people, those who try to suspend judgment. Now contemplate epistemic
humility. Think of someone heavily introspective, tortured by the awareness
of his own ignorance. He lacks the courage of the idiot, yet has the
rare guts to say "I don't know." He does not mind looking like a fool or,
worse, an ignoramus. He hesitates, he will not commit, and he agonizes
over the consequences of being wrong. He introspects, introspects, and introspects
until he reaches physical and nervous exhaustion.
This does not necessarily mean that he lacks confidence, only that he
holds his own knowledge to be suspect. I will call such a person an epistemocrat;
the province where the laws are structured with this kind of
human fallibility in mind I will call an epistemocracy.
The major modern epistemocrat is Montaigne.
EPISTEMOCRACY, A DREAM 1 91
Monsieur de Montaigne, Epistemocrat
At the age of thirty-eight, Michel Eyquem de Montaigne retired to his estate,
in the countryside of southwestern France. Montaigne, which means
mountain in Old French, was the name of the estate. The area is known
today for the Bordeaux wines, but in Montaigne's time not many people
invested their mental energy and sophistication in wine. Montaigne had
stoic tendencies and would not have been strongly drawn to such pursuits
anyway. His idea was to write a modest collection of "attempts," that is,
essays. The very word essay conveys the tentative, the speculative, and the
nondefinitive. Montaigne was well grounded in the classics and wanted to
meditate on life, death, education, knowledge, and some not uninteresting
biological aspects of human nature (he wondered, for example, whether
cripples had more vigorous libidos owing to the richer circulation of
blood in their sexual organs).
The tower that became his study was inscribed with Greek and Latin
sayings, almost all referring to the vulnerability of human knowledge. Its
windows offered a wide vista of the surrounding hills.
Montaigne's subject, officially, was himself, but this was mostly as a
means to facilitate the discussion; he was not like those corporate executives
who write biographies to make a boastful display of their honors and
accomplishments. He was mainly interested in discovering things about
himself, making us discover things about himself, and presenting matters
that could be generalized—generalized to the entire human race. Among
the inscriptions in his study was a remark by the Latin poet Terence:
Homo sum, humani a me nil alienum puto—I am a man, and nothing
human is foreign to me.
Montaigne is quite refreshing to read after the strains of a modern education
since he fully accepted human weaknesses and understood that no
philosophy could be effective unless it took into account our deeply ingrained
imperfections, the limitations of our rationality, the flaws that
make us human. It is not that he was ahead of his time; it would be better
said that later scholars (advocating rationality) were backward.
He was a thinking, ruminating fellow, and his ideas did not spring up
in his tranquil study, but while on horseback. He went on long rides and
came back with ideas. Montaigne was neither one of the academics of the
Sorbonne nor a professional man of letters, and he was not these things on
two. planes. First, he was a doer; he had been a magistrate, a businessman,
1 9 2 WE J U S T C A N ' T P R E D I CT
and the mayor of Bordeaux before he retired to mull over his life and,
mostly, his own knowledge. Second, he was an antidogmatist: he was
a skeptic with charm, a fallible, noncommittal, personal, introspective
writer, and, primarily, someone who, in the great classical tradition,
wanted to be a man. Had he been in a different period, he would have
been an empirical skeptic—he had skeptical tendencies of the Pyrrhonian
variety, the antidogmatic kind like Sextus Empiricus, particularly in his
awareness of the need to suspend judgment.
Epistemocracy
Everyone has an idea of Utopia. For many it means equality, universal justice,
freedom from oppression, freedom from work (for some it may be the
more modest, though no more attainable, society with commuter trains
free of lawyers on cell phones). To me Utopia is an epistemocracy, a society
in which anyone of rank is an epistemocrat, and where epistemocrats
manage to be elected. It would be a society governed from the basis of the
awareness of ignorance, not knowledge.
Alas, one cannot assert authority by accepting one's own fallibility.
Simply, people need to be blinded by knowledge—we are made to follow
leaders who can gather people together because the advantages of being in
groups trump the disadvantages of being alone. It has been more profitable
for us to bind together in the wrong direction than to be alone in the
right one. Those who have followed the assertive idiot rather than the introspective
wise person have passed us some of their genes. This is apparent
from a social pathology: psychopaths rally followers.
Oncejn a while you encounter members of the human species with so
much intellectual superiority that they can change their minds effortlessly.
Note here the following Black Swan asymmetry. I believe that you
can be dead certain about some things, and ought to be so. You can be
more confident about disconfirmation than confirmation. Karl Popper
was accused of promoting self-doubt while writing in an aggressive
and confident tone (an accusation that is occasionally addressed to this author
by people who don't follow my logic of skeptical empiricism). Fortunately,
we have learned a lot since Montaigne about how to carry on the
skeptical-empirical enterprise. The Black Swan asymmetry allows you to
be confident about what is wrong, not about what you believe is right.
Karl Popper was once asked whether one "could falsify falsification" (in
other words, if one could be skeptical about skepticism). His answer was
E P I S T E M O C R A C Y , A D R E A M 193
that he threw students out of his lectures for asking far more intelligent
questions than that one. Quite tough, Sir Karl was.
THE PAST'S PAST, AND THE PAST'S FUTURE
Some truths only hit children—adults and nonphilosophers get sucked
into the minutiae of practical life and need to worry about "serious matters,"
so they abandon these insights for seemingly more relevant questions.
One of these truths concerns the larger difference in texture and
quality between the past and the future. Thanks to my studying this distinction
all my life, I understand it better than I did during my childhood,
but I no longer envision it as vividly.
