TKT4859

Decisions under Uncertainty

How should we decide when we do not know? An interdisciplinary village on uncertainty, belief, risk and rational choice — in science, society and everyday life.

Introduction

A doctor reads a screening result and must decide whether to alarm a healthy-looking patient. A jury weighs conflicting evidence. A city plans for a climate it cannot predict. A believer wonders whether faith is a safe bet; a card player weighs the next hand; all of us, a career, a treatment, a move. Deciding without knowing is the human condition — and almost every discipline has developed its own way of dealing with it, usually without talking to the others. In this village, student teams pick a decision problem that intrigues them, take it apart, and investigate how it is decided - and how it could be decided better.

Relevant competency

Uncertainty has no owner discipline, and this village has no admission ticket. Students of philosophy, logic and religious studies can question what “rational” and “probable” even mean; mathematicians and statisticians know the formal machinery; psychologists know how people actually judge and choose; economists know how markets price risk; students of engineering, physics and the natural sciences know how uncertainty is tamed or not in models of the world; and students from health sciences, law, social sciences, architecture, communication and the arts bring the settings in which real decisions are made, argued and defended. Whatever your background: you decide under uncertainty every day, and your field has something to say about it.

About the village

The village has a simple starting point: uncertainty is not chaos, it can be reasoned about. How strongly should we believe something, and how should new evidence change our minds? When is a risk worth taking, and when is it worth paying, or waiting, for more information? And what changes when we do not just observe the world, but act in it? In the first village days, the teams explore such questions through games and puzzles of chance and choice, and build a small shared toolbox for taking decisions apart. Each team then defines its own project within the theme. Possible problem settings as teasers, not as a menu, could be:

• The test paradox: why a positive test for a rare disease usually means you are healthy — and what that implies for screening programmes
• The jury’s dilemma: how should evidence be weighed, and when is “beyond reasonable doubt” reached?
• Betting on God: is faith a good bet? How religions and philosophies deal with deciding in the face of the unknown
• The gambler and the actuary: why the same mathematics produces ruin at the casino and security in insurance
• How safe is safe enough? How society decides about vaccines, bridges and self-driving cars
• Why we fear flying but not staircases: perception, aversion and the framing of risk
• Deciding for the climate: what does rational choice mean when the future is deeply uncertain?
• Correlation is not causation: when may a machine or a scientist claim that one thing causes another, and act on it?
• Your life as a decision problem: career, partner, apartment can decision theory help, and should it?
• Two disciplines, one decision: how differently would, say, a philosopher and an engineer treat the same problem?

No prior knowledge of any of this is required curiosity about how we decide is the only prerequisite. The village leader’s own background is structural engineering, where such questions are asked about the safety of bridges and buildings; in this village, that is one example among many, and the applications go wherever the teams take them.

External partners

No external partners have officially joined this village yet. Organisations that make high-stakes decisions under uncertainty every day hospitals, insurers, public authorities, infrastructure owners will be contacted. They will contribute by presenting decision problems from their own practice, offering each group a source of inspiration for identifying the work to do.

More about Experts in Teamwork

In the document Formal Framework, you can read more about the course, including the general course description for EiT, which covers learning outcomes, learning methods and activities, as well as more information about assessment and compulsory activities.

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