Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
Why you don't have free will, with Brian Klaas
2k Plays1 year ago
Australiana is now Fire at Will - your safe space for dangerous conversations.
We all comfort ourselves by believing in cause and effect. According to Dr Brian Klaas, we wilfully ignore a bewildering truth: but for a few small changes, our lives and our societies could be profoundly different.
When given the choice between complex uncertainty and comforting – but wrong – certainty, we too often choose comfort. In other words, we ignore the flukes.
Brian is an associate professor of global politics at University College, London, a contributing writer for The Atlantic, and the author of several books, the most recent of which has just been released. It is titled: Fluke: Chance, Chaos, and why everything we do matters.
Follow Australiana on social media here.
Subscribe to The Spectator Australia here.
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction and Guest Overview
00:00:14
Speaker
G'day and welcome to Australiana from The Spectator Australia. I'm Will Kingston. To some extent, we all comfort ourselves by believing in cause and effect. We tell ourselves that there are nice, neat causal links between what we do and what happens to us.
00:00:31
Speaker
that we are the masters of our destiny. When you listen to podcasts, in fact, when you listen to this podcast for I'm guilty in this regard, you hear about forces that influence people and societies as if the relationship is as simple as X causes Y. According to my guest today, we willfully ignore a bewildering truth, but for a few small changes, our lives and our societies could be profoundly different.
00:00:59
Speaker
When given the choice between complex uncertainty and comforting but wrong certainty, we too often choose comfort. In other words, we ignore the flukes. To find out why, I'm joined by Dr. Brian Klass. Brian is an Associate Professor of Global Politics at University College London, a contributing writer at The Atlantic, and the author of several books, most recent of which has just been released.
Role of Randomness in Social Science
00:01:27
Speaker
He's titled Fluke.
00:01:28
Speaker
Chance, chaos, and why everything we do matters. Brian, welcome to Australia. It's great to be here. Let's start with you. So you've described yourself as a disillusioned social scientist. So double barrel question. What's a social scientist and why are you of the disillusion variety?
00:01:51
Speaker
Well, social scientists try to understand change in human societies and the sort of origin stories of why those changes happen and potentially how we can avoid calamity and so on. I'm disillusioned because I think that the way that we are taught to represent change and understand change in human society is flawed by a major bias, which is that we assume that big events must have big causes and that the way that we model them often systematically writes out the noise or the flukes.
00:02:20
Speaker
So I think there's a lot of stuff that I talked about in the book where some of it is derived from my own professional background, where I've just sort of felt like the world doesn't operate the way we pretend it does. And some of it is from this story that I opened the book with, which is
00:02:35
Speaker
a story of a woman in Wisconsin in 1905 who has a mental breakdown and murders her children. Unfortunately, she kills all four of her kids and then takes her own life. And the reason I mentioned that is because this is my great grandfather's first wife and he came home to the farmhouse in Wisconsin in 1905 and found his whole family murdered.
00:02:55
Speaker
And he remarried a few years later to my great grandmother. And that's why I exist. It's also why you're listening to my voice. And so I think this is one of those things where on a personal level, there is this aspect where I feel like a complete accident of history. I think humanity is an accident of history. And therefore, that has been percolating in my mind alongside this aspect of how social science tells neat and tidy stories about cause and effect, which I just think are wrong very often.
00:03:24
Speaker
To what extent does this research and your thinking invalidate social science or to what extent does it perhaps reshape how we should look at it?
Critique of Mathematical Models in Social Science
00:03:34
Speaker
Well, I hope it doesn't invalidate social science. I mean, I believe very strongly in social science. It's the only tool we have to navigate an uncertain world and try to avoid catastrophes. But I think the goals of social science, I think, are at a crossroads right now. And what I mean by that is a lot of social science methods are trying to get ever greater mathematical models
00:03:53
Speaker
to have ever greater certainty in the causal patterns to explain the past. The way that we understand change is we basically look at what happened in the past, and then we sort of say, OK, this fits the pattern. Here's our elegant equation that fits the pattern. I mean, the problem to me is that that's not what social science is for, in my view. My view is that social science is to solve problems. That's why we do it. And when you look at a lot of academic social science, it's not being used to solve problems. I mean, I'm a political scientist, and I cannot point to a single major achievement of political science.
