What caught my eye this week.
A key trait as an investor is the ability to change your mind. That’s because we’re all wrong about stuff, all the time.
I don’t mean you that should flip stocks on a whim, or pick-and-mix this season’s asset allocation like you’re choosing a t-shirt for the beach.
Staying power is crucial, whether you’re a passive investor or you’re chasing market-beating returns for your sins.
But being able to change your mind is equally vital.
It’s estimated the best stock-pickers only get about 60% of their calls right.
The high-speed traders at Renaissance Capital reportedly generated billions by being right just 51% of the time.
If you want to make money when you’re so often wrong, it helps to admit it.
What would change your mind?
I love the Financial Times and I’m a very satisfied subscriber.
But boy have its pundits been wrong about Tesla.
For the better part of a decade I’ve read snarky comments in the FT about Tesla’s valuation, its shareholders, and the showmanship of Elon Musk.
Some concerns were valid, sure. But when during Tesla’s ascent should the skeptics have upgraded their thesis?
When Tesla shipped its first electric car?
Maybe when it rolled out the mass-market Model 3?
Or when Tesla turned profitable?
Or when it achieved its goal in 2020 of producing 500,000 vehicles in a year?
Now Tesla is valued at $1 trillion. The FT covered that. But its scribes couldn’t resist joking that the new 100,000 car deal with Hertz that drove this latest price spurt was mostly about burnishing the latter’s meme credentials.
In a more balanced piece yesterday the paper conceded:
Out of the Musk limelight, Tesla has been building an increasingly solid business.
Good for them. Griping all the way to $1 trillion wasn’t a good look. But better late than never to think again.
Sinking feeling
At least journalists don’t have their money on the line.
Hedge funds have lost billions shorting Tesla stock.
It was always a dumb short – as I mentioned in my post on my own Tesla woes – because Elon Musk had super-rich Silicon Valley friends who’d said they’d back the company with capital in a heartbeat.
Some of those shorting Tesla even called it a fraud after it made what’s become the best-selling premium sedan in the world. At that point they should have admitted they didn’t understand what was going on, and stood aside.
There’s no shame in it – and it’s easier on your wallet.
Tesla has a mammoth task ahead, and even as a shareholder I agree its valuation looks stretched. But you have to appreciate everything it’s doing right before you can bet against what could go wrong.
If you don’t understand something then you shouldn’t be shorting it.
Big mistakes
All this is more easily written than done.
As a naughty active investor with thousands of companies to misunderstand, I get six things wrong before breakfast.
Yet passive investors can go off the rails, too.
Some concede they know no better than the market and so pursue an indexing approach – a noble strategy – but then call bonds a bubble waiting to burst for a decade, or shun US stocks for years, seeing them as overvalued.
One huge danger with these big macro calls is that the sunk cost of being so wrong so far makes you desperate to eventually be right to fix things. Such mind games can take your portfolio far away from consensus.
Conversely, another risk is actually admitting you got it wrong, changing position, but doing it so late in a bout of market mania that you end up taking all of the pain of a correction with little of the previous gains.
Avoiding using your feet for target practice like this is another subtle benefit of an automated approach like our Slow & Steady Passive Portfolio.
Wrong way, right turn
None of this is to say that the market doesn’t get it wrong sometimes too.
Over on his Compound Advisors blog this week, Charlie Bilello posted a great selection of times when the wisdom of the crowd proved more witless.
Of course those examples are so striking because we know how they ended.
Those investing on the way up – or down – had no idea where the story would finish. All they saw was a one-way ticket, right until the road ran out.
So for my part I strive to be ready to change my mind on a dime. ‘Strong convictions, weakly held’ is the way the cool kids put it.
If that’s difficult with investing, then take heart that at least it’s easier than with politics or as it transpires epidemiology…
Have a great weekend, and don’t forget that business with the clocks!
