It was one of those NPR car moments when there was something super interesting on but I just got to the grocery store and the Mississippi sun keeps you from hanging out in the car to listen. It was an old episode of Radio Lab with an interview with Annie Duke—Dealing with doubt. The doubt in this context is uncertainty. If you don’t know who Annie Duke is, she was a very good professional poker player retiring in 2012 to focus on strategic decision making https://www.annieduke.com/. Her book Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don’t Have All the Facts is a great read and some very interesting parallels to natural resource management can be draws because we rarely have the luxury of certainty and management actions are at time a bet that the action will achieve the desired outcome.

The 19 minute interview can be found below. At about 3 minutes in Annie was asked

“What do you do in the case when there aren’t any signals to read the only thing you really know is nothing?”

“Well actually what you sort of figure out is that you don’t need to know The real breakthrough moment for me was when I stopped trying to figure out anything with certainty”

The question gets at what many natural resources managers are trained as scientists which comes with the objective to know things with certainty. In contrast a manager often does not have the luxury of knowing the potential outcome of a management action with certainty but must make a decision anyways. That is where making smart decisions is important and realizing you can’t science the shit out of something but you must make a decision.

Worth a listen in my opinion to think about uncertainty and decision making.