a reminder to the optimism of social sciences

The reason we frequently get our predictions wrong is that the human mind reasons by analogy and extrapolation. We are drawn to internally consistent "stories" about the world as we know it, and we tend to project these stories into the future, often in a linear and mechanistic fashion. But just because a story is consistent or coherent does not make it correct as a prediction of the future.

Daniel Kahneman, the Nobel Prize laureate for Economics in 2002, puts it this way, "[T]he exaggerated expectation of consistency is a common error. We are prone to think that the world is more regular and predictable than it really is, because our memory automatically and continuously maintains a story about what is going on, and because the rules of memory tend to make that story as coherent as possible and to suppress alternatives. Fast thinking is not prone to doubt."