From Monevator
Making monthly repayments on a repayment mortgage is a form of saving – Monevator
How to improve the 60/40 portfolio – Monevator
From the archive-ator: Investing for 100-year-olds – Monevator
News
Note: Some links are Google search results – in PC/desktop view you can click to read the piece without being a paid subscriber. Try privacy/incognito mode to avoid cookies. Consider subscribing if you read them a lot!1
OBR puts permanent hit to GDP from Brexit at 4%; worse than Covid – BBC & Guardian
Deal to rescue seventh largest energy supplier Bulb in doubt – Guardian
Budget: key points at-a-glance – BBC
Budget: what you need to know – Be Clever With Your Cash
Budget: the small print – Which
Budget: how does it add up for me? [Calculator tool] – Guardian
Budget: reality bites as Tories embrace big-state, fiscal conservatism [Search result] – FT
Budget: millions will be worse off in 2022, says IFS – BBC
Budget: all the official policy and spending documents [PDFs] – GOV UK
Crippling shortages and rising prices hit UK economy [Search result] – FT
Products and services
The days of super-cheap mortgages are ending – Guardian
Games consoles, laptops, and smartphones in short supply for Christmas – ThisIsMoney
Portfolio Charts has had a spruce-up – Portfolio Charts
Open a SIPP with Interactive Investor and pay no SIPP fee for six months. Terms apply – Interactive Investor
Junior ISAs vs Premium bonds: which wins over 18 years? – ThisIsMoney
Crypto wallet Coinbase goes offline for hours, again – Yahoo Finance
Sign-up to Freetrade via my link and we can both get a free share worth between £3 and £200 – Freetrade
Junior Isas are ten. How much is your child’s worth? [Search result] – FT
Homes for hosting a Halloween party, in pictures – Guardian
Comment and opinion
Risking, fast and slow – Of Dollars and Data
The most important chart in investing – Banker on FIRE
How to improve your finances, no matter how messy they are – The Cut
Let the market worry for you – The Irrelevant Investor
Board, not bored – Quietly Saving
“I spent 44 years studying retirement. And then I retired…” [Possible paywall] – WSJ
Q&A with the author of Trillions asks: why is stock-picking getting more popular despite the evidence that index investing is best? – CNBC
Is hyperinflation on the way? [No.] – Pragmatic Capitalism
Rich or wealthy? [Podcast Q&A with Morgan Housel] – Art of Manliness
How funds pick their benchmarks [US but relevant] – Advisor Perspectives
The proposed US billionaire tax: worst tax ever? – Musings on Markets
Naughty corner: Active antics
15 favourite investment patterns – Intrinsic Investing
One skill that sets an investor apart is creativity – Enterprising Investor
A history of wealth creation in the US equity market – Alpha Architect
A deep dive into UK retailer cum distribution platform Next – John Kingham
Profitability and value together drive a stock’s returns – Verdad
A bit more on Bitcoin mini-special
The bull case for Bitcoin – Morningstar
Wealth management money will come for crypto – A Wealth of Common Sense
An excellent primer on why the new Bitcoin futures ETF is best left to short-term traders – Morningstar
A momentum trading strategy for Bitcoin – Dual Momentum
Covid corner
Public support for ‘do everything possible’ at a record low – New Statesman
Are UK daily cases set to plummet, even without Plan B? – BBC
Mask wearing at the heart of the British Covid divide [Search result] – FT
How does Covid end? The world is watching the UK to find out – Guardian
Kindle book bargains
How Money Works: The Facts Visually Explained by DK – £1.99 on Kindle
Island on the Edge by Anne Cholawo – £1.29 on Kindle
Quit like a Millionaire by Kirsty Shen and Bryce Leung – £0.99 on Kindle
Back to Nature by Chris Packham – £1.99 on Kindle
Environmental factors
‘Planned’ fuel duty rise frozen for 12th year in a row [On eve of COP 26…] – Independent
Make or break: here’s what’s at stake at COP 26 – Guardian
How one woman protected millions of acres – Reasons to be Cheerful
Decarbonization by the numbers [Podcast] – Exponential View
African elephants are evolving to lose their tusks – Smithsonian
Tycoons created the dinosaur – Nautilus
Unfreezing the ice age: the truth about humanity’s deep past – Guardian
Off our beat
How to level up – Raptitude
Job-seekers are ghosting would-be employers as the tables are turned – Slate
Twenty years ago Grand Theft Auto III changed games forever – The Ringer
The grim threat of ‘spiking’ on a night out – BBC
Internal versus external benchmarks – Morgan Housel
The last great mystery of the mind – Guardian
In conversation: Dave Grohl – Vulture
And finally…
“Louis Bachelier is arguably the index fund’s intellectual godfather. But economics and finance are fields where everyone stands on the shoulders of giants.”
