Can the future be predicted? Here is the wiser answer

We come from years of media overdose from pundits and predictions. First Covid, then the war in Ukraine, in fact, brought to the fore a trend that has accompanied human beings since the times they lived in caves: that of trying to predict the future. The big difference is that once upon a time, to make predictions, we relied solely on the motion of the stars or on the "reading" of the entrails of animals. Today we use more and more often the huge amount of data in our possession, confident that we know how to read and process them easily. Result: as in the mists of time, even the best experts often don't get it right. Indeed they make solemn blunders, not for this reason giving up their career as soothsayers and "seers".

In short, the future continues and eludes us, also because the reasons why it is so difficult to get a prediction right escape us.

In the agile volume "I told you so!" (Hoepli editore, 2023, Euro 14.90. Also Ebook) Roberto Marangoni presents, in an accessible way to the general public, a review of the predictability of different systems (physical, biological, meteorological, economic), explaining why in many cases it is really impossible expect “certain” scientific predictions Marangoni - who is used to working with enormous amounts of data on a daily basis since he teaches Bioinformatics and Genetic and Genomic Analysis at the University of Pisa - starts from an incontrovertible fact: formulating predictions on the evolution of a phenomenon is a spontaneous act that no one escapes, but even if we are used to making and listening to opinions, "in my opinion", predictions, we remain bad "seers".

And we continue to get our forecasts wrong, especially when we are faced with complex problems in which there are many variables. This is even more evident today given that the world around us has reached a complexity unheard of until a few decades ago. The human brain needs thousands of years to make a significant evolution. Impossible for a substantial change to occur within a few decades. If we look at the evolution of man, the human brain, and with it the way of reasoning, developed over tens and hundreds of thousands of years in an environment - that of groups of hunters and gatherers who roamed in the forests or in the savannah - completely different than the current one. In that environment it was necessary to make quick, immediate, instinctive decisions that would allow our ancestors to escape predators or to capture a prey that ensured survival. Today that same brain faces a world with the Internet, Facebook, and fifty emails a day to answer.

However, the big problems arise when we have to face the complexity of issues on a global level. In many cases man seems incapable of managing the big trends, of predicting the possible outcomes of such complex situations. Let's think, for example, of how incorrect the analyzes of the various economic crises of recent years have proved to be: many hypotheses, even of worthy economists, but in the end managers of large banking institutions, economic experts have admitted to proceeding by trial and error. There is no longer a global vision of the problem, because the economic system we live in has become too complex.

Having ascertained that it is not so simple to understand the difficulties of the world in which we live and to make predictions, we must then try to change our mindset: in fact, the search for security is innate in us, for a sure, certain prediction, which coming today to lack makes us confused and disoriented. First of all we need to work on the so-called "mental traps", on bias, i.e. on the most common systemic errors: given the complexity of the environment in which we live and the impossibility of analyzing everything, in our assessments we tend to rely on heuristic solutions, shortcuts mental, which we implement unconsciously and which can be deceptive and misleading. We must start from the awareness that few events or phenomena can be predicted with excellent reliability; for the most part the prediction is necessarily limited to a probabilistic estimate of multiple possible evolutions. To the objective difficulties of the systems, subjective psychological mechanisms are added which unknowingly make us bad "seers". In fact, our brain tends to overestimate our critical skills and abilities. Underestimate what does not seem credible to him. He tends to select only the facts that interest him or that confirm the theories already elaborated. Simplify phenomena, even when they are complex.

Which is why very often "I don't know" is the most honest and scientifically based answer to the question "what's going to happen?". This does not mean giving up our ability to analyse, criticize and elaborate. It means being aware of our limits, for example accepting the help of those technologies that allow us, in a more neutral and efficient way than the human brain, to analyze data, compare them, indicating trends, connections, correlations that would otherwise be overlooked. Naturally, this does not allow us to see into the future, but it offers us the possibility of having ever better, more refined and effective tools available to build more founded, more realistic scenarios, based on objective data and not on self-delusions. -we create.