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‘Fewer sandtrout – the ecological transformation of the planet…’ ‘They resist it, of course,’ she said, and now she began to understand the fear in his voice, drawn into this thing against her will. ‘When the sandtrout go, so do all the worms,’ he said. ‘The tribes must be warned.’ ‘No more spice,’ she said. Words merely touched high points of the system danger which they both saw hanging over human intrusion into Dune’s ancient relationships. ‘It’s the thing Alia knows,’ he said. ‘It’s why she gloats.’ ‘How can you be sure of that?’ ‘I’m sure.’ Now she knew for certain what disturbed him, and she felt the knowledge chill her. ‘The tribes won’t believe us if she denies it,’ he said. His statement went to the primary problem of their existence: What Fremen expected wisdom from a nine-year-old? Alia, growing farther and farther from her own inner sharing each day, played upon this. ‘We must convince Stilgar,’ Ghanima said. As one, their heads turned and they stared out over the moonlit desert. It was a different place now, changed by just a few moments of awareness. Human interplay with that environment had never been more apparent to them. They felt themselves as integral parts of a dynamic system held in delicately balanced order. The new outlook involved a real change of consciousness which flooded them with observations.

For an instant, temptation warred with fear within him. This flesh possessed the ability to transform melange into a vision of the future. With the spice, he could breathe the future, shatter Time’s veils. He found the temptation difficult to shed, clasped his hands and sank into the prana-bindu awareness. His flesh negated the temptation. His flesh wore the deep knowledge learned in blood by Paul. Those who sought the future hoped to gain the winning gamble on tomorrow’s race. Instead they found themselves trapped into a lifetime whose every heartbeat and anguished wail was known. Paul’s final vision had shown the precarious way out of that trap, and Leto knew now that he had no other choice but to follow that way. ‘The joy of living, its beauty is all bound up in the fact that life can surprise you,’ he said.

‘Alia is possessed,’ she said. ‘That could happen to us. It could already have happened and we might not know it.’ ‘No.’ He shook his head, met her gaze. ‘Alia resisted. That gave the powers within her their strength. By their own strength she was overcome. We’ve dared to search within, to seek out the old languages and the old knowledge. We’re already amalgams of those lives within us. We don’t resist; we ride with them. This was what I learned

‘Ambitions tend to remain undisturbed by realities,’ The Preacher said. ‘I dare such words because you stand at a crossroad. You could become admirable. But now you are surrounded by those who do not seek moral justifications, by advisers who are strategy-oriented. You are young and strong and tough, but you lack a certain advanced training by which your character might evolve.

‘Once your father confided in me that knowing the future too well was to be locked into that future to the exclusion of any freedom to change.’ ‘The paradox which is our problem,’ Leto said. ‘It’s a subtle and powerful thing, prescience. The future becomes now. To be sighted in the land of the blind carries its own perils. If you try to interpret what you see for the blind, you tend to forget that the blind possess an inherent movement conditioned by their blindness. They are like a monstrous machine moving along its own path. They have their own momentum, their own fixations. I fear the blind, Stil. I fear them. They can so easily crush anything in their path.’

Stilgar turned his back on the desert, stared toward the oasis of his beloved Sietch Tabr. Such talk always disturbed him. Leto sensed the sweaty smell of Stilgar’s movement. It was such a temptation to avoid the purposeful things which had to be said here. They could talk half the day away, moving from the specific to the abstract as though drawn away from real decisions, from those immediate necessities which confronted them.

men change their faces at her command,’ Leto said. ‘A ruler need not be a prophet, Stil. Nor even godlike. A ruler need only be sensitive.

They had suppressed creativity and all sense of progress, of evolution. Prosperity had been dangerous to the old Imperium and its holders of power.

In the old ways and old religions, there’d been no future, only an endless now. Before Muad’Dib, Stilgar saw, the Fremen had been conditioned to believe in failure, never in the possibility of accomplishment. Well… they’d believed Liet-Kynes, but he’d set a forty-generation timescale. That was no accomplishment; that was a dream which, he saw now, had also turned inward. Muad’Dib had changed that!

Change was dangerous. Invention must be suppressed. Individual willpower must be denied. What other function did the priesthood serve than to deny individual will? Alia kept saying that opportunities for open competition had to be reduced to manageable limits. But that meant the recurrent threat of technology could only be used to confine populations – just as it had served its ancient masters. Any permitted technology had to be rooted in ritual. Otherwise… otherwise…

‘Just as individuals are born, mature, breed, and die, so do societies and civilizations and governments.’ Dangerous or not, there would be change. The beautiful young Fremen knew this. They could look outward and see it, prepare for it. Stilgar was forced to stop. It was either that or walk right over Leto. The youth peered up at him owlishly, said: ‘You see, Stil? Tradition isn’t the absolute guide you thought it was.’

‘They sell pieces of etched marble,’ he said, pointing. ‘Did you know that? They set the pieces out in the desert to be etched by stormsands. Sometimes they find interesting patterns in the stone. They call it a new art form, very popular: genuine storm-etched marble from Dune. I bought a piece of it last week – a golden tree with five tassels, lovely but very fragile.’ ‘Don’t change the subject,’ Alia said. ‘I haven’t changed the subject,’ he said. ‘It’s beautiful, but it’s not art. Humans

You can work your own muscles, exercise them, strengthen them, but the mind acts of itself.

Planetary feudalism remained in constant danger from a large technical class, but the effects of the Butlerian Jihad continued as a damper on technological excesses. Ixians, Tleilaxu, and a few scattered outer planets were the only possible threat in this regard, and they were planet-vulnerable to the combined wrath of the rest of the Imperium. The Butlerian Jihad would not be undone. Mechanized warfare required a large technical class. The Atreides Imperium had channeled this force into other pursuits. No large technical class existed unwatched. And the Empire remained safely feudalist, naturally, since that was the best social form for spreading over widely dispersed wild frontiers – new planets.

‘But surely your own mother would not turn against you!’ ‘She was Bene Gesserit long before she was my mother. Duncan, she permitted her own son, my brother, to undergo the test of the gom jabbar! She arranged it! And she knew he might not survive it! Bene Gesserits have always been short on faith and long on pragmatism.

Not once did Stilgar think of taking his problem to Alia. That ruled out Irulan, who ran to Alia with anything and everything. In coming to his decision, Stilgar realized he had accepted the possibility that Leto judged Alia correctly.

This is the fallacy of power: ultimately, it is effective only in an absolute, a limited universe. But the basic lesson of our relativistic universe is that things change. Any power must always meet a greater power. Paul Muad’Dib taught this lesson to the Sardaukar on the Plains of Arrakeen. His descendants have yet to learn the lesson for themselves.

‘If you put away those who report accurately, you’ll keep only those who know what you want to hear,’ Jessica said, her voice sweet. ‘I can think of nothing more poisonous than to rot in the stink of your own reflections.’

