Find the gray boxes

Open them if you can

It's not rocket science. You encounter them just about every day. They're everywhere you look. Not complex. Not complicated. Just incomplete.

I'm writing about "gray boxes" today. The term isn't in vogue, like "black swans" or "pink flamingoes" a few years back. But I think it ought to be a the top of mind from time to time.

I think about "boxes" based on two criteria: what you can see and what you can know about a process or thing.

A black box is a complete unknown. It's like a black hole with edges and sides. Something goes in and is then fully hidden. People talk about the internal workings of North Korea as a "black box" sometimes, and I'd grant that example (though I think the South Korean intelligence agencies likely know at least a bit about North Korea). There are other examples in science, points beyond which our understanding simply does not extend.

A "white" or "clear" box is transparent. Easily penetrated for an observer. All the way through. This may be like an assembly-line where one can see the product built from start to finish. Every doohickey and gizmo gets added, piece by piece, until the end. All for the viewer to see and interpret.

I should pause here and point out that developers use software testing protocols based on levels of knowledge—black box (none/going in blind to new software), white box (full knowledge of software tested), and gray box (a blend of both). The thing with software is that it's not a good replica for real-life. So it takes work to think through a jump to reality.

Here we get to gray boxes. If black boxes are opaque and white/clear boxes are transparent, then gray boxes are all that fall in-between. That's the majority, by far.

Think about it. Every other person you meet is some shade of gray box to you. Sure, you may know them well. They may be someone you spend a lot of time with. But that only gives you a fraction, a partial understanding of what makes that person tick. (Heck, you are your own gray box at times, I'd reckon.)

Or the climate. I'm not about to make any grandiose political statements, so please don't read anything into this simple conclusion. The climate shifts, sometimes in unexpected ways. We have an enormous body of research and knowledge on the climate. But we have equal gaps in our long-look understanding of it as well. (Not to mention the human impact on the planet creates huge long-term uncertainties.)

Every war is a gray box.

When we look around we should see these gray boxes for what they are. Mix a little certainty with some uncertainty and you've got one. I think our approach ought to be with caution. Even a pinch of uncertainty can undo the other 99 percent.

But we can hope to get enough "right" when approaching a gray box to understand it and address it. That's about the best we can do to open them (a little) when we can.