the incumbent problem refers to the vast
but often overlooked an unfair advantage
that all new people cities and jobs have
over existing or as we put it incumbent
ones the beautiful person glimpsed
briefly in the street as we step off the
bus the city visited for a few days of
holiday the job we read about in a few
chanta lysing paragraphs of a magazine
these have unwise tendencies to seem
immediately and definitively superior to
our current partner our long-established
home and our committed work place and
they can inspire us to sudden and in
retrospect sometimes regrettable
divorces relocations and resignations
when we spot apparent perfection we tend
to blame our spectacular bad luck for
the mediocrity of our lives without
realizing that we are mistaking an
asymmetry of knowledge for an asymmetry
of quality we are failing to see not
that our partner home and job are
especially awful just that we know them
especially well incumbents are the
victims of disproportionate knowledge
they are generally no worse than anyone
or anything else but as they are
familiar that every failing has had a
chance to be minutely charted the
corrective to disproportionate knowledge
is experienced
we need to mine the secret reality of
other people and places and so learn
that beneath their charms they will
almost invariably be essentially normal
in nature that is no worse yet no better
than the incumbents we already
understand the solution to the incumbent
problem is to extrapolate from what we
already know and apply it to what we
don’t yet the most plausible
generalization we can make about unknown
things is that they are likely to be
closer to what we’ve already
than they are to being completely and
bountifully different we should beware
of the in justices we unthinkingly visit
upon all the incumbent features and
relationships of our lives our wisdom
display cards explore what it really
means to be wise and how we can strive
to become more enlightened in our
everyday lives be sure to subscribe to our Channel internal notifications
but often overlooked an unfair advantage
that all new people cities and jobs have
over existing or as we put it incumbent
ones the beautiful person glimpsed
briefly in the street as we step off the
bus the city visited for a few days of
holiday the job we read about in a few
chanta lysing paragraphs of a magazine
these have unwise tendencies to seem
immediately and definitively superior to
our current partner our long-established
home and our committed work place and
they can inspire us to sudden and in
retrospect sometimes regrettable
divorces relocations and resignations
when we spot apparent perfection we tend
to blame our spectacular bad luck for
the mediocrity of our lives without
realizing that we are mistaking an
asymmetry of knowledge for an asymmetry
of quality we are failing to see not
that our partner home and job are
especially awful just that we know them
especially well incumbents are the
victims of disproportionate knowledge
they are generally no worse than anyone
or anything else but as they are
familiar that every failing has had a
chance to be minutely charted the
corrective to disproportionate knowledge
is experienced
we need to mine the secret reality of
other people and places and so learn
that beneath their charms they will
almost invariably be essentially normal
in nature that is no worse yet no better
than the incumbents we already
understand the solution to the incumbent
problem is to extrapolate from what we
already know and apply it to what we
don’t yet the most plausible
generalization we can make about unknown
things is that they are likely to be
closer to what we’ve already
than they are to being completely and
bountifully different we should beware
of the in justices we unthinkingly visit
upon all the incumbent features and
relationships of our lives our wisdom
display cards explore what it really
means to be wise and how we can strive
to become more enlightened in our
everyday lives be sure to subscribe to our Channel internal notifications
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