– John Wrigglesworth, Trillions: How a Band of Wall Street Renegades Invented the Index Fund
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I was wrong about Tesla and still am (alongside crypto, Tech stocks) but besides what’s in my index funds, the ascent or boom hasn’t hurt me that much and it can continue to grow in valuation to a gizillion for all I care.
Mk,.if I’d shirted it I’d care a lot more but I’m passive (mostly) and passive means your emotions should be passive too.
We aren’t good at valuing things – look at the market over the last 2 years, black swans, doom,.despair,. hope. Somebody has made a killing (I’ve not done too badly myself).
But if there is one thing financial professional types are Hopeless at his valuing a company that is growing exponentially! And who’s biggest supporters are fanboi memeshare investors.
(I’m prepared to be wrong for the long term btw. It’s not a matter of changing my mind, it’s sticking to the plan.)
Are you sure that Tesla is profitable?
There’s an article a couple of days ago in the Telegraph’s business section which calls it the trillion-dollar company, that makes no money.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2021/10/27/tesla-1-trillion-company-doesnt-make-money/
Your information is news to me, and I’m ready to change my mind, but there seen to be different opinions here.
I changed my mind about American stocks and was late to the party, I’m probably still under exposed to them now, time will tell on that front, but I’m comfortable with that. I keep changing my mind around crypto but don’t need the volatility so if I did take a punt, it would be a small one. Never changed my mind significantly about China, never found reason to invest in a fully exposed ETF yet, although the argument to do so has occasionally been persuasive
JimJim
Well, atleast remoaners admitted that mass unemployment after brexit isn’t happening. Instead they are now focussing on shortage of workers.
Soon they’ll admit that wages are indeed going up for low wage workers. Am sure they’ll fish out an article saying immigration was neutral (where the small print says the rich were all off and poor were crushed by immigration).
Next step: scaremongering on inflation without admitting it was due to wages going up.
Another thought provoking article, thank you guys.
In my usual trawl around to learn more I’ve come across a number of articles which if I understand correctly talk about how bond yields can be in some sense predicted using macro factors and bond duration yields short bond verses long bond yield gap). Also looking at how macro factors (unemployment, GDP, etc.) may provide a method when to switch (or hold) between conventional bonds to index linked bonds.
In my usual fashion of putting 2+2 together to get 5 and knowing very little about bonds except checking out your article showing how rising interest rates affect bond duration, I’m wondering if any of the bond experts would be prepared to offer a dummies guide about if different bonds can be forecasted (a better choice of word than predicted) using freely available information.
Example, is it possible to know when you ‘could’ look at adjusting duration or go from conventional gilts to index linked versions or moving to global bonds, etc. Or possibly move the amount from bonds to more equity (if you’re happy with the risk/return elements). I know it’s more active but I do like to understand how things might work.
Bonds really are still a bit of mystery to me so get a bit lost. I know what I’m asking maybe complete folly or ill-advised but I’d just like to know anyone elses take on this as I simply don’t know. I realise there are bond articles on monevator but is it possible to have an all encompassing bond primer for dummies that brings all things bond related together and what’s just snake oil.
