The Rational Investor #023: Chuck Klosterman on Unexpected Progress

Happy Saturday to you,

Welcome to the 23rd edition of The Rational Investor Newsletter.

Today’s quote comes from the book But What If We’re Wrong? by Chuck Klosterman. It’s an interesting read about challenging our preconceived notions. The story below sticks out as the highlight of the book for me. And it’s a major highlight because it should cause us to check our reservations about what the future might look like at the door. I haven’t read this book in years and yet, this story is one I’ll never forget.

Onto the main event…[FYI: the only edit to the quote is breaking it up into shorter paragraphs for easier reading.]

Here’s Chuck Klosterman on Unexpected Progress:

“Even if we can’t foresee the unforeseeable, it’s possible to project a future reality where the most logical conclusions have no relationship to what actually happens. It feels awkward to think like this, because such thinking accepts irrationality. Of course, irrational trajectories happen all the time.

Here’s an excerpt from a 1948 issue of Science Digest: ‘Landing and moving around on the moon offers so many serious problems for human beings that it may take science another 200 years to lick them.’ That prediction was off by only 179 years. But the reason Science Digest was so wrong was not technological; it was motivational.

In 1948, traveling to the moon was a scientific aspiration; the desire for a lunar landing was analogous to the desire to climb a previously unscaled mountain. Science Digest assumed this goal would be pursued in the traditional manner of scientific inquiry—a grinding process of formulating theories and testing hypotheses.

But when the Soviets launched the Sputnik satellite in 1957, the meaning of the enterprise changed. Terrified Americans suddenly imagined Khrushchev launching weapons from the lunar surface. The national desire to reach the moon first was now a military concern (with a sociocultural subtext over which country was intellectually and morally superior). That accelerated the process dramatically.

By the summer of ‘69, we were planting flags and collecting moon rocks and generating an entirely new class of conspiracy theorists. So it’s not that the 1948 editors of Science Digest were illogical; it’s that logic doesn’t work particularly well when applied to the future.”

I love that last line most of all…that logic doesn’t work well when applied to the future.

Because, who could have predicted not only that we would make it to the moon a mere 21 years later but also the reason why we’d move so quickly? Nobody is the only correct answer.

Kelly Hayes said,

“Everything feels unprecedented when you haven’t engaged with history.”

This is true of tragedies, but I think it’s equally true of progress. Both happen when you least expect it and in ways that nobody could have ever predicted.

Thanks for reading. I’ll be back again next week with more timeless wisdom from great investors.

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