One of the keys to building models is coming out with actionable predictions. Human beings are mastery rationalizers, so it's very easy to come up with a model to justify any course of action, but the important question is: when you take that course of action you've justified, did things play out the way that your model predicts?
Of course, there are Black swan events that no one could predict. There is no model that would have predicted that in 2020 the entire world economy would be shut down due to a pandemic. On the other hand, a model should account for some level of unexpected events, because the world isn't static.
It is no great miracle producing a set of predictions that tomorrow will be largely the same as today. Most of the time such a model will be absolutely correct. The value comes in trying to predict what might change, in figuring out what the next Black swan event could be, or in trying to see with unbiased eyes the White swan event that is sitting right in front of you.
Human beings have the tremendously huge brains we do in part so that we can try to predict the future. That is our superpower as a species. That's why our tool use is on a completely different level than any other species, because we can imagine how we might use some incredibly complicated tool that has no present use. It also allows us to behave in ways that are insanely social. For example, one person building a piece of software that allows different social media websites to connect together. They did that imagining a future that could have thousands of different websites existing and communicating. And today we have the fediverse. It also allows us to plan ahead at a level that no other creature even comes close to. How many other species do you think have 5-year plans? How many other species do you think have 10-year plans? How many species do you think have any conception of 15 or 20 years from now? That's incredible, and it's a superpower that we have as humans.
The thing is, we need to use that superpower. Just listening to other people and letting them tell us what to do means that we're going to be doing the exact same thing as everyone else and we're never going to get ahead. Just sitting and dogmatically reciting orthodoxy in the face of new information means we're never going to get ahead. We as individuals needed to take in information as much as we can, try to build models for ourselves, and most importantly take in additional new information from the outside world to test our previous predictions, honestly and lies whether our predictions were correct, and modify our models based on that feedback from The real world so that we can make better decisions based on better predictions tomorrow.
It sure sounds like a lot of work, having to go around and put all this effort into building models, and learning more information, and testing our models, and modifying your models, but the thing is if we don't do that then we're not going to be able to make predictions ahead of the pack, and we're not going to be able to get any sort of comparative advantage. Moreover when everyone else is hurting, you could be ok because you successfully predicted the bad thing others who were relying on others to do it for you.
Once you start putting in the work, many things become much more obvious. Then you start to see the establishment saying "nobody could have predicted this!" And you sort of have to shake your head because once you're out of the echo chamber, it's just not true anymore.