Thanks again guys!
Did even Renaissance Capital hit the buffers recently?
The book was a rip roaring read completely reinforcing …….
a ) how extremely limited were my investing abilities compared with these guys
b ) sitting tight through thick and thin in my global index trackers was was the right investing technique for me
So it has proved-so far!
xxd09
“Remoaners” !!!!!!!!!!
I never understood the folk that accept “they know nothing” so opt to index but then make these macroeconomic calls on bonds or tilting jn favour of Japan over the USA. Just buy the world index and stick with it if you truly believe “you know nothing”.
@Jonathan — You write:
As I’m sure you’re aware, Tesla reported has reported profitable quarters in 2021, depending on how you measure profits. Reasonable people can disagree about whether it was ‘actually’ profitable. I have zero interest in the debate here, because public Internet discussions of that sort of thing have proven (for all of us I’m sure over time) to be huge disagreements about fundamental issues rather than interesting dissection of the minutia. 🙂
I will instead make a few general observations.
Firstly, people argue about the nature of Tesla’s revenues (e.g. emissions credits) or the way it fueled its growth (ebullient capital raising on the back of over-ambitious targets) as if the people who ran the company didn’t realize they had access to revenues from carbon credits or to a super-charismatic genius founder. Others say things like “well it only scaled so rapidly because it got its first factory on the cheap”.
But guess what — all those things were true. So criticising them or calling the company a fraud or a sham (not you here, others) is at best self-defeating and at worse foolish.
Maybe if Tesla didn’t have seemingly limitless access to capital it would have pursued a different path to growth and been a different company. Maybe if it hadn’t got a great deal on its Fremont factory it would have partnered at some point with a legacy manufacturer? Maybe if it had run out of money in the early days despite all this it would have sold 50% of its shares to Larry Page?
Who knows? The point is it pursued the (risky) strategy it did because those levers were there to be pulled. Self-evidently with a market cap of $1 trillion as one of the largest companies in the world and a stock that has been a multi-millionaire maker, it did something right. 😉
One could not like the way it did business. One could not buy the stock. But to *short* the stock because it was growing fast and winning acclaim in a way that one didn’t personally approve of was, well, a widow-maker of a trade.
More generally, many bearish onlookers have looked at fast-growth technology-enabled — usually, but not always, software/Internet companies — for 20 years repeatedly missing the big picture.
Where are the profits, they’ve asked? It doesn’t make any money, they’ve tutted.
These people appear to believe their edge in the market is that they can tell a negative number from a positive number at the bottom of a profit/loss statement. Is that really an informational edge? Or have they been missing something — for two decades?
The reality is that this isn’t the 1990s. The past two decades have seen a combination of ‘everything moving to software’ and an unprecedented opportunity to scale globally (mostly due to the Internet and more latterly smartphones, but also very cheap and plentiful capital) that has enabled the right companies with the right product and sufficiently aggressive managements to absolutely pummel the gas pedal in a race for global scale and a winner-takes-most endgame.
Should Netflix not have borrowed billions for years and instead striven for profitability at a local scale first — and only then built out its global ambitions and its own content creation?
Obviously not, in retrospect to cynics but as foreseen by management.
Should Amazon have stuck to books until that made money and not got involved in selling on-demand computing power to third-parties?
Obviously not, in retrospect to cynics but as foreseen by management.
Should Tesla have stuck to making little niche cars for the super-wealthy until after maybe 25 years it was hopefully making enough of them to post a profit to the satisfaction of old-school investors? (Not that this would have happened, it would surely have been out-competed as the big auto makers belatedly transitioned to EV and it probably would have gone bust).
(Tesla is trickier because it doesn’t *seemingly* involve the scale economies enable by the Internet and the collapse in the price/accessibility of Compute. Although the valuation says that isn’t true, incidentally, because its market cap almost certainly partly turns on self-driving fleets of robotaxis…)
I could go on and on with various examples.
