Still True

A Guide to What Never Changes, and What Only Looks Like It

von George Chu

288 Seiten, Taschenbuch

Kurzbeschreibung des Verlags

There is a genre of very good book that says: stop trying to forecast the future and pay attention to the things that do not change. The advice is excellent. This book is about the sentence that always follows it and is almost never examined - and here is the list.

A claim that something never changes is one of the strongest claims available about human affairs. It asserts a regularity across centuries, across cultures, and across every improvement in how we measure. Most of what appears on such lists has never been tested that way. Several items fail. A few fail spectacularly.

The lists are not dishonest. They are assembled from things that sound true - and sounding true is not one of the tests.

What this book does differently- It gives a test. Four conditions a regularity must meet before this book will call it a constant: measured more than once, in more than one society, with a mechanism that predicts something other than itself, and surviving improvement in the instruments. Every claim is scored against all four, in public, in a table.- It gives the size. "People are loss-averse" is not a finding. "Losses weigh roughly twice as much as gains in small-stakes laboratory tasks, with the ratio falling toward one as the stakes rise, and a mixed record in riskless choice" is. A constant with no magnitude cannot be planned around.- It has a whole part about the ones that failed. Four claims everybody repeats that the record does not support - and two of them the author believed before checking.

What survives>What does not>287 pages. Seventy-four figures, eighty-two tables, twelve appendices - including the test on one page, a scorecard rating every regularity against all four conditions, the calibration test with its answers, a forecast record to keep, and the whole book in twenty-four sentences.

What is constant is the machinery - incentives, comparison, queues, arousal, uncertainty. What changes, enormously and demonstrably, is what the machinery is pointed at.

• Reihe: Independently published
• ISBN: 9798175747462
• Sprache: Englisch
• Erscheinungsdatum: 20.09.2026
• Größe: 229 x 152 mm
• Verlag: Independently published