Not-Knowing — Vaughn Tan
Series homepage for a multi-year essay project on not-knowing — a diagnostic framework distinguishing four types of uncertainty that are not reducible to formal risk. Tan argues major institutions fail at navigating uncertainty not from lack of resources or competence, but from a failure of mindset and tools: risk registers, scenario matrices, and expected-value calculations were designed for situations where all possible actions, outcomes, and probabilities are knowable in advance. True uncertainty is inherently unquantifiable, and applying risk tools to it produces false confidence followed by catastrophic failure.
The Four Types of Not-Knowing (Non-Risk)
- Not-knowing about possible actions — actions are enchained, partly invisible, and poorly understood
- Not-knowing about possible outcomes — full consequences reveal themselves only over time
- Not-knowing about causation — whether a given action produces a given outcome
- Not-knowing about value — what outcomes are actually worth
Each type has different sources and requires different responses. Misdiagnosis produces worse results than having no framework at all.
Series Structure
- Pre-readings: "True uncertainty ≠ formal risk" (7 Apr 2025), "Why (and how) I think about not-knowing" (4 Mar 2023)
- Part 1 — Motivation: Innovation requires not-knowing; not-knowing enables curiosity, freedom, effectiveness, and contentment; generative vs. bad uncertainty
- Part 2 — Clearing the Ground: Why not-knowing feels hard (evolved fear + social shame); how "risk" language triggers quantitative tools that only work for formal risk cases that "almost never exist outside a casino"; the formal risk mindset is dangerous because "it feels right"
- Part 3 — Laying the Foundations: Deep dives into each of the four types, plus "the fog of time" (five mechanisms by which time changes not-knowing) and "the fountain" (how the four types trigger each other unpredictably)
- Part 4 — Building a Toolkit: Diagnostic tools, action tools, capacity-building tools, update tools. Four approaches matched to specific not-knowing types: portfolios of experiments, stacking the deck, negotiation/goal superordination
Key Quotes
- "Applying the wrong framework produces worse decisions than having no framework at all"
- Formal risk "almost never exists outside a casino"
- The risk mindset "prevent[s] you from seeing non-risk unknowns at all"
- On innovation: "The only thing definitionally true of all innovation... is that it requires not-knowing"
- The formal risk mindset is dangerous because "it feels right"
- "The real skill is accurate diagnosis of what type of not-knowing you face before reaching for any tool at all"
Related
- Tan is co-founder of poietic (wg task coordination system)
- Author of The Uncertainty Mindset
- IDK tool at productivediscomfort.org