This doesn’t mean these companies are risk-less — far from it! — and it doesn’t mean they will prove good investments indefinitely.
In particular — and even leaving aside the ultra-competitive battle on the way to become a semi-monopoly in this or that niche that could do for any individual outfit — I’m certain the usual investing pattern of a highly-rated stock eventually going ex-growth and seeing its multiples collapse will eventually call for all these companies, whether gracefully or during some sort of crash.
To be honest it could happen next week for all I know. You could halve the valuation of nearly all these US tech growth stock darlings, and I wouldn’t particularly blink (although I might weep, as I still have about 25% of my portfolio in them, even after selling down etc). I don’t know even close to exactly what they’re worth, and I don’t think anyone else does. Embracing that has been part of the shift an investor’s mindset has needed to make, post-2005 or so.
But thinking they may well be overvalued is a long long way from arguing they’re worth very little or some sort of chimera — which innumerable critics who’ve spent three seconds thinking about them have done for 15 years — when it reality they are enormous revenue-generating businesses bringing immense value to their users and redefining the economics of sector after sector.
Anyway, after all that the “it doesn’t make a profit” is the most easily dismissed criticism in my view I’m afraid. It’s up there with the “we should make our own cars so the UK can be more successful” rationale for Brexit.
It sounds very sensible, but it is in fact counter to even the simplest investing tenets. (No offense meant here, I’m sure you wouldn’t extend it indefinitely in every direction etc, your concern is with Tesla. I’m just illustrating the wider point).
I give my nephew £100 to open a lemonade stand and he spends £75 on a stand and £25 on lemons, water, and sugar and he opens the stand one Saturday at midday.
I show up at half-past twelve and ask for my money back.
I haven’t got it, he says.
Why, I ask, are you not profitable?
Well he’s done his sums and he can see that by the end of Sunday he will indeed be profitable on a run-rate basis, backing out the cost of his lemons and his time. And by the end of the month he’ll have made back enough to cover the cost of the stand, too.
But right now he’s sold three cups of lemonade for £4.50.
He certainly can’t repay me my £100.
Not even a down payment because he wants to buy more lemons, and also to hire an assistant so he can take loo breaks.
“Charlatan!” I cry. “Fraud! Shameless promoter!”
I call his mother who takes him tearfully home, and I content myself with some very expensive lemonade.
A lemonade stands’ market opportunity is defined by the ultimate returns from building and staffing as many lemonade stands as possible over a reasonable area where the enterprise can still be sensibly managed et cetera. How punchy you (/management) wants to be with those projections is one of the critical measures of risk when you make your investment in the business.
A lemonade stands’ market opportunity is not defined by the profits on the first Saturday afternoon.
An Internet/tech company today is a far better hustle than selling lemonade. It can often add marginal sales at near-zero cost. (I know this is getting beyond Tesla, I just haven’t ranted about this for a bit. 😉 )
If one doesn’t appreciate or give weight to any of this, then one is doomed to invest in profitable and solid companies like Debenhams or Centrica and to wonder why your portfolio is mired in treacle ten years later.
Years ago — mostly pre-Monevator — I used to spend a lot of time arguing with British investors on bulletin boards about this sort of thing, but I lost interest eventually.
Today people have the likes of Amazon and Netflix that they can look to so you don’t have to take it on faith anymore. Ho hum.
Again, doesn’t mean high-flying growth stocks are good investments at *today’s* price. I think they’re frothy. 50x price-to-sales is the new 10x price-to-sales, and I remember when 10x price-to-sales gave me wobbles when I pressed the buy button.
But one has to realize the market is pricing them at high multiples because it’s seen that in retrospect for several key multi-baggers (and drivers of index returns) it previously priced them too cheaply.
Also, again, as I say above I think Tesla’s valuation currently looks stretched given the execution risks etc.
But you have to see the business through the right lens if you’re going to take a position against the market. 🙂
That’s my two-pence on the subject, just for interest. I’m not here to change anyone’s mind on this!