00:04:22
Speaker
other than some theoretical ideas that have often not been applied in the real world. And so, of course, there's policy intervention that social scientists and political scientists make all the time, but I think it's a world where we're really disengaging from it for theoretical reasons to sort of chase what I call as the holy grail of causality.
00:04:43
Speaker
And I think social science can be better. So, you know, part of the book is about history and philosophy and science and so on. Part of it is a call to sort of reconcile these problems with the way that social science is done. So it's more effective at solving problems.
Order and Disorder: Concepts from Biology
00:04:59
Speaker
Let's get some terminology out of the way at the outset. There are three important terms I think we need to define. There is contingency, convergence and chaos. Talk me through each of those.
00:05:11
Speaker
Yeah, so interrupt me if I go on for too long, because these are important terms. But contingency versus convergence is a really important framework for understanding change. I've borrowed it from evolutionary biology, where evolutionary biologists have been having this debate for a very long time about whether the world is swayed by order or disorder effectively.
00:05:29
Speaker
Contingency is much more around the idea of disorder, and convergence is much more around the idea of order. Now, when it comes to how these things actually play out, it's very easy to understand them in evolutionary biology terms. So 65 million years ago, a space rock hit the Earth, and it wiped out the dinosaurs. And if it had hit a very different part of Earth, or even if it had moved a few hundred miles, it probably wouldn't have killed all the dinosaurs. Indeed, if it had been delayed by 10 seconds, it probably would have missed the Earth.
00:05:56
Speaker
So the rise of mammals and the origin story of humans is basically derived from what is a contingent event, an event that could have been very different but for a small change, if there had not been this asteroid from the Oort cloud in the distant reaches of space that wiped out the dinosaurs and made it possible for us to emerge.
00:06:13
Speaker
So contingency is this idea that you have the small change and the whole world is different, right? Convergence is a totally opposite theory, which is basically that the noise of life gets wrinkled out in the sort of margins. And you end up in this position where everything converges towards a inevitable end point. So my favorite example of this in evolutionary biology
00:06:32
Speaker
is that if you were to take an octopus eye and a human eye and observe them side to side, they're unbelievably similar. Even though evolution has been operating on 600 million different years of branch of the branch of life rather has diverged 600 million years ago. So we're on totally different lineages in the sort of tree of life. And yet,
00:06:50
Speaker
we came up with the same eye. And the reason that happened was because it worked. So the forces of order just whittled down bad solutions to vision and came up with the same good solution twice. So when you think about this in human terms, I have this idea called the snooze button effect, which is to say that if you wake up in the morning and you're tired and you slap the snooze button,
00:07:11
Speaker
And then you imagine redoing that moment in your life and you don't slap the snooze button. The question is, does your life unfold in a profoundly different way or is it mostly the same? And if the snooze button changes your life, then it's a contingent moment. If it doesn't, it's a convergent moment. I think basically all moments are contingent. I mean, one of the arguments of the book is that every little thing that is happening is slightly changing the way that both history and your life will unfold. But let's put that aside for a second.
00:07:36
Speaker
And the reason that I think that is because of chaos theory. So this gets to your third question. And chaos theory is a scientifically verified aspect of complex systems, which basically says that small changes can have enormous effects over long timescales. And sometimes they don't have to be that long. So we know this with weather, that we can't predict the future of weather beyond 7 to 10 days.
00:07:58
Speaker
And that's because of chaos theory. If there's an even tiny mistake in the model, the wind speed is off by a millionth of a mile an hour, or the temperature is off by a millionth of a degree, over time, the model will get radically different depending on that small fluctuation in measurement.
Experiments and Social Change
00:08:16
Speaker
So what's called sensitivity on initial conditions, that's the formal way of describing chaos theory, is something that I think affects human societies as well. So I think the ripple effects of many different things that we do
00:08:28
Speaker
changing the future. And the example I opened the book with is a story from 1926 in Kyoto, Japan, where a couple goes on vacation, falls in love with the city. And then 19 years later, the husband is Henry Stimson, and he's America's Secretary of War. And he's told by the target committee that they have picked Kyoto, his sort of pet city, to drop the first atomic bomb.
00:08:50
Speaker
And he twice meets with President Truman to get him to take Kyoto off the bombing list. And so the first bomb falls on Hiroshima instead. And a 19-year-old vacation has this ripple effect that then later on ends up producing mass death in one city rather than another. So that's chaos theory in human terms. And I think it's something that we don't take very seriously in social science for a very simple reason. It's really, really hard to model.
