Wisdom Of The Week

• Constant exposure to danger without its realization leaves human beings less concerned about what once terrified them, and therefore experience can have the paradoxical effect of having people learn to feel more immune than they should to the unlikely dangers that surround them.
• Humans have limited capabilities to store and recall history. They are sensitive to reconstructed memories that erve current beliefs and desires. They conserve belief by being less critical of evidence that seems to confirm prior beliefs than of evidence that seems to disconfirm them. They distory both observations and believes in order to make them consistent. They prefer simple causalities, ideas that place causes and effects close to one another and that match big effects with big causes. 
• Experience is rooted in a complicated causal system that can be described adequately only by a description that is too complex for the human mind. The more accurately reality is reflected, the less comprehensible the story, and the more comprehensible the story, the less realistic is it.
• Underlying many of these myths is a grand myth of human significance: the idea that humans can, through their individual and collective intelligence actions, influence the course of history to their advantage.
• The ambiguities of experience take many forms but can be summarized in terms of five attributes: 1) the causal structure of experience is complex; 2) experience is noisy; 3)history includes numerous examples of endogeneity, causes in which the properties of the world are affected by actions adapting to it; 4) history as it is known is constructed by participants and observes; 5) history is miserly in providing experience. It offers only small samples and thus large sampling eror in the inferences formed.

- Read rest of the brilliant post on FarnamStreet (from the book The Ambiguities of Experience by James March)