I’m getting hugely behind again. One of my kids is now sick, so after 8-weeks of school holidays he managed to be back at school for a day before he was off again.

Rushing to get something done for a workshop in Luxembourg this week and another in Switzerland next and then need to proofread Future Vision and read material for the next issue of What’s Next. Future Babble is 90% read (thoroughly recommended), as is Grace by Jeff Buckley, which I’ve been listening to a lot.

Excerpt from Future Babble:

“As for why we believe expert predictions, the answer lies ultimately in our hard-wired aversion to uncertainty. People want to know what’s happening now and what will happen in the future, and admitting we don’t know can be profoundly disturbing. So we try to eliminate uncertainty however we can. We see patterns where there are none. We treat random results as if they are meaningful. And we treasure stories that replace the complexity and uncertainty of reality with simple narratives about what’s happening and what will happen. Sometimes we create these stories ourselves, but, even with the human mind’s bountiful capacity for self-delusion, it can be hard to fool ourselves into thinking we know what the future holds for the stock market, the climate, the price of oil, or a thousand other pressing issues. So we look to experts. They must know. They have Ph.D.s, prizes, and offices in major universities. And thanks to the news media’s preference for the simple and dramatic, the sort of expert we are likely to hear from is confident and conclusive. They know what will happen; they are certain of it. We like that because that is how we want to feel. And so we convince ourselves that these wise men and women can do what wise men and women have never been able to do before. Fundamentally, we believe because we want to believe.”

Lot’s more from Future Babble via the New York Times here