The Art of Thinking Clearly: Better Thinking, Better Decisions

See also Sunk Cost Fallacy (ch. 5); Action Bias (ch. 43)

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69
DISREGARD THE BRAND NEW
Neomania
How will the world look in fifty years? What will your everyday life be like? With
which items will you surround yourself?
People who pondered this question fifty years ago had fanciful notions of how
‘the future’ would look: highways in the skies. Cities that resemble glass worlds.
Bullet trains winding between gleaming skyscrapers. We would live in plastic
capsules, work in underwater cities, vacation on the moon and consume
everything in pill form. We wouldn’t conceive offspring any more; instead we
would choose children from a catalogue. Our best friends would be robots, death
would be cured and we would have exchanged our bikes for jetpacks long ago.
But hang on a second. Take a look around. You’re sitting in a chair, an
invention from ancient Egypt. You wear pants, developed about 5,000 years ago
and adapted by Germanic tribes around 750 B.C. The idea behind your leather
shoes comes from the last ice age. Your bookshelves are made of wood, one of
the oldest building materials in the world. At dinnertime, you use a fork, a well-
known ‘killer app’ from Roman times, to shovel chunks of dead animals and
plants into your mouths. Nothing has changed.
So, how will the world look in fifty years? In his book 
Antifragile
, Nassim Taleb
gives us a clue: assume that most of the technology that has existed for the past
fifty years will serve us for another half-century. And assume that recent
technology will be passé in a few years’ time. Why? Think of these inventions as
if they were species: whatever has held its own throughout centuries of
innovation will probably continue to do so in the future, too. Old technology has
proven itself; it possesses an inherent logic even if we do not always understand
it. If something has endured for epochs, it must be worth its salt. You can take this
to heart the next time you are in a strategy meeting. Fifty years into the future will
look a lot like today. Of course, you will witness the birth of many flashy gadgets
and magic contraptions. But most will be short-lived.
When contemplating the future, we place far too much emphasis on flavour-of-
the-month inventions and the latest ‘killer apps’, while underestimating the role of

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traditional technology. In the 1960s, space travel was all the rage, so we
imagined ourselves on school trips to Mars. In the 1970s, plastic was in, so we
mulled over how we would furnish our see-through houses. Taleb traces this
tendency back to the 
neomania
pitfall: the mania for all things shiny and new.
In the past, I sympathised with so-called ‘early adopters’, the breed of people
who cannot survive without the latest iPhone. I thought they were ahead of their
time. Now I regard them as irrational and suffering from a kind of sickness:
neomania
. To them, it is of minor importance if an invention provides tangible
benefits; novelty matters more.
So, don’t go out on a limb when forecasting the future. Stanley Kubrick’s cult
movie, 
2001: A Space Odyssey
, illustrates why you shouldn’t. Made in 1968, the
movie predicted that, at the turn of the millennium, the U.S. would have a
thousand-strong colony on the moon and that PanAm would operate the
commuter flights there and back. With this fanciful forecast in mind, I suggest this
rule of thumb: whatever has survived for X years will last another X years. Taleb
wagers that the ‘bullshit filter of history’ will sort the gimmicks from the game-
changers. And that’s one bet I’m willing to back.