Prediction, not narration, is the real test of our understanding of the world. - Nassim Nicholas Taleb

We do not spontaneously learn that we don't learn that we don't learn. The problem lies in the structure of our minds: we don't learn rules, just facts, and only facts. Metarules (such as the rule that we have a tendency to not learn rules) we don't seem to be good at getting. We scorn the abstract; we scorn it with passion.

When you develop your opinions on the basis of weak evidence, you will have difficulty interpreting subsequent information that contradicts these opinions, even if this new information is obviously more accurate.

Corporations are in love with the idea of the strategic plan. They need to pay to figure out where they are going. Yet there is no evidence that strategic planning works — we even seem to have evidence against it. A management scholar, William Starbuck, has published a few papers debunking the effectiveness of planning — it makes the corporation option-blind, as it gets locked into a non-opportunistic course of action.