topic: [[Thinking]] people: #people/naseemtaleb created: 2023-10-12 *"the pathology of thinking that the world in which we live is more understandable, more explainable, and therefore more predictable than it actually is."* p. 9 This reminds me of [[the illusion of continuity]] and the ways our brain is fooled into thinking it knows what the heck is going on. These are both ways of [[dealing with complexity]]. It's kind of like [[cognitive biases]], and our bias is to consider the world explicable, because without that bias we struggle to deal with the true randomness of the world. The illusion of understanding is the lie we tell ourselves that since we can find explanations for the past when looking backwards (which are of course oversimplifications in themselves), we can explain and predict the future. If we step back and make sure we are [[Thinking in Systems]], we can design our systems to help us, to an extent, live with [[Antifragility]]. If we think we can predict, we risk ourselves unnecessarily by believing we understand the world. When we believe we have [[situational awareness]] of the world, we believe we can predict. ##### What would the opposite argument be? We live with incredible [[Blind Spot]]s, we are victims of [[Naive Realism]], that we have a special view of the world. We do, but it is mostly limited to a tiny stripe. We need to face our [[ways of knowing]] with [[epistemic humility]], be humble to how we came about thinking we know. tags: #note/idea | #on/understanding | #on/bias | #on/humility | #on/thinking ##### Sources: [[The Black Swan]]