When I am weaker than you, I ask you for freedom because that is according to your principles; when I am stronger than you, I take away your freedom because that is according to my principles. – Words of an ancient philosopher, (Attributed by Harq al-Ada to One Louis Veuillot)

then. She turned to look at the rock wall on her left. ‘Alia grasps the power firmly now.’ She looked back at Idaho. ‘You understand? One uses power by grasping it lightly. To grasp too strongly is to be taken over by power, and thus to become its victim.’

The universe is just there; that’s the only way a Fedaykin can view it and remain the master of his senses. The universe neither threatens nor promises. It holds things beyond our sway: the fall of a meteor, the eruption of a spiceblow, growing old and dying. These are the realities of this universe and they must be faced regardless of how you feel about them. You cannot fend off such realities with words. They will come at you in their own wordless way and then, then you will understand what is meant by ‘life and death’. Understanding this, you will be filled with joy. – Muad’Dib to his Fedaykin

‘You see, Tyek, the influence of a planet upon the mass unconscious of its inhabitants has never been fully appreciated. To defeat the Atreides, we must understand not only Caladan but Arrakis: one planet soft and the other a training ground for hard decisions. That was

In all major socializing forces you will find an underlying movement to gain and maintain power through the use of words. From witch doctor to priest to bureaucrat it is all the same. A governed populace must be conditioned to accept power-words as actual things, to confuse the symbolized system with the tangible universe. In the maintenance of such a power structure, certain symbols are kept out of the reach of common understanding – symbols such as those dealing with economic manipulation of those which define the local interpretation of sanity. Symbol-secrecy of this form leads to the development of fragmented sub-languages, each being a signal that its users are accumulating some form of power. With this insight into a power process, our Imperial Security Force must be ever alert to the formation of sub-languages. –Lecture to the Arrakeen War College,

But one learns from books and reels only that certain things can be done. Actual learning requires that you do those things.’

Farad’n knew his own talents and held few illusions about them. He was a historian-archaeologist and judge of men. Necessity had forced him to become an expert on those who would serve him – necessity and a careful study of the Atreides. He saw it as the price always demanded of aristocracy. To rule required accurate and incisive judgments about those who wielded your power. More than one ruler had fallen through mistakes and excesses of his underlings.

The Mentat-generalist, on the other hand, should bring to decision-making a healthy common sense. He must not cut himself off from the broad sweep of what is happening in his universe. He must remain capable of saying: ‘There’s no real mystery about this at the moment. This is what we want now. It may prove wrong later, but we’ll correct that when we come to it.’ The Mentat-generalist must understand that anything which we can identify as our universe is merely part of larger phenomena.

‘Abandon certainty! That’s life’s deepest command. That’s what life’s all about. We’re a probe into the unknown, into the uncertain.

The one-eyed view of our universe says you must not look far afield for problems. Such problems may never arrive. Instead, tend to the wolf within your fences. The packs ranging outside may not even exist.

In the Bene Gesserit Way, he opened his mind to Jacurutu, seeking to know nothing about it. Knowing was a barrier which prevented learning.

If you believe certain words, you believe their hidden arguments. When you believe something is right or wrong, true or false, you believe the assumptions in the words which express the arguments. Such assumptions are often full of holes, but remain most precious to the convinced.

‘Every judgment teeters on the brink of error,’ Leto explained. ‘To claim absolute knowledge is to become monstrous. Knowledge

He knew his previous mistake now: he had sought power in the reality of his trance, choosing that rather than face the fears which he and Ghanima had fed in each other. Fear defeated Alia! But the seeking after power spread another trap, diverting him into fantasy. He saw the illusion.

‘I am your spirit. I am the only life you can realize. I am the house of your spirit in the land which is nowhere, the land which is your only remaining home. Without me, the intelligible universe reverts to chaos. Creative and abysmal are inextricably linked in me; only I can mediate between them. Without me, mankind will sink into the mire and vanity of knowing. Through me, you and they will find the only way out of chaos: understanding by living.’

‘Religion is the emulation of the adult by the child. Religion is the encystment of past beliefs: mythology, which is guesswork, the hidden assumptions of trust in the universe, those pronouncements which men have made in search of personal power, all of it mingled with shreds of enlightenment. And always the ultimate unspoken commandment is “Thou shalt not question!” But we question. We break that commandment as a matter of course. The work to which we have set ourselves is the liberating of the imagination, the harnessing of imagination to humankind’s deepest sense of creativity.’

Peace demands solutions, but we never reach living solutions; we only work toward them. A fixed solution is, by definition, a dead solution. The trouble with peace is that it tends to punish mistakes instead of rewarding brilliance.

Jessica held her arms stiffly at her side, said: ‘I am charged to say this to you. “I stand in the sacred human presence. As I do now, so should you stand someday. I pray to your presence that this be so. The future remains uncertain and so it should, for it is the canvas upon which we paint our desires. Thus always the human condition faces a beautifully empty canvas. We possess only this moment in which to dedicate ourselves continuously to the sacred presence which we share and create.”

People, not commercial organizations or chains of command, are what make great civilizations work. Every civilization depends upon the quality of the individuals it produces. If you over-organize humans, over-legalize them, suppress their urge to greatness – they cannot work and their civilization collapses.

Halleck looked once more at Leto, really saw him. He saw the signs of stress around the eyes, the sense of balance in the stance, the passive mouth with its quirking sense of humor. Leto stood out from his background as though at the focus of a blinding light. He had achieved harmony simply by accepting it.

The child who refuses to travel in the father’s harness, this is rite symbol of man’s most unique capability. ‘I do not have to be what my father was. I do not have to obey my father’s odes or even believe everything he believed. It is my strength as a human that I can make my own choices of what to believe and what not to believe, of what to be and what not to be.’ – Leto Atreides II,

‘Each day, each moment brings its changes,’ Ghanima said. ‘One learns by recognizing the moments.’

“The question is one of powers and how they may be used,” Scytale said, moving closer to the Guildsman’s tank. “We of the Tleilaxu believe that in all the universe there is only the insatiable appetite of matter, that energy is the only true solid. And energy learns. Hear

“The Fremen are civil, educated and ignorant,” Scytale said. “They’re not mad. They’re trained to believe, not to know. Belief

“I told him that to endure oneself may be the hardest task in the universe.” She shook her head. “That’s… that’s…” “A bitter pill,” he said, watching the guards run toward them across the roof, taking up their escort positions. “Bitter nonsense!” “The greatest palatinate earl and the lowliest stipendiary serf share the same problem. You cannot hire a Mentat or any other intellect to solve it for you. There’s no writ of inquest or calling of witnesses to provide answers. No servant—or disciple—can dress the wound. You

Production growth and income growth must not get out of step in my Empire. That is the substance of my command. There are to be no balance-of-payment difficulties between the different spheres of influence. And the reason for this is simply because I command it. I want to emphasize my authority in this area. I am the supreme energy-eater of this domain, and will remain so, alive

Paul’s foot caught in a low drift of sand across the street. For an instant, he felt mud clinging to the shoes of his childhood. Then he was back in the sand, in the dust-clotted, wind-muffled darkness with the Future hanging over him, taunting. He could feel the aridity of life around him like an accusation. You did this! They’d become a civilization of dry-eyed watchers and tale-tellers, people who solved all problems with power… and more power… and still more power—hating every erg of it.

