Brian Klaas

When you were in the hunter-gatherer society or, you know, the long stretch of humanity,

If you see or hear a rustling of the grass, it makes sense for you to infer that there might be a saber-toothed tiger there.

And if you are wrong and there's nothing there, that doesn't kill you.

But if you ignore the rustling in the grass and think, oh, that's unrelated to anything else, and the saber-toothed tiger is there, it will eat you.

So we've evolved through survivorship of basically people who find patterns.

And when you find patterns, it helps you survive.

So our brains are fine-tuned here.

to see explanations for everything.

We're allergic to explanations of randomness or small changes having big effects.

And this is where, again, I think the cognitive bias we have is important to recognize because we can counteract it.

We can understand that actually sometimes there are random things that happen.

Sometimes small changes do have big effects.

Yeah, I mean I think – I describe myself as a disillusioned social scientist because I am a social scientist.

I do study this stuff.

I do try to think about how the world works.

I mean the history of the 21st century is a history of models and predictions being upended by fluky events, right?

I mean every geopolitical forecast was invalidated by 9-11.

Every financial and economic forecast was invalidated by the financial crisis.

Every regional geopolitical forecast.

In the Arab Spring, a guy lights himself on fire in Tunisia and it causes the collapse of multiple regimes and multiple civil wars.