Sunday, January 15, 2017

An honest answer........................


     From his stint as a consultant he learned something valuable, however.  It seemed that a big part of a consultant's job was to feign total certainty about uncertain things.  In a job interview with McKinsey, they told him that he was not certain enough in his opinions.  "And I said it was because I wasn't certain.  And they said, 'We're billing five hundred grand a year, so you have to be sure of what you are saying.'"  The consulting firm that eventually hired him was forever asking him to exhibit confidence when, in his view, confidence was a sign of fraudulence.  They'd asked him to forecast the price of oil for clients, for instance.  "And then we would go to our client and tell them we could predict the price of oil.  No one can predict the price of oil.  It was basically nonsense."
     A lot of what people did and said when they "predicted" things, Morey now realized was phony: pretending to know things rather than actually knowing things.  There were a great many interesting questions in the world to which the only honest answer was, "It's impossible to know for sure."

-Michael Lewis,  The Undoing Project:  A Friendship That Changed Our Minds

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