Radical UncertaintyMervyn King, John Kay
Radical Uncertainty
by Mervyn King, John Kay · first published 2019
6mentions
1recommended by
3HN commenters
2021–2026first – last mentioned
33% recommend67% neutral
"In a changing world, forecasts and numbers usually represent bogus quantification. Kay and King tell us how to think smarter. Radical uncertainty changes the way we should think about decision-making. For over half a century economics has assumed that people behave rationally by optimizing among well-defined choices. Behavioral economics questioned how far people are rational, pointing to the cognitive biases that seem to describe actual behavior. Radical Uncertainty is a bold, paradigm-shifting book that takes us past standard and behavioral economics, completely shifting our understanding o
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John Kay wrote a good book about this (Radical Uncertainty). There is a trend to falsely quantify questions that take place either under conditions of uncertainty or where numbers are just axiomatic assumptions rather than based on regular observations. It's…
on “David Chalmers considers the possibilities of VR” ↗John Kay wrote a good book about this called Radical Uncertainty. It's annoying that there is an increasing tendency to frame what is a purely narrative statement in quantitative terms. As the author points out war is not historically predetermined, at least in any…
on “Nuclear war probabilities are useless - counter to the nuclear gambler’s ruin” ↗…trustworthy in the past, may become significantly less accurate, and can in fact become dangerous to rely upon too blindly. Read a really good book on this a few years ago by John Kay and Mervyn King, Radical Uncertainty (https://wwnorton.com/books/9781324004776), where they talk about the issue of applying the logic of "known uncertain" systems (like games of poker, or volcanic eruptions) to completely dynamic "radically…
on “Complex dynamics require complex solutions” ↗…trying to model in the future depends on its behaviour in the past. This is not true for all systems, it's not even true for most systems. John Kay differentiates between 'resolvable uncertainty' and 'radical uncertainty'. Modelling a volcano eruption is resolvable because it's a reasonably predictable system and you can make confident stochastic claims. Complex human systems are chaotic, have 'unknown unknowns', are…
on “AI tools have been built to catch Covid, but none of them helped” ↗I had the privilege last night of attending a lecture given by Prof Sir John Kay (Obliquity, Radical Uncertainty, etc). He was scathing on two points: 1) the way the world changed in the 1970s from management as responsibility to leadership as prize, and 2) the abject failure of business schools to develop a serious…
on “False claims in a widely-cited paper. No corrections. No consequences” ↗The author (Brian Klaas) references "Radical Uncertainty" by Kay and King. In their book, Radical Uncertainty, Mervyn King and John Kay draw a distinction between two kinds of problems: puzzles and mysteries. Here is the description of their book:…
on “The Perils of Moneyballing Everything” ↗