#uncertainty — Public Fediverse posts

The earnest admission of not-knowing is the furled flower that rests in the heart of all true science, art, and empathy.
-- Pat Rothfuss

⬆ #Wisdom #Quotes #PatRothfuss #Empathy #Science #Uncertainty

⬇ #Photography #Panorama #BWCA #RoseFalls #Minnesota

I can live with doubt and uncertainty and not knowing. I think it's much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers that might be wrong.... I don't feel frightened by not knowing things, by being lost in the mysterious universe without having any purpose.
-- Richard Feynman

⬆ #Wisdom #Quotes #RichardFeynman #Doubt #TheUnknown #Uncertainty

⬇ #Photography #Panorama #GoblinValley #Utah

Agir sans fondement, apprendre dans l’incertitude

Nous devons décider et agir sous incertitude radicale. Face à l’effondrement biocidaire du capitalocène, attendre la certitude scientifique complète serait déjà une décision — celle de laisser faire. Savoirs situés, habitudes plastiques, doute créatif, heuristique de la peur et action collective : une éthique sans fondement ultime, mais pas sans responsabilité. #Uncertainty #PostNormalScience #Degrowth #ClimateCrisis…

https://homohortus31.wordpress.com/2026/08/21/agir-sans-fondement-apprendre-dans-lincertitude/

~ "Walmart reported its weakest sales growth in six years, extending a string of data suggesting that #ConsumerSpending —the key engine of #US economic growth—is softening" as people, facing high #prices and economic #uncertainty, spend carefully.

#USA #USeconomy #economics #consumers #inflation
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https://www.wsj.com/finance/stocks/u-s-stocks-and-bonds-slide-brushing-off-treasurys-buyback-plans-57ced23b

DATE: August 19, 2026 at 08:38PM
SOURCE: SCIENCE DAILY PSYCHOLOGY FEED

TITLE: Researchers reveal deeper workings of brain’s information hub

URL: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2026/08/260819041224.htm

The brain has a remarkably flexible system for handling uncertainty and changing situations. Researchers found that the frontoparietal cortex constantly shifts how it communicates with other brain regions depending on what information is needed to make a decision. Rather than simply becoming more active when things get difficult, this network appears to reorganize itself in real time.

URL: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2026/08/260819041224.htm

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#psychology #counseling #socialwork #psychotherapy @psychotherapist @psychotherapists @psychology @socialpsych @socialwork @psychiatry #mentalhealth #psychiatry #healthcare #depression #psychotherapist #BrainResearch #FrontoparietalCortex #Neuroscience #DecisionMaking #Uncertainty #BrainNetworks #CognitiveFlexibility #NeuralCommunication #BrainConnectivity #NeuroscienceNews

Radical Acceptance, Journals, and Waiting for the Tide to Turn

I don’t deal with it well whatsoever.

The amount of pain I’ve gone through, both self-inflicted and at the hands of many others, has left my identity with a very activated nervous system. Fireworks suspended by a rupture in spacetime. A dozen vipers sitting beneath some shadowy jungle ferns. A crescendo never ending from a phantom orchestra. A cursed locomotive always rattling across tracks during a forever midnight. All those frenetic and lurking images can describe my nervous system in one way or another.

Of course, having an severely triggered nervous system makes uncertainty absolutely awful to deal with, especially when having relationships with people, whether it is romantic, friends, or colleagues.

Therefore, I’ve had to hack my own brain to deal with uncertainty. I’ll gladly share what works for me. There is no magic bullet. No wondrous spear thrown by a demigod. One thing might work for a decade, but suddenly lose effectiveness. Life is dense, complicated, and elusive. Regardless, these are some things I’m currently doing to deal with uncertainty.

Hack One: Radical acceptance. I learned this in my DBT skills class back in therapy. Practicing radical acceptance for a specific goal can be helpful. In this case, I look at uncertainty and I radically accept that I cannot control every little thing out there in life, or what will happen to me. I accept the chaos of existence. I don’t argue about it. I don’t try and reason with it. I just try to let it exist in parallel to me. Reality is a permanently unfinished painting. Nobody knows what it’ll fully look like.

Hack Two: Journals. I hate to say it, but journals are a great way to flex into uncertainty, and not react to things that might bring on more uncertainty after you’ve been trying to avoid it. Write down all the gross frustrations and garbage that other humans aren’t fit to hear. Lean into the ridiculous. Go full tinfoil hate crazy on those pages. Get it out of you. Go full Jackson Pollock from the soul. I try to journal once a day, usually in the morning when my cortisol levels are bonkers. Great way to capture uncertainty and radically accept it. Through a controlled form of expulsion and madness.

Hack Two (Part Two): Journals again. I just wanted to share how important it is to write down when you’ve gone through something challenging. Not to immortalize it or be masochistic, but to remember that you did it. You survived. You made it through. Write down that you went through a bad breakup, got cheated on, lost a job, got rejected, whatever the case. Write down that you got through it. Look back at these moments when uncertainty paralyzes you. This written reminder tells you that you survived it. You continued. You made it through whatever haunted tunnel life decided to throw at you, or you decided to travel down. Yes, that is direct reference to Spirited Away.

