Adventures in Uncertainty

2026-10-07T16:14:34+00:00

This blog is now titled Adventures in Uncertainty for at least two reasons. The first is that I inted to blog about adventures in the most general sense. I love to rock climb and backpack in the mountains. I’ve written a few reports of my past climbing and camping trips and hope to share more of those here. But adventure–as a term–is broad; sometimes I find myself on an intellectual adventure to a greater understanding. I will read parts of academic papers or textbooks to try ascertaining a concept with subject-matter literacy. These are adventures, too, that ought not be overlooked.

The second reason for so titling this blog is that I obsess about uncertainty. In my professional life, I would say statistical uncertainty is the principal concern. Statistics as a discipline is about measuring things and quantifying uncertainty.¹ But also in my recreational life, uncertainty looms large. When I find myself in the excitement of a multipitch rock climb, for example, much of my cognitive energy is steered towards acknowledging and accepting uncertainty. “Does our intended route lead us straight up that crack system, or are we meant to travserse along a ledge to an alternate weakness?” … is often the type of reasoning I engage in, while climbing.

“Statistics is both the science of uncertainty and the technology of extracting information from data.” From Wikipedia: Hand, David (2010). Statistics: An Overview. In Lovric, Miodrag (ed.). International Encyclopedia of Statistical Science. Springer. pp. 1504–1509. ↩

Pompon.io

Adventures in Uncertainty