Life is mostly random, but we don’t see it because our brains are wired to understand it as a series of logical events.
These mental shortcuts called heuristics help us make sense of a world in a way that doesn’t represent it truthfully.
Let’s take narratives as an example.
Narratives are compelling stories we tell ourselves. A narrative links a series of random actions to each other to make them appear as a logical sequence of events.
Eg: when I tell myself my own life story, I say that I studied for one year but didn’t like it, so I took a gap year. I make it sound like the gap year was a logical thing to do, while it was in fact completely random.
Part of the job of building narratives is creating “past predictions.”
Making past predictions is the action of looking at historical events to make them appear as logical outcomes leading to the situation we’re in today. Past predictions make history sound like all that happened in the past was “bound to happen”.
Eg: When we look at it today, many say that 9/11 was perfectly predictable. No, it wasn’t. It only appears predictable after it happened, due to past predictions.
So, what do we use past predictions and narratives for?
We use them as sources of information to predict the future. Since we believe that the future will resemble the past, we look at the past hoping to catch a glimpse of the future.
Unfortunately, this is another fallacy. The future is random and unpredictable.
It’s so unpredictable that the overwhelming majority of predictions we make end up being wrong. This is the first problem. The second problem is that we have a very narrow understanding of history.
History as we know it is not perfect. It’s an account of some of the events that happened in the past. It is missing all of the events that didn’t happen (in an alternative universe, the Titanic didn’t sink) as well as the events we don’t know about.
The past, as a result, is only a little more well-known than the future and the present.
The present isn’t well-known at all.
Few are aware that they’re living history when they’re actually living history. These moments are always realized ulteriorly (eg: no one knew at the beginning of WWI, that it was the beginning of WWI).
Nobody can predict the future, as we said.
People that do and that, somehow, end up being right every time (eg: “legendary investors”) are called lucky fools.