Download or read book The Limits to Certainty written by O. Giarini and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-12-06 with total page 287 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: I consider it a privilege to have been invited to write a preface for "The Limits to Certainty". It is however paradoxical that a theo retical physicist be asked to write about a monograph dealing mainly with service economics. Notwithstanding, I am delighted to do so. Indeed, it is striking that two so widely different fields like physics and social science, and more especially economics, can interact in such a constructive way. There is no question here of reductionism. Nobody claims to be able to reduce social scien ces to physics, nor to use patterns of social interaction in order to formulate new laws for atoms. What is at stake here is more im portant than reduction; the age-old separation between the so-cal led "hard" and "soft sciences" is breaking down. This separation has a long history. First, one should recall the influence of Newton's achievement on the formulation of scienti fic goals. This influence led to the formulation of equilibrium mo dels for supply/demand adjustment. As was noticed by Walter Weisskopf: "the Newtonian paradigm underlying classical and non-classical economics interpreted the economy according to the patterns developed in classical physics and mechanics, in analogy to the planetary system, to a machine or clockwork: a closed auto nomous system ruled by endogenous factors of a highly selective nature, self-regulating and moving to a determinate, predictable point of equilibrium" (The Geneva Papers on Risk and Insurance (1984), Vol. 9, no. 33, pp. 335-360).
Download or read book The Limits to Certainty written by Orio Giarini and published by Springer. This book was released on 1989-11-30 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Mathematics the Loss of Certainty written by Morris Kline and published by . This book was released on 2009 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book In Search of Certainty written by Mark Burgess and published by "O'Reilly Media, Inc.". This book was released on 2015-04-09 with total page 473 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Quite soon, the world’s information infrastructure is going to reach a level of scale and complexity that will force scientists and engineers to approach it in an entirely new way. The familiar notions of command and control are being thwarted by realities of a faster, denser world of communication where choice, variety, and indeterminism rule. The myth of the machine that does exactly what we tell it has come to an end. What makes us think we can rely on all this technology? What keeps it together today, and how might it work tomorrow? Will we know how to build the next generation—or will we be lulled into a stupor of dependence brought about by its conveniences? In this book, Mark Burgess focuses on the impact of computers and information on our modern infrastructure by taking you from the roots of science to the principles behind system operation and design. To shape the future of technology, we need to understand how it works—or else what we don’t understand will end up shaping us. This book explores this subject in three parts: Part I, Stability: describes the fundamentals of predictability, and why we have to give up the idea of control in its classical meaning Part II, Certainty: describes the science of what we can know, when we don’t control everything, and how we make the best of life with only imperfect information Part III, Promises: explains how the concepts of stability and certainty may be combined to approach information infrastructure as a new kind of virtual material, restoring a continuity to human-computer systems so that society can rely on them.
Download or read book The Limits of Growth written by D. H. Meadows and published by . This book was released on 1974 with total page 205 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Negative Certainties written by Jean-Luc Marion and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2020-10-28 with total page 291 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Now in paperback, Jean-Luc Marion's groundbreaking philosophy of human uncertainty. In Negative Certainties, renowned philosopher Jean-Luc Marion challenges some of the most fundamental assumptions we have developed about knowledge: that it is categorical, predicative, and positive. Following Descartes, Kant, and Heidegger, he looks toward our finitude and the limits of our reason. He asks an astonishingly simple—but profoundly provocative—question in order to open up an entirely new way of thinking about knowledge: Isn’t our uncertainty, our finitude, and rational limitations, one of the few things we can be certain about? Marion shows how the assumption of knowledge as positive demands a reductive epistemology that disregards immeasurable or disorderly phenomena. He shows that we have experiences every day that have no identifiable causes or predictable reasons and that these constitute a very real knowledge—a knowledge of the limits of what can be known. Establishing this “negative certainty,” Marion applies it to four aporias, or issues of certain uncertainty: the definition of man; the nature of God; the unconditionality of the gift; and the unpredictability of events. Translated for the first time into English, Negative Certainties is an invigorating work of epistemological inquiry that will take a central place in Marion’s oeuvre.
Download or read book Radical Uncertainty Decision Making Beyond the Numbers written by John Kay and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2020-03-17 with total page 407 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Much economic advice is bogus quantification, warn two leading experts in this essential book, now with a preface on COVID-19. Invented numbers offer a false sense of security; we need instead robust narratives that give us the confidence to manage uncertainty. “An elegant and careful guide to thinking about personal and social economics, especially in a time of uncertainty. The timing is impeccable." — Christine Kenneally, New York Times Book Review Some uncertainties are resolvable. The insurance industry’s actuarial tables and the gambler’s roulette wheel both yield to the tools of probability theory. Most situations in life, however, involve a deeper kind of uncertainty, a radical uncertainty for which historical data provide no useful guidance to future outcomes. Radical uncertainty concerns events whose determinants are insufficiently understood for probabilities to be known or forecasting possible. Before President Barack Obama made the fateful decision to send in the Navy Seals, his advisers offered him wildly divergent estimates of the odds that Osama bin Laden would be in the Abbottabad compound. In 2000, no one—not least Steve Jobs—knew what a smartphone was; how could anyone have predicted how many would be sold in 2020? And financial advisers who confidently provide the information required in the standard retirement planning package—what will interest rates, the cost of living, and your state of health be in 2050?—demonstrate only that their advice is worthless. The limits of certainty demonstrate the power of human judgment over artificial intelligence. In most critical decisions there can be no forecasts or probability distributions on which we might sensibly rely. Instead of inventing numbers to fill the gaps in our knowledge, we should adopt business, political, and personal strategies that will be robust to alternative futures and resilient to unpredictable events. Within the security of such a robust and resilient reference narrative, uncertainty can be embraced, because it is the source of creativity, excitement, and profit.
