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how well can social scientists predict events in a family’s life?
aim of the study was to measure the level of objective ignorance that remains in these life events after sociologists have done their work.
more than 750 scientific articles have been written based on data from the Fragile Families study.
focused on the predictability of six outcomes observed
The achievement of the winning team in these competitions defines the state of the art at a point in time, which is always exceeded in the next competition.
predictive accuracy remained disappointingly low.
aggregates, which were much more predictable.
Aggregate measures are widely known to be both more predictive and more predictable than are measures
of single outcomes.
conclusion of the challenge is that a large mass of predictive information does not suffice for the prediction of single events in people’s lives—and even th...
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8 million subjects over one hundred years, concluded that “social psychological effects typically yield a value of r [correlation coefficient] equal to .21.”
A review of 708 studies in the behavioral and cognitive sciences found that only 3% of reported correlations were .50 or more.
Statistical terms are often misleading to the lay reader, and “significant” may be the worst example of this.
With a sufficiently large sample, a correlation can be at once very “significant” and too small to be worth discussing.
“Researchers must reconcile the idea that they understand life trajectories with the fact that none of the predictions were very accurate.”
equate understanding with prediction (or the absence of one with the absence of the other), they use the term understanding in a specific sense.
a claim to understand something is a claim to understand what causes that thing.
To understand is to describe a causal chain.
correlation, the measure of predictive accuracy, is a measure of how much causation we can explain.
causation does imply correlation.
wherever there is causality, there is correlation.
correlation, the accuracy of this prediction, is a measure of how much causality we understand.
Objective ignorance sets a ceiling not only on our predictions but also on our understanding.
In short, why do professionals—and why do we all—seem to underestimate our objective ignorance of the world?
different mode of thinking, which comes more naturally to our minds, will be called here causal thinking.
It feels, in fact, like the logical end of a chain of events, the inevitable denouement of a foreordained tragedy.
Whatever the outcome (eviction or not), once it has happened, causal thinking makes it feel entirely explainable, indeed predictable.
most things take place in the broad valley of the normal, where events are neither entirely expected nor especially surprising.
the process of understanding reality is backward-looking.
search stops when a good narrative is found.
It is the occurrence of the event that tells you its cause.
what we mean by understanding a story, and this is what makes reality appear predictable—in hindsight.
under the illusion that it could have been anticipated.
sense of understanding the world depends on our extraordinary ability to construct narratives that explain the events we observe. The search...
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first resort is to produce an explanation by filling a blank in our model of the world.
Genuine surprise occurs only when routine hindsight fails.
As we know from classic research on hindsight, even when subjective uncertainty does exist for a while, memories of it are largely erased when the uncertainty is resolved.
two ways of thinking about events: statistical and causal. The causal mode saves us much effortful thinking by categorizing events in real time as normal or abnormal.
Abnormal events quickly mobilize costly effort
flow of events in the valley of the normal requires little mental work.
Causal thinking avoids unnecessary effort while retaining the vigilance needed to detect abnormal events.
statistical thinking is effortful.
demands specialized training.
The distinction between these two views is a recurring theme of this book.
also call the outside view,
causal mode comes much more naturally to us.
The correlations of experience and brilliance with success are at best moderate and probably low.
The reliance on flawed explanations is perhaps inevitable, if the alternative is to give up on understanding our world.
contribute to overconfident predictions of the future.
noise is a fundamentally statistical notion.
