What's Irrelevant?

For centuries, we humans arrogantly thought that we were at the center of the universe. Our experience constantly confirmed and reinforced our belief that planet Earth is flat, it doesn’t move, and everything else revolves around it.

We simply assumed that what we see must be what is.

But that experience turned out to be unreliable and irrelevant. To grasp our actual situation, we had to develop methods and technologies that let us see beyond our experience. Without an accurate assessment of our actual place, we’d be stuck with the wrong know-how derived from experience, and further reinforced by more experience.

In life, what we observe shapes what we know, even when it contains irrelevant details that lead to misperceptions and illusions. For example, our first impressions are usually not as relevant as we think they are, especially when diagnosing complex situations. Yet we feel compelled to rely on them. Also, while we often blindly trust our personal experience, it can actually be quite limited, and not generalize as much as we hope.

In Moneyball, author Michael Lewis explores how personal experience is unreliable when judging performance in baseball.

"People always thought their own experience was typical when it wasn't. There was also a tendency to be overly influenced by a guy's most recent performance: what he did last was not necessarily what he would do next. […] The human mind played tricks on itself when it relied exclusively on what it saw, and every trick it played was a financial opportunity for someone who saw through the illusion to the reality."

In the end, a solution to this problem involved employing algorithms that go beyond experience-based personal judgments.

And under high degrees of uncertainty, the past can be irrelevant to predict the future. In fact, experience can even get in the way of foreseeing and mitigating unprecedented disasters and disruptive innovations. For instance, when we try to predict the implications of a pandemic like COVID-19 or a technology like genome editing, we can’t simply rely on our individual or collective experience.

This is why, in Range, journalist David Epstein emphasizes the importance of “thinking outside experience” to have a better understanding of a complicated decision. If we don’t, we can end up convinced that the earth is flat, or that we have oracle-like abilities to easily diagnose complex situations and predict highly uncertain events.