Fatal Certainty: The Cult of Prediction and the Need for a New Way to Deal with Fundamental Future Uncertainty
Since ancient times, human beings have craved certainty. Two and a half millennia ago, rulers facing life-and-death decisions sought guidance from prophets and oracles; closer to our own time, astrologers such as Nostradamus were in high demand. The western Enlightenment brought a new approach to uncertainty: the scientific method of trial and error, which proved spectacularly effective in rendering previously inexplicable phenomena both understandable and predictable.
Centuries of steady scientific progress have greatly increased the sphere of knowledge and the predictive powers of human beings. Yet that very progress has created the illusion that essentially everything important to humans is, or soon will be, predictable. The relatively new field of probability, which arose alongside the scientific revolution, has added another layer to this certainty. Even that which cannot be known with certainty, probability seems to say, can be predicted to within an acceptable level of uncertainty.
Fatal Certainty makes the argument that this sanguine attitude toward future uncertainty is unjustified. The remaining sphere of strictly unpredictable phenomena, in fact, is far closer to what it was in the days of the Oracle of Delphi than most people realize.
The first two decades of the third millennium have demonstrated this fact over and over. The terrorist attacks of 2001; the “cakewalk” of the Iraq War that turned into anything but; the global financial crisis of 2008; and the COVID pandemic of 2020-present were not just the result of bad luck. In important respects, they were all either made possible, or made far worse than they should have been, by a fatally arrogant expert certainty that assumed that the phenomena of terrorism, war, finance, and epidemiology were all so well-understood that outcomes could be predicted with certainty, and catastrophe in these areas was therefore unthinkable.
One might think that disasters such as these would cause experts to search for new ways to deal with what must now be acknowledged as radically uncertain, yet still strategically critical, phenomena. Unfortunately, for the most part this has not been the case. The response instead has been to double down on prediction, particularly on numerical forecasting approaches – even in areas in which prediction is either impossible or useless for planning.
Fortunately, there is another approach to dealing with fundamental uncertainty: rigorous imagination. Fatal Certainty makes an inarguable case for human beings and institutions getting much, much better at this discipline – before it is too late.
