The Comfort of the Known, the Pull of the Unknown

Over the weekend, I was reading about the Ellsberg Paradox, a thought experiment from 1961 that reveals something about how we weigh risk and uncertainty.

The setup is simple: imagine two urns filled with red and black balls. From the first urn, you know there are exactly 50 red and 50 black. From the second, you only know it has 100 balls in some mix, but not how many of each color. You’re asked to bet on drawing a red.

Most people choose the first urn, even though both offer the same chance in theory. The comfort of known odds outweighs the possibility of unknown upside.

Startups often mirror this. Some opportunities resemble the first urn, familiar categories where the odds feel easier to imagine. Others resemble the second, ambiguous spaces, harder to quantify, and therefore often avoided, even if they may hold promise.

It made me pause: perhaps ambiguity is not only uncertainty, but sometimes the quiet space where new possibilities take shape.

Have you experienced moments where the unknown revealed more than the known?