Resources / Library
Library
A small working canon for reasoning under uncertainty.
These authors disagree on almost everything. They share one allergy: certainty theater.
Reasoning
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Risk Savvy and Rationality for Mortals
Risk literacy and ecological rationality
Express risks in terms people can understand. Match decision rules to their environment; simple heuristics can outperform complex models when information is scarce or unreliable.
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Conjectures and Refutations
Critical rationalism
Advance knowledge by exposing claims to criticism. Make hypotheses testable, look for errors, and resist protecting a theory from the evidence that could overturn it.
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Fallacies
Informal fallacies
Identify errors in an argument and explain why they matter. Consult the catalogue for definitions and examples; use its competing classifications to distinguish faulty reasoning from an unfamiliar or unwelcome conclusion.
Decisions
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Robust Decision Making / Decision Making under Deep Uncertainty
Decision-making under deep uncertainty
Test strategies across many plausible futures. Find where each breaks, then choose those that hold up when no single forecast deserves your confidence.
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Superforecasting
Calibration and forecasting
Keep score. Break forecasts into smaller questions, assign probabilities, and update them as evidence arrives. Judge predictions against outcomes over time, with confidence recorded beforehand.
Systems
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“The Use of Knowledge in Society” and “The Pretence of Knowledge”
Distributed knowledge
Account for knowledge held by people close to a problem. No central model captures all the local information on which a complex economy depends.
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A Conflict of Visions and Knowledge and Decisions
Trade-offs and constrained vision
Examine the assumptions behind competing visions of society. Judge institutions by the incentives they create and the trade-offs they impose, including effects their designers never intended.
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How the World Really Works
Material realism
Measure the energy and materials a proposed transition requires. Check its scale and speed against the physical systems that produce food, build infrastructure, and power industry.
A work earns its place by staying useful for years, making its method clear, or challenging the framework.