The convoluted wording of legalisms grew up around the necessity to hide from ourselves the violence we intend toward each other. Between depriving a man of one hour from his life and depriving him of his life there exists only a difference of degree. You have done violence to him, consumed his energy. Elaborate euphemisms may conceal your intent to kill, but behind any use of power over another the ultimate assumption remains: “I feed on your energy.” —Addenda to Orders in Council The Emperor Paul Muad’Dib

When they arose to dress for the day, she said: “If the people only knew your love…” But his mood had changed. “You can’t build politics on love,” he said. “People aren’t concerned with love; it’s too disordered. They prefer despotism. Too much freedom breeds chaos. We can’t have that, can we? And how do you make despotism lovable?” “You’re not a despot!” she protested, tying her scarf. “Your laws are just.” “Ahh, laws,” he said. He crossed to the window, pulled back the draperies as though he could look out. “What’s law? Control? Law filters chaos and what drips through? Serenity? Law—our highest ideal and our basest nature. Don’t look too closely at the law. Do, and you’ll find the rationalized interpretations, the legal casuistry, the precedents of convenience. You’ll find the serenity, which is just another word for death.”

Alia reviewed the letter as she walked down the ramp to the antechamber where her guard amazons waited. “You produce a deadly paradox,” Jessica had written. “Government cannot be religious and self-assertive at the same time. Religious experience needs a spontaneity which laws inevitably suppress. And you cannot govern without laws. Your laws eventually must replace morality, replace conscience, replace even the religion by which you think to govern. Sacred ritual must spring from praise and holy yearnings which hammer out a significant morality. Government, on the other hand, is a cultural organism particularly attractive to doubts, questions and contentions. I see the day coming when ceremony must take

“There are problems in this universe for which there are no answers.”

Every discussion is influenced by emotions, no matter how rational the topic at hand. When starting a dialogue, it helps to think of the discussion as a negotiation where the prize is figuring out what everyone wants. And, above all, the most

Ehdaie’s biggest mistake was assuming, at the start of a conversation, that he knew what the patient wanted: Objective medical advice, an overview of options to make an informed choice. “But you don’t want to begin a negotiation assuming you know what the other side wants,” Malhotra said. This is the first part of the What’s This Really About? conversation: Figuring out what everyone wants to talk about. The simplest method for uncovering everyone’s desires, of course, is simply asking What do you want?

Differences in how couples seek control are only one factor that helps explain why some marriages succeed while others stumble. But if, during moments of tension, we focus on things we can control together, conflicts are less likely to emerge. If we focus on controlling ourselves, our environment, and the conflict itself, then a fight often morphs into a conversation, where the goal is understanding, rather than winning points or wounding our foes.

Wealthy people obviously aren’t the only ones afraid of running out of money: It’s a fear I heard about over and over from people who’d heard my ideas. So you’ll see me addressing this fear throughout the book. After all, nobody would ever try to die with zero if they’re afraid they’ll hit zero before they die.

But let’s say you’re not part of the vast majority—let’s say you’re worth millions or tens of millions. What then? Even if I earn enough that I could save up for a few extra months of life in the hospital, I can’t see the logic in doing that: There’s a big difference between living a life and just being kept alive, and I’d much rather spend on the former. So I will not work for years to save up for a few more months on a ventilator with a quality of life that’s close to zero—or, depending on the level of suffering, maybe even negative. So instead of engaging in “precautionary saving,” as economists call the practice, I’ll let the cards fall where they may. We all die sooner or later, and I’d rather die when the time is right than sacrifice my better years just to squeeze out a few more days at the tail end.

So it’s fine to look at your life expectancy, to consider your risk tolerance, and to do the math to figure out how many years you need to save for. But that’s not the same as being so frightened of outliving your money—or of the thought of death—that you avoid even looking at the numbers. If you live your life with fear and avoidance, my bet is you will either fritter your money away or play it so safe that you will leave many, many years of your hard-earned money behind—so you’ll be working many years as a slave to your own fears.

Like all living creatures, humans have evolved to survive. Of course, we want to do more than just survive; for example, I’m sure if I asked you if you want to survive or really thrive, you’d choose thriving. But our biology is such that efforts to live the best life we can often don’t come as naturally or as strongly as the basic instinct to survive. Avoiding death is our number one priority, and that single goal dwarfs everything else.

The upshot of all this is that if you wait until you die to have your children inherit your money, you’re leaving the outcome to chance. I call it the three Rs—giving random amounts of money at a random time to random people (because who knows which of your heirs will still be alive by the time you die?). How can randomness be caring? It’s the opposite of caring: Being okay with leaving all these outcomes to chance means you evidently don’t care if you spend years of your life working for future random people, and it means you may not care how much the people closest to you will actually get, or when.

for people who are older than me—my mom and my sister and my brother. That made me think: What about now? Do I want to give anything now, when they can enjoy those gifts more than later? My answer was yes, so I gave them that amount. In short, by giving the money to my kids and other people at a time when it can have the greatest impact on their lives, I’m making it their money, not mine. That’s a clear distinction, and I find it liberating: It frees me to spend to the hilt on myself. If I want to spend like mad, I can do it without worrying about the effect on my kids. They have their money to spend as they wish, and I have mine.

“Your salary will only go up, your earning power will only go up,” Levitt recalls his older colleague telling him, in almost a perfect echo of what Joe Farrell told me. “And so you shouldn’t be saving now, you should be borrowing. You should be living today in much the way that you’ll be living in 10 or 15 years, and it’s crazy to actually be scrimping and saving, which is what at least someone like me who was brought up in a middle-class family was taught to do.” Levitt says this was one of the best pieces of financial advice he ever got.

My point—and this is important—is that the day I die and the day I stop being able to enjoy certain experiences are two distinctly different dates. And this is true for everyone. That is what I mean when I say that we die many deaths in the course of our lives: The teenager in you dies, the college student in you dies, the single unattached you dies, the version of you that’s a parent of an infant dies, and so on. Once each of these mini-deaths occurs, there’s no going back.

so be sure you’re making those choices deliberately.

I’ve given you an impossible task: to die with zero. You can follow every rule in this book, you can closely track your health and life expectancy, and you can recalculate your financials every day—yet you’re not going to hit exactly zero. When you take your last breath, you might still have a few dollars in your pocket, and maybe even hundreds more in the bank. So technically, you will have failed to die with zero. That’s inevitable—and it’s okay. Why? Because that goal will have done its real job, of pushing you in the right direction: By aiming to die with zero, you will forever change your autopilot focus from earning and saving and maximizing your wealth to living the best life you possibly can.

