In many walks of life, expressions of uncertainty are mistaken for admissions of weakness. When you first start to make these probability estimates, they may be quite poor. But there are two pieces of favorable news. First, these estimates are just a starting point: Bayes’s theorem will have you revise and improve them as you encounter new

The human brain is quite remarkable; it can store perhaps three terabytes of information.41 And yet that is only about one one-millionth of the information that IBM says is now produced in the world each day. So we have to be terribly selective about the information we choose to remember.

Much of the most thoughtful work on the use and abuse of statistical models and the proper role of prediction comes from people in the medical profession.88 That is not to say there is nothing on the line when an economist makes a prediction, or a seismologist does. But because of medicine’s intimate connection with life and death, doctors tend to

Denmark consumes no more energy today than it did in the late 1960s,28 in part because it is environmentally friendly and in part because of its low population growth. (By contrast, the United States’ energy consumption has roughly doubled over the same period.29)

However, these pricing patterns would not have been very easy to profit from unless you were very patient. They’ve become meaningful only in the long term, telling you almost nothing about what the market will be worth one month or one year later.

In fact, the actual value for GDP fell outside the economists’ prediction interval six times in eighteen years, or fully one-third of the time. Another study,18 which ran these numbers back to the beginnings of the Survey of Professional Forecasters in 1968, found even worse results: the actual figure for GDP fell outside the prediction interval

Staring at the ocean and waiting for a flash of insight is how ideas are generated in the movies. In the real world, they rarely come when you are standing in place.13 Nor do the “big” ideas necessarily start out that way. It’s more often with small, incremental, and sometimes even accidental steps that we make progress.

Alvin Toffler, writing in the book Future Shock in 1970, predicted some of the consequences of what he called “information overload.” He thought our defense mechanism would be to simplify the world in ways that confirmed our biases, even as the world itself was growing more diverse and more complex.42

one of the most important feedbacks is between what he calls