That most predictions are wrong and that prevention, robustness and adaptability is way more important. I can’t help myself – I have to add one thing about the people who give out predictions on all kinds of things. Often these are the people who live in a world where their actions have no consequences and where their ideas and theories don’t have to agree with reality....“You only have to be right on a very, very few things in your lifetime as long as you never make any big mistakes…An investor needs to do very few things right as long as he or she avoids big mistakes.”

Darwin’s result was due in large measure to his working method, which violated all my rules for misery and particularly emphasized a backward twist in that he always gave priority attention to evidence tending to disconfirm whatever cherished and hard-won theory he already had. In contrast, most people early achieve and later intensify a tendency to process new and disconfirming information so that any original conclusion remains intact. They become people of whom Philip Wylie observed: “You couldn’t squeeze a dime between what they already know and what they will never learn.”