From How Not to Invest by Barry Ritholtz:
There is a forecasting-industrial complex, and it is a blight on all that is good and true. The symbiotic relationship between the media and Wall Street drives a relentless parade of money-losing tomfoolery: Television and radio have 24 hours a day they must fill, and they do so mostly with empty nonsense. Print has column inches to put out. Online media may be the worst of all, with an infinite maw that needs to be constantly filled with new and often meaningless content.
The broader internet—with its incredible volume of content, endless noise, spam, grift, and now AI slop, ruthless competition for attention, and the need to placate the algorithm gods—has gotten really bad. This is one of the reasons why I never transitioned my writing to a niche like student loans or other financial pseudoadvice, even when that was potentially a lucrative option. The need to continue writing the same things over and over in my free time was unfathomable. Once I said what I wanted to say (for example), I had no interest in saying it again. To wit:
Award-winning Wall Street Journal columnist Jason Zweig brilliantly defined what he actually did: “My job is to write the exact same thing between 50 and 100 times a year in such a way that neither my editors nor my readers will ever think I am repeating myself.”
I’m not sure that’s possible for most people? Not to most readers, and probably for only a select few writers. The problem with all this thirst for raw material is that most of it isn’t very good, and much of it is derived from our worst storytelling tendencies:
The idea of narrative fallacy—the term was actually coined by Nassim Taleb in The Black Swan—applies to pretty much everything. Danny Kahneman explains it in Thinking, Fast and Slow: Flawed stories of the past shape our views of the world and our expectations for the future. Narrative fallacies arise inevitably from our continuous attempt to make sense of the world. The explanatory stories that people find compelling are simple; are concrete rather than abstract; assign a larger role to talent, stupidity, and intentions than to luck; and focus on a few striking events that happened rather than on the countless events that failed to happen. Any recent salient event is a candidate to become the kernel of a causal narrative.
The ability to tell a convincing story is very different from the ability to be right.
All of us, by our very nature, are telling “wrong” stories most of the time (even when we’re right).