Quotes About Uncertainty

An unbiased appreciation of uncertainty is a cornerstone of rationality

When the question is difficult and a skilled solution is not available, intuition still has a shot: an answer may come to mind quickly—but it is not an answer to the original question.

risk-averse decision maker will choose a sure thing that is less than expected value, in effect paying a premium to avoid the uncertainty.

The difficulties of statistical thinking contribute to the main theme of Part 3, which describes a puzzling limitation of our mind: our excessive confidence in what we believe we know, and our apparent inability to acknowledge the full extent of our ignorance and the uncertainty of the world we live in. We are prone to overestimate how much we understand about the world and to underestimate the role of chance in events.

Prospect Theory: An Analysis of Decision Under Risk

Sometimes scientific progress leaves us more puzzled than we were before.

We must allow for that uncertainty in our thinking.

A matter of judgment is one with some uncertainty about the answer and where we allow for the possibility that reasonable and competent people might disagree.

We were forecasting based on the information in front of us—WYSIATI—but the chapters we wrote first were probably easier than others, and our commitment to the project was probably then at its peak. But the main problem was that we failed to allow for what Donald Rumsfeld famously called the "unknown unknowns.

We are prone to overestimate how much we understand about the world and to underestimate the role of chance in events. Overconfidence

you often have answers to questions that you do not completely understand, relying on evidence that you can neither explain nor defend.

the likelihood that something will go wrong in a big project is high.

An unbiased appreciation of uncertainty is a cornerstone of rationality—but it is not what people and organizations want.

objective ignorance accumulates steadily the further you look into the future.

defining risk is thus an exercise in power.

there is a large amount of objective ignorance in the prediction of human behavior.

The core of the illusion is that we believe we understand the past, which implies that the future also should be knowable, but in fact we understand the past less than we believe we do.

our excessive confidence in what we believe we know, and our apparent inability to acknowledge the full extent of our ignorance and the uncertainty of the world we live in.

Risk" does not exist "out there," independent of our minds and culture, waiting to be measured. Human beings have invented the concept of "risk" to help them understand and cope with the dangers and uncertainties of life.

Consistent overweighting of improbable outcomes—a feature of intuitive decision making—eventually leads to inferior outcomes.

Amos liked the idea of an adjust-and-anchor heuristic as a strategy for estimating uncertain quantities: start from an anchoring number, assess whether it is too high or too low, and gradually adjust your estimate by mentally "moving" from the anchor. The adjustment typically ends prematurely, because people stop when they are no longer certain that they should move farther.

the evidence from more than fifty years of research is conclusive: for a large majority of fund managers, the selection of stocks is more like rolling dice than like playing poker.

Conscious doubt is not in the repertoire of System 1; it requires maintaining incompatible interpretations in mind at the same time, which demands mental effort. Uncertainty and doubt are the domain of System 2.

When it comes to rare probabilities, our mind is not designed to get things quite right. For the residents of a planet that may be exposed to events no one has yet experienced, this is not good news.