Rating Certainty

In my management studies it was explained to me on multiple occasions that there are varying levels of certainty. Here we can translate certainty theory into the four-star scale:

1. One star: not knowing what you don't know. For example you live in a forest with a with a man eating tiger, and you don't realize that there is a man eating tiger living in your forest. In this case you would have made no preparations at all to deal with the tiger when it comes for you.
2. Two stars: being mistaken, or knowing something that is wrong. Having an incorrect opinion about a subject is better than not knowing a subject exists. For example, if you know that a man eating tiger is loose in your forest, but you are dead wrong about the location of the tiger, at least you will have made some spears and developed some effective escape roots, even though the tiger can still surprise you.
3. Three starts: knowing what you don't know. Knowing the questions to the answers you don't have is a good position to be in. For example, if you know that the man eating tiger is hunting in your forest, and you know you don't know the location of the tiger, you can be on the ready for the tiger to attack at any time.
4. Four stars: knowing what you know. The best situation is absolute certainty. For example if you know for a fact that the man eating tiger in your forest is sleeping in his cave, then you can have time and space to take care of other important things besides being on the look out for the tiger.

Notice here the loop in all 4 stars scale things. 4 is close to 1: if you become complacent in the knowledge you have and stop asking questions, you will develop categorical gaps in our knowledge. For example if you become complacent in the knowledge that the tiger sleeps in his cave during mid day, and no longer be on the lookout for predators at that time of day, you might not discover the hungry panther who hunts when the tiger sleeps until it is too late.

Don't feel overwhelmed when you start to have many questions in life, it probably means you are seeing that you now need to know things that before you were wrong about, or didn't even know those things existed. You can't get absolute certainty without sometimes being wrong and asking good questions.