"It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble. It's what you know for sure that just ain't so."
Hollywood's (ironically inaccurate) screen credits to Mark Twain: The Big Short (2015); An Inconvenient Truth (2006)
"It could last, you know, six days, six weeks. I doubt six months."
U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld on the potential duration of the Iraq war (2003)
Despite centuries of philosophical warnings, scientific discoveries, and repeated empirical failures, the human quest for predictability in world events and human behavior remains marked by overconfidence. True wisdom lies not in the certainty of our forecasts, but in the ability to recognize the limits of our knowledge—even in an age of big data, algorithms and AI.
The launch on April 1 (April Fool's Day), 2026 of the 2025 World Humility Index of Predictions (WHIP) is intended as a counterweight to the prevailing cultural and institutional bias (hubris) that equates the possession of vast data with the ability to foresee the future and the factors that determine its outcomes. In a world increasingly dominated by "truth engines" and prediction markets (around in analog form since the 1500s), the primary lesson of 2025 (as well as in all recorded history) is not that our models require more data, but that we require more humility in planning for possibilities.
In 2024, an exhibition at Oxford's Bodleian Libraries, Oracles, Omens and Answers, examined our long obsession with predicting the future. Known as the "science" of divination, the exhibit chronicled how people throughout the ages have sought (and continue to seek) to tame the future. The "gifts" (a/k/a "grifts") of prophesy range from spider and crab divinations to bibliomancy, to reading entrails, tarot cards, horoscopes and TikTok scrolls—while other "manufactured" sources of prediction include the eponymous Magic 8 ball, Ouija boards, as well as plastic "fortune" fish that curl up in your palm when asked a question.
https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2024/dec/07/tarot-tarantulas-and-tiktok-exploring-our-long-obsession-with-predicting-the-future
Even today, astrology continues to have believers (and deceivers) in almost every culture around the world. As far back as ancient Babylon, astrologers have held positions of influence and power as they offered predictions about health, prosperity and the likelihood of impending disasters. President Reagan regularly consulted with an astrologist and Nostradamus' cryptic (ambiguous) predictions still retain a global following almost 500 years after his death. Unearthing the predictions and hidden codes of sacred texts can guarantee a best-selling book (The Bible Code), a viral podcast or even your own religious following. (See, William Branham and William Miller.) Winston Churchill, who wrote about bibliomancy, would open the Bible at random and pick a verse to guide him through his most critical decisions.
As Bryan Gardner observed in the book review section of the MIT Technology Review (The Robots Who Predict the Future, February 2026):
To be human is, fundamentally, to be a forecaster. Occasionally a pretty good one. Trying to see the future, whether through the lens of past experience or the logic of cause and effect, has helped us hunt, avoid being hunted, plant crops, forge social bonds, and in general survive in a world that does not prioritize our survival. Indeed, as the tools of divination have changed over the centuries, from tea leaves to data sets, our conviction that the future can be known (and therefore controlled) has only grown stronger.
https://www.technologyreview.com/2026/02/18/1132579/robots-predict-future-book-review/
The historical fallacy of predictability in human affairs and world events, however is a well-documented and persistent error, rooted in both cognitive bias and institutional hubris. From the warnings of ancient philosophers and the flapping butterflies of Lorenz' Chaos Theory to the debacles of financial models and the claimed prescience of modern prediction markets, the evidence is overwhelming—our confidence in forecasting far exceeds our actual ability to predict. This overconfidence is not only a cognitive default but is reinforced by selective memory, institutional incentives, and the seductive power of sophisticated models. As long-time investor Jeremy Grantham concluded about the 2008 Financial Crisis and what people learned: "In the short term a lot, in the medium term a little, in the long term, nothing at all. That would be historical precedent."
The contemporary science of forecasting is defined by the tension between the accessibility of "big data" and the illusive quest for the ROI of predictive accuracy. Ironically, this digital paradox is central to an analog observation known as "Joy's Law", posited by the former CEO of Sun Microsystem, William Joy: "No matter who you are, most of the smartest people work for someone else." The strategic implication of following Joy's law is not merely a recruitment challenge to gather more information than exists within one's four-walls. It is in accepting a foundational conclusion reached from following such a process: No individual, organization or collaboration, regardless of their scale or resources, can master the cognitive capability to predict a world characterized by non-linear shifts and systemic complexity. All we can do is plan for possibilities.
As former Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld famously explained about the miscalculation of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction:
"There are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns—the ones we don't know we don't know. And if one looks throughout the history of our country and other free countries, it is the latter category that tends to be the difficult ones."
Indeed, the lesson, that has echoed throughout the ages and disciplines, is that effective decision-making requires an honest reckoning with what we do not and cannot know. Socrates cautioned that the only true wisdom lies in knowing you know nothing. Isaac Newton, who could calculate the motion of heavenly bodies, reportedly confessed that he could not, however, fathom the madness of people—a lesson he learned only after losing his fortune in the South Sea Bubble. Shakespeare's Cassius reminded us that the fault is not in our stars but in ourselves. Tellingly, Richard Haass concluded after surveying 400 years of World history, "It is Impossible to predict what the next crisis will be or where it will originate." The World: A Brief Introduction. And in a line by Yogi Berra that Haass is fond of citing—"It's tough to make predictions, especially about the future."
And yet, as Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman observed, the illusion that we understand the past still fosters overconfidence in our ability to predict the future.
