Obliquity— John Kay

Preface

But it isn’t just economists who make that mistake. Politicians, investors, bankers and business people believe that although they don’t solve problems according to a standard model of rational decision making, they ought to. So they pretend that they do— to others, and perhaps to themselves.

The intelligence agents who anticipated the attack on the Twin Towers were not praised for their prescience, and the risk managers who warned banks of impending nemesis were fired. It is good for reputation to succeed against the odds. But it is often better for reputation to fail against the odds than to improve them. In an uncertain situation the effect of improving the odds is never obvious, either before the event or after it.

Captain MacWhirr, limited man though he was, understood that dilemma. Machiavelli, the epitome of the oblique decision maker, was the archetypal fox. Five centuries before Tetlock confirmed it empirically, Machiavelli understood that to be an effective decision maker it was wise not to seek public credit for the success of your decisions. Yet another of obliquity’s many paradoxes.

Perhaps there is a better one sentence resolution of the paradox of obliquity: ‘Adaptation is smarter than you are.

18. Order without design

The evolved complexity that Darwin had observed in nature was also true of economic and social systems. Hayek observed that:

Nobody has yet succeeded in deliberately arranging all the activities that go on in a complex society. If anyone did ever succeed in fully organising such a society, it would no longer make use of many minds, but would be altogether dependent on one mind; it would certainly not be very complex but extremely primitive— and so would soon be the mind whose knowledge and will determined everything.

Conclusions

21. The practice of obliquity

There is not, and will not be, such a science. Our objectives are typically imprecise and multi-faceted, and change as we work towards them, and properly so. Our decisions depend on the responses of others and on what we anticipate those responses will be. The world is complex, imperfectly known, and our knowledge of it is incomplete, and theses things will remain true however much we learn and however much we analyse it.

We do not solve problems in the way the concept of decision science implies because we can’t. The achievement of the great statesman is not to reach the best decision fastest but to mediate effectively among competing views and values.