Hack Three: Waiting for the Tide to Turn. This is simply a glittering term for just waiting for your response to level. Uncertainty triggers an emotional wave inside of you. Before you react to any of it, you simply try to get some time to pass between and before you make any decisions that might be truly damaging or ruled by emotion. The journal is of course a method to delay it, but going for a walk, working out, playing a game, anything to sort of delay that panic that uncertainty provokes is in my mind helpful. Now, I’m of course referring to situations that aren’t dangerous and don’t require immediate life saving reactions. Please don’t sit down and write in a journal if you’re currently being held at gunpoint.

That’s all I got. Hopefully these hacks help you out. Sometimes a very specific type of uncertainty can trigger you, that you didn’t know existed. It is unpredictable and borderline secretive. Having even a meager blueprint in how to deal with uncertainty I think is helpful.

Domain rebranded from the.kalvin.blog (RM169.99/year) to the.kalvin.click (RM53.99/year). Saves RM116 annually. The choice is not preference — it is survival within family budget constraints and chronic uncertainty.

https://the.kalvin.click/the-kalvin-click-rebranding-to-survive/

#rebranding #domain #cost #survival #budget #poverty #anxiety #uncertainty #blogging #infrastructure #digital #choice #necessity #hardship #pragmatism

How is numeric illiteracy related to students' anxiety?

Quiles et al. at #FSU found lower #numeracy in undergrads predicted higher intolerance of #uncertainty, which predicted #anxiety.

🔐 https://doi.org/10.1080/16506073.2025.2557547

Would boosting probabilistic reasoning be clinically protective?

About Life and Uncertainty

https://mylittlehawk.com/2026/08/17/about-life-and-uncertainty/

…
The EU's adaptation framework serves as a distraction. The cover for treating adaptation as purely technical is thinner than it has been in years. This summer ongoing disasters offer an opening to:
* discuss adaptation;
* look at the perpetrators: https://fed.brid.gy/r/https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:ghfylraepxvzz7zjex4nelzw/post/3msbmrpwlhc2v

_References_

The present thread was inspired by two other voices about the same technocratic output: http://strategicclimaterisks.substack.com/p/how-the-eu-adaptation-framework-vastly

Here is the announcement of the report from the European Scientific Advisory Board on Climate Change, 'Strengthening resilience to climate change – Recommendations for an effective EU adaptation policy framework': https://climate-advisory-board.europa.eu/news/escalating-climate-impacts-demand-urgent-coordinated-adaptation-across-the-eu

#climatePolicy #adaptation #climateChange #livability #policy #climate #riskAssessment #governance #uncertainty #EU #EuropeanUnion #Europe

A quotation from Bertrand Russell

Absence of finality is of the essence of the scientific spirit.

Bertrand Russell (1872-1970) English mathematician and philosopher
Education and the Social Order [Education and the Modern World], ch. 1 “The Individual versus the Citizen” (1932)

More about this quote: wist.info/russell-bertrand/852…

#quote #quotes #quotation #qotd #bertrandrussell #certainty #discovery #finality #science #scientificmethod #testing #uncertainty #validation

The prevalent definitions flatter humans precisely because they center the things humans happen to be good at, and call the resulting picture objective.

https://athinkerinnature.substack.com/p/what-intelligence-actually-is

#Intelligence #Computation #AI #AGI #Biology #Evolution #Adaptation #Uncertainty

/2

Why is this relevant?

It speaks of global economic #uncertainty related to #AI development, rising #prices (including of #energy) & conflicts around the world like the #IranWar.

#economics

Major central banks steer a cautious hiking path ~

• Five major central banks are in hike mode

• US Fed leaves rates unchanged (and 30-year US Treasury yields are rising)

• Bank of England leaves rates unchanged

/1
#economics #finance #CentralBanks
#business #inflation #prices #InterestRates #uncertainty
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https://www.reuters.com/business/finance/global-markets-central-banks-graphic-2026-07-30/

Dogfirmations with Doofie and Dingus: Uncertainty

Uncertainty does not scare Doofie; it simply makes space for wonderful new possibilities.

#Uncertainty #technology #artificialintelligence #animals #photography #dogs #nature #pets #artist

View Dogfirmation: https://dogs.blackcatwhitehatsecurity.com/?dogID=228#today

Book Burner

The books we burn 
at night to warm our 
wounded hearts, do 
we read them before 
lighting them aflame? 

Is it sacrifice or merely 
sacrilege to immolate 
these holy books, how 
can we stand the pain 
of this insane world? 

#TheHerd 🐑 Use #AI Like a Fortune-Teller—and get in trouble.

👇 The savvy use #CommonSense, instead. Like Warren Buffett.

