Even more snippets.................................

 The innovative success of a market economy does not result from individuals or firms trying to 'optimize' but from their attempts by trial and error to navigate a world of radical uncertainty.  In practice, successful people work out how to cope with and manage uncertainly, not how to optimize.

It makes sense to live our lives under the assumption that physical laws hold and do not change, but it does not make sense to live our lives under the assumption that the world of human affairs is stationary.

In a world characterised by radical uncertainty, there are many things we don't know, even with hindsight.  And others we know only with hindsight.  But since we are reluctant to acknowledge the role that radical uncertainty—and luck—play in human affairs, we apply hindsight anyway.

Good decisions often work out badly, and bad decisions sometimes work out well.

Different people will make different judgments faced with the same information because, given radical uncertainty, many different interpretations of the same data are possible.

Human intelligence is collective intelligence, and that is the source of the extraordinary human economic achievement.

The abject failure of models in the global financial crisis has not dented their popularity among regulators.

Certainty is unattainable and the price of near certainly unaffordable.

-John Kay and Mervyn King,  Radical Uncertainty:  Decision-Making Beyond The Number