Featured

‘Model Land’ and its phantasies threaten us all.

As a mathematician and a psychologist from a network studying real-world decision-making under radical uncertainty, we work on the dangers of investing scientific models with phantastic (wished-for but unrealistic) power to resolve uncertainty and produce optimal solutions. In this short blog we discuss the dangers of forgetting that, in the context of uncertainty, successful anticipatory thinking is not about making good predictions, it is about agility when judging what information to gather to grasp an unfolding landscape, and constant curiosity about what might be left out. Algorithms – and humans masquerading as algorithms, or passing the buck to algorithms – are fragile decision-makers under many real-life conditions.

Featured

The need for constructive ambivalence during the Covid-19 pandemic.

“What we observe is not nature itself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning.” Werner Heisenberg (1) I have been researching how humans make decisions in contexts of risk and uncertainty for nearly thirty years. Much of this has been in the context of financial markets but much of what I have learned seems […]

Featured

Grappling with uncertainty, and the emotions it provokes

The stories we tell ourselves about futures and the impact of our actions in them are important acts of imagination which enable us to act, despite uncertainty. However, they can also become over-comfortable refuges from the anxiety provoked by uncertainty and a route to disregarding important information and perspectives which challenge our certainties.

Category: Uncertainty

‘Model Land’ and its phantasies threaten us all.

Like this:

The need for constructive ambivalence during the Covid-19 pandemic.

Like this:

Grappling with uncertainty, and the emotions it provokes

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this: