Acquisition Of Skills Requires A Regular Environment,

Psychologists Really Aim To Be Scientists, White-coat Stuff, With Elaborate Statistics, Running Experiments.

If There Is Time To Reflect, Slowing Down Is Likely To Be A Good Idea.

We Were Required To Predict A Soldier's Performance In Officer Training And In Combat, But We Did So By Evaluating His Behavior Over One Hour In An Artificial Situation. This Was A Perfect Instance Of A General Rule That I Call Wysiati, "what You See Is All There Is." We Had Made Up A Story From The Little We Knew But Had No Way To Allow For What We Did Not Know About The Individual's Future, Which Was Almost Everything That Would Actually Matter. When You Know As Little As We Did, You Should Not Make Extreme Predictions Like "he Will Be A Star."

The Idea That The Future Is Unpredictable Is Undermined Every Day By The Ease With Which The Past Is Explained.

After A Crisis We Tell Ourselves We Understand Why It Happened And Maintain The Illusion That The World Is Understandable. In Fact, We Should Accept The World Is Incomprehensible Much Of The Time.