Risk Intelligence by Dylan Evans

Author:Dylan Evans [Evans, Dylan]
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780857899262
Publisher: Atlantic Books

Epistemic feelings are well calibrated when they accurately reflect your level of knowledge about a particular topic. If you feel uncertain about a statement when you really know little about it one way or the other, your feeling is well calibrated. If you feel uncertain about a statement that you know a lot about, but the evidence for and against the statement is finely balanced, then your feeling is also well calibrated. Likewise, if you feel very confident that something will happen when you have a lot of information that strongly suggests the event will occur, your feeling is also well calibrated. If, on the other hand, you feel sure about something despite knowing very little about it, or feel uncertain despite having a lot of relevant knowledge that points to a definite verdict, your epistemic feelings are miscalibrated.

Even if your epistemic feelings are well calibrated, however, you won’t be able to reliably translate them into accurate decisions about risks unless you can do a good job of expressing those feelings in terms of specific numerical probabilities. That is why, of course, my risk intelligence test focuses on this aptitude. In the next chapter we’ll look at some good methods of helping you fine-tune your epistemic feelings, as well as a set of basic concepts from probability theory that can help you do a better job of assessing probabilities on a daily basis. But before getting to those, it’s important for you to do a basic assessment of your degree of comfort with such mathematical thinking.

Risk intelligence does require a certain amount of numeracy, and in working to improve our risk intelligence it is important to assess how numerate we are, both in terms of our ability to work with numbers, and how comfortable we feel with mathematical methods and concepts. The simple truth is that some people find putting numbers on things harder than others. At one end of the spectrum there are people such as the Hungarian mathematician Paul Erdős, the “man who loved only numbers” as the title of Paul Hoffman’s biography nicely put it. Erdős published more papers than any other mathematician in history. He spent most of his life as a vagabond, traveling between scientific conferences and the homes of other mathematicians. He would show up, unannounced, at a colleague’s doorstep and announce “my brain is open,” staying long enough to work furiously on a paper or two, before moving on a few days later, leaving his colleague exhausted. He never married, and had no children.

At the other end of the spectrum are people who find numbers utterly foreign. David Boyle’s entertaining book The Tyranny of Numbers captures the oppressive character that numbers seem to have for this latter group:

Every time a new set of statistics comes out, I can’t help feeling that some of the richness and mystery of life gets extinguished. Just as individual stories of passion and betrayal get hidden by the marriage statistics, or the whole meaning of the Holocaust gets lost in the number 6,000,000.

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