00:09:15
Speaker
But I don't think that means it's untrue. I think it's actually the way the world works. It's just that we pretend it isn't because then we can model much more easily with five or six obvious big variables. And we'll get back to modeling in a bit because increasingly it seems to control more and more aspects of our lives on contingency and convergence. You've said that there has now been a fair bit of for a long time being a debate in several disciplines, but we are closer to actually working out the relationship between the two.
00:09:45
Speaker
There's that nice term that I've heard you refer to, contingent convergence. Talk to me about that and perhaps weave in the long-term evolution experiment.
00:09:56
Speaker
Yeah, so this one is a tricky one to make people riveted by bacterial experiments with E. coli. But this idea I find so unbelievably fascinating. So I'll give it a shot. So contingent convergence is this idea that the way that the world works is partway between disorder and order. And therefore, when the disorder happens, when the contingent moment happens, the pathway of change shifts.
00:10:17
Speaker
But then within that new path, there's going to be some order. So you can think about this in human terms like you drive to work and most of the time it takes the same amount of time. Every so often you get in a car accident and your life might change forever. So with this long-term evolution experiment, what they did that was really elegant and smart was they said, let's figure out which one of these is actually playing a bigger role, contingency or convergence. So they take E. coli, this bacterium, and they clone it 12 times. So they basically got 12 identical populations of E. coli in these different flasks.
00:10:47
Speaker
And this starts in the 1980s. It's been going on for a really long time. And E. coli reproduced so quickly that it's basically the equivalent of almost 2 million years of human history that they've evolved now in this experiment. Now, what's beautiful about this is it's just a completely controlled environment. So all there is is a solution of glucose, which is the food for the E. coli, and citrate, which stabilizes the solution. And every single day, they just give them the same solution over and over and over and over.
00:11:14
Speaker
Now, for the first, I don't know, 12 to 15 years, I can't remember the exact day, but for the first bit of the study, it looked like convergence had just won the question, right? Because all of the different 12 populations were slightly different, there was change, but they were all converging towards better fitness at eating E. coli. So they were basically getting better at eating the sugar, right? Now, all of a sudden, one day, a postdoc, a researcher comes in, and one of the 12 flasks is totally cloudy.
00:11:40
Speaker
And somebody thinks, OK, it's been contaminated. Let's throw it away. So they restart it from a previous generation because they freeze these things to make sure they have snapshots in time to be able to redo bits of the experiment if they need to. So they rerun it.
Randomness and Its Impact on Life
00:11:54
Speaker
And all of a sudden, a little bit later, it turns cloudy again. And they're like, OK, this wasn't contamination. Something is going on with this flask, one of the 12. So they sequence it. And what they find is that this one of the 12 populations
00:12:08
Speaker
has evolved the ability to eat citrate, which it shouldn't be able to do. This is supposed to be a stabilizer, not a food. But when they sequenced the genome, what was really amazing was that the chain of events that made this possible was for completely neutral mutations. They didn't give the E. coli any benefit whatsoever.
00:12:25
Speaker
And then the fifth mutation allowed them to eat citrate. So it's like, you imagine this like house of cards with like, you know, four things stacked in just the right way, totally randomly. And then they have this one little mutation and boom, now it can eat citrate. And the deal is that every time that you look at that population forever, it's different from the other 11. And it's better, right? It's more fit because it can eat this new food source. So contingent convergence is saying, look, you know, there are these patterns in the world. There is order in the world. The populations evolve.
00:12:54
Speaker
roughly in similar ways for a while, but then boom, all of a sudden something changes and that citrate population is totally different forever. And so I think that's a nice framework for thinking about social change that you can have a moment where it's like, yeah, here's the US plugging along the economy doing its thing and then boom, September 11th happens and the financial crisis or the pandemic.
00:13:16
Speaker
And contingent convergence is sort of the diversion of the path and then the forces of trends and constraints and so on once you divert paths and proceed with the unfolding of history.
00:13:27
Speaker
Perhaps the people who aren't as strong with their science knowledge, I was trying to think about what the closest equivalent would be at a human level. The best I can come up with is twins to try and explain contingent convergence. You mentioned twins in the book. Put contingent convergence or discuss contingent convergence in the context of twins.
