I started reading Overcoming Bias in the last few months, and Eliezer Yudkowsky has more or less convinced me that uncertainty is a property of your mind, not reality. Because of this, I really liked this passage in The Black Swan (p. 198 )
Often, in conferences when they hear me talk about uncertainty and randomness, philosophers, and sometimes mathematicians, bug me about the least relevant point, namely whether the randomness I address is “true randomness” or “deterministic chaos” that masquerades as randomness. A true random system is in fact random and does not have predictable properties. A chaotic system has entirely predictable properties, but they are hard to know.
[...]There is no functional difference in practice between the two since we will never get to make the distinction– the difference is mathematical, not practical. If I see a pregnant woman, the sex of her child is a purely random matter to me (a 50 percent chance for either sex)– but not to her doctor, who might have done an ultrasound. In practice, randomness is fundamentally incomplete information.
[...]Randomness, in the end, is just unknowledge.

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April 19, 2008 at 4:59 pm
Tom
I agree with you that “randomness” can always be resolved with the proper amount of equipment. However, developing any type of mathematical or economic model that accounts for 100% of the randomness is impossible. Thus, randomness provides a meaningful approximation.
April 19, 2008 at 5:37 pm
jsalvati
Oh, maybe I wasn’t clear, but that was precisely the author’s point (with which I was agreeing). When I say that “uncertainty is a property of your mind, not reality”, I don’t mean to say that one should ignore or discount that uncertainty since it is “only” a property of your mind, quite the opposite; we should think hard about what we know and what we don’t know. Developing a model to account for anything close to 100% of results, is essentially impossible for all social interactions that take place in real life. You should treat “unknowledge” as randomness exactly because it is a property of your mind and not of reality. The process in reality might not be random, but you don’t have a better way to think about it.
April 21, 2008 at 10:12 am
algerie
Well, I have taken quite a close look on your website and I must say that I find it extraordinarily interesting.