Here was no Faustian bargain, as movie directors and other naifs still find it intellectually challenging to imagine. Here was no evil machinery that the noble scientists might have hidden from the politicians and the generals. To the contrary, here was a new insight into how the world works, an energetic reaction, older than the earth, that science had finally devised the instruments and arrangements to coax forth

Knowledge,” Niels Bohr once noted, “is itself the basis for civilization.” You cannot have the one without the other; the one depends upon the other. Nor can you have only benevolent knowledge; the scientific method doesn’t filter for benevolence. Knowledge has consequences, not always intended, not always comfortable, not always welcome. The earth revolves around the sun, not the sun around the earth. “It is a profound and necessary truth,” Robert Oppenheimer would say, “that the deep things in science are not found because they are useful; they

Bohr proposed once that the goal of science is not universal truth. Rather, he argued, the modest but relentless goal

foundered on the certain calculus of escalation. “Every great and deep difficulty bears within itself its own solution,” Niels Bohr had counseled the scientists at Los Alamos whose consciences he found stirred when he arrived there in 1943.

The discovery of how to release nuclear energy, like all fundamental scientific discoveries, changed the structure of human affairs—permanently.

It is still an unending source of surprise for me to see how a few scribbles on a blackboard or on a sheet of paper could change the course of human affairs. Stanislaw Ulam

Max Planck thought otherwise. He doubted that atoms existed at all, as did many of his colleagues—the particulate theory of matter was an English invention more than a Continental, and its faintly Britannic odor made it repulsive to the xenophobic German nose—but if atoms did exist he was sure they could not be mechanical. “It is of paramount importance,” he confessed in his Scientific Autobiography, “that the outside world is something independent from man, something absolute, and the quest for laws which apply to this absolute appeared to me as the most sublime scientific pursuit in life.” Of all the laws of physics, Planck believed that the thermodynamic laws applied most basically to the independent “outside world” that his need for an absolute required.88 He saw early that purely mechanical atoms violated the second law of thermodynamics. His choice was clear.

orthodoxy of science. They acquired “the established doctrine, the dead letter.” Some, at university, went on to study the beginnings of method.96 They practiced experimental proof in routine research. They discovered science’s “uncertainties and its eternally provisional nature.” That began to bring it to life.

are; all we are allowed to do is to watch the playing. Of course, if we watch long enough, we may eventually catch on to a few of the rules. The rules of the game are what we mean by fundamental physics. Even if we know every rule, however . . . what we really can explain in terms of those rules is very limited, because almost all situations are so enormously complicated that we cannot follow the plays of the game using the rules, much less tell what is going to happen next. We must, therefore, limit ourselves

Good science, original work, always went beyond the body of received opinion, always represented a dissent from orthodoxy. How, then, could the orthodox fairly assess it? Polanyi suspected that science’s system of masters and apprentices protected it from rigidity. The apprentice learned high standards of judgment from his master. At the same time he learned to trust his own judgment: he learned the possibility and the necessity of dissent.

“His leading idea was that the different possible conceptions of life are so sharply opposed to one another that we must make a choice between them, hence his catchword either-or; moreover, it must be a choice which each particular person must make for himself, hence his second catchword, the individual.”

“Bohr characteristically avoids such a word as ‘principle,’ ” says Rosenfeld; “he prefers to speak of ‘point of view’ or, better still, ‘argument,’ i.e. line of reasoning; likewise, he rarely mentions the ‘laws of nature,’ but

Much of the difficulty was language, that slippery medium in which Bohr saw us inextricably suspended. “It is wrong,” he told his colleagues repeatedly, “to think that the task of physics is to find out how nature is”—which is the territory classical physics had claimed for itself. “Physics concerns what we can say about nature.”

The machine gun mechanized war. Artillery and gas mechanized war. They were the hardware of the war, the tools. But they were only proximately the mechanism of the slaughter. The ultimate mechanism was a method of organization—anachronistically speaking, a software package.376 “The basic lever,” the writer Gil Elliot comments, “was the conscription law, which made vast numbers of men available for military service.377 The civil machinery which ensured the carrying out of this law, and the military organization which turned numbers of men into battalions and divisions, were each founded on a bureaucracy. The production of resources, in particular guns and ammunition, was a matter for civil organization. The movement of men and resources to the front, and the trench system of defence, were military concerns.”

Oppenheimer was no longer a frightened boy, but he was still an insecure and uncertain young man. He sorted among information, knowledge, eras, systems, languages, arcane and apposite skills in the spirit of trying them on for size. Exaggeration made it clear that he knew you knew how awkwardly they fit (and self-destructively at the same time supplied the awkwardness). That was perhaps its social function. Deeper was worse. Deeper was self-loathing, “a very great sense of revulsion and of wrong.” Nothing was yet his, nothing was original, and what he had appropriated through learning he thought stolen and himself a thief: a Goth looting Rome. He loved the loot but despised the looter. He was as clear as Harry Moseley was clear in his last will about

Working late one evening in his room under the eaves of Bohr’s institute Heisenberg remembered a paradox Einstein had thrown at him in a conversation about the value of theory in scientific work. “It

I believe that through discipline we can learn to preserve what is essential to our happiness in more and more adverse circumstances, and to abandon with simplicity what would else have seemed to us indispensable; that we come a little to see the world without the gross distortion of personal desire, and in seeing it so, accept more easily our earthly privation and its earthly horror—

Were this thinking not in the framework of scientific work, it would be considered paranoid. In scientific work, creative thinking demands seeing things not seen previously, or in ways not previously imagined; and this necessitates jumping off from “normal” positions, and taking risks by departing from reality. The difference between the thinking of the paranoid patient and the scientist comes from the latter’s ability and willingness to test out his fantasies or grandiose conceptualizations through the systems of checks and balances science has established—and to give up those schemes that are shown not to be valid on the basis of these scientific checks. It is specifically because science provides such a framework of rules and regulations to control and set bounds to paranoid thinking that a scientist can feel comfortable about taking the paranoid leaps. Without this structuring, the threat of such unrealistic, illogical, and even bizarre thinking to overall thought and personality organization in general would be too great to permit the scientist the freedom of such fantasying.

“I believe all young people think about how they would like their lives to develop,” Lise Meitner wrote in old age, looking back; “when I did so I always arrived at the conclusion that life need not be easy provided only that it was not empty. And this wish I have been granted.”

