MISALIGNED EXPECTATIONS

You went to the drawer for scissors. The scissors were not there. What was there was a warranty for a toaster you no longer own, a key that opens nothing in this house, and a photograph you had forgotten you were in. You closed the drawer annoyed, because you had come for scissors, and annoyance is what we feel when the world declines to match the picture we brought with us.
That annoyance is the subject of this book, and the argument is that we have it backwards. An expectation is not a window onto the future. It is a set of instructions for when to stop looking. While the prediction holds, the room counts as searched, the drawer counts as known, and the world is politely excused from showing you anything else. The moment the prediction fails is the moment the lid comes off.
Boris Kriger takes the most ordinary experience there is - wanting something and getting something else - and follows it into strange country. Why does a perfect forecaster turn out to be the most powerless creature in the ancient world? Why does a prediction, once acted upon, stop being true? Why would a being who was never wrong about anything have no future to look forward to, nothing left to want, and no reason to open a single drawer? And who, exactly, is making money from the gap between what you were told to expect and what arrives?
This is not a book about lowering your expectations. Lowering them is the same mistake with a minus sign. It is a book about going and looking sooner, about what turns up when you do, and about the one situation - clearly marked - where nothing turns up at all and no consolation is offered.
Keywords: expectations, prediction, surprise, uncertainty, decision making, philosophy of mind, self-knowledge