Here's a thing I say a lot on the bird site: arguments about future facts are weak. They're guesses. Sometimes well informed, sometimes not. A lot of times they are actually pre-emptive framing trying to shape the future.

Please consider this as we head into the 2024 election.

Politicians and pundits and news orgs and pollsters and etc. will try to spin what will happen, they win if they can convince you that their predictions are true. They can shape reality that way.

We all have a cognitive & emotional weakness for wanting to know what will happen in the future. Our brain spends a lot of time/effort on predicting and we feel more at ease in the world if we can predict what will happen. So we listen to those who claim to know.

But see how that's so easy to abuse?

My dad worked in & ran a car factory for his life's work and is an expert in production methods. He's a bit of a fatalist (if it's you're time, it's your time), but also made sure that we knew the PDCA formula for getting stuff done, and done well. Plan Do Check Adjust.

It assumes you need a plan, but that your planning will be imperfect and the future will not be as you thought. No worries, check (evaluate) and make adjustments. You can't predict accurately, but you need to act.

@jenmercieca an issue I've seen before is confusion between the vastly different strategies required for success in events that occur repeatedly (building a car) vs those that reoccur only thematically (elections or military action) vs those that essentially never reoccur (natural disasters)

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