In the past three weeks I’ve read two books — The Best and the Brightest and The Big Short. Despite being written 40 years apart and dealing with utterly different topics (foreign policy in the 60’s and Wall Street in the 00’s, respectively), the books are fundamentally about the same thing: ostensibly smart people making enormously consequential errors because they refuse to accept reality, substituting either outdated or fantastical views of the world for plainly available facts.

In TBATB, the most painful errors (in retrospect) are those of Continue reading →