Accordingly, an element in the mechanics of how the human mind learns from the past makes us believe in definitive solutions—yet not consider that those who preceded us thought that they too had definitive solutions. We laugh at others and we don’t realize that someone will be just as justified in laughing at us on some not too remote day. Such a realization would entail the recursive, or second-order, thinking that I mentioned in the Prologue; we are not good at it.
