People invent stories and use them to predict the future.
People make very few predictions — and offer endless explanations.
People live, like it or not, in uncertainty.
People believe that if they try hard, they can know the future.
People accept any explanation that fits the facts.
The signs of disaster are written plain on the wall. It's only the ink that's invisible. (p. 221)
In the last Economy Note I talked about Amos Tversky, the man who opened up the field of "behavioral economics."
There are notes he jotted down while talking with his collaborator Daniel Kahneman, who went on to win the Nobel Prize in Economics — notes meant for a future paper.
A part of those notes struck me, and that's what I shared above.
"People make very few predictions — and offer endless explanations."
Yes. We tend to always offer up explanations that we don't really need to, while doing only a tiny amount of the predicting that actually matters.
There are other lines in the notes too.
"People often struggle to get information they already have, and avoid new knowledge.
Humans are deterministic devices tossed into a probabilistic universe.
In that combination, there's room for the surprising to happen.
Everything that has already happened was clearly inevitable."
Of these, this line stays with me.
"People often struggle to get information they already have, and avoid new knowledge.
I have to nod along to that too.
"People make very few predictions — and offer endless explanations."
"People often struggle to get information they already have, and avoid new knowledge.
Aren't I doing the same? It might be a good moment to take a look.
