Loserthink: How Untrained Brains Are Ruining America

by Scott Adams

In political discussions, you rarely see anything like a full description of the costs and benefits. Political advocates focus on the costs of a plan when they hate it and the benefits when they like it. People who follow politics mimic the advocates and end up with halfpinions instead of full opinions. Ideally, you want to consider all the impacts of your decisions, both now and later. But the present has one quality that the future does not: certainty. You can often predict with confidence what will happen tomorrow, but predicting events more than a year in the future gets iffy fast. In the business world, no one takes too seriously predictions that are more than three years out. That’s a good rule of thumb. Financial predictions that are more than three years out are about as useful as underpants on a robot.