Refusal to admit error is an obvious ego-driven foible, but I keep coming back to the bigger issue of pretending we can accurately discern the future. We can acknowledge our inability to foresee what will happen. We can also undertake specific steps to try to have a better process for thinking about what we do and don’t know about the future in order to make better decisions, as Wharton School professor Phillip Tetlock has shown.
The sooner we understand what is and isn’t knowable, the better off we -- and our portfolios -- will be.
This column was provided by Bloomberg News.