When was Abraham Lincoln born?

When was Abraham Lincoln born? If you don't know the year off the top of your head, and your smartphone battery has just died, how do you answer this? Perhaps you know that he was president during the Civil War in the 1860s and that he was the first U.S. president to be assassinated. Looking at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, you don't see a young, energetic man but something more akin to a worn-out sixty-year-old veteran. The me-morial must depict him at the height of his political power, say, at the age of sixty. Let's assume that he was assassinated in the mid-1860s, making 1805 our estimate for the year he was born. (The correct answer is 1809.) So how did we work it out? We found an anchor to help us the year 1865-and worked from there to an educated guess.

— from The Instruments (Awareness/Perception/Expectations)

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