How to predict the future?
Having a fascination with the present moment might be the only way to make better decisions about the future.
1.1. Decision making is an attempt to predict the future:
Every time we contemplate a decision, whether big or small, we are attempting to see into the future. In other words, the act of scrutinizing options and possible outcomes is a form of mental time travel. Can we see how this decision will play out? What are the odds we make the right decision? And, the single most important question: will I regret this decision?!? If I could somehow communicate with my future self, what would I want to know now to make the right decision today?
The future is largely unknowable and becomes more opaque the farther into it we attempt to peer. We know from complex adaptive systems that there are too many factors and relationships to know precise details of the future state of the Universe with any meaningful degree of accuracy – chaos ensures we’re always betting against the house.
Suggested reading - Complexity Science based Decision Making
We tend to think that we’re pretty good decision makers, largely thanks to our brain’s serial overconfidence (perhaps our survival as a species is predicated on having a heightened sense of control, however false, over the unknown). In reality, luck factors into our successes far more prominently than our brain wants to admit.
1.2. Why is it hard to predict the future?
One of the biggest inhibitors of good decision making is our brain’s inability to see things as nonlinear. We tend to think in an analog, incremental way, but the world itself is dominated by exponentials, power laws, and compounding – all of which we struggle to conceptualize. From an evolutionary perspective, linear thinking is likely a lot more energy efficient and less mentally overwhelming, which would be important for quick decision making to ensure day-by-day survival, as was required of our human ancestors for hundreds of thousands of years.
Our cultural fascination with time travel boils down to our own regret over how little we confront the actual present, and, more specifically, how we often fail to be fully aware and present when we make decisions. Having a fascination with the present moment might be the only way to make better decisions about the future.
“I have no interest in forecasting the future, only in creating it by acting appropriately in the present.” - Russell Ackoff
1.3. What Time travel can teach us?
1.3.1. Slowing Down Time
One of our biggest fears is that we’ll blink and life will be over. Indeed, our time on Earth isn’t even measurable in the timescale of the Universe. Imagine two paths connecting two points in time: one short path, where time is normal, and one long path, where time is stretched and slowed. Because time moves slower on the longer, time-dilated path, you have more time to react and adapt relative to your competition on the direct route, so when you both arrive [in the future], you have out-thought and out-innovated your competition.
This also highlights an important element of decision making: the often futile attempt to beat entropy. Every time we make a decision, we are putting in energy and effort in an attempt to fight the chaos of the unpredictable future. Entropy is the slow cooling of the Universe from high information to low information. As things become more disordered and contain less information, entropy rises. This phenomenon is also what gives a vector to how we experience the passage of time (e.g., instead of experiencing the future before the past).
Much of what society has done is to try to create temporary order despite the long-arching trend toward disorder in the Universe. We build buildings, cities, communities and companies – we take organized energy and reshape it into all sorts of literal and figurative structures. But, it’s only a temporary, local increase in order, and, in the long run, the information value is lost and entropy rises. The trend toward more disorder means that predicting the future is very hard, if not impossible.
On the plus side, we’ve got a lot of time before the Universe fully cools (so much so that our existence will register as a miniscule blip on the timeline), and we have lots of free energy to play around with in the meantime. However, if we can heighten our awareness of the entropy, it can help us be more aware and appreciative of the present. The more details we take in – the more we learn in each given moment – the slower we perceive the passage of time. This present awareness is the greatest advantage we can achieve in decision making.
1.3.2. Time loops:
In life, we often make the same decisions over and over leading to the same bad outcomes. To redeem ourselves and get unstuck from the loop requires a lightbulb moment of insight. It’s a sad reality of life that, while we can easily spot the flaws in other people's reasoning, we are terrible at seeing our own biases and blind spots, leading to years, or even a lifetime, of lost time while we try to sort out what’s wrong.
