Humans may be the only species that can imagine an unknown future. But that doesn't mean we're any good at it.
Last week Americans were united by a shared experience of holding our breath. No matter who won the presidential election, we knew that about half the country would be celebrating and the other would be grieving. But as I write in my guest essay, those reactions are not an accurate gauge of what will happen. Predicting is hard. Even people who excel in forecasting tournaments are frequently wrong. On Election Day this year, a superforecaster who anticipated Donald Trump's rise in 2015 gave Kamala Harris an 87 percent chance of winning. Based on history, he factored incumbency as a strong positive, but in our turbulent times, it turned out to be a strong negative. After Trump won, the lexicographer Susie Dent posted that the word of the moment was "recrudescence": "the return of something terrible after a time of reprieve." For those who view Trump as a terrible leader and a terrible person, it's easy to fixate on everything that could go wrong in the short run. But we shouldn't overlook what might go right in the long run. For Democrats, this could be a "woke-up" call — a case for stopping the moral grandstanding that alienated many persuadable voters. It could be a burning platform to institute reforms that strengthen democracy, from term limits on the Supreme Court to new voting procedures. It could be a catalyst to educate the majority of voters who preferred Harris's policies to Trump's but didn't know them. It could be an opportunity to fight for policies that are widely supported by both conservatives and liberals, from criminal and mental illness background checks for gun sales to de-escalation training for police officers to mandatory cognitive exams for presidents. My essay is about the importance of accepting uncertainty about what's next. But there are actions we can take to reduce that uncertainty. As the computer scientist Alan Kay has said, "The best way to predict the future is to invent it."
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Saturday, November 16, 2024
Opinion Today: Think you know how the next four years will go? You don’t.
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