A futurist friend recently made an expensive, early exit from the Middle East during a flare-up in the Israel-Iran conflict … then felt embarrassed when the situation de-escalated theatrically. That embarrassment stems from misframing the decision as an optimisation problem — which assumes that precise estimation of risks, probabilities, and timings is possible. It wasn’t. The situation wasn’t only risky, it was also uncertain — marked by capricious actors uninterested in playing by well-understood rules. In uncertain situations, optimisation fails and other frames for decisionmaking make much more sense. The real skill here is correctly diagnosing the kind of not-knowing you’re facing, then choosing a decision frame suited to uncertainty, not just risk.

Read it here:

A futurist friend recently made an expensive, early exit from the Middle East during a flare-up in the Israel-Iran conflict … then felt embarrassed when the situation de-escalated theatrically. That embarrassment stems from misframing the decision as an optimisation problem — which assumes that precise estimation of risks, probabilities, and timings is possible. It wasn’t. The situation wasn’t only risky, it was also uncertain — marked by capricious actors uninterested in playing by well-understood rules. In uncertain situations, optimisation fails and other frames for decisionmaking make much more sense. The real skill here is correctly diagnosing the kind of not-knowing you’re facing, then choosing a decision frame suited to uncertainty, not just risk.

Read it here: https://vaughntan.org/optfallacy