Uncharted

But the time horizon for accurate forecasts is dauntingly small: the Good Judgment Project found that, while many forecasters were accurate within only about 150 days, its own super-forecasters weren’t confident beyond 400 days.

But it didn’t explain the foundational belief at CERN: that great, valuable discoveries derive not from planning but from adhering to a total commitment to the pursuit of new knowledge.

We don’t retrieve a memory, we don’t replay the event; we reconstruct it on the fly, assembling a new picture, a fresh sensation each time. It’s unhelpful to think of these as flaws or bugs, because the very fact that memory comes to us freshly assembled is why we can use it to come up with new ideas. These additions, subtractions and rearrangement

This mind wandering is without intention or plan. But, consciously or unconsciously, artists are incapable of not doing it. It is why Dickens prowled city streets at night, Ibsen took long daily walks and Virginia Woolf set out across London. They all sought to absorb the minute details that others might ignore or overlook but that artists collect.

We could and should treat predictions as hypotheses and ask better questions of ourselves: if there is vested interest, where does it lie? What’s at stake? What am I being sold? Is this propaganda, bad science, careerism or entertainment? Does the hypothesis emanate from individuals working alone or from a team? What’s their track record? How far o

Like so many, he recognised that the best he could hope for was better, not best, never perfect.

While we can never render complexity simple, we could embrace it as an adventure, calling us to investigate the infinite permutations of life that it contains. Surrendering agency, action and adventure for convenience is a miserable bargain. In an uncharted world, who is content to be left hugging the shore when we could use our freedom to explore?

What they found was not that one generation was universally more contented than the rest, but that each individual became happier over time. So those who started adulthood grumpy became less so, those that were cheerful to begin with got even more so.

What keeps them on course is a shared, passionate commitment to guiding principles that demand that the best be allowed to emerge and be improved, by anyone, from anywhere. Starting with principles, they regard outcomes only as landmarks showing where they are. They map the future not by trying to pre-empt or co-opt it, but by believing in it, bein

Nothing about this trajectory yields a coherent narrative. Jo was finding her way through life, little by little, experimenting with what suited her, and attracted employers. Every step she took revealed more of who she was and what she wanted from life. There was no map; she just explored.