Business English Marketing and Sales Teacher's Book. Книга для учителя

We shall see how you can verify, even measure, such arrogance in your own living room. Second, we will look at the implications of this arrogance for all the activities involving prediction. Why on earth do we predict so much? Worse, even, and more interesting: Why donБЂ™t we talk about our record in predicting? Why donБЂ™t we see how we (almost) always miss the big events? I call this the scandal of prediction. ON THE VAGUENESS OF CATHERINEБЂ™S LOVER COUNT Let us examine what I call epistemic arrogance, literally, our hubris concerning the limits of our knowledge. Epistд“mд“ is a Greek word that refers to knowledge; giving a Greek name to an abstract concept makes it sound important. True, our knowledge does grow, but it is threatened by greater increases in confidence, which make our increase in knowledge at the same time an increase in confusion, ignorance, and conceit. Take a room full of people. Randomly pick a number. The number could correspond to anything: the proportion of psychopathic stockbrokers in western Ukraine, the sales of this book during the months with r in them, the average IQ of business-book editors (or business writers), the number of lovers of Catherine II of Russia, et cetera ...»