@TI *applauds*
@TI- 2 posts in one day, very generous of you .
Cathy Woods of Ark is still got about 10% in Tesla and recently suggested it can go to 3K.
Personaly I dont see Tesla just as a car company but as a new energy provider.
They are in to Solar and battery storage in a big way. 24hour solar capture from space is close to a reality and will contribute massively to the worlds energy needs.
@TI, there’s at least an entire (admittedly somewhat but not completely active) fascinating article in what aspects of the rest of the economic/investing/sentiment landscape make 50x the new 10x, and as a consequence put people in a position to consider the likelihood of that multiplier reverting.
I’ve been wrong in assuming all things are cyclical, when some are not – at least not on a useful time scale.
I distinctly remember a conversation back in ~2006 noting the decline of myspace and rise of facebook and wondering what would replace facebook in a few years. 15 years later it’s 1000 times bigger having swallowed the entire social market.
Around that time I was also waiting to see this property “cycle” do some cycling. Still waiting after 20 years. The only thing cyclical about it is the positive first derivative.
Tesla is a luxury car maker, it’s not Toyota or even Honda. It’s hard to conceive of a premium manufacturer being over 50% of the industry by market cap.
Things like crypto and Tesla are difficult to understand for someone not in the target market. I’m not a nerdy, Libertarian, or wealthy enough to participate, and I’m skeptical of the evangelists. The lesson is probably stick to what you know, and have no opinion on (ie index) everything else.
I found the article Risking Fast & Slow really quite brilliant.
@TI – per your comment
Only thing I would add here is I think these opportunities can be on 50x sales because interest rates are so low. There are fewer attractive alternatives to put your money and accordingly the opportunity cost is so low. Arguably it’s helped facilitate the likes of Amazon etc crowding out competitors further as cost of capital is so low.
Morgan Housel the Psychology of Money is good reading. Although I often think about the janitor who died leaving $millions and think what’s the point and should that person really be held up as a bastion of success? Unless his whole raison d’etre was to leave as much money to charity as possible. In which case, the person is a hero. Otherwise it feels like a wasted opportunity to a large degree. People bang on about buffet’s compounding achievements whilst rarely highlighting his own acknowledged short comings in other areas accentuated by this obsession in accumulation.
Per your article – I am wrong all the time. In work, I regularly interact with plc board directors most of whom are utterly convinced they are right all of the time. Most of the time, my observation is that they are no more right than anyone else. But having that public display of confidence means that for those who are proved to be right, most likely due to luck as opposed to skill, the doors are opened to the highest rewards on offer. For those who were wrong, again due to back luck as opposed to relatively poor skill, that’s just a statistic, an individual to be forgotten particularly if they make particularly unlucky choices. Healthy introspection is not healthy to get to the top in my very cynical view. Be completely confident in your abilities and hopefully you’ll be lucky enough to be highly successful before it goes wrong.
@Hak – not sure if your remarks were partly aimed at my previous call for further information? My post was not about just ‘accepting knowing nothing’ about bonds but a wish to know more about the world of bonds.
In your response ‘Just buy the world index and stick with it if you truly believe “you know nothing”.’ may be OK when only referring to diversifying equities but not bonds, surely?
I’ve no issues with any questions I’ve seen posted before as over time I’ve learned loads from them and the answers given, even on things I didn’t know about. How will people learn if they’re in constant fear of being made fool of by being criticised or dismissed when all they want to do is ask a few questions?
You say you don’t understand why someone wants to know more about a specific tilt, be nice and just ask them.
I’ve always found it very hard to have strong conviction about anything. My preference for Math, Physics and computers as a child was that it provided a degree of certainty. Everything else just seemed so damned subjective. How could you hold a view on anything, for any period of time, without doubting yourself five minutes later? I seem to spend my life constantly holding diametrically opposed views in some sort of anxious tension.