The only way you can imagine a future "similar" to the past is by assuming
that it will be an exact projection of it, hence predictable. Just as
you know with some precision when you were born, you would then
know with equal precision when you will die. The notion of future mixed
with chance, not a deterministic extension of your perception of the past,
is a mental operation that our mind cannot perform. Chance is too fuzzy
for us to be a category by itself. There is an asymmetry between past and
future, and it is too subtle for us to understand naturally.
The first consequence of this asymmetry is that, in people's minds, the
relationship between the past and the future does not learn from the relationship
between the past and the past previous to it. There is a blind spot:
when we think of tomorrow we do not frame it in terms of what we
thought about yesterday or the day before yesterday. Because of this introspective
defect we fail to learn about the difference between our past predictions
and the subsequent outcomes. When we think of tomorrow, we
just project it as another yesterday.
This small blind spot has other manifestations. Go to the primate section
of the Bronx Zoo where you can see our close relatives in the happy
primate family leading their own busy social lives. You can also see masses
of tourists laughing at the caricature of humans that the lower primates
represent. Now imagine being a member of a higher-level species (say a
"real" philosopher, a truly wise person), far more sophisticated than the
human primates. You would certainly laugh at the people laughing at the
nonhuman primates. Clearly, to those people amused by the apes, the idea
of a being who would look down on them the way they look down on the
apes cannot immediately come to their minds—if it did, it would elicit selfpity.
They would stop laughing.
1 9 4 WE J U S T C A N ' T P R E D I CT
Accordingly, an element in the mechanics of how the human mind
learns from the past makes us believe in definitive solutions—yet not consider
that those who preceded us thought that they too had definitive solutions.
We laugh at others and we don't realize that someone will be just
as justified in laughing at us on some not too remote day. Such a realization
would entail the recursive, or second-order, thinking that I mentioned
in the Prologue; we are not good at it.
This mental block about the future has not yet been investigated and
labeled by psychologists, but it appears to resemble autism. Some autistic
subjects can possess high levels of mathematical or technical intelligence.
Their social skills are defective, but that is not the root of their problem.
Autistic people cannot put themselves in the shoes of others, cannot view
the world from their standpoint. They see others as inanimate objects, like
machines, moved by explicit rules. They cannot perform such simple mental
operations as "he knows that I don't know that I know," and it is this
inability that impedes their social skills. (Interestingly, autistic subjects, regardless
of their "intelligence," also exhibit an inability to comprehend
uncertainty.)
Just as autism is called "mind blindness," this inability to think dynamically,
to position oneself with respect to a future observer, we should
call "future blindness."
Prediction, Misprediction, and Happiness
I searched the literature of cognitive science for any research on "future
blindness" and found nothing. But in the literature on happiness I did find
an examination of our chronic errors in prediction that will make us
happy.
This prediction error works as follows. You are about to buy a new
car. It is going to change your life, elevate your status, and make your
commute a vacation. It is so quiet that you can hardly tell if the engine is
on, so you can listen to Rachmaninoff's nocturnes on the highway. This
new car will bring you to a permanently elevated plateau of contentment.
People will think, Hey, he has a great car, every time they see you. Yet you
forget that the last time you bought a car, you also had the same expectations.
You do not anticipate that the effect of the new car will eventually
wane and that you will revert to the initial condition, as you did last time.
A few weeks after you drive your new car out of the showroom, it will
EPISTEMOCRACY, A DREAM 1 9 5
become dull. If you had expected this, you probably would not have
bought it.
You are about to commit a prediction error that you have already
made. Yet it would cost so little to introspect!
Psychologists have studied this kind of misprediction with respect to
both pleasant and unpleasant events. We overestimate the effects of both
kinds of future events on our lives. We seem to be in a psychological
predicament that makes us do so. This predicament is called "anticipated
utility" by Danny Kahneman and "affective forecasting" by Dan Gilbert.
The point is not so much that we tend to mispredict our future happiness,
but rather that we do not learn recursively from past experiences. We have
evidence of a mental block and distortions in the way we fail to learn from
our past errors in projecting the future of our affective states.
We grossly overestimate the length of the effect of misfortune on our
lives. You think that the loss of your fortune or current position will be
devastating, but you are probably wrong. More likely, you will adapt to
anything, as you probably did after past misfortunes. You may feel a sting,
but it will not be as bad as you expect. This kind of misprediction may
have a purpose: to motivate us to perform important acts (like buying new
cars or getting rich) and to prevent us from taking certain unnecessary
risks. And it is part of a more general problem: we humans are supposed
to fool ourselves a little bit here and there. According to Trivers's theory
of self-deception, this is supposed to orient us favorably toward the future.
But self-deception is not a desirable feature outside of its natural domain.
It prevents us from taking some unnecessary risks—but we saw in Chapter
6 how it does not as readily cover a spate of modern risks that we do
not fear because they are not vivid, such as investment risks, environmental
dangers, or long-term security.
Helenus and the Reverse Prophecies
If you are in the business of being a seer, describing the future to other lessprivileged
mortals, you are judged on the merits of your predictions.
Helenus, in The Iliad, was a different kind of seer. The son of Priam
and Hecuba, he was the cleverest man in the Trojan army. It was he who,
under torture, told the Achaeans how they would capture Troy (apparently
he didn't predict that he himself would be captured). But this is not
what distinguished him. Helenus, unlike other seers, was able to predict
1 9 6 WE J U S T C A N ' T P R E D I CT
the past with great precision—without having been given any details of it.
He predicted backward.
Our problem is not just that we do not know the future, we do not
know much of the past either. We badly need someone like Helenus if we
are to know history. Let us see how.
The Melting Ice Cube
Consider the following thought experiment borrowed from my friends
Aaron Brown and Paul Wilmott:
Operation 1 (the melting ice cube): Imagine an ice cube and consider
how it may melt over the next two hours while you play a few rounds of
