I gave this talk a few months ago, and it captures a lot of my shtick on “fatal certainty,” “the cult of prediction,” and the importance of rigorous imagination in strategic decision-making. Enjoy…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oxzth2cJICQ
No One Knows, So We’d Better Start Imagining July 26, 2023 Some 2500 years ago, a ruler of a great kingdom, Croesus of Lydia, saw a threat to his regime arising on his border. A new leader, Cyrus, had already created an empire that dwarfed Lydia, the Achaemenid Persian empire. Croesus,…
July 25, 2023 A week or so ago, the economist Paul Krugman put out a subscribers-only opinion piece entitled “Camps of economists fought grand theoretical battles, and all lost.” To his credit, he numbers himself among those who “lost” in these battles, which were over the likelihood of serious inflation…
October 5, 2023 To me, a great general idea is one that can be approached from many different directions, and it will still explain important phenomena. One where, after hearing about it, for some period of time afterwards, everywhere you look, you seem to see an example of it in…