Risk, Choice, and Uncertainty: Three Centuries of Economic Decision-Making (2020) and Perplexing Paradoxes: Unraveling Enigmas in the World Around Us (2024). Szpiro was on the faculty at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, and the Hebrew University in Jerusalem.
He applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Ignorance: What We Do Not Know, Cannot Know, Must Not Know, and Refuse to Know, with the following results:
If you open Ignorance on page 99 you would get a good sense of what the book is about—especially if you simultaneously look at the illustration on page 98. The case turns on a specific form of ignorance: computers rely on sequences of random numbers whose outcomes we cannot predict, even though they are generated by strict rules. It shows how such managed ignorance allows random numbers to be used to solve problems that would otherwise be intractable.Visit George G. Szpiro's website.
The underlying tension is that computers produce these numbers deterministically from preceding values. In that sense, they are only quasi-random, not truly random. For practical purposes, however, we must remain ignorant of how each number is produced; otherwise, the sequence would lose its usefulness as a stand-in for genuine randomness. The discussion harkens back to my recent book Random Numbers Unveiled: The Secrets of Numbers That You Can’t Predict but Can Rely On (Taylor & Francis, 2026). Even though the computer follows strict rules, one remains ignorant of the next number in the sequence—an ignorance that is not a defect but a feature.
My book examines ignorance across a range of disciplines in sixty short chapters, organized around four categories: what we do not know—say, in mathematics, in law, in philosophy; what we cannot know—like the length of the coast of Britain, the precise location and speed of a particle, or the nature of God; what we must not know—like the costs already sunk in a project, insider information in financial market, the secrets of Kabbalah if you’re under 40; and what one refuses to know—like whether a diamond is real or fake, or—if you are defense lawyer—whether the accused actually committed the crime so as to maintain plausible deniability. Most chapters treat such themes through more familiar and accessible examples; the computational case on page 99 is among the more technical instances.
Across these domains, ignorance emerges not merely as a lack of knowledge but as an organizing principle that structures inquiry, guides decision-making, and conditions belief. At times it is deliberately preserved to enable progress; at others, it marks the limits of cognition or the boundaries imposed by social norms. Rather than standing in opposition to knowledge, ignorance often functions as one of its necessary preconditions.
The Page 99 Test: Perplexing Paradoxes.
--Marshal Zeringue
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