“How much money do you need?” Commander Hoover wanted to know.1237 Szilard had not planned to ask for money. “The diversion of Government funds for such purposes as ours appears to be hardly possible,” he explained to Pegram the next day, “and I have therefore myself avoided to make any such recommendation.”1238 But Teller answered Hoover promptly, probably speaking for Fermi: “For the first year of this research we need six thousand dollars, mostly in order to buy the graphite.” (“My friends blamed me because the great enterprise of nuclear energy was to start with such a pittance,” Teller reminisces; “they haven’t forgiven me yet.”1239 Szilard, who would write Briggs on October 26 that the graphite alone for a largescale experiment would cost at least $33,000, must have been appalled.1240) Adamson had anticipated just such a raid on the public treasury. “At this point,” says Szilard, “the representative of the Army started a rather longish tirade”: He told us that it was naive to believe that we could make a significant contribution to defense by creating a new weapon. He said that if a new weapon is created, it usually takes two wars before one can know whether the weapon is any good or not. Then he explained rather laboriously that it is in the end not weapons which win the wars, but the morale of the troops. He went on in this vein for a long time until suddenly Wigner, the most polite of us, interrupted him. [Wigner] said in his high-pitched voice that it was very interesting for him to hear this. He always thought that weapons were very important and that this is what costs money, and this is why the Army needs such a large appropriation. But he was very interested to hear that he was wrong: it’s not weapons but the morale which wins the wars. And if this is correct, perhaps one should take a second look at the budget of the Army, and maybe the budget could be cut.

The senior men turned their collective brilliance to fusion. They had not yet bothered to name generic bombs of uranium and plutonium. But from the pre-anthropic darkness where ideas abide in nonexistence until minds imagine them into the light, the new bomb emerged already chased with the technocratic euphemism of art deco slang: the Super, they named it.

“Decisions are often clearly recognized as mistakes at the time when they are made by those who are competent to judge, but . . . there is no mechanism by which their collective views would find expression or become a matter of record.”

Since invention is unpredictable, Szilard writes, “the only thing we can do in order to play safe is to encourage sufficiently large groups of scientists to think along those lines and to give them all the basic facts which they need to be encouraged to such activity.

Bohr, who used to say that accuracy and clarity were complementary (and so a short statement could never be precise),

Nations existed in a condition of international anarchy. No hierarchical authority defined their relations with one another. They negotiated voluntarily as self-interest moved them and took what they could get. War had been their final negotiation,

Nuclear fission and thermonuclear fusion are not acts of Parliament; they are levers embedded deeply in the physical world, discovered because it was possible to discover them, beyond the power of men to patent or to hoard.

The technological imperative, the urge to improvement even if the objects to be improved are weapons of mass destruction, was already operating at Los Alamos. Under intense pressure to produce a first crude weapon in time to affect the outcome of the war, people had found occasion nevertheless to think about building a better bomb.

Robert Oppenheimer at his best: When, three days ago, the world had word of the death of President Roosevelt, many wept who are unaccustomed to tears, many men and women, little enough accustomed to prayer, prayed to God.2269 Many of us looked with deep trouble to the future; many of us felt less certain that our works would be to a good end; all of us were reminded of how precious a thing human greatness is.

I see that as human beings we have two great ecstatic impulses in us. One is to participate in life, which ends in the giving of life. The other is to avoid death, which ends tragically in the giving of death. Life and death are in our gift, we can activate life and activate death. Gil Elliot

“The chief lesson I have learned in a long life,” he wrote at the end of his career, “is that the only way you can make a man trustworthy is to trust him; and the surest way to make him untrustworthy

They deliver new accounts of the nature and structure of human experience.

perceiving itself involves a form of understanding:

By seeing brains as restless, pro-active organs constantly driven to predict and help bring about the play of sensory stimulation, we may be glimpsing some of the core functionality that allows three pounds or so of mobile, body-based brain-meat, immersed in the human social and environmental swirl, to know and engage its world.

perception is controlled hallucination.3 Our brains try to guess what is out there, and to the extent that that guessing accommodates the sensory barrage, we perceive the world.

Let’s take the training signal first. One way to think about prediction-driven learning is to see it as offering an innocent (that is, ecologically feasible) form of supervised learning. More accurately, it offers a form of self-supervised learning, in which the ‘correct’ response is repeatedly provided, in a kind of ongoing rolling fashion, by the environment itself.

predictive forms of learning are particularly compelling because they provide a ubiquitous source of learning signals: if you attempt to predict everything that happens next, then every single moment is a learning opportunity. This kind of pervasive learning can for example explain how an infant seems to magically acquire such a sophisticated understanding of the world,

The prediction task, thus conceived, is a kind of bootstrap heaven. For example, to predict the next word in a sentence, it helps to know about grammar (and lots more too). But one way to learn a surprising amount about grammar (and lots more too) is to look for the best ways to predict the next words in sentences. This is just the kind of training that the world can naturally provide, since your attempts at prediction are soon followed by the soundform corresponding to (you guessed it) the next word in the sentence. You can thus use the prediction task to bootstrap your way to the grammar, which you then use in the prediction task in future.

prediction-driven learning, as it unfolds in these kinds of multilayer settings, tends to separate out interacting distal (or bodily) causes operating at varying scales of space and time. This is important since structured domains are ubiquitous in both the natural and human-built world. Language exhibits densely nested compositional structure in which words form clauses that form whole sentences that are themselves understood by locating them in the context of even larger linguistic (and non-linguistic) settings. Every visual scene, such as a city street, a factory floor, or a tranquil lake, embeds multiple nested structures (e.g., shops, shop doorways, shoppers in the doorways; trees, branches, birds on the branches, leaves, patterns on the leaves). Musical pieces exhibit structures in which overarching sequences are built from recurring and recombinant sub-sequences, each of which has structure of its own. The world, we might reasonably suggest, is known by us humans (and doubtless most other animals too) as a meaningful arena populated by articulated and nested structures of elements.

‘between raw data seeking an explanation (bottom-up) and hypotheses seeking confirmation (topdown)’

Low-level visual input [is] replaced by the difference between the input and a prediction from higher-level structures … higher-level receptive fields … represent the predictions of the visual world while lower-level areas … signal the error between predictions and the actual visual input.

authors concluded, exactly in line (as they note) with predictive processing, that ‘our results support an account of perception as a process of probabilistic inference … wherein integration of top-down and bottom-up information takes place at every level of the cortical hierarchy’

An interesting upshot of this is that many visual illusions, as mentioned in 1.12, may nonetheless be best understood as ‘optimal percepts’. In other words, given the structure and statistics of the world we inhabit, the optimal estimate of the worldly state (the estimate that represents the best possible take on the incoming signal, given what the system already knows) will be the one that, on some occasions, gets things wrong. A few local failures, then, are just the price we pay for being able to get things right, most of the time, in a world cloaked by ambiguity and noise.

The largest contributor to ongoing neural response is the ceaseless anticipatory buzz of downwards-flowing neural prediction that drives perception and action in a circular causal flow. Incoming sensory information is just one further factor perturbing those restless pro-active seas. As ever-active prediction engines these kinds of brains are not, fundamentally, in the business of ‘processing inputs’ at all. Rather, they are in the business of predicting their inputs. This pro-active neural strategy keeps us poised for action and (as we shall later see) allows mobile, embodied agents to intervene on the world, bringing about the kinds of sensory flow that keep them viable and fulfilled.

