Controlling Uncertainty: Decision Making and Learning in Complex Worlds [Hardcover]

This is a timely book. Its fundamental question - how do we learn to make decisions that help us control our environment? is one that is being begged in many contexts.

In both personal and professional lives, we are having to make more choices than previous generations. And we are making these choices in ever more complex and unstable environments.

Much recent thinking about our capacity to make these choices, and succesfully control our environment(s), is deeply pessimistic. Personal struggles, for control of our bodies, careers, and relationships, are regularly portrayed as causes of epidemic stress. At a larger level, from Beck's Risk Society, to John Gray's Straw Dogs, James Lovelock's The Revenge of Gaia, to a number of recent titles on global financial markets, so much seems to speak of a losing battle to stay in control.

Yet, at the same time, so much popular political and marketing communication (and strategy?) remains a blithe cheerleader to our powers of decision-making.

Certainly, reading this overview of the varied disciplines that now shed light on human decision-making, one feels that the abstract, uncompromised, `choice-making man' of existentialism and right-wing ideology has long outstayed his welcome.

Yet, this is a fundamentally constructive work, more focussed on describing our powers than deriding our limitations. Osman describes how - in which conditions, and through which fundamental mechanisms - an individual can come to exert a high degree of control of a complex, even shifting, environment.
However, she observes, across a wide range of disciplines, that the learning/control process relies upon mechanisms that are essentially geared towards controlling uncertainty.
Reducing uncertainty seems a far more modest, as a fundamental-thing-we-do, than the self-realising, world-shaping activities we more often imagine ourselves to be about. But controlling uncertainty comes first, and all else depends on it.

Looking backwards, Osman is convincing in demonstrating that controlling uncertainty has been a foundational theme, in different guises, across multiple domains for a great many years. In the chapters on cybernetics, AI and control systems engineering, we see how controlling uncertainty remains central in attempts to create artificial control systems, and - fascinatingly - how development of these systems now speaks back to current understandings of human decision-making.

Here we get a lively sense of work in progress across a wide range of disciplines and of great potential for interdisciplinary advance. Osman presents an ambitious synthesis, but one that frames an essentially pragmatic, inclusive approach, that aims to forge connections and build understanding, rather than polemicise.
For a specialist in any of the fields covered, this book delivers an inter-disciplinary perspective from which it will be impossible to retreat. It is a work that may have the potential to transform disciplinary boundaries altogether.

Lastly, for the general reader, it also adds to broader social and political discourses about choice and self-determination. `To what extent are we capable of rational decision-making?' is not the central question here: Osman discusses what a problematic, nuanced issue that is, and makes it essentially secondary to `how do we actually make decisions?'.
This is a pragmatic book that shows us that maximising individuals' control of their lives requires far more than just maximising the choices available to them. To make choice meaningful, effective in reaching goals, an ongoing investment - in controlling uncertainty - is also, always, needed.
There is much here that should inspire policy-makers, marketers and market regulators, too.