We do not yet know what we have not yet discovered

"Malthus had quite accurately foretold the one phenomenon , but had missed the other altogether. Why ? Because of the systematic pessimistic bias to which prophecy is prone. In 1798 the forthcoming increase in population was more predictable than the even larger increase in the food supply not because it was in any sense more probable, but simply because it depended less on the creation of knowledge. By ignoring that structural difference between the two phenomena that he was trying to compare, Malthus slipped from educated guesswork into blind prophecy . He and many of his contemporaries were misled into believing that he had discovered an objective asymmetry between what he called the ‘ power of population ’ and the ‘ power of production ’ . But that was just a parochial mistake – the same one that Michelson and Lagrange made. They all thought they were making sober predictions based on the best knowledge available to them. In reality they were all allowing themselves to be misled by the ineluctable fact of the human condition that we do not yet know what we have not yet discovered."