May Contain Lies: How Stories, Statistics, and Studies Exploit Our Biases—And What We Can Do about It

Three conditions must be in place: diversity, aggregation, and incentives. Each condition clicks into the equation. Diversity reduces the collective error. Aggregation assures that the market considers everyone’s information. Incentives help reduce individual errors by encouraging people to participate only when they think they have an insight.

For the knowable unknowns, the best strategy is to widen and diversify the team of advisors or stakeholders, to track down your General Greene and get a more accurate map of the terrain, or build a scale model of the compound based on satellite imaging. But it’s also crucial to keep track of the stubborn blind spots—the places where uncertainty can

driven. Rarely do we sift through all the available information to ensure we know every fact. And we don’t need to. It is all about degrees of certainty. “I can make a decision with 30 percent of the information,” said former secretary of state Colin Powell. “Anything more than 80 percent is too much.” There is always a level at which we trust ours