00:13:50
Speaker
Yeah, so I mean, you know, there's a lot of things that are convergent about the genome of identical twins. Obviously, it's identical. And so you would imagine there's going to be massive similarities in how their lives unfold. There's a quote that I put in the book from a scholar at King's College London who just says, look, you know, let's imagine these two kids are completely identical genetically, and they're sitting in the same classroom. And one of them is listening to the teacher read a poem.
00:14:13
Speaker
And at that moment, as the one twin is just absolutely enamored with this poem and finds it really moving, the other one gets distracted by a bird flying near the window. And the idea is, OK, well, maybe the distracted twin gets an interest in birds or doesn't get an interest in poetry, and the other one does. And all of a sudden, their lives shift. So there's the forces of order in the genome and so on, which obviously does play a part in our life script.
00:14:38
Speaker
But there's also all these little experiences. And I think that the example there is one that's so small that it's really profound. But of course, you know, twins have different experiences. They get a different girlfriend or boyfriend or whatever it is. And all of a sudden you have, you know, their lives diverge. And so I think this is something that like we intuitively accept, like I think all of us understand
00:14:57
Speaker
that our lives have these divergent pathways, but there's some order within them. I think what's bizarre is that when we tell the stories of our lives, we basically write these things out, right? Because the mentality we're supposed to have is that we're the masters of our destinies. And so we picked our path through life.
00:15:13
Speaker
And I think it's just complete lie. I mean, I think there's aspects of this that do affect our trajectories. Of course, we make choices about like where to go to school or who to marry or whatever. But like, you know, this is something where there's massive amounts of contingency embedded in it. And some of it's invisible. Some of it's stuff you never see.
00:15:28
Speaker
And also some of it's stuff you have no control over. I mean, I have no say over where I was born, who my parents were, when I was born, or the fact that I have a brain that is the way it is, right? I mean, my brain is not my choice. So like, all this stuff is contingent. And it's just sort of like the background, it's just like taken for granted. But I would argue that those are probably the most important factors in how my life is unfolded. I think it's pretty nothing more important than when I was born, where I was born and who my parents were.
00:15:54
Speaker
and also the brain structure that I was given. So it's a pretty strange thing when you think about it, how little we actually embed these lessons into most of our philosophical thought and discussions about social change in the modern world.
00:16:07
Speaker
I think that's a really insightful and important observation that yes, we intuitively understand that random events can impact us and the way that we live our lives, but then we still almost willfully ignore it
Determinism and Free Will
00:16:24
Speaker
anyway. It's a lovely little term that you use in the book, the delusion of individualism, which talks to this.
00:16:31
Speaker
My question is why? Why is randomness so unsettling to us? And then why do we default back to that willful blindness?
00:16:40
Speaker
Yeah, I think there's a few reasons. I mean, I think one is just it's uncomfortable, right? I mean, it's really uncomfortable. People do not like the idea that they play things of chance. And they don't like the idea of lacking control. I mean, these are normal human impulses, I think. Now, there's a reason for some of these, I think, which is derived from evolution and evolutionary psychology and how our brains have been forged over time, which is that we are people who are determined by pattern detection.
00:17:04
Speaker
There's a Jonathan Gottschalk, a scholar, who's written a book called The Storytelling Animal. He used that phrase, and I think it's a very good phrase. We make sense of the world through narrative. And the reason we do that is because in the prehistoric past, if you think about all of human history,
00:17:19
Speaker
something like 9,300 of the 9,500 generations of modern humans that have ever existed lived in a hunter-gatherer society where they effectively had really simple patterns of cause and effect. And in those patterns of cause and effect, they had to navigate. If you had a false positive where you thought there was a predator, but there wasn't,
00:17:42
Speaker
then that's okay. There's no problem because you just still survive. If you have a false negative, in other words, if there's some sort of pattern and you assume it's random, there's nothing to see there, you die because a predator eats you. So our brains have been shaped by the forces of evolution to be overly, basically,
00:18:01
Speaker
you know, affected by patterns and to be overly attuned to patterns. And this creates a dynamic in the modern world that I think is really problematic because we live in a way more complex cause and effect environment than there ever was before. So way more things are happening to us that are arbitrary. You know, I mean, you get infected with COVID. Why did that happen? Well, some random person in China got infected with a virus that mutated.
00:18:23
Speaker
your life has been upended or even if you were in lockdown, whatever it was, your life was upended. All these arbitrary forces change our lives way more often than they did in the distant past of the species, but we still have the same brains that deal with cause and effect and linear patterns where randomness