Future Blindness
Taleb calls the failure to imagine how a future observer might judge today’s confident beliefs future blindness. He connects it to a failure to learn from earlier predictions: we remember what happened more readily than how uncertain it once looked.
THE IDEA
THE PAST’S PAST, AND THE PAST’S FUTURE
Some truths only hit children—adults and nonphilosophers get sucked into the minutiae of practical life and need to worry about “serious matters,” so they abandon these insights for seemingly more relevant questions. One of these truths concerns the larger difference in texture and quality between the past and the future. Thanks to my studying this distinction all my life, I understand it better than I did during my childhood, but I no longer envision it as vividly.
The only way you can imagine a future “similar” to the past is by assuming that it will be an exact projection of it, hence predictable. Just as you know with some precision when you were born, you would then know with equal precision when you will die. The notion of future mixed with chance, not a deterministic extension of your perception of the past, is a mental operation that our mind cannot perform. Chance is too fuzzy for us to be a category by itself. There is an asymmetry between past and future, and it is too subtle for us to understand naturally.
The first consequence of this asymmetry is that, in people’s minds, the relationship between the past and the future does not learn from the relationship between the past and the past previous to it. There is a blind spot: when we think of tomorrow we do not frame it in terms of what we thought about yesterday on the day before yesterday. Because of this introspective defect we fail to learn about the difference between our past predictions and the subsequent outcomes. When we think of tomorrow, we just project it as another yesterday.
This small blind spot has other manifestations. Go to the primate section of the Bronx Zoo where you can see our close relatives in the happy primate family leading their own busy social lives. You can also see masses of tourists laughing at the caricature of humans that the lower primates represent. Now imagine being a member of a higher-level species (say a “real” philosopher, a truly wise person), far more sophisticated than the human primates. You would certainly laugh at the people laughing at the nonhuman primates. Clearly, to those people amused by the apes, the idea of a being who would look down on them the way they look down on the apes cannot immediately come to their minds—if it did, it would elicit self-pity. They would stop laughing.
Accordingly, an element in the mechanics of how the human mind learns from the past makes us believe in definitive solutions—yet not consider that those who preceded us thought that they too had definitive solutions. We laugh at others and we don’t realize that someone will be just as justified in laughing at us on some not too remote day. Such a realization would entail the recursive, or second-order, thinking that I mentioned in the Prologue; we are not good at it.
Taleb illustrates recursive perspective-taking with the sentence “he knows that I don’t know that I know,” then connects difficulty with that operation to autism. His further generalizations about “intelligence,” autism, and an inability to understand uncertainty are not substantiated in this excerpt. They should not be treated as a clinical description of autistic people.
Taleb compares this failure of recursive thinking with what he calls “mind blindness,” then proposes the label “future blindness.” The point of his future-observer exercise does not depend on establishing that clinical analogy.
When to use it
When making long-term strategic plans in business or policy, explicitly ask: 'What might a future observer criticize about our current assumptions?'
In scientific research, consider that current paradigms may be overturned; avoid overly confident predictions about the longevity of your field's theories.
When evaluating any 'definitive' solution, mentally step into the shoes of a future historian and imagine what they would note as obvious blind spots.
FROM THEORY TO EVERYDAY LIFE
In practice
Tourists at the Bronx Zoo
Visitors laugh at the apes, not realizing that a higher-intelligence species would laugh at them in the same way. They fail to apply recursive thinking to imagine a future or higher perspective looking back at their own views.
Predicting Technological Progress
A planner revisits predictions from the 1950s about life in 2000, including visions of flying cars and jetpacks. The exercise is to ask which assumptions once seemed secure and which comparable assumptions shape the planner’s own forecasts.
A MOMENT TO REFLECT
Put it to work.
Think of a strong belief you hold today about the future (e.g., politics, technology, science). How might someone 50 years from now view that belief as naive? Why is it difficult to imagine that perspective?
Recall a past prediction you made that turned out wrong. What assumptions did you unconsciously project from the past? How could you apply that lesson to your current predictions?
If you were a future observer looking back at today's society, what current 'definitive solutions' would you consider laughable? Why does our mind resist this exercise?
CONTINUE THE CONVERSATION
Source texts
- The Black Swan The Impact of the Highly Improbable With a new section On Robustness and Fragility (Nassim Nicholas Taleb)