave precision, but often find comfort in vagueness. This must be particularly vexing for those in health professions. Your fields, along with those of engineering and the natural sciences, demand precision for success. But unlike them, yours also requires you to make peace with vagueness.

    Let’s look at a few examples.

    There is some excitement in the medical community over a concept known as personalized, precision medicine. For those unfamiliar with the term, the New England Journal of Medicine recently explained it as “. . . coupling established clinical–pathological indexes with state-of-the-art molecular profiling to create diagnostic, prognostic, and therapeutic strategies precisely tailored to each patient's requirements. . .”[1]

    A more prosaic explanation is that personalized, precision medicine will diagnose your health issues at the molecular level and treat them accordingly. Imagine, by examining your DNA, physicians will know precisely the type and amount of medicine or therapy to prescribe.

    When it comes to health care, particularly for our loved ones or ourselves, we want that level of personalized precision. No patient, slipping into the embrace of anesthesia, wants to hear a surgeon murmur, “Well, I don’t know, it’s in there somewhere.” Or who wants a pharmacist who says, “that looks about right.”

    When it comes to our health we want precision at a highly personalized level. Or at least we think we do.

    In 2011, researchers at the University of Utah and Stanford released a study about the benefits of vagueness.[2]

    It detailed an experiment involving the Holistic Health Index or HHI. Have you heard of this index? I would be surprised if you have, because it doesn’t exist. The researchers made it up, and used it to create health scores for 39 test subjects. All of the subjects were given a readout of their HHI to compare against an ideal score for their age group, gender, etc., They were then given basic good health instructions to improve their scores.[3]

    The researchers, however, told one portion of the group that their readout was precise with no margin of error, but informed the others that their scores had a variability range of 3 percent.[4]

    Over the course of the experiment, the group with precise feedback, on average, gained only one pound. The group with the vague feedback? On average, they lost four pounds.[5]

    The researchers surmised that the vagueness provided subjects with the illusion that they were in proximity of the ideal, which motivated them to keep trying.[6]

    Remember, the researchers were not conducting an experiment for health care purposes, but to consider the effects of vagueness versus precision.

    They concluded: “Our research suggests that, at times, vagueness has its merits…The fuzzy boundaries afforded by vague information allow people to distort that information in a favorable manner.”

    It turns out that this benefit can occur inadvertently as well. In his book, The Quest for Cosmic Justice, Thomas Sowell tells us that we agree on the need for justice or equality, for example.  “But our agreement is only seeming because we mean such different things by the same words.”[7]

    Let’s consider another author. In his book, Not Exactly, Kees van Deemter demonstrates how vagueness is central to our lives and that “. . .many aspects of our world are best understood in terms of degrees and probabilities, not crisp dichotomies.”[8]

    Van Deemter notes that vagueness “. . . can be used crisply in many ways,” and can be a virtue.[9]

    Let me offer another example:

    Two older buildings stand side by side.  One is to be demolished; the other restored.  The doomed building is 50 feet high; the other, 70 feet.  So do you tell the construction crew to demolish the building that is 50-feet tall and hope that they take the time to measure? Or is it safer to be vague and simply tell them, “Take down the shorter one?” 

    The value of vagueness can be of particular benefit for practitioners in health careers. Remember that you have been educated as critical thinkers, not mere number-readers. The precision measurements you will wield are tools, not ends in themselves. Appreciate the wisdom of Pablo Picasso, who said, “You have to have an idea of what you are going to do, but it should be a vague idea.”[10]

    It is my good wish for you, that in your personal lives as well as your professional careers you strive for a goal that is wonderfully, joyfully, magically vague. It is a goal that cannot be measured, analyzed or defined. That goal is happiness. May you find it for yourselves, and create it in others. 

    [1] Mirnexami, Reza; Nicholson, Jeremy; Darzi, Ara; “Preparing for Precision Medicine.” Feb. 9, 2012, New England Journal of Medicine. http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMp1114866

    [2] Lehrer, Jonah. “In Praise of Vagueness.” July 21, 2011. Wired Science Blogs. http://www.wired.com/2011/07/in-praise-of-vagueness/

    [3] Lehrer, Ibid

    [4] Lehrer, Ibid

    [5] Lehrer, Ibid

    [6] Lehrer, Ibid

    [7] Sowell, Thomas, The Quest for Cosmic Justice, Free Press, October 11, 1999, p. 3

    [8] Van Deemter, Kees, Not Exactly: In Praise of Vagueness, Oxford University Press, 2010

    [9] Van Deemter, Ibid

    [10] http://thinkexist.com/quotes/with/keyword/vague/

  • Topic Category: Commencement Address
  • Tags: [critical thinking, happiness, kees van deemter, picasso, precision, thomas sowell, vagueness]
  • Filed in: Speeches,

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