We are not cognitive couch potatoes idly awaiting the next ‘input’, so much as proactive predictavores—nature’s own guessing machines forever trying to stay one step ahead by surfing the incoming waves of sensory stimulation.

The perceptual problems that confront us in daily life vary greatly in the demands they make upon us. For many tasks, it is best to deploy large amounts of prior knowledge, using that knowledge to drive complex proactive patterns of gaze fixation, while for others it may be better to sit back and let the world do as much of the driving as possible. Which strategy (more heavily input-driven or more heavily expectation-driven) is best is also hostage to a multitude of contextual effects. Driving along a very familiar road in heavy fog, it can sometimes be wise to let detailed top-down knowledge play a substantial role. Driving fast along an unfamiliar winding mountain road, we need to let sensory input take the lead

It copes, PP suggests, by continuously estimating and re-estimating its own sensory uncertainty. Within the PP framework, these estimations of sensory uncertainty modify the impact of sensory prediction error. This, in essence, is the predictive processing model of attention. Attention, thus construed, is a means of variably balancing the potent interactions between top-down and bottom-up influences by factoring in their so-called ‘precision’, where this is a measure of their estimated certainty or reliability (inverse variance, for the statistically savvy). This is achieved by altering the weighting (the gain or ‘volume’, to

The only hypothesis that can endure over successive saccades is the one that correctly predicts the salient features that are sampled. … This means that the hypothesis prescribes its own verification and can only survive if it is a correct representation of the world. If its salient features are not discovered,

Indeed, it seems very likely that for most creatures acts of deliberate imagining (which I suspect may require the use of self-cueing via language) are simply impossible. But creatures that are thus enabled to perceive a structured world possess the neural resources to generate, from the top-down, approximations to those same sensory states. There thus emerges a deep duality between online perception (as enabled by the predictive processing architecture) and capacities for the endogenous generation of quasi-sensory states.

In the absence of the driving sensory signal, there is no stable ongoing information (in the form of reliable, estimated-as-high-precision, prediction error) about low-level perceptual detail available to constrain the system, and hence no pressure to create or maintain a stable hypothesis at the lower levels of processing.

The bulk of our story so far has focused upon the use of stored knowledge to predict what might be thought of as a kind of ‘rolling present’. Obviously, these processes of prediction depend heavily upon past experiences. But that dependence does not (yet) involve the actual recollection of past experiences. Instead, the past there exists only as it is crystallized into the agent-inaccessible form of altered probability density distributions used to meet and to organize the incoming sensory flow.

The brain, they conclude, is ‘a fundamentally prospective organ that is designed to use information from the past and the present to generate predictions about the future’ (Schacter et al., 2007, p. 660). This may be the deep reason why episodic memory is fragile, patchy, and reconstructive since ‘a memory system that simply stored rote records would not be well-suited to simulating future events’ (Schacter and Addis, 2007a, p. 27; see also Schacter and Addis, 2007b). Schacter and Addis, like Suddendorf and Corballis, are especially interested in the relations between episodic memory and a certain form of ‘personal, episodic’ future thinking: one in which we mentally project ourselves ahead in time by simulating our own possible future experiences. I think we may now flag this as another important and distinctive manifestation of what already looks, from the PP perspective, to be a quite fundamental alignment between perception, recall, and imagination. Such alignment flows directly, or so I have been arguing, from the basic prediction-and-generative-model-based perspective on perception: a perspective that may thus offer an even broader framework within which to conceptualize the relations between recall (of various kinds) and imagination (of various kinds). More generally, what seems to be emerging is a view of memory as intimately bound up with constructive processes of neural prediction and

PP offers an attractive ‘cognitive package deal’ in which perception, understanding, dreaming, memory, and imagination may all emerge as variant expressions of the same underlying mechanistic ploy—the ploy that meets incoming sensory data with matching top-down prediction

Your judgment in this matter is scarcely objective. This Channis, now, is ambitious—for himself. He is completely trustworthy—out of no loyalty but to himself. He knows that it is on my coattails that he rides and he would do anything to increase my power that the ride might be long and far and that the destination might be glorious. If he goes with you, there is just that added

Here the Mule saw no uniformity, but the primitive diversity of a strong mind, untouched and unmolded except by the manifold disorganizations of the universe. It writhed in floods and waves. There was caution on the surface, a thin, smoothing effect, but with touches of cynical ribaldry in the hidden eddies of it. And underneath there was the strong flow of self-interest and self-love, with a gush of cruel humor here and there, and a deep, still pool of ambition underlying all.

So he created his Foundations according to the laws of psychohistory, but who knew better than he that even those laws were relative? He never created a finished product. Finished products are for decadent minds.

Turbor interrupted. “I was on Kalgan, Anthor. I was there last week. If there was any Second Foundation on it, I’m mad. Personally, I think you’re mad.” The young man whirled on him savagely. “Then you’re a fat fool. What do you expect the Second Foundation to be? A grammar school? Do you think that Radiant Fields in tight beams spell out ‘Second Foundation’ in green and purple along the incoming spaceship routes? Listen to me, Turbor. Wherever they are, they form a tight oligarchy. They must be as well hidden on the world on which they exist, as the world itself is in the Galaxy as a whole.” Turbor’s jaw muscles writhed. “I don’t like your attitude, Anthor.” “That certainly disturbs me,” was the sarcastic response. “Take a look about you here on Terminus. We’re at the center—the core—the origin of the First Foundation with all its knowledge of physical science. Well, how many of the population are physical scientists? Can you operate an Energy Transmitting Station? What do you know of the operation of a hypernuclear motor? Eh? The number of real scientists on Terminus—even on Terminus—can be numbered at less than one percent of the population.

The First Foundation is left with the Mind Static device—a powerful weapon against us. That, at least, is not as it was before.” “A good point. But they have no one to use it against. It has become a sterile device; just as without the spur of our own menace against them, encephalographic analysis will become a sterile science. Other varieties of knowledge will once again bring more important and immediate returns. So this first generation of mental scientists among the First Foundation will also be the last—and, in a century, Mind

“You are said to be young. Thirty-five?” “Near enough. Thirty-four.” “In that case,” said Barr, with soft emphasis, “I could not begin better than by informing you regretfully that I am not in the possession of love charms, potions, or philtres. Nor am I in the least capable of influencing the favors of any young lady as may appeal to you.” “I have no need of artificial aids in that respect, sir.” The complacency undeniably present in the general’s voice was stirred with amusement. “Do you receive many requests for such commodities?” “Enough. Unfortunately, an uninformed public tends to confuse scholarship with magicianry, and love life seems to be that factor which requires the largest quantity of magical tinkering.”

“The Foundation itself told you they aimed at Galactic dominion?” “Told me!” Riose was violent again. “It was not a matter of telling me. The officials said nothing. They spoke business exclusively. But I spoke to ordinary men. I absorbed the ideas of the common folk; their ‘manifest destiny,’ their calm acceptance of a great future. It is a thing that can’t be hidden; a universal optimism they don’t even try to hide.”

