One of the things I am fascinated by is the desire in human nature to explain everything with a pattern and to dismiss things that don't fit in a box. What got me thinking about this was a discussion on Yahoo about why American Idol's ratings are down.
There were all sorts of rationales posited, but the thing that is fascinating to me is the belief that there must be some systemic rationale for the drop. Couldn't it be that the contestants were less interesting this year? Or could it be that we are just a bit bored with the brand and concept? I don't know, and that is exactly the point. Too often we demand a grand explanation for things that may be unique to a specific situation and do not fit a pattern.
Lets take a more controversial subject, at least in tech crowds. God.
What is fascinating to me is that smart people can be so confident that there is no spiritual plane of some sort. Some level of existence that we just don't understand. My purpose here is not to convince you to believe in God or to believe anything about American Idol, but to suggest exactly the opposite. I think that we should all embrace more than a little bit of uncertainty in life. Trying to explain everything with our severely limited perceptual abilities is foolish. I am not saying that we should stop trying to figure out the answers. But on the other hand acceptance of the unknown and the, at least currently, unknowable is incredibly freeing. I feel like we as technologists often find this idea discomfiting. I personally find the quest for knowledge combined with the certainty of my uncertainty to be a very satisfying balance.
Friday, May 2, 2008
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17 comments:
Yup. A bit of uncertainty might lead to a bit more personal wisdom.
Have you read Taleb's book which speaks much about uncertain luck vs the conceit of 'knowing': "The Black Swan"?
The book is inspired, even captivating.
Embracing one's uncertainty can be very satisfying.
I do find it interesting that (it seems) you've inherently explained the uncertainty by labeling it with "God" and "spiritual plane."
Are you not falling into the same trap you saw in the discussions around American Idol?
@pk
yes, I am reading Black Swan as we speak. Great book.
@bfw
I don't believe I have explained uncertainty in this piece at all, least of all by calling it God. I certainly have no explanations for things which I don't understand. I do believe though that there is "something out there" that is beyond our ability to directly sense it. Call it God. Call it "spirituality" or whatever. I really don't know, but I am on a quest to gain deeper understandings of that which I know it is likely I will never really understand. And I am OK with that.
While I understand the point that you are attempting to make, I believe that your choice of examples could have been better. Let me first indicate that I am neither a religious man, nor an American Idol fan.
First, comparing the ratings of a television series to the existence of a supernatural being in your argument is logically inconsistent; the former may be labeled as a 'consequence' of many variables (i.e. a causal relationship), such as the relative quality of the contestants, market saturation/penetration, time of airing, and even more esoteric variables that are too numerous to name. The latter, however, does not have any characteristics of a causal relationship. Does the mere act of believing in a deity cause him/her/it to spawn into existence? As far as we know, no.
The fact is, the ratings on American Idol could be explained, given enough data and variables. However, the existence of God cannot be proven or disproven due to the very nature of the posited question.
Anyways, that was my exp(2,n) cents.
eighties,
You seemed to miss my entire point - though that indeed could be totally my fault. The idea is that it does not matter where uncertainty comes from. The fact is that it is there. And we can likely not explain many things about which we are uncertain. Some things may be more reasonable to try to explain than others. But it is the internal process of gaining comfort with uncertainty about which I speak. It is not logically inconsistent to compare them because I am not comparing them. They are two different and distinct examples of uncertainty, which can come in may forms. The source is irrelevant - from the trivial, i.e. American Idol, to the not so trivial, i.e. the existence or lack there of of a spiritual plane. Indeed the Black Swan book PK mentioned above is all about this. I will be much smarter about it when I am done. Interestingly I did not link my blog post to the book. But I guess it has had a subconscious effect. That perhaps is where some plagiarism comes from - lol!
"I do believe though that there is "something out there" that is beyond our ability to directly sense it. Call it God. Call it "spirituality" or whatever."
