Weiye Loh's Library tagged Uncertainty →  View Popular, Search in Google

"Moral certainty is always a sign of cultural inferiority. The more uncivilized the man, the surer he is that he knows precisely what is right and what is wrong. All human progress, even in morals, has been the work of men who have doubted the current moral values, not of men who have whooped them up and tried to enforce them. The truly civilized man is always skeptical and tolerant, in this field as in all others. His culture is based on "I am not too sure.""

Morality Uncertainty Culture

an extra portion of red meat a day, where a portion is 85g or 3 oz — a lump of meat around the size of a pack of cards or slightly smaller than a standard quarter-pound burger — is associated with a hazard ratio of 1.13, that is a 13% increased risk of death. But what does this mean? Surely our risk of death is already 100%, and a risk of 113% does not seem very sensible? To really interpret this number we need to use some maths.

Death Statistics Uncertainty

[A]lthough political (and religious) ideology has no place in deciding scientific questions, the practice of science is inherently political. In that sense, science can never come before politics. Scientists everywhere enter into a social contract, not least because they are not their own paymasters. Much, if not most, scientific research has social and political implications, often broadly visible from the outset. In times of crisis (like the present), scientists must respond intellectually and professionally to the challenges facing society, and not think that safeguarding their funding is enough.

Science Politics Value Policy Uncertainty Funding

A year after the Fukushima reactor catastrophe, we can start to estimate its effects on people’s medical and mental health. Curiously, it’s the mental impact that we can predict best. As a recent Green Blog post by Matthew Wald explained, the medical effects are expected to be too weak and widely dispersed to measure. According to one theory, the increased radiation received by hundreds of thousands of citizens will cause an increase in their cancer rate — but an increase too tiny to detect amid the large number of cancers that will occur anyway. According to a rival theory, radiation at these low levels will cause scarcely any cancers at all. Scientists just don’t know.

The psychological impact, however, is plain. Precisely because damage from very-low-level radiation cannot be detected, people exposed to it are left in anguished uncertainty. Many believe they have been fundamentally contaminated for life. They may refuse to have children for fear of birth defects. They may be shunned by others who fear a sort of mysterious contagion.

Nuclear Uncertainty Radiation Fukushima Japan Measurement Health Mental Mental Illness Psychology Trauma

How many people died? It's one of the first questions asked in a war or violent conflict but it's one of the hardest to answer. In the chaos of war many deaths go unrecorded and all sides have an interest in distorting the figures.

The best we can do is come up with estimates but the trouble is that different statistical methods for doing this can produce vastly different results — see the Plus article Body count which reported on controversy surrounding the death toll of the last Iraq war. Statisticians know how well different methods do in theory and under ideal assumptions, but wars rarely adhere to these. And we can't concoct a war in the lab to see which method does best.

But recently a unique document has helped throw some light on the question of how to count the dead.

War Death Model Assumption Statistics Facts Uncertainty

Uncertainty Risk Knowledge Knowledge-Doing Gap

if practical ethics should take empirical uncertainty into account, surely it should take moral uncertainty into account as well.  In many situations, we don’t know all the moral facts.  I think it is fair to say, for example, that we don’t currently know exactly how to weigh the interests of future generations against the interests of current generations.  But this issue is just as relevant to the question of how one ought to act in response to climate change as is the issue of expected temperature rise.  If the ethics of climate change offers advice about how best to act given empirical uncertainty concerning global temperature rise, it should also offer advice about how best to act, given uncertainty concerning the value of future generations.

Ethics Facts Science Uncertainty

Law Judgment Reason Uncertainty

Catastrophe models are controversial. Proponents say they bring science to underwriting and synthesize the latest understanding of storms and climate change to insurers. Opponents say they're gee-whiz black boxes that manufacture instant justification for high rates for insurers.

Insurance Catastrophe Science Uncertainty Underwriting

Writing at VoxEu.org Victor Ginsburgh, of the Université Libre de Bruxelles, notes that experts aren't so expert in many situations:

Prediction Uncertainty Complex System Expertise

"The reserve of modern assertions is sometimes pushed to extremes, in which the fear of being contradicted leads the writer to strip himself of almost all sense and meaning. One specimen of this method will suffice:

"It is reasonably certain that a petty chieftain named Arthur did exist, probably in South Wales. It is possible that he may have held some military command uniting the tribal forces of the Celtic or highland zone or part of it against raiders and invaders (not all of them necessarily Teutonic). It is also possible that he may have engaged in all or some of the battles attributed to him; on the other [hand, this attribution may belong to a later date."