“The laws of history are as absolute as the laws of physics, and if the probabilities of error are greater, it is only because history does not deal with as many humans as physics does atoms, so that individual variations count for more.

“This Mule is a madman. Can he defeat the universe?” He faltered and sat down to seize Randu’s wrist, “Our few survivors have reported the Mule’s poss … enemy’s possession of a new weapon. A nuclear-field depressor.” “A what?” Ovall said, “Most of our ships were lost because their nuclear weapons failed them. It could not have happened by either accident or sabotage. It must have been a weapon of the Mule. It didn’t work perfectly; the effect was intermittent; there were ways to neutralize—my dispatches are not detailed. But you see that such a tool would change the nature of war and, possibly, make our entire fleet obsolete.”

Ebling Mis’s house in a not-so-pretentious neighborhood of Terminus City was well known to the intelligentsia, literati, and just-plain-well-read of the Foundation. Its notable characteristics depended, subjectively, upon the source material that was read. To a thoughtful biographer, it was the “symbolization of a retreat from a nonacademic reality,” a society columnist gushed silkily at its “frightfully masculine atmosphere of careless disorder,” a University Ph.D. called it brusquely, “bookish, but unorganized,” a nonuniversity friend said, “good for a drink anytime and you can put your feet on the sofa,” and a breezy newsweekly broadcast, that went in for color, spoke of the “rocky, down-to-earth, no-nonsense living quarters of blaspheming, Leftish, balding Ebling Mis.”

“And you see a way out?” “No, but there must be one. Maybe Seldon made no provisions for the Mule. Maybe he didn’t guarantee our victory. But, then, neither did he guarantee defeat. He’s just out of the game and we’re on our own. The Mule can be licked.” “How?” “By the only way anyone can be licked—by attacking in strength at weakness.

“That has nothing to do with it,” replied Pirenne. “We are scientists.” And Hardin leaped through the opening. “Are you, though? That’s a nice hallucination, isn’t it? Your bunch here is a perfect example of what’s been wrong with the entire Galaxy for thousands of years. What kind of science is it to be stuck out here for centuries classifying the work of scientists of the last millennium? Have you ever thought of working onward, extending their knowledge and improving upon it? No! You’re quite happy to stagnate. The whole Galaxy is, and has been for space knows how long. That’s why the Periphery is revolting; that’s why communications are breaking down; that’s why petty wars are becoming eternal; that’s why whole systems are losing nuclear power and going back to barbarous techniques of chemical power. “If you ask me,” he cried, “the Galactic Empire is dying!”

“With the result that pure deduction is found wanting. Again what is needed is a little sprinkling of common sense.” “For instance?” “For instance, if he foresaw the Anacreonian mess, why not have placed us on some other planet nearer the Galactic centers? It’s well known that Seldon maneuvered the Commissioners on Trantor into ordering the Foundation established on Terminus. But why should he have done so? Why put us out here at all if he could see in advance the break in communication lines, our isolation from the Galaxy, the threat of our neighbors—and our helplessness because of the lack of metals on Terminus? That above all! Or if he foresaw all this, why not have warned the original settlers in advance that they might have had time to prepare, rather than wait, as he is doing, until one foot is over the cliff, before doing so? “And don’t forget this. Even though he could foresee the problem then, we can see it equally well now. Therefore, if he could foresee the solution then, we should be able to see it now. After all, Seldon was not a magician. There are no trick methods of escaping from a dilemma that he can see and we can’t.” “But, Hardin,” reminded Fara, “we can’t!” “But you haven’t tried. You haven’t tried once. First, you refused to admit that there was a menace at all! Then you reposed an absolutely blind faith in the Emperor! Now you’ve shifted it to Hari Seldon. Throughout you have invariably relied on

ceasing of the soft, distant purring of the hyperatomic

Sutt said cynically, “Very nicely put. So, to get back to the original point of discussion, what are your terms? What do you require to exchange your ideas for mine?” “You think my convictions are for sale?” “Why not?” came the cold response. “Isn’t that your business, buying and selling?” “Only at a profit,” said Mallow, unoffended. “Can you offer me more than I’m getting as is?”

blaster is a good weapon, but it can point both ways.’ ”

For a hundred years now, we’ve supported a ritual and mythology that is becoming more and more venerable, traditional—and immovable. In some ways, it isn’t under our control any more.” “In what ways?” demanded Mallow. “Don’t stop. I want your thoughts.” “Well, suppose one man, one ambitious man, uses the force of religion against us, rather than for us.” “You mean Sutt—” “You’re right. I mean Sutt. Listen, man, if he could mobilize the various hierarchies on the subject planets against the Foundation in the name of orthodoxy, what chance would we stand?

“Economic control worked differently. And to paraphrase that famous Salvor Hardin quotation of yours, it’s a poor nuclear blaster that won’t point both ways. If Korell prospered with our trade, so did we. If Korellian factories fail without our trade; and if the prosperity of the outer worlds vanishes with commercial isolation; so will our factories fail and our prosperity vanish. “And there isn’t a factory, not a trading center, not a shipping line that isn’t under my control; that I couldn’t squeeze to nothing if Sutt attempts revolutionary propaganda.

“So then,” said Jael, “you’re establishing a plutocracy. You’re making us a land of traders and merchant princes. Then what of the future?” Mallow lifted his gloomy face, and exclaimed fiercely, “What business of mine is the future? No doubt Seldon has foreseen it and prepared against it. There will be other crises in the time to come when money power has become as dead a force as religion is now. Let my successors solve those new problems, as I have solved the one of today.”

I didn’t become an always-rational, emotion-free decision-maker from thinking in bets. I still made (and make) plenty of mistakes. Mistakes, emotions, losing—those things are all inevitable because we are human. The approach of thinking in bets moved me toward objectivity, accuracy, and open-mindedness. That movement compounds over time to create significant changes in our lives.

In The Ascent of Man, scientist Jacob Bronowski recounted how von Neumann described game theory during a London taxi ride. Bronowski was a chess enthusiast and asked him to clarify. “You mean, the theory of games like chess?” Bronowski quoted von Neumann’s response: “‘No, no,’ he said. ‘Chess is not a game. Chess is a well-defined form of computation. You may not be able to work out the answers, but in theory there must be a solution, a right procedure in any position. Now, real games,’ he said, ‘are not like that at all. Real life is not like that. Real life consists of bluffing, of little tactics of deception, of asking yourself what is the other man going to think I mean to do. And that is what games are about in my theory.’”

We have to make peace with not knowing.

But getting comfortable with “I’m not sure” is a vital step to being a better decision-maker. We

The secret is to make peace with walking around in a world where we recognize that we are not sure and that’s okay. As we learn more about how our brains operate, we recognize that we don’t perceive the world objectively

The definition of “bet” is much broader. Merriam-Webster’s Online Dictionary defines “bet” as “a choice made by thinking about what will probably happen,” “to risk losing (something) when you try to do or achieve something” and “to make decisions that are based on the belief that something will happen or is true.”