Thus I’m constantly astounded by the level of conviction people seem to have on a variety of subjects they know bog all about. Moreover, their ability to hold on to those convictions, as a growing weight of data builds in the opposite direction, beggar’s belief.
Finance attracts humans with an innately high levels of conviction. For a small few, this is totally rational. They are do know more, they are smarter, quicker etc. For the majority though, it’s totally irrational. It’s just a concocted belief system, resting on quicksand.
I’ve found it’s that majorities tendency to hold to a view long past it’s sell by date is where I can make consistent money. To some degree in a world full of strong convictions and excessive hubris, a person like myself who lacks self-confidence and exists in a constant state of anxiety has a competitive edge. Of course, I must dodge the minority who actually do know what they are talking about. The rest I can exploit just by taking a little nibble out of them, each time they inevitably end up over their skis.
@Learner, Yes, it’s not easy to spot the winners. I remember disliking Facebook, while thinking that ‘Friendsreunited’ was the best site ever, discovering people I remembered from Primary school and joining discussions set up by forgotten faces from uni. I could hardly believe it when it fizzled out, yet the sneaky, spying Facebook went from strength to strength.
@ZXSpectrum48k #18
> I seem to spend my life constantly holding diametrically opposed views in some sort of anxious tension.
Take hope from F Scott Fitzgerald who called this out in the 1930s
In my line of work I’ve heard ‘strong convictions, weakly held’ a lot over the years – typically it’s said by people who are about to demonstrate strongly held weak convictions.
@ZXSpectrum48k
>person like myself who lacks self-confidence and exists in a constant state of anxiety has a competitive edge
Evolutionary Psychology in a nutshell, great for species survival, bit harsh on the individual. Kick back and blame the genes.
@ZXSpectrum48k and ermine
That feeling of being able to accept uncertainty and lack of knowledge feels like it comes up pretty often in different contexts, and to my mind it’s an important virtue (not just in investing). A few things that come to mind:
1. A bit niche, but a commentator in the Economist’s coverage of a Republican primary debate years back involving Christine O’Donnell made an observation along the lines of “I have never been as certain about anything as she is about everything.” I suspect politics is one of those fields that tends to reward people who (at least in public and for so long as it’s popular) have very strong views on pretty much everything.
2. Keats coined the concept of ‘negative capability’, which he said was ‘when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact’ (and he thought Shakespeare had that quality in abundance, which is what made him write such interesting characters). It could be read as being anti-scientific or anti-knowledge, but I think of it more as a recognition that in some areas of life we need to accept that we’re just never going to get the kind of certainty we might ideally want, and that trying to ignore that reality isn’t going to help and might well be counterproductive. (Ermine, I think you might previously have mentioned this idea on your blog at some point, but my memory’s hazy.)
Yes, much of our (corporate) culture rewards determined people who see not problems ahead and bulldoze through them when they invariably arise, compared to those of us who see a fog of probabilities.
I ran into this all the time when I was foolish enough to be employed enough to be exposed to office politics. I was “negative” (because I saw pros and cons, and eithers and ors) and notably got a project I’d pretty much originated taken off me and given to one of these tunnel vision types who radiated confidence, whether it was warranted or not.
Of course they ran into some of the problems I foresaw — and, by way of balance, of course some of the things I wasn’t sure about never materialized as concerns — and overall higher management was very happy to see things moving along.
An apt phrase I’ve used before — I can’t believe I invented this, so presume I’ve picked it up along the way off somebody — is that we build statues to the captain who navigates the ship through the stormy ocean, not the captain who realized it would be stormy and kept their boat in the harbour until the weather cleared.
The Ancient Greeks had something to say about this sort of thing, too. 🙂
@Ermine. Nice quote. Never been a reader of FSF but I was dimly aware of it.
The problem is the caveat at the end “… still retain the ability to function”. That’s the hard bit. Analysis paralysis is a real issue since I seem bereft of “gut instinct”. I have a bit of gut though!