(Amazon)
But these stories people told themselves were biased by the availability of the material used to construct them. “Images of the future are shaped by experience of the past,” they wrote, turning on its head Santayana’s famous lines about the importance of history: Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. What people remember about the past, they suggested, is likely to warp their judgment of the future. “We often decide that an outcome is extremely unlikely or impossible, because we are unable to imagine any chain of events that could cause it to occur. The defect, often, is in our imagination.”
–Michael Lewis, The Undoing Project (New York: Norton, 2017), pp.194-195 (emphasis mine)
Antoine de Saint-Exupery said “A rock pile ceases to be a rock pile the moment a single man contemplates it, bearing in him the image of a cathedral.” Bob Dylan said “I was so much older then, I’m younger than that now”.