The year 2025 actually functioned as it should have—as another annual reminder about the need for humility, specifically within the domains of geopolitical forecasting, financial modeling, technological and social engineering and disaster planning. As we took the time to reflect on the preceding year, a clear "delta" of volatility emerged between the sophisticated predictive apparatuses employed by the world's leading institutions and minds, and the actual unfolding of events. John Kenneth Galbraith once quipped that the only function of economic forecasting is to make astrology look respectable. He identified two types of forecasters: those who don't know, and those who don't know they don't know. The indexed events of 2025 suggest that his taxonomy remains accurate.
Decades after Galbraith, Abby Joseph Cohen invoked her own inner Clint Eastwood ("Dirty Harry") philosophy about "knowing one's limitations."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CG2cux_6Rcw
"Those of us who have lived our professional lives really focusing in on the math, I think should feel very humble right now because what we recognize is that the models may not be able to properly reflect all of the volatility not just in the markets, but in the economy, in policy and of course in investor sentiment."
The purpose of the WHIP Index is to remind us to interrogate the structural failures of prediction and to advocate for a transition to a mindset of humility and planning about the prospect of what is nonetheless possible—not just probable. Warren Buffett has long observed that forecasts may tell you a great deal about the forecaster but nothing about the future. Hence, in a world of unforeseen possibilities, "predicting rain doesn't count, building arks does." (Buffett has also joked that the only things that can be predicted with certainty are the likelihood of investors panicking and the likelihood of financial professionals exploiting that emotion.) Eisenhower, who had to navigate through the "fog of war" and its many unpredictable and costly battles, as well as eight years of "Foggy Bottom," put it slightly differently: "I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable."
You will find The WHIP Index is organized in 10 segmented categories of exposures, ranging from geopolitical to financial markets to cyber to safety and security, etc. In keeping with the spirit of "X", we kept the total number of 2025 issues within these categories to well under 280 (190 to be precise).
We also strongly felt that the collaborative nature of the WHIP Index and its message mandated the democratization of online access—with no paywall. Enter whenever and stay as long as you like.
No recriminations or need to "whip" yourself for not foreseeing how 2025 would unfold. (Coincidentally, Steven Dubner (Freakonomics)—after informing us that "predicting the future anytime, in any realm, is fairly perilous" and that even the "experts" who offer predictions "are quite terrible at it"—suggested: "How about punishing all those bad predictions?") https://freakonomics.com/podcast/the-folly-of-prediction/ Instead, as we seek to collaboratively build an annual index to reinforce the lessons of possibilities over predictability, just let us know what we also could have added for the 2025 version. (Admittedly, we left much on the "cutting room" floor.)
Needless to say, the first quarter of 2026 already is off to an unpredicted and humbling start. So, please send us your early nominees for this year.
We would be remiss in not acknowledging at least some of the other truly knowledgeable sources that informed the thesis behind the WHIP Index. David Halberstam, chronicling the tragedy of Vietnam in The Best and the Brightest, warned of the danger of making important what you can measure rather than measuring what is important. He described the reliance on data as a "god that failed," noting that Vietnam "resisted analysis" because its most critical elements were not quantifiable. The brilliance of the advisors, he concluded, became their greatest weakness—an overconfidence that blinded them to their own failing forecasts.
Peggy Noonan, reflecting on the architects of a subsequent war and how history rhymes, observed:
One thing I came to conclude about the men and women who put the [Iraq] war together was that they had grown up in such a blessed, prosperous and stable country that they had a false sense of endlessly sunny skies. Personally they hadn't been unlucky—they were at the top of the pile, had never been losers. They thought good things would follow their good efforts in the same way study had produced honors at college and discipline had produced their professional rise. They didn't think dark because they'd never known darkness. It was a disadvantage. To make solid decisions at that scale you have to know in your gut that history's an abattoir and the floors are slippery.
https://www.wsj.com/opinion/iraqs-shadow-over-the-iran-debate-19355e17
Relevantly, we share in longer form, Andrew Sorkin's introspective take-away from the ten-years of research for his insightful book, 1929, about the causes and consequences of the Great Depression.
Writing 1929 required long stretches of focus — time to sit with incomplete information, conflicting narratives, and decisions that only look obvious in retrospect....
[O]ur confidence in our judgments needs to be tempered by humility. It is a theme that many of the main actors in 1929 could have used more of.
We are constantly being asked to judge. Every day brings new characters and choices — people in the news now, people from nearly a century ago — all presented in formats that reward speed and certainty. The incentives push us to decide quickly who was right, who was wrong, who should have known better.
One of the most persistent traps of writing about history is hindsight. It creates the illusion that clarity was always available — that decisions were obviously misguided, that moral lines were clearly drawn, that outcomes were easy to foresee.
After answering the same questions again and again — about what people missed, why no one stopped it, whether something similar could happen again — I began to notice that many of the questions weren't really about history at all. They were about reassurance.
We want the past to tell us that mistakes are obvious, that bad outcomes announce themselves early, that moral failures are easy to spot from the inside. But history resists that clarity. It unfolds before anyone knows how it ends.
Judgment matters. Knowing its limits matters too.
https://sorkin.substack.com/p/notes-from-the-road-on-judgment-and
To this we would simply add Faulkner's adage about the "whip" (sorry, couldn't resist) of history's long tail:
The past is never dead. It is never even past.
Requiem for a Nun (1951)
(NB: But none for Jeffrey Epstein or Cesar Chavez)
We respectfully offer the WHIP Index as a living document, built to grow with each year's reminder that humility is not a weakness but a discipline.
We look forward to hearing from you.