The Better Letter: Equal-Opportunity Extremists
We are all natural-born and equal-opportunity extremists who want to live in exceptional times.
The Doomsday Clock is a metaphor created to warn us about how close we are to destroying our world with dangerous technologies of our own creation. It currently reads 100 seconds to midnight. It has been poised to strike midnight (signaling annihilation) since its inception 75 years ago but never quite gets all the way there. It’s “best” reading? 11:43pm. It suggests the past 75 years have been mighty grim.
We are all natural-born and equal-opportunity extremists who want to live in exceptional times. That is why, for example, in the financial world (the object of my day job), we regularly overpay both for insurance and for lottery tickets (literal and figurative) and why market crashes and “the next Amazon” are predicted approximately 1,263,749,876 times more often than they actually occur (my estimate may be too conservative).
In this experiment involving giving electric shocks to subjects, scientists found people were willing to pay up to $20 to avoid a 99 percent chance of a painful electric shock. On its face, that seems reasonable. However, those same subjects would also be willing to pay up to $7 to avoid a mere one percent chance of the same shock. We humans have only the vaguest concept of what probability means and represents. We pretty much only think about the shock. Or getting rich.
That’s not a great way to make decisions.
This week’s TBL focuses on our fascination with disaster and doom. There is a terrific example in popular culture right now.
In our imaginations, we’re perennially poised on the precipice of destruction. Still, because we are so terrible generally at foreseeing the future (next week’s TBL will feature my annual Forecasting Follies review of 2021’s worst predictions), we’re still here.
This week will feature our consistent extremism – we can’t seem to get enough of the end of the world – and how we ought to look at extreme claims.
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Equal-Opportunity Extremists
In June 1995, Kevin Kelly sat down with Kirkpatrick Sale, a self-described “neo-Luddite,” for an adversarial interview about our technological future. They were each extremists in a world that generally mean-reverts.
Sale believed society was on the verge of collapse and that technology was the culprit, which he didn’t think was really all that bad. He hoped the surviving few would create small, tribal clusters. They wouldn’t just be off the grid. There would be no grid – which Sale saw as a feature of the impending apocalypse rather than a bug. Sale was and is an “anarcho-communalist” who advocates for decentralized, self-sufficient systems — with life organized at “human scale.”
Near the end of the discussion, Sale predicted that industrial civilization would, in the not-too-distant future, suffer economic collapse, class warfare, and widespread environmental disaster. It was an argument his then newest book made.
“If the edifice of industrial civilization does not eventually crumble as a result of a determined resistance within its very walls, it seems certain to crumble of its own accumulated excesses and instabilities within not more than a few decades, perhaps sooner.”
In response, Kelly hoped to make Sale “accountable for that romantic nonsense that he was spouting.” Kelly was a true believer in the prospect of technology making life easier and better, especially in the developing world. So, he offered a wager. “I bet you $1,000 [payable to charity] that in the year 2020, we’re not even close to the kind of disaster you describe,” Kelly said. “I’ll bet on my optimism.”
Sale took the bet.
When 2021 dawned, the designated arbiter of the bet determined Kelly to be the winner. The global pandemic made the situation more striking than it otherwise would have been (climate change is a big problem, as is income inequality), but the outcome was hardly in doubt.
As found by the best research about how humans react when their prophecies fail, Sale was sure he had prevailed, denying the obvious. Note the research study’s summary conclusion.
“A man with a conviction is a hard man to change. Tell him you disagree, and he turns away. Show him facts or figures and he questions your sources. Appeal to logic and he fails to see your point.”
Kelly thinks Sale simply refuses to honor his commitment by refusing to concede and acknowledge the arbiter’s decision. But Sale thinks Doomsday is just around the corner. Still. So, all bets are off.
People calling for extreme events is utterly common today in pretty much every area: politics, culture (popular and otherwise), art, literature, science, religion, academia, journalism, and (especially) social media. If Substack offered the digital capacity for me to include them, I could have linked hundreds of examples in no time. Notwithstanding the extreme claims, the world hasn’t ended, or society collapsed – at least, not yet.
However, and to be clear, bad stuff, even truly horrific stuff, happens. Markets crash. Volcanoes erupt. Wars are fought. Just a lot less than they are predicted.
What should we do about these great expectations of grief? Most require no response at all. We can safely ignore Harry Dent when he predicts the market will crash next week. Yet again.
But some doomsday predictions are serious and are offered in good faith by serious people. For those situations, I offer the following top ten list of suggestions for responding to forecasts of gloom, doom, and boom.
1. Be skeptical. Extreme events are, by definition, outliers. Thus, any predictions about their occurrence deserve skepticism and scrutiny. Moreover, a broader scientific skepticism is appropriate. The scientific method can and should be applied to traditional science as well as to all types of inquiry about the nature of reality. That means using the common scientific tools of investigation, reason, observation, induction, and testing with an attitude of skepticism.
2. Consider the source. Unless the source is unimpeachable and the underlying facts well supported, there is no reason to worry about it. Listen to real experts and ignore some guy on Twitter.
3. Consider the substance. Unfortunately, experts (good and bad, real and phony) are all prone to the same weaknesses all of us are. Philip Tetlock’s excellent Expert Political Judgment examines why experts are so often wrong in sometimes excruciating detail. Even worse, when wrong, experts are rarely held accountable and rarely admit it. They insist that they were just off on timing (“I was right but early”), or blindsided by an impossible-to-predict event, or almost right, or wrong for the right reasons. Tetlock goes so far as to show that the better known and more frequently quoted experts are, the less reliable their guesses about the future are likely to be, largely due to overconfidence, one of our consistent problems.
