Is everything getting worse?
This path starts with memory and ends with predictions. The last piece has the one habit I’d take from all five: write your predictions down before you know how things turn out.
- A Message From the Past (Thoughts on Nostalgia)
Housel argues nostalgia comes from knowing how the story ends, which erases the uncertainty you felt at the time and makes past years, markets, and eras look easier than they were.
- The Seduction of Pessimism
Housel argues pessimism sounds smarter than optimism because short-term shocks are easier to recall and we underestimate how people adapt, as Jeremy Siegel's long horizon and the oil cycles show.
- Technology predictions
Altman collects confident expert predictions that turned out wrong, from Wilbur Wright doubting flight and Einstein dismissing nuclear energy to 2015 skeptics calling superhuman AI ridiculous.
- The typical path of how people respond to life-changing inventions
A ten-step list of how people react to a transformative technology, from never having heard of it to calling it too powerful and demanding regulation.
- Hindsight bias
Yudkowsky argues that knowing an outcome makes it look far more predictable than it was, so after disasters like Challenger and 9/11 we learn overly specific lessons and underestimate the real cost of caution.
That's the last one. All 12 paths