we should be making ‘educated bets’ with a thorough knowledge of the evidence and weighed by a clear understanding of the problems we’re trying to solve. If our bets are aligned with the purposes we’ve agreed, then by putting time and effort into the implementation and sustainability of our decisions, we avoid the unscrupulous optimism of best cases and address the possibility of the worst case coming to pass. As the economist Thomas Sowell warns us, “It is so easy to be wrong – and to persist in being wrong – when the costs of being wrong are paid by others.”
