Category Archives: uncertainty

Negative capability and optimal ambiguity

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Decorative photograph of sculpture on Liverpool waterfront at nightHow is your negative capability?  The very term ‘negative capability’ conveys confusion and ambiguity.  It means our ability to accept uncertainty, a lack of knowledge or control.  It was coined by John Keats to describe the skill of appreciating something without fully understanding it.  It implies suspending judgment about something in order to learn more about it.  This is difficult because we have to move out of a low entropy mindset and consider how it fits in a range of possible mindsets or neuronal assemblies, which raises our psychological entropy and with it our anxiety and mental stress [see ’Psychological entropy increased by effectual leaders‘ on February 10th, 2021].  If we are able to tolerate an optimal level of ambiguity and uncertainty then we might be able to develop an appreciation of a complex system and even an ability to anticipate its behaviour without a full knowledge or understanding of it.  Our sub-conscious brain has excellent negative capabilities; for example, most of us can catch a ball without understanding, or even knowing, anything about the mechanics of its flight towards us, or we accept a ride home from a friend with no knowledge of their driving skills and no control over the vehicle.  Although, if our conscious brain knows that they crashed their car last week then it might override the sub-conscious and cause us to think again before declining the offer of a ride home.  Perhaps this is because our conscious brain tends to have less negative capability and likes to be in control.  Engineers like to talk about their intuition which is probably synonymous with their negative capability because it is their ability to appreciate and anticipate the behaviour of an engineering system without a full knowledge and understanding of it.  This intuition is usually based on experience and perhaps resides in the subconscious mind because if you ask an engineer to explain a decision or prediction based on their intuition then they will probably struggle to provide a complete and rational explanation.  They are comfortable with an optimal level of ambiguity although of course you might not be so comfortable.

Sources:

Richard Gunderman, ‘John Keats’ concept of ‘negative capability’ – or sitting in uncertainty –  is needed now more than ever’.  The Conversation, February 21st, 2021.

David Jeffery, Letter: Keats was uneasy about the pursuit of perfection.  FT Weekend, April 2nd, 2021.

Caputo JD. Truth: philosophy in transit. London: Penguin, 2013.

Near earth objects make tomorrow a little less than certain

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Photograph of earth from spaceA couple of weeks ago, I wrote about unattainable uncertainty [see ‘Uncertainty is unattainable and near-uncertainty unaffordable’ on May 12th, 2021] and you might have thought that some things are certain, such as that tomorrow will follow today.  However, even that’s not certain – it has been estimated that there is a 1 in 300,000 chance in the next one hundred years of an asteroid impact on earth resulting in more than one million fatalities.  It might seem like a very small probability that you will not be around tomorrow due to an asteroid impact; however, as Sir David Spiegelhalter has pointed out, if that probability of fatalities related to an industrial installation, then it would be considered an intolerable risk by UK Health and Safety Executive.  By the way, if you want a more accurate estimate of the probability that an asteroid impact will prevent you seeing tomorrow then NASA provides information about the next Near Earth Object (NEO) to pass within 10 lunar distances (the distance between the moon and the earth which is 384,000 km) at https://cneos.jpl.nasa.gov/.  121 NEOs came within one lunar distance during the last twelve months of which the largest had a diameter of between 88 m and 200m, which is about the size of an Olympic Stadium, and came within 310,000 km; while the closest came within 8000 km, less than a Earth’s diameter which is 12,742 km, and was between 4.8 m and 11 m in diameter or about the size of two double-decker buses.  Spiegelhalter reassures us by telling us that there is no record of anyone, except a cow, being killed by an asteroid whereas tragically the same cannot be said about double decker buses!

Sources:

Reinhardt JC, Chen X, Liu W, Manchev P, Pate-Cornell ME. Asteroid risk assessment: a probabilistic approach. Risk Anal. 36:244–61, 2016.

Spiegelhalter D. Risk and uncertainty communication. Annual Review of Statistics and Its Application. 4:31-60, 2017.

Certainty is unattainable and near-certainty unaffordable

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The economists John Kay and Mervyn King assert in their book ‘Radical Uncertainty – decision-making beyond numbers‘ that ‘economic forecasting is necessarily harder than weather forecasting’ because the world of economics is non-stationary whereas the weather is governed by unchanging laws of nature. Kay and King observe that both central banks and meteorological offices have ‘to convey inescapable uncertainty to people who crave unavailable certainty’. In other words, the necessary assumptions and idealisations combined with the inaccuracies of the input data of both economic and meteorological models produce inevitable uncertainty in the predictions. However, people seeking to make decisions based on the predictions want certainty because it is very difficult to make choices when faced with uncertainty – it raises our psychological entropy [see ‘Psychological entropy increased by ineffective leaders‘ on February 10th, 2021].  Engineers face similar difficulties providing systems with inescapable uncertainties to people desiring unavailable certainty in terms of the reliability.  The second law of thermodynamics ensures that perfection is unattainable [see ‘Impossible perfection‘ on June 5th, 2013] and there will always be flaws of some description present in a system [see ‘Scattering electrons reveal dislocations in material structure‘ on November 11th, 2020].  Of course, we can expend more resources to eliminate flaws and increase the reliability of a system but the second law will always limit our success. Consequently, to finish where I started with a quote from Kay and King, ‘certainty is unattainable and the price of near-certainty unaffordable’ in both economics and engineering.

Predicting the future through holistic awareness

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Decorative picture: view along hotel corridorIt is traditional at the start of the year to speculate on what will happen in the new year.  However, as Niels Bohr is reputed to have said ‘Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future’.  Some people have suggested that our brains are constantly predicting the future. We weigh up the options for what might happen next before choosing a course of action. Our ancestors might have watched a fish swimming near a river bank and predicted where it would be a moment later when their spear entered the water. Or on a longer timescale, they predicted that seeds planted at a particular time of year would yield a crop some months later. Our predictions are not always correct but our life depends on enough of them being reliable that we have evolved to be good predictors of the immediate future. In Chinese thought, a distinction is made between predicting the near and distant future because the former is possible and latter is impossible, at least with any degree of confidence (Simandon, 2018).  Wisdom can be considered to be understanding the futility of trying to predict the distant future while being able to sense the near future through an acute awareness and immersion in one’s surroundings. This implies that a wise person can go beyond the everyday predictions of the immediate future, made largely unconsciously by our brains, and anticipate events on a slightly longer timescale, the near future. In engineering terms, events in the near future are short-term behaviour dominated by the current status of the system whereas events in the distant future are largely determined by external interactions with the system. This seems entirely consistent with the Chinese concept of wisdom arising from ‘vanishing into things’ which means to become immersed in a situation and hence to be able sense the current status of the system and reliably anticipate the near future. Some engineers might call it intuition which has been defined as ‘judgments that arise through rapid, non-conscious and holistic associations’ (Dane & Pratt, 2007).  So, in 2021 I hope to continue to exercise my intuition and remain immersed in a number of issues but I am not going to attempt to predict any distant events.

References:

Dane, E. and Pratt, M.G., 2007. Exploring intuition and its role in managerial decision making. Academy of management review, 32(1), pp.33-54.

Simandan, D., 2018. Wisdom and foresight in Chinese thought: sensing the immediate future. Journal of Futures Studies, 22(3), pp.35-50.