How Should We Prepare for the Unknown? With Statistician David Spiegelhalter

**Mia Sorrenti** (0:00)
Welcome to Intelligence Squared, Where Great Minds Meet. I'm producer Mia Sorrenti. In a world of economic shocks, geopolitical crises and constant predictions about the future, how should we make decisions when certainty is impossible? And what can statistics teach us about living with risk, chance and the unknown? In this episode, physicist and science broadcaster Helen Czerski speaks with statistician David Spiegelhalter about his book, The Art of Uncertainty. Drawing on probability, data and real-world examples, Spiegelhalter explores how we assess risk and sheds light on what roles chance, luck and coincidence play in our lives.
Let's join our host Helen Czerski now with more.

**Helen Czerski** (0:41)
Welcome to Intelligence Squared, David. We are here to discuss your book, which I'm holding here, The Art of Uncertainty, How to Navigate Chance, Ignorance, Risk and Luck, which sounds like everything and it's got a lovely picture of a double-yolked egg on the cover. I don't know how I have never got double yokes in an egg without it, without having, I guess you can buy them, can you? Now you can reduce, you can increase your chances these days.

**David Spiegelhalter** (1:07)
That's my joke in it. Of course, you can go and buy them in shops. Yes.

**Helen Czerski** (1:11)
You can buy your trade. Okay. So there is a lot in here. And of course, this is all particularly, it feels particularly relevant at the moment. I'm sure humans have always lived with risk and uncertainty, but I think a lot of us feel that the level of uncertainty in the world is particularly high at the moment. So this is a good time for this. So I wanted to start with something actually, which is towards the, almost right at the end of your book, which is that you have a section titled Manifesto for Uncertainty. And I just wondered why, I mean, the whole book in a way is a manifesto for uncertainty, but why do we need a manifesto for uncertainty?

**David Spiegelhalter** (1:47)
Oh, I think because there's a popular impression that people don't like uncertainty and that somehow uncertainty is a really bad thing. And it's not. Well, first of all, it's unavoidable. We can't be certain. We don't know what's going to happen. We don't know what's happened in the past. We don't know what's going on at the moment. We live in a life of uncertainty, and it's a huge part of being human. And without it, can you think of anything worse than living in a completely certain world, knowing exactly what's going to happen? It'd be like a worse prison sentence. And with audiences, I ask people, who likes uncertainty? One or two people put their hand up. I say, okay, all right, so the rest of you, you want to know what you're going to have for Christmas. You always watch the last episode of a series on Netflix first to find out what happens. You want to know the result of a football match before you watch it, if it's recording.
And then I ask, okay, if I could tell you, who would want to know when they're going to die? And that one, you usually get maybe about five, 10% of people do put their hands up, the planners, the ones who are the planners. But most people don't. So I say, sorry, you love uncertainty. We live in a world of uncertainty, it's fine.
So actually, that is a complete, I think, misunderstanding, that, you know, I suppose in the book, I kind of finish off by saying, well, you know, we should, if we can actively enjoy it, because we can't avoid it.
And actually, it's what makes life, you know, interesting and varied, and means that there's a little bit of, you know, a little free-saw of risk, perhaps, and that risk meaning some things might work out well, and they may not work out so well. And how awful it would be to be without that. So, my manifesto of uncertainty, and I do talk about how one might help to deal with it a bit. But the point is that this is very personal, people's attitudes. As I said, people vary a lot in their appetite for uncertainty. Your risk appetite is, you know, you're supposed to be assessed on that when you buy a financial product. And, you know, actually, of course, for some people, it can, there's intolerance of uncertainty scales that you can do, because if you're really intolerant of uncertainty, it becomes a clinical condition, because you can't bear not knowing everything, not having everything down to absolutely obsessively precise plan about absolutely everything. And this is debilitating to people.
Yeah, and so, you know, it can, for some people, it can be, some people relish it more than others, shall we say.