Daniel Gilbert Reporting Live from Tomorrow Summary

Name
Professor
Course
18 October 2018
The Belief Transmission Game
The authors Daniel Gilbert in Reporting Live from Tomorrow and Daniel Kahneman in Surety of Fools show that people are prone to error in making predictions. False beliefs, intuition, and cognitive fallacies are often the basis of decisions rather than careful, rational thinking based on evidence. Although Gilbert states that the transmission of beliefs, whether accurate or false, occurs unconsciously, that beliefs self-replicate, and spread like genes, there is an extent to which people have the choice to reject those beliefs.
False beliefs are among the reasons that lead to mistakes in the prediction of the future. Gilbert uses the biological concept of super-replicators to illustrate the transmission of beliefs in people’s culture. A super replicator gene is the strong replicated gene that passes on and gains more power as it replicates. Similarly to the replicating process of the gene, beliefs become strong and quickly spread. The efficiency in this process is due to the fact the people influence others to think like them once they have a belief. The process becomes a cycle that involves everyone around it. False beliefs replicate as quickly as genuine beliefs as they are part of the same transmission process. When a person believes in something, it doesn’t mean it is real or false they are just convinced.
All cultures around the world tell their members that bearing and raising children will make them happy. According to Gilbert, “The believe-transmission game is rigged so that we must believe that children and money bring happiness regardless of whether such beliefs are true” (Gilbert, 177). He thinks that money is a false replicator and concluded from his research that money only makes people happy if they are alleviated from very poor conditions in the middle class. He goes further to explain that those in the middle-upper class are not happier than those in the upper class and that after a certain point is reached, “the rest of your money is an increasingly useless pile of paper”(Gilbert, 177). People believe that raising children and working to earn increases their happiness. They do this for reasons beyond their ken as they are part of the society’s logic. Happiness describes an experience and not the actions that lead to it.
In addition to beliefs, Gilbert explains how imagination also contributes to our error in predicting the future. He cites the limitation of imagination and why it is not reliable. First, “We fill in leave out without telling us.” In the heat of the moment, people fail to predict or imagine the real consequences of their actions which they would under normal circumstances. Secondly, is the tendency to “project present into the future” (Gilbert, 180). When imagining the future people tend to miss out many things that they fill out with stuff from the present. Thirdly, people over exaggerate and imagine the worse when they think something terrible is going to happen. To counter the limitations, people must accept to use other’s (surrogate) imaginations when making important decisions rather than their own which are not very realistic. However, people o...