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Blaming judgments
We can learn to make better decisions by observing — and judging — those of others. But there are pitfalls on the way
Imagine a frosty winter night. You wake up, but the display of the alarm clock is dark. Your watch tells you it is 3am. A quick wander around the house confirms: no power, and hence no heating, no lighting, no cooking. How well prepared would you be for a situation like this? How long would it be before you have done what is necessary for your house to function as normal? Unless you have a generator handy, it is unlikely it will take you less than 24 hours — and nobody would criticize your inability to restore normality any faster. Yet, when the equivalent happened at London’s Heathrow airport on 21 March, accusations of poor planning and execution were rife. Isn’t that odd?
Not only the outcome
Somewhere along the evolutionary timeline, our ancestors acquired an ability that turned out to be exceptionally valuable for our survival and our rapidly-growing prosperity: the skill to detect and understand cause and consequence. At first, it will have helped those who possessed it associate a rustle in the undergrowth with the presence of a predator — and escape alive; later on, this capacity helped humans discover (or was it invent?) agriculture… and off we…