This is not much to show after so much toil and learning"

--- AHistory of the English-Speaking Peoples / Winston Churchill

Uncertainty Academic Writing

John Maynard Keynes thought that most economic decision-making occurs in ambiguous situations in which probabilities are not known. He concluded that much of our business cycle is driven by fluctuations in “animal spirits,” something in the mind – and not understood by economists.

Of course, the problem with economics is that there are often as many interpretations of any crisis as there are economists. An economy is a remarkably complex structure, and fathoming it depends on understanding its laws, regulations, business practices and customs, and balance sheets, among many other details.

Yet it is likely that one day we will know much more about how economies work – or fail to work – by understanding better the physical structures that underlie brain functioning. Those structures – networks of neurons that communicate with each other via axons and dendrites – underlie the familiar analogy of the brain to a computer – networks of transistors that communicate with each other via electric wires. The economy is the next analogy: a network of people who communicate with each other via electronic and other connections.

Brain Probability Uncertainty Neuroscience Economics

The global climate change debate has a lopsided empirical basis - in the economy of nature but not political economy - and this has contributed to a peculiar moralising trajectory. I have three main concerns with this: i) climate change has displaced other important concerns, for example of the 1 billion people living in unacceptable poverty; ii) a fixation on global CO2 levels alone distracts from what we can practically do, and even from caring about other aspects of the environment that we want to protect; iii) the debate has induced a kind of millenarian meltdown in which otherwise sensible people have lost all sense of proportion and hope.

Climate Change Economy Morality Economics Uncertainty Statistics

, I don't think that all such pleas for more moderation should be granted. In particular, there is a tendency to advocate suspended judgment rather than definite opinion as the appropriate response to thorny ultimate questions.

Uncertainty Relativism Judgment

Economics Policy Uncertainty Economy

The flood disaster arguably was exacerbated by poor decision making under flawed decision processes -- decision makers chose the certainty of ignorance over the uncertain nature of uncertainty judgments.  Indeed, as van den Honert describes the rainfall forecasts were inaccurate, but this did not mean that they would have been without value.

Ultimately, the only way that Queensland gets out of this situation will be to build sufficient water retention capacity to simultaneously meet the conflicting objectives of flood mitigation and water storage as a drought buffer. In other words, there is a technological fix here that can dramatically reduce uncertainties -- but such a strategy will cost money.
POSTED BY ROGER PIELKE, JR. AT 8/30/2011 06:55:00 AM

Uncertainty Ignorance Rain Climate Science

A fundamental problem with climate science in the public realm, as conventionally practiced by the IPCC, is the essential ink blot nature of its presentation. By "ink blot" I mean that there is literally nothing that could occur in the real world that would allow those who are skeptical of scientific claims to revise their views due to unfolding experience. That is to say, anything that occurs with respect to the climate on planet earth is "consistent with" projections made by the climate science community. Some scientists go further and argue that climate science cannot be shown to be incorrect based on experience because its projections are probabilistic. The result is that  people tend to see in climate science other things than those that can be resolved empirically -- which fosters politicization and tribal behavior.

The ink blot nature of climate science would be a non-issue if it were a field like philosophy or cosmology in which people were debating non-empirical claims for academic interests. But climate science -- or at least a very visible part of that field -- has set forth on an evangelistic path in trying to convince the unconvinced of their views among politicians and the general public.

Climate Science Uncertainty Science Economics Presentation

In its AR4 report the IPCC says:
The uncertainty guidance provided for the Fourth Assessment Report draws, for the first time, a careful distinction between levels of confidence in scientific understanding and the likelihoods of specific results. This allows authors to express high confidence that an event is extremely unlikely (e.g., rolling a dice twice and getting a six both times), as well as high confidence that an event is about as likely as not (e.g., a tossed coin coming up heads). Confidence and likelihood as used here are distinct concepts but are often linked in practice.
Here are some specific definitions to help you answer some questions.

A. "high confidence" means "about 8 out of 10 chance of being correct".
B. "extremely unlikely" means "less than 5% probability" of the event or outcome
C. "as likely as not" means "33 to 66% probability" of the event or outcome

So here are your questions:

1. If the IPCC says of a die that it has -- "high confidence that an event is extremely unlikely (e.g., rolling a dice twice and getting a six both times)" -- how should a decision maker interpret this statement in terms of the probability of two sixes being rolled on the next two rolls of the die?

2. If the IPCC says of a die that it has -- "high confidence that an event is about as likely as not (e.g., a tossed coin coming up heads)" -- how should a decision maker interpret this statement in terms of the probability of a head appearing on the next coin flip?

Please provide quantitative answers to 1 and 2, show your work.

Uncertainty Confidence Probability

Odds Probability Chance Uncertainty

Climate Change Climate Science Probility Uncertainty