The reliance on flawed explanations is perhaps inevitable, if the alternative is to give up on understanding our world. However, causal thinking and the illusion of understanding the past contribute to overconfident predictions of the future. As we will see, the preference for causal thinking also contributes to the neglect of noise as a source of error, because noise is a fundamentally statistical notion. Causal thinking helps us make sense of a world that is far less predictable than we think. It also explains why we view the world as far more predictable than it really is. In the valley of
...more