Experts have also damaged their credibility by claiming excessive certainty, opining outside their areas of expertise, and treating their proposed solutions are scientific demands. For example, climate change is undoubtedly real and human action has almost certainly driven it, but what the impact of it on our planet will be is less certain than the experts allow. Even more importantly, the policy solutions offered by scientists are not typically matters of their expertise, though they act like they are.
Demand that experts (and anyone making a significant claim) show their work so you can check their work.
4. Focus on the data. Nassim Taleb calls our tendency to create false or unsupported stories to legitimize our pre-conceived notions the “narrative fallacy.” It threatens our analysis and judgment constantly. Therefore, while we may enjoy the stories and even be aided by them, we should focus on the actual data, especially because the stories so often conflict. Our interpretations of the data need to be reevaluated constantly too. Mathematician John Allen Paulos makes an important distinction.
“There is a tension between stories and statistics, and one under-appreciated contrast between them is simply the mindset with which we approach them. In listening to stories, we tend to suspend disbelief in order to be entertained, whereas in evaluating statistics we generally have an opposite inclination to suspend belief in order not to be beguiled.”
5. Scale is always relevant. Extreme events don’t happen very often even though they are often predicted and expected. However, extreme events, views, and predictions get attention. CNN ratings are a disaster except when they are covering disasters. In 1994, the writer R.U. Sirius presciently noted, “As more and more people get a voice, a voice needs a special stridency to be heard above the din.”
One way people seek to be heard or to gain notoriety is to make a fair point while scaling up the projected consequences. Even when there is really good evidence of a current problem, most such problems are relatively minor, and even the major problems are rarely catastrophic. Scale matters.
6. Demand scrupulous honesty. Science is necessarily tentative and subject to change based upon new or better information. Unfortunately, some people think such changes are a bug rather than a feature of the scientific endeavor. Thus, it is tempting to try to use “spin” to keep from seeming to have changed one’s views or positions. That’s a mistake that damages one’s credibility more than owning up to changes or additions.
Science is designed to weed out error and bias. It is by far the best mechanism we have for doing so. But it isn’t perfect. Because it is populated by humans, it is prone to the planning fallacy, motivated reasoning, confirmation bias, overconfidence, and a long litany of other foibles. As the great physicist and Nobel laureate Richard Feynman stressed, “The first principle is that you must not fool yourself — and you are the easiest person to fool.”
When something has changed, say so. Honesty is the best policy.
7. Admit mistakes. Similarly, it is crucial to own up to your mistakes. Your credibility demands it. When you are wrong, admit it.
8. Follow the money (and other interests). Motivated reasoning is our tendency to scrutinize ideas more critically when we disagree with them than when we agree. In general, we see what we want to see and act accordingly. And if it’s in our interest to see things a certain way, we almost surely will. Upton Sinclair offered perhaps its most popular expression: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!”
9. Don’t forget unintended consequences. There are always unintended consequences. Always.
10. Complexity, chaos, and chance are immense. On this point I merely note the reality that stuff [sic] happens – good, bad, indifferent – and offer my ode to that reality, with apologies to Franklin P. Adams.
Reality’s Sad Lexicon
These are the saddest of possible words:“Complexity, Chaos and Chance.”Trio of disrupters, fleeter than memes,Complexity, Chaos, and Chance.Ruthlessly pricking our grandiose schemes,Turning to feces our favorite themes –Words that are heavy, despoiling our dreams:“Complexity, Chaos, and Chance.”
We long for significance. To be right about important things. To save the day. To matter. But none of us is likely to predict the end of the world (and what would it matter if we did?). And while lots of big careers have been made by getting a big prediction right once in a row, rare indeed is the person who has done it more often.
David Karpf pointed out: “Nothing ever quite seems to fulfill its imagined revolutionary potential, and nothing ever quite seems to die.” As I have noted before, I expect that “[l]ess will change than we expect, things will change less than we expect, and any changes will not persist as long as we expect.”
We are all natural-born and equal opportunity extremists who want to live in exceptional times. But most of us are ordinary and most times are ordinary. And that’s okay. Act accordingly.
Totally Worth It
If you’re looking for a New Year’s resolution, here’s a good one.
Feel free to contact me via rpseawright [at] gmail [dot] com or on Twitter (@rpseawright) and let me know what you like, what you don’t like, what you’d like to see changed, and what you’d add. Don’t forget to subscribe and share.
Of course, the easiest way to share TBL is simply to forward it to a few dozen of your closest friends.
Over the Christmas holiday, while I was in the Washington, DC area visiting my children and grandchildren, I sent a friend with whom I went to high school – who owns the best restaurant in Chicago (Michelin review), among other ventures – the above picture I took of the White House and the National Christmas Tree. He responded with the picture below, explaining that he and his wife “drove to Indiana for the Amish Lights Festival.”
This piece from 2003 is the best thing I saw or read this week. The most encouraging. The sharpest. The stupidest. The strongest. The sweetest. The saddest. The most shameful. The most bizarre. The most accurate. The most heroic. The best book in the last 125 years? A different sort of apocalypse.
Please send me your nominees for this space to rpseawright [at] gmail [dot] com or via Twitter (@rpseawright).
The Spotify playlist of TBL music now includes more than 200 songs and about 16 hours of great music. I urge you to listen in, sing along, and turn the volume up.
Benediction
Gracious Lord, make this New Year a meaningful one.
Not by shielding us from sorrow and pain, but by strengthening us to bear them when they come.
Not by making our path easy, but by making us fit enough to tread any path.
Not by removing obstacles and hardships, but by facing our fears.
Not by granting us unbroken sunshine, but by keeping our outlook bright even in the shadows.
Not by making our lives always pleasant, but by showing us where we are most needed and by making us zealous to be there and to help.
God, make this year a meaningful one. Amen.
Thanks for reading. Happy New Year.
Issue 95 (December 31, 2021)