Why are life trajectories difficult to predict? We investigated this question through in-depth qualitative interviews with 40 families sampled from a multi-decade longitudinal study. Our sampling and interviewing process were informed by the earlier efforts of hundreds of researchers to predict life outcomes for participants in this study. The qualitative evidence we uncovered in these interviews combined with a well-known mathematical decomposition of prediction error helps us identify some origins of unpredictability and create a new conceptual framework. Our specific evidence and our more general framework suggest that unpredictability should be expected in many life trajectory prediction tasks, even in the presence of complex algorithms and large datasets. Our work also provides a foundation for future empirical and theoretical work on unpredictability in human lives.

翻译：为什么生活轨迹难以预测？我们通过对一项持续数十年的纵向研究中抽取的40个家庭进行深度定性访谈来探究这一问题。我们的抽样和访谈过程参考了此前数百名研究人员预测该研究参与者生活结局的努力。这些访谈中揭示的定性证据，结合预测误差的经典数学分解方法，帮助我们识别出不可预测性的若干起源，并构建了一个新的概念框架。我们的具体证据及更广泛的框架表明，即使在复杂算法和大规模数据集存在的情况下，许多生活轨迹预测任务中仍应预期存在不可预测性。我们的工作还为未来关于人类生活中不可预测性的实证与理论研究奠定了基础。