Uncharted

Plummer is making a provocative and important point: that what matters most isn’t the predictions themselves but how we respond to them, and whether we respond to them at all.

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.

In reality, without inside information, it is impossible to beat the market consistently.13 This is one reason why the market is increasingly dominated by passive investment funds that promise only to match market indexes, not beat them.

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.

Approach the future with fervent curiosity, not with an ideology or itinerary but with a methodology that progresses with questions: what do we need to do now? What do we need to be now? What must we preserve at all cost?

The German philosopher Karl Popper described a parallel process in human history. He argued that the fundamental driver of all human progress is the growth of knowledge. We obviously can’t predict what we don’t know yet, and we can’t know how, in what directions, or at what speed, human knowledge will develop. And therefore, Popper concludes, histo

Most people become significantly more agreeable, conscientious and emotionally stable as they age.

In 2007, Maguire and her colleagues reported that five people with amnesia caused by damage to the hippocampus were less able to imagine future events. Memory, they found, serves many functions – and one of them is to allow us to simulate the future.

The great advantage of experiments is that they stop you being stuck; they’re one way to prototype a future we think we want. You could say that experiments are how we learn everything. We try to stand up, fall over, recalibrate and next time find we can teeter for a second or two. Keep at it and mastery emerges. Misbehave and feedback provides evi