Sublime

But as knowledge grows, the role of the professional comes under questioning. Developments in technology give professionals the power to produce larger and broader effects at the same time that they become more clearly aware of the remote consequences of their prescriptions.

Assess the reliability of your prediction and fine-tune. How good we are at making decisions depends a great deal on what we are trying to predict.

On aurait pu croire que par la complexité de la géopolitique et de l’économie, il faudrait constituer un groupe d’hyper spécialistes pour prédire certains événements dans ces domaines, chacun apportant à l’équipe une connaissance ésotérique. Mais c’était en réalité le contraire. Comme avec les créateurs de comics et les inventeurs qui déposent des

I knew of Rumsfeld’s interest in Pearl Harbor. He greeted me with a photocopy of the foreword to a remarkable book, Roberta Wohlstetter’s 1962 Pearl Harbor: Warning and Decision, which outlined the myriad reasons why the Japanese attack had been such a surprise to our military and intelligence officers. Worse than being unprepared, we had mistaken

Simply put, it takes a really smart person to be maximally destructive, because otherwise nobody else will listen to him.

In this book, I’ll discuss the danger of “unknown unknowns”—the risks that we are not even aware of. Perhaps the only greater threat is the risks we think we have a handle on, but don’t.* In these cases we not only fool ourselves, but our false confidence may be contagious.

Economists aren’t unique in this regard. Results like these are the rule; experts either aren’t very good at providing an honest description of the uncertainty in their forecasts, or they aren’t very interested in doing so. This property of overconfident predictions has been identified in many other fields, including medical research, political sci