The Uncertainty Mindset 2019-2020

A newsletter project by Vaughn Tan (book | homepage | Twitter | Instagram).

If you've arrived here from an external site and want to know what's going on—or if you've become disoriented in this garden of forking paths—you can always go to the index page, the topic list, or the issue list.

Feel free to get in touch (especially if you find a broken link) or sign up for the newsletter.

long-term view

Vaughn Tan3rd January 2021 at 7:52pm

A perspective that emphasizes the long future rather than what happens in the now. This is good, but zooming out like this also makes it easier to delude ourselves that 1) the future is fundamentally knowable instead of uncertain and that 2) our actions should be guided by the risk mindset. The uncertainty mindset, it should be obvious, functions as a corrective for these two pitfalls of long-term thinking.

For more on the long-term view, start with #44: The long view.

See also: causality, complexity, control, coronavirus, negative capability, not-knowing, realistic imagination, strategy, the work of uncertainty, tradeoffs, uncertain futures.