Risk vs Uncertainty: What People Confuse
Concepts Corrected & verified

Risk vs Uncertainty: What People Confuse

Published by When Notes Fly · View original ↗

Risk has known probabilities; uncertainty doesn't. With risk you can calculate odds, with uncertainty you can't even assign probabilities to outcomes.

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  1. 28 July 2026 · corrected by Emir Baycan

    Flagged one quotation's uncertain provenance: 'Uncertainty is not the absence of knowledge. It is the presence of unknowns.' is a widely circulated paraphrase of themes from Frank Knight's 1921 Risk, Uncertainty and Profit, but this exact wording could not be verified to be a direct quotation from the text. Verified accurate and left in place: Frank Knight's risk/uncertainty distinction (1921), Keynes's A Treatise on Probability (1921) and its parallel distinction, and the Good Judgment Project's documented superforecaster practices (explicit uncertainty acknowledgment, Bayesian updating, question decomposition).

    What the page claimed

    The article presented a specific quotation as a direct Frank Knight quote without noting its uncertain provenance.

    What was corrected

    Added a note that the quotation is a widely circulated paraphrase rather than a verified direct quotation from Knight's original text.

    Why: The quotation is commonly attributed to Knight online but its exact wording could not be verified traceable to his 1921 book. Correction adds the appropriate caveat rather than removing the (broadly accurate) idea it conveys.

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