The Outside View
We're not exceptions to the rule that people are often wrong
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We think too highly of our own opinions. Of course, we think our opinions are correct; that’s just what having an opinion means. If we didn’t think our opinion was right, we’d hold a different opinion. But if we want to make accurately calibrated forecasts—so that what we’re predicting happens about as often as we say it will—we need to subject our own ideas to the same skepticism with which we’d view the ideas of others.
We should be particularly skeptical of our own ideas when we’re forecasting human events. We may be very smart, but predicting the behavior of a complex system—in which outcomes may depend on slight variations in a large number of variables—is not something even the smartest person can work out analytically. In human affairs, we often don’t have—and in practice can’t have—enough information to reliably project the current state of the world forward in time. In those cases, what’s likely to happen is often primarily an empirical question, which we can confidently answer only by seeing what has happened in comparable situations. History from this perspective is the record of past experiments in the behavior of human societies; it’s our best evidence for how future experiments are likely to turn out.
