a.k.a. anticipation, pronoia/πρόνοια

If you often feel like you’ve been blindsided by life or “I should have seen that coming” then maybe you need to work on your foresight.

Complementary virtues

Contrasting vices

Virtues possibly in tension

How to acquire or strengthen it

Benjamin Franklin suggested chess as a good way of exercising the foresight-muscle. One of our group didn’t find chess helpful but suggested this exercise: write down the possibilities that immediately come to mind in some important upcoming situation and guess at probabilities for each of those possibilities. Then try really hard to come up with other possibilities you haven’t thought of yet… freak rainstorm, somebody gets called away to a funeral suddenly, luggage lost, all the “long tail” stuff. Just let your imagination go wild. Then go back and reassign the probabilities again with all these other options before you. It can be surprising how much they change!

The discipline of “project management” has developed some techniques for overcoming biases that make it difficult for people to estimate how long tasks will take, how many resources they will require, and so forth.

There are a variety of “cognitive biases” or “cognitive illusions” that make forecasting unnecessarily difficult. By knowing these, you can anticipate your errors and plan ways to ameliorate them.

There are cooperative techniques for improving forecasting, like using “prediction markets”.

Notes and links

TBD

Mentioned elsewhere

TBD

Inspirational quotes