How can we be sure that we are choosing the alternative that is best for us? What if another alternative would bring us more happiness, satisfaction, or money? The answer, of course, is we can’t be sure. Things outside our control (luck) can influence the result. The futures we imagine are merely possible. They haven’t happened yet. We can only make our best guess, given what we know and don’t know, at what the future will look like. If we’ve never lived in Des Moines, how can we possibly be sure how we will like it? When we decide, we are betting whatever we value (happiness, success, satisfaction, money, time, reputation, etc.) on one of a set of possible and uncertain futures. That is where the risk is. Poker players live in a world where that risk is made explicit. They can get comfortable with uncertainty because they put it up front in their decisions. Ignoring the risk and uncertainty in every decision might make us feel better in the short run, but the cost to the quality of our decision-making can be immense. If we can find ways to become more comfortable with uncertainty, we can see the world more accurately and be better for it.

Before language, our ancestors could form new beliefs only through what they directly experienced of the physical world around them.

The popular wisdom is that the smarter you are, the less susceptible you are to fake news or disinformation. After all, smart people are more likely to analyze and effectively evaluate where information is coming from, right? Part of being “smart” is being good at processing information, parsing the quality of an argument and the credibility of the source. So, intuitively, it feels like smart people should have the ability to spot motivated reasoning coming and should have more intellectual resources to fight it. Surprisingly, being smart can actually make bias worse. Let me give you a different intuitive frame: the smarter you are, the better you are at constructing a narrative that supports your beliefs, rationalizing and framing the data to fit your argument or point of view. After all, people in the “spin room” in a political

It’s a shame the social contract for poker players is so different than for the rest of us in this regard because a lot of good can result from someone saying, “Wanna bet?” Offering a wager brings the risk out in the open, making explicit what is already implicit (and frequently overlooked). The more we recognize that we are betting on our beliefs (with our happiness, attention, health, money, time, or some other limited resource), the more we are likely to temper our statements, getting closer to the truth as we acknowledge the risk inherent in what we believe.

Once we start doing that, we are more likely to recognize that there is always a degree of uncertainty, that we are generally less sure than we thought we were, that practically nothing is black and white, 0% or 100%. And that’s a pretty good philosophy for living.

When we field our outcomes as the future unfolds, we always run into this problem: the way things turn out could be the result of our decisions, luck, or some combination of the two. Just as we are almost never 100% wrong or right, outcomes are almost never 100% due to luck or skill. Learning from experience doesn’t offer us the orderliness of chess or, for that matter, folding and sorting laundry

Ideally, our happiness would depend on how things turn out for us regardless of how things turn out for anyone else. Yet, on a fundamental level, fielding someone’s bad outcome as their fault feels good to us. On a fundamental level, fielding someone’s good outcome as luck helps our narrative along.

however, that “the general conclusion from almost a century of

When we look at the people performing at the highest level of their chosen field, we find that the self-serving bias that interferes with learning often recedes and even disappears. The people with the most legitimate claim to a bulletproof self-narrative have developed habits around accurate self-critique.

The key is that in explicitly recognizing that the way we field an outcome is a bet, we consider a greater number of alternative causes more seriously than we otherwise would have. That is truthseeking.

When we treat outcome fielding as a bet, it pushes us to field outcomes more objectively into the appropriate buckets because that is how bets are won. Winning feels good. Winning is a positive update to our personal narrative. Winning is a reward. With enough practice, reinforced by the reward of feeling good about ourselves, thinking of fielding outcomes as bets will become a habit of mind.

Once we start actively training ourselves in testing alternative hypotheses and perspective taking, it becomes clear that outcomes are rarely 100% luck or 100% skill. This means that when new information comes in, we have options beyond unquestioned confirmation or reversal. We can modify our beliefs along a spectrum because we know it is a spectrum, not a choice between opposites without middle ground.

In the long run, the more objective person will win against the more biased person. In that way, betting is a form of accountability to accuracy.

Experts engaging in traditional peer review, providing their opinion on whether an experimental result would replicate, were right 58% of the time. A betting market in which the traders were the exact same experts and those experts had money on the line predicted correctly 71% of the time. A lot of people were surprised to learn that the expert opinion expressed as a bet was more accurate than expert opinion expressed through peer review, since peer review is considered a rock-solid foundation of the scientific method.

We are not naturally disinterested. We don’t process information independent of the way we wish the world to be.

Thinking in bets embodies skepticism by encouraging us to examine what we do and don’t know and what our level of confidence is in our beliefs and predictions.

Without embracing uncertainty, we can’t rationally bet on our beliefs. And we need to be particularly skeptical of information that agrees with us because we know that we are biased to just accept and applaud confirming evidence.

In the performance art of improvisation, the first advice is that when someone starts a scene, you should respond with “yes, and . . .” “Yes” means you are accepting the construct of the situation. “And” means you are adding to it.

Finally, focus on the future. As I said at the beginning of this book, we are generally pretty good at identifying the positive goals we are striving for; our problem is in the execution of the decisions

The best players think beyond the current hand into subsequent hands: how do the actions of this hand affect how they and their opponents make decisions on future hands? Poker players really live in this probabilistic world of, “What are the possible futures? What are the probabilities of those possible futures?” And they get very comfortable with the fact that they don’t know exactly because they can’t see their opponent’s cards. This is true of most strategic thinking. Whether it involves sales strategies, business strategies, or courtroom strategies, the best strategists are considering a fuller range of possible scenarios, anticipating and considering the strategic responses to each, and so on deep into the decision tree.

Her first study, of women enrolled in a weight-loss program, found that subjects “who had strong positive fantasies about slimming down . . . lost twenty-four pounds less than those who pictured themselves more negatively. Dreaming about achieving a goal apparently didn’t help that goal come to fruition. It impeded it from happening. The starry-eyed dreamers in the study were less energized to behave in ways that helped them lose weight.”

It may not feel so good during the planning process to include this focus on the negative space. Over the long run, however, seeing the world more objectively and making better decisions will feel better than turning a blind eye to negative scenarios. In a way, backcasting without premortems is a form of temporal discounting: if we imagine a positive future, we feel better now, but we’ll more than compensate for giving up that immediate gratification through the benefits of seeing the world more accurately, making better initial decisions, and being nimbler about what the world throws our way.

One of the things poker teaches is that we have to take satisfaction in assessing the probabilities of different outcomes given the decisions under consideration and in executing the bet we think is best. With the constant stream of decisions and outcomes under uncertain conditions, you get used to losing a lot.

Life, like poker, is one long game, and there are going to be a lot of losses, even after making the best possible bets. We are going to do better, and be happier, if we start by recognizing that we’ll never be sure of the future. That changes our task from trying to be right every time, an impossible job, to navigating our way through the uncertainty by calibrating our beliefs to move toward, little by little, a more accurate and objective representation of the world.