Uncertainty and Inevitability

How can we navigate chance and our own lack of knowledge?

I watched the online LSE Live event for Prof Sir David Spiegelhalter’s new book: The Art of Uncertainty.

In an engaging talk, Professor Spiegelhalter covered many important topics in statistics.

What is uncertainty?

Professor Spiegelhalter described uncertainty as “thinking slow about what we don’t know”. The first part borrows from Daniel Kahneman’s popular book about two modes of thought. ‘Thinking slow’ means to be more deliberative and logical. This reasoning differs to faster, instinctive and emotional responses.

What do we not know? One classification for types of uncertainty is:

• Aleatoric uncertainty: Quantitative probabilities, like the randomness of rolling dice.
• Epistemic uncertainty: Whether the data and knowledge inputs into a model are correct. For instance, are important pieces of information missing?
• Knightian uncertainty: This is about unknown forms of risk. The name is from Frank Knight, an economist.