How to Be an Expert in a Changing World

December 2014

If the world were static, we could have monotonically increasing
confidence in our beliefs. The more (and more varied) experience
a belief survived, the less likely it would be false. Most people
implicitly believe something like this about their opinions. And
they're justified in doing so with opinions about things that don't
change much, like human nature. But you can't trust your opinions
in the same way about things that change, which could include
practically everything else.

When experts are wrong, it's often because they're experts on an
earlier version of the world.

Is it possible to avoid that? Can you protect yourself against
obsolete beliefs? To some extent, yes. I spent almost a decade
investing in early stage startups, and curiously enough protecting
yourself against obsolete beliefs is exactly what you have to do
to succeed as a startup investor. Most really good startup ideas
look like bad ideas at first, and many of those look bad specifically
because some change in the world just switched them from bad to
good. I spent a lot of time learning to recognize such ideas, and
the techniques I used may be applicable to ideas in general.

The first step is to have an explicit belief in change. People who
fall victim to a monotonically increasing confidence in their
opinions are implicitly concluding the world is static. If you
consciously remind yourself it isn't, you start to look for change.

Where should one look for it? Beyond the moderately useful
generalization that human nature doesn't change much, the unfortunate
fact is that change is hard to predict. This is largely a tautology
but worth remembering all the same: change that matters usually
comes from an unforeseen quarter.

So I don't even try to predict it. When I get asked in interviews
to predict the future, I always have to struggle to come up with
something plausible-sounding on the fly, like a student who hasn't
prepared for an exam.
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