Sometimes the answer lies in asking better questions, but, typically, it’s about seeing what’s right in front of us – something obvious we fail to notice, like the fish that doesn’t know what water is. The key to becoming unstuck is usually a fresh perspective on a situation from a completely different angle (e.g., what you can achieve in team discussions). This idea is similar to Galilean relativity – you cannot fully grasp a system within which you are embedded; therefore, you need to put yourself outside of the system.
1.3.3. The time travel:
When actions in the past can impact the future, shifting through time can be very disorienting. Could we have done things differently? If so, how? If the alternative required greater courage/risk, would we have? Was there information we missed? Sometimes it feels like we have memories of different branches through time even though we only traveled one of them. While we can always benefit from identifying previous mistakes, an obsession with the past can detract from our awareness of the present and our focus on what is within our power to change, leading to missed opportunities to craft a better future. Pattern recognition can be dangerous in a complex, unpredictable world, where we are likely to frequently encounter emergent behavior rather than just history repeating. As such, it’s important to fight the urge to rely on the past, even though doing so can create a feeling of instability.
1.3.4. Fast forward to the Future:
This is a good example of our desire to fast forward to the future to see how today’s decisions might play out. This idea is similar to ‘work backward’ concept popular at Amazon: when they have an idea for a new product/service, they write the press release for its intended launch and then work backward to today when they are starting to develop it, asking the question: How did we get there from here? So, picture the world as you want it to be 10, 50, 100 years from now. Then ask: What step should I take in the present to put me on the path to making that future a reality?
1.4. Mindfulness in the context of decision making:
It’s important to distinguish between long-term desires and shorter-term plans. Intentions are the things that DON’T change. Intent should serve as a northstar throughout the winding paths life takes us down. To begin to move toward a new intention requires a plan and a step toward that plan. To take the step, we need a lot of confidence – after all, the path of least resistance is often to do exactly what we did yesterday. However, life acts like a huge noise field where it’s incredibly difficult to recognize the signal.
Mindfulness is central in these contexts. Identifying and avoiding cognitive bias helps us see and accept mistakes as we make them. An understanding of complexity crafts our ability to be humble. The ‘noisy’ nature of life often results in our initial step of confidence being slightly off course. Because we get off course, it’s important to balance confidence with the humility to admit mistakes and course correct...once a better direction becomes clearer.
“What would it be like to start a conversation with myself that my future self would thank me for? What would it be like to become the saintly ancestor of my future happiness?” - David Whyte
Oftentimes it’s not the answers we are looking for, but the right questions to ask. How can we converse with ourselves today in a way that we ask better questions and arrive at better decisions?
1.5. How to predict the future?
1.5.1. Slow down time:
Try and spot the figurative gravity wells and light speed hacks that allow your clock’s gears to turn more slowly than others’, which will create a huge advantage in decision making. This entails figuring out how you should be spending your time so that you are asking the right questions, gleaning the most useful information, and giving yourself time to analyze, digest, and connect dots. If reading the news or scrolling social media is not causing you to ask better questions, or if it’s pulling you out of your awareness of the present, then stop – it’s needlessly spinning your gears and speeding up time. Remember to focus on intentions. Focus on your awareness of the present and being extremely intentional about what you want to accomplish, and you will find you can achieve more in less time.
1.5.2. Focus on what won’t change:
This concept is often referenced from Jeff Bezos who famously said his primary focus at Amazon was on what won’t change: people will always want more selection, lower prices, and faster delivery. Rather than focus on the competition, Amazon tried to continue to improve on these three dynamics of their ecommerce business. While we spend a lot of our time desiring to know what will change when we make decisions, often inverting the problem and seeing what is unlikely to change is more useful. So, fast forward through time or imagine an array of different multiverses. What remains invariant despite changing time/space and the unpredictable future paths?
1.5.3. Perform pre-mortems:
This exercise helps you determine what could go wrong before it happens. A pre-mortem is a way to try and picture yourself in the future and work backward to decisions made today. It’s similar in concept to Jeff Bezos’ regret minimization framework: “I wanted to project myself forward to age 80 and say, ‘Okay, now I'm looking back on my life. I want to have minimized the number of regrets I have.’”
