Meditations and Learnings

Meditations and Learnings

The Information Paradox

Counter-intuitively, with more information, many people become worse at making predictions. With each increment of data, we create new hypotheses and suck at throwing away outdated models. The natural human predilection to bias confirming evidence and dismissing negative evidence means these wrong hypotheses are carried through and compounded. Our ideas are “sticky” in this sense - once we’ve formed them, we’ll rarely change our minds. A lesson from this is that we should hold off before developing our theories. Even when experts have more information, they tend to grow more confident in their initial estimations rather than more accurate.