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.

stacking the deck

Vaughn Tan3rd January 2021 at 4:47pm

Setting up conditions so that outcomes are likely to be in a generally desired direction instead of a specific desired outcome—this fuzzy way of thinking about causality is more likely to "work" in complex situations marked by interconnectedness and interdependence or in uncertainty. The uncertainty mindset is consistent with a stacking the deck approach to strategy.

Stacking the deck is contrasted with the risk mindset approach, which usually sets up conditions in the hopes that there is a clear and deterministic relationship between cause and effect.

See also: control, freedom, knowability, routines, self-therapy, strategy, uncertain futures, uncertainty mindset.