1.6. Investing as an example
Let’s consider the example of investing. When you consider investing in a stock, transport yourself into the future and guess the answers in following scenarios.
You didn’t buy enough. Why? What questions/data would have clarified your understanding of the potential?
You should not have bought it. Why did you? What did you miss about the range of outcomes, the degree of predictions forced by the valuation, etc.?
Similarly, if you are contemplating selling a stock, try to answer these questions as your future self:
You regretted selling it and ended up buying it back at a higher price. Why?
You never regretted selling. What negatives were there that you were right about? Often, the question isn’t about buying or selling outright, but getting to the truth of what position size an investment should be.
This exercise may sound simplistic and obvious, but the key is to make time travel feel as real as possible to fully experience the thoughts and emotions of your future self. Making mistakes in investing (and life in general) is personal and painful – it’s a gut punch of regret. So, we try to literally vault ourselves into the future and see what it feels like to be selling a stock at a major loss – it’s a horrible feeling, how could we have avoided it? The answer can only be in the present. What information are we missing today, or, more likely, what questions are we failing to ask? What is it about the range of outcomes that we need to better grasp? Imagine you have an actual time machine to travel five years into the future. Imagine which path you took through time to get there and which ones you avoided.
1.7. The Importance of Awareness
One of the most freeing concepts that can improve decision making is: it’s worthless to dwell on regret because there’s no going back. Whatever happened, happened, and it’s now permanently out of your control. So, take a few moments to learn what you can about the factors that influenced your decision and then put it out of your mind. There are thousands of factors that can play into decisions over which you have no control.
Neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky shares some devastatingly great insights on this concept in his book Behave. Here is a passage listing just a few of the unconscious influences on decision making: “blood glucose levels; the socioeconomic status of your family of birth; a concussive head injury; sleep quality and quantity; prenatal environment; stress and gluticocorticoid levels; whether you’re in pain; if you have Parkinson’s disease and which medication you’ve been prescribed; your Dopamine D4 receptor gene variant; if you suffered childhood abuse; how much cognitive load you’ve borne in the last few minutes; your MAO-A gene variant; if you’re infected with a particular parasite; if you have the gene for Huntington’s disease; lead levels in your tap water when you were a kid; if you live in an individualist or collectivist culture; if you’re a heterosexual male and there’s an attractive woman around; if you’ve been smelling the sweat of someone who is frightened. On and on. ” So, focus on what you can control – your awareness of the present.
1.8. Discover the Intelligent contained within self-awareness that is beyond thoughts.
One of the most important developments in human evolution is the ability to think. However, an even more important development is the ability to grow beyond thinking. To do this, we need to uncover the intelligence contained within awareness itself, an intelligence beyond thoughts. Consider the innocence of a young child at an adult party, who asks the group of adults what they would do in this situation: ‘Imagine you are surrounded by hungry tigers with a cliff behind you. What would you do?’ Each adult comes up with a different creative solution, but the boy just shakes his head. So they turn to him and ask, ‘What would you do?’ The boy smiles and says, ‘I’d simply stop imagining.’
1.9. The Grandfather Paradox:
Altering the past means you might not be the same person, who in the future goes back to alter the past (literally interpreted, if you travel back in time to kill your grandfather, you would never be born to travel back in time to kill your grandfather, therefore you would be born, etc.) Making decisions is also a paradox: we desire to see into a future that we can never truly know. These paradoxes cannot be resolved. Instead, we’ve made the case for cultivating awareness in the present, which should ease the dual burdens of decision remorse and wanting to know the unknowable/predict the unpredictable. While we can harness deliberate and intentional mental time travel to our advantage, our obsession with the impossible is just a mental trap that drains energy and shifts our attention away from the present. And, the actual present is our only window of opportunity to make decisions that positively shape the future. By cultivating awareness, trying to slow down time, and finding the right questions to ask we can attempt to create a landscape for a good decision making that allows us to take the next incremental step toward a better future.
Reference: https://www.nzscapital.com/news/time-travel