Download or read book Critical letters Letter 3 4 written by Hughes R P. Fraser Halle and published by . This book was released on 1861 with total page 84 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Critical Letters Letter 1st 4th By R F Brancassine Dr F Halle written by Hughes R. P. Fraser HALLE and published by . This book was released on 1869 with total page 98 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Searching for Certainty written by John L. Casti and published by . This book was released on 1993 with total page 496 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This comprehensive overview of the prediction game takes readers on a journey through the worlds of probability, chance and chaos, and investigates developmental biology, modern warfare, weather and climate prediction, mathematics, economics and games of chance.
Download or read book The Pursuit of Certainty written by Shirley Robin Letwin and published by . This book was released on 1998 with total page 434 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: By examining the thought of four seminal thinkers, Shirley Robin Letwin in The Pursuit of Certainty provides a brilliant record of the gradual change in the English-speaking peoples' understanding of "what sort of activity politics is." As Letwin writes, "the distinctive political issue since the eighteenth century has been whether government should do more or less." Nor, as many historians argue, did this issue arise because of the Industrial Revolution or "new social conditions [that] aggravated the problem of poverty" but, Letwin believes, because of the "profoundly personal reflection" of major thinkers, including Hume, Bentham, Mill, and Webb. David Hume, for example, believed that to "reach for perfection, to seek an ideal, is noble, but dangerous, and is therefore an activity that individuals or voluntary groups may pursue, but governments certainly should not." By the end of the nineteenth century, as Letwin observes, Beatrice Webb came to "equate the triumph of reason over passion with the rule of science over human life." Thus did the "pursuit of certainty" displace the traditional English understanding of the limitations of human nature--hence the necessity of limits to governmental power and programs. Consequently, in our time, "Politics was no longer one of several human activities and at that not a very noble one; it encompassed all of human life" in quest of philosophical "certainty" and social perfection. The Liberty Fund edition is a reprint of the original work published by Oxford in 1965. Shirley Robin Letwin (1924-1993) was a Professor of Political and Legal Philosophy at Harvard, Cambridge, and the London School of Economics. Please note: This title is available as an ebook for purchase on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and iTunes.
Download or read book What We Believe but Cannot Prove written by John Brockman and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2009-10-13 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: More than one hundred of the world's leading thinkers write about things they believe in, despite the absence of concrete proof Scientific theory, more often than not, is born of bold assumption, disparate bits of unconnected evidence, and educated leaps of faith. Some of the most potent beliefs among brilliant minds are based on supposition alone -- yet that is enough to push those minds toward making the theory viable. Eminent cultural impresario, editor, and publisher of Edge (www.edge.org), John Brockman asked a group of leading scientists and thinkers to answer the question: What do you believe to be true even though you cannot prove it? This book brings together the very best answers from the most distinguished contributors. Thought-provoking and hugely compelling, this collection of bite-size thought-experiments is a fascinating insight into the instinctive beliefs of some of the most brilliant minds today.
Download or read book A Clinician s Guide to Statistics and Epidemiology in Mental Health written by S. Nassir Ghaemi and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2009-07-09 with total page 167 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Describes statistical concepts in plain English with minimal mathematical content, giving an insight into which statistics to believe - and why.
Download or read book After Certainty written by Robert Pasnau and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017-11-10 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: No part of philosophy is as disconnected from its history as is epistemology. After Certainty offers a reconstruction of that history, understood as a series of changing expectations about the cognitive ideal that beings such as us might hope to achieve in a world such as this. The story begins with Aristotle and then looks at how his epistemic program was developed through later antiquity and into the Middle Ages, before being dramatically reformulated in the seventeenth century. In watching these debates unfold over the centuries, one sees why epistemology has traditionally been embedded within a much larger sphere of concerns about human nature and the reality of the world we live in. It ultimately becomes clear why epistemology today has become a much narrower and specialized field, concerned with the conditions under which it is true to say, that someone knows something. Based on a series of lectures given at Oxford University, Robert Pasnau's book ranges widely over the history of philosophy, and examines in some detail the rise of science as an autonomous discipline. Ultimately Pasnau argues that we may have no good reasons to suppose ourselves capable of achieving even the most minimal standards for knowledge, and the final chapter concludes with a discussion of faith and hope.
Download or read book Louisiana Reports written by Louisiana. Supreme Court and published by . This book was released on 1902 with total page 916 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Cases Argued and Determined in the Supreme Court of Louisiana written by Louisiana. Supreme Court and published by . This book was released on 1902 with total page 912 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Southern Reporter written by and published by . This book was released on 1903 with total page 1122 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Includes the decisions of the Supreme Courts of Alabama, Florida, Louisiana, and Mississippi, the Appellate Courts of Alabama and, Sept. 1928/Jan. 1929-Jan./Mar. 1941, the Courts of Appeal of Louisiana.
