As someone who's very interested in psychology and how that intersects with prediction and decision-making, I found the interview with Dan Gilbert to be super interesting and really enlightening. The most surprising part of the video for me was when Gilbert talked about the difference in the way we think about the past versus the way we think about the future. Intuitively, I knew there definitely had to be a difference between the two ways of thought, because one thing has happened and another is simply what we can imagine or predict will happen, but it was surprising to see the way that Gilbert put the distinction into words. Gilbert describes our thinking of the past as constrained by data, which seemed odd to me when I first watched the video, but made a lot of sense when the video went on and I really got the chance to think about it. While the future can essentially be limitless, as it's yet to happen and based on what we think could happen, the past has happened. We can imagine things that occurred in the past, but we have the information in the present to contend with what is and isn't actually past.
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