Welcome to the first edition of Informed. I hope you agree that it’s an interesting title and one that poses some interesting questions. Writing a hundred years ago, Bertrand Russell famously illustrated the problem of being informed with a story about a turkey that noted that every time the sun rose, come 9am, he was fed, watered and allowed out to play.
Some turkeys might have been content with a single observation, but this one was familiar with matters of epistemology and took pains to check his data. He gathered a series of observations throughout the summer until he accepted he had sufficient evidence to know that each and every day, without fail, the sun would rise and at 9am he would invariably and inevitably be fed, watered and allowed out to play.
Paul Wharton, Chief Investment Strategist at Deutsche Bank Private Wealth Management UK, explains why it is always wise to guard against the unexpected
On Christmas Eve the sun rose as usual – and at 9am his throat was cut.
For a time there was a belief that underlying the behaviour of mankind was a set of natural laws that, once discovered, would lead to the capacity to make valid predictions regarding the path of social and economic development in the same way a chemist or physicist can reliably presage the behaviour of molecules, compounds and the planetary motions.
Friedrich Hayek demolished such pretensions in his 1974 acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize in Economics, observing: “The recognition of the insuperable limits to his knowledge ought to teach the student of society a lesson of humility which should guard him against becoming an accomplice in men’s fatal striving to control society.”
Hayek was developing a principle Keynes had noted earlier with his comment that most politicians are in thrall to some “long-dead theoretician”. Richard Feynman, one of the 20th century’s greatest intellects, made a more prosaic but perhaps more telling comment in respect of the “experts” he kept seeing on TV.
“There are myths and pseudo-science all over the place,” he lamented. “You see, I have the advantage of having found out how difficult it is to really know something – how careful you have to be about checking the experiments, how easy it is to make mistakes and fool yourself. I know what it means to know something.”
In other words, make sure you understand what you can know; know that you know it; and beware how you use it, because it may lead in unexpected directions.
Learning from experience, after all, isn’t foolproof. No matter how many white swans you see, you cannot conclude black swans don’t exist. To say the least, this makes planning for the future tricky.
The relative brevity of human life doesn’t help. For most of history a given generation has lived in much the same way as its predecessor and, indeed, its