Smart people tend not to believe in spiritual things because a side effect of being smart is learning the value of ignoring beliefs and relying on evidence instead. There isn't a shred of evidence for the existence of God or a spiritual realm. Or as a smart man once said, “An atheist doesn't have to be someone who thinks he has a proof that there can't be a god. He only has to be someone who believes that the evidence on the god question is at a similar level to the evidence on the werewolf question.” So unless you believe in werewolves, that's a pretty good explanation of why smart people tend to be so sure.
It's one thing to embrace the fact that we don't understand everything, that's good to do, but it's quite another to make up fairy tales and call it knowledge. It's not only bad, it's damaging to the mind to be brainwashed to believe such foolishness, especially at a young age as most of us are when the brainwashing begins.
There might be a god out there, pigs might actually fly, and pink unicorns might orbit the moon, but there's not any evidence that says we should believe any of those things, so if you do, why?
occam's razor - the simplest answer is the right one. it is no longer new & the immediacy of society today demands new.
"Trying to explain everything with our severely limited perceptual abilities is foolish."
Sorry, don't want to appear rude, but some people call this science and has served us very well in the past : )
@zarate
And what "science" is going to explain why Google became one of the largest companies in the world in 10 years. Could it have been predicted? Can we predict the next one? What are the "patterns" that lead to Google?
The point is that there are unpredictable things. And when we try to explain the unexplainable, that is not science. I am not saying trying to figure things out is wrong. But I am saying that to not understand that everything cannot be explained by our "science" is foolish. And therefore to not be comfortable with uncertainty is foolhardy.
Luck, Chance, Uncertainty, Randomness and Noise are the most underrated forces in our lives, our businesses and our relationships. We live in denial of the power they exert. We have an innate yearning for order, meaning and certainty. We have a need for explanation, for punctuation – for beginnings and ends, for causes and effects. We have trouble when effects precede causes.
We like stories and explanations. We are explanation machines. We try to explain everything. Explanations help to dispel uncertainty, to relieve a kind of existential anxiety. Explanations for eons have paraded as knowledge. We are easily led astray. Epistemological inquiries into how we know what we know and how we know we know what we know seek to map some of this territory. Semantically, we also need to be sensitive to our terms. There is knowledge, there is information, there is wisdom – are they the same? Are they different? Yet, the quest for knowledge is an essential human quest. Toleration of ambiguity facilitates the quest.
Knowledge while an essential striving may also have its downsides. Sometimes there is a vanity or conceit that it may engender. There is also a valuing of certain kinds of knowing over others - basically knowledge that is provable. Knowledge can also function like a commodity that may privilege certain people over others giving power to those in its possession. Those in the “know”. Knowledge may also construct its own little conceptual and perceptual prisons and ghettos. This prison of the "known" is what a Zen Buddhist might say prevents us from realizing “beginners mind”. We look but we don’t see.
Kurt Godel proved that we can never know everything. This notion was quite upsetting to those around him. Wittgenstein found his theorem intolerable. Godel showed that there will always be truths in a system that can never be proved from within that system. Yet, despite the lack of proof they are still true. In addition, let me add – there are no spheres in flatland.
Very refreshing comment. For a while, I thought all you techies were raging atheists.
"I think that we should all embrace more than a little bit of uncertainty in life. Trying to explain everything with our severely limited perceptual abilities is foolish."
I owe you another beer.... ;-)
tx, jd
I think a lot of people commenting on this post missed Hank's real point.
But I think Hank missed his real point, too.
To get the important issue out of the way first: Sure, some people may overestimate what incidental power of deduction and understanding they possess. I'll even give you that there is a freeing or liberating feeling just waiting to reward you for pointedly underestimating those same abilities.
But on to what Hank was talking about: American Idol, was it?
I had to really think hard about what Hank meant by "there were all sorts of rationales posited" and "that there must be some systemic rationale for the drop." After all, Hank himself, hardly pausing for a breath, posts two rationales himself. I guess these two weren't "systemic" enough to attract his own criticism.
The rest of you probably got the gist of what Hank was saying, and it went something like this:
some things are too difficult, for some reason or other, to understand, therefore..
..therefore what exactly?