"Trillions of dollars are now at risk because global investors are making the same mistake that caused the dot-com bubble, Black Friday, and the 1929 Wall Street crash. The mistake is: To believe that numbers can predict the future."

🔗 https://bigthink.com/business/why-warren-buffetts-superpower-is-an-achilles-heel-for-ai/?ref=refind

🏷️ #economy #investing #InvestingStrategy #uncertainty #volatility #WarrenBuffett

"We introduce a multi-objective, multi-value #IAM framework to guide just climate policymaking under deep uncertainty" We address three shortcomings of previous models:
1. #comparison: "By making decision-makers’ preferences over objectives explicit, multi-objective approaches facilitate a posteriori navigation of conflicting interests."
2. #values: "A just and effective alternative is to adopt policy design frameworks that accommodate multiple values and preferences of different stakeholders, fostering mutual understanding and consensus."
3. #uncertainties: "Climate sensitivity and damage functions are major sources of deep uncertainty". A "feedback mechanism makes adaptive policies robust against deep uncertainties and allows them to accommodate diverse future states-of-the-world (SOW) and extreme events."

from Biswas, P. et al. (2026). "Prioritizing the welfare of vulnerable nations promotes equitable achievement of Paris target" https://doi.org/10.1038/s44168-026-00385-z

#climatePolicy #uncertainty

Accepting a hypothesis depends on the importance of being mistaken. It can be considered a judgment with ethics attached.
Without accounting for multiple values and preferences in policy design, scientific insights risk becoming politicized, potentially reinforcing dominant parties’ interests in funneling action while shifting risks to vulnerable populations.
Roger A. Pielke Jr. advocated for taking the role of saying "How about these other ideas?" instead of taking a position on currently debated topics.

ref. (2007). "The Honest Broker: Making Sense of Science in Policy and Politics" 🧩 🧵

#policy #uncertainty #uncertainties #robustness #probabilities #futures #anticipation #IAMs #science #modelling #modeling #risks #riskAssessment #unknowns #governance #bias #workCollectives #institutions #Pielke

"But none of these can substitute for the inner posture of citizenship: the capacity to meet uncertainty without collapsing into destructive fear."

https://athinkerinnature.substack.com/p/revitalizing-democracy-for-the-21st

#democracy #uncertainty #future #freedom

"How do you live in a world that you don't understand? What you do is you try and cover your downside for losses and open for the upside. And for that you need to be corrigible. You need to be open to being wrong."
This was a summary of Nassim Taleb's "Antifragile" book according to Mark Blyth, political economist.

On bubbles, commodification, the values of economics: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XNlPnd4aVs0

#uncertainty #mistakes #corrigibility #criticalThinking #adaptability #learning #quotes #NassimTaleb #MarkBlyth #Antifragile #bookStodon #book #video #economics #wealth #taxation #austerity #concentration #capitalism #immigration

A quotation from Eleanor Roosevelt

One’s philosophy is not best expressed in words; it is expressed in the choices one makes. In stopping to think through the meaning of what I have learned, there is much that I believe intensely, much I am unsure of. In the long run, we shape our lives and we shape ourselves. The process never ends until we die. And, the choices we make are ultimately our own responsibility.

Eleanor Roosevelt (1884–1962) First Lady of the US (1933–1945), politician, diplomat, activist
You Learn by Living, Foreword (1960)

More about this quote: wist.info/roosevelt-eleanor/33…

#quote #quotes #quotation #qotd #eleanorroosevelt #actions #belief #choices #living #personalresponsibility #philosophy #responsibility #takeresponsibility #uncertainty #wordsanddeeds

A Question of Conscience

Are you dead, my guide?
Or have you simply sunk into the muck
that creeps upon these inner corridors,
drowning in helpless demise?

The glass is obscured and the
bright moon has faded into the mist
while I, like a blind hand groping,
stand trembling in this night,

waiting.

October 28, 1988, Curridabat, Costa Rica

Part of the continuing Respectful American series, a selection of writings from my travel journals from Central America in 1988

Power Agency Uncertainty

https://social.trom.tf/display/dbc8dc44-646a-5ba4-a610-e92380213155

astute observations

`Mistaking close classes is a sign of low separability. In contrast, mistaking distant classes is a sign of a bad model, noisy data points, or the existence of outliers. The proposed uncertainties are not aggregated, i.e., they are specific to each prediction and do not require a ground truth.`

https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/10284772

#dataScience #machineLearning #ML #statistics #uncertainty #quantification #UQ

I Trust to Come Shortly | Five Minutes in the Garden – Episode 176 https://www.allforgardening.com/1881529/i-trust-to-come-shortly-five-minutes-in-the-garden-episode-176/ ##BiblicalDevotional ##ChristianDailyDevotional ##DailyGrace ##FiveMinutesInTheGarden ##ITrustInTheLord ##OrthodoxDevotional ##Philippians2 ##QuietFaithfulness ##TrustingGod ##Uncertainty #GardenPlans