The environment— social, commercial, natural— in which we operate changes over time and as we interact with it. Our knowledge of that complex environment is necessarily piecemeal and imperfect. And so objectives are generally best accomplished obliquely rather than directly.

We deal with complex systems whose structure we can understand only imperfectly. The problems we face are rarely completely specified, and the environment in which we tackle them contains irresolvable uncertainties.

Numerous studies show that we process negative and positive information differently. You might say we’re saddled with a “negativity bias.” We take in “bad” information, including small mistakes and failures, more readily than “good” information. We have more trouble letting go of bad compared to good thoughts. We remember the negative things that happen to us more vividly and for longer than we do the positive ones. We pay more attention to negative than positive feedback. People interpret negative facial expressions more quickly than positive ones. Bad, simply put, is stronger than good. This is not to say we agree with or value it more but rather that we notice it more.

What this means is that when you have to think about connections between parts, rather than just counting the individual parts of a system, the number of possibilities grows very rapidly; the potential combinations multiply, rather than just adding up. Very quickly, they multiply up to astronomically huge numbers, spelling absolute death to any hope of knowing the entire state of the system.

In fact, knowing only a few of the feedback circuits can be actively misleading, if you rely too greatly on your partial information. It is a sobering thought, for example, that despite employing some of the best and brightest* analysts in the world, the advice given by the US State Department over the last fifty years could comfortably have been outperformed by a parrot that had been trained to repeat the phrase, ‘Don’t start a war.’ The repeated failures of the State Department are not the consequence of ignorance; they are the consequence of having very good and deep — but not total — knowledge of an extremely complicated situation, in which facts outside of that information set turned out to be crucial. Knowing a great deal of detail about a subset of a system has a habit of increasing your confidence in your opinions disproportionately from their reliability.

*The phrase ‘the best and brightest’ is often used by people who don’t know that its original context was ironic. It entered the language as the title of David Halberstam’s book about the policy mistakes of the Vietnam War.

The quality of your decisions is directly related to the quality of your thoughts. The quality of your thoughts is directly related to the quality if your information.

Many people treat all sources of information as if they’re equally valid. They’re not. While you might value getting everyone’s opinion, that doesn’t mean each opinion should be equally weighted or considered.

A lot of the information we consume is in the form of highlights, summaries, or distillations. It’s the illusion of knowledge. We learnt the answer but can't show our work.