"[Arrow's] experience as an Air Force weather forecaster during the Second World War "added the news that the natural world was also unpredictable." ... One incident that occurred while Arrow was forecasting the weather illustrates both uncertainty and the human unwillingness to accept it. Some officers had been assigned the task of forecasting the weather a month ahead, but Arrow and his statisticians found that their long-range forecasts were no better than numbers pulled out of a hat. The forecasters agreed and asked their superiors to be relieved of this duty. The reply was: "The Commanding General is well aware that the forecasts are no good. However, he needs them for planning purposes.""
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Academics from the United StatesPeople from New York CityMathematicians from the United StatesEconomists from the United StatesNobel laureates in Economics
Original Language: English
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Peter L. Bernstein, Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk, Chapter 12, "The Measure of Our Ignorance".
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Kenneth_Arrow
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Kenneth Arrow
Kenneth Joseph Arrow (August 23, 1921 – February 21, 2017) was an American economist, who was Professor Emeritus of Economics in Stanford, and joint winner of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics with John Hicks in 1972.
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