Telling someone they shouldn't try to understand something because it seems unlikely that they can strikes me as being a bit like criticizing a wheelchair-bound individual for having athletic aspirations.
I really think the problem with this post, Hank, and many arguments like it, is a confusion of terminology.
On the one hand, you seem to be levying a criticism against apparently futile inquiry, while on the other hand you seem to be just as inquisitive, you just prefer simpler explanations to complex ones.
But the problem is, your explanations aren't just simpler, they fail to even qualify as explanations at all.
Allow me to introduce an uncommon but very functional distinction between two words which, due to their connotations in casual parlance, make them particularly well suited to the task.
When respecting this distinction, a parable about how the Zebra got its stripes as a punishment would qualify as an account, and a theory of why it would be evolutionarily advantageous for the Zebra species or its precursor to develop stripes would qualify as an explanation.
In other words: an explanation, as a matter of course, must be a necessary consequence of any initial state characterized by the explanation. An account has the freedom to be too vague or incidental to convey higher understanding to the listener/reader. Accounts are inherently ex post facto and cannot provide accurate predictions or expectations for a situation; they are merely the fairytales we tell ourselves about how the arrangement of our furniture has affected our mood by blocking our chi, or how we have been too greedy and are being punished by the volcano gods, or where people go when they die.
In response to your claim that there are smart people with faith "that there is no spiritual plane of some sort," I have only this to say:
No, there are no smart people who are confident that there is no spiritual plane of some sort. You're mistaken. Please adjust your definition of "smart person" to accommodate Existentialism 101 as a prerequisite.
I've been seeing a lot of Rhetoric from Hank Williams lately, and this article doesn't fall short in that category. While many have tried, you cannot stretch the implications of certain uncertainty to include self-gratifying fantasy, even if it is as vague (and moderate!) as "something out there."
Please stop publishing opinions just because they're the moderate / agreeable opinion. You're just peeing in the memepool.
And stop writing about opportunistic subjects. I know it attracts viewers and comments, but really, you aren't adding anything new to the discussion.
Disclaimer: I think I may have ripped off "..as a matter of course, must be a necessary consequence.." from the book "Godel's Proof."
whoops
"Please stop publishing opinions just because they're the moderate / agreeable opinion. You're just peeing in the memepool.
And stop writing about opportunistic subjects. I know it attracts viewers and comments, but really, you aren't adding anything new to the discussion."
Donny,
I have noted that at least several of my posts seem to disturb you. That is your right. But in case you hadnt noticed, this is *my* blog. As such it is a place where I write about what I want to. If it is of no interest to you, I would suggest you take you leave so as to avoid any pee in your "memepool" or any of your other orifices.
Hank, a colorful exaggeration of your logic that I ought to simply ignore your blog might be the insinuation that firefighters ought to ignore fires.
More poignantly however, I'd observe this: if everyone took the advice of merely ignoring every author or speaker they perceived to be leading others astray (whatever that means,) I think you'd find it manifests itself on an emergent scale as a systemic cultural illness of complacency.
Anyhow, I generally find your articles insightful, which makes it even more important IMO to make a statement when you're wrong.
In this article, you make the same stupid mistake that everyone does before they understand the "celestial teapot" argument. The teapot seems deliberately ludicrous, by design, to highlight our stubbornness in the face such obvious facts as our cultural and animal bias toward all metaphysical assumptions, no matter how vague they are, or how "open-minded" we think we are being about them. You tap into that vagueness/"open-mindedness" in your article. Many people, like you it would appear, think that it is somehow more reasonable to believe in "some kind of afterlife" than to believe in no kind of afterlife. The fact is, however, that these are equally fallacious, and until you're of a mind to write an article including the following expression of wonder paraphrased from this very article, you will be pandering (either advertently or inadvertently) to a widening so-called "moderate" crowd that deftly straddles the center for no reason other than intellectual masturbation.
"What is fascinating to me is that smart people can be so confident that there is no celestial teapot of some sort."
Too much knowledge (or thinking) becomes a liability.
"Smart" people can be at a major disadvantage because of their blinders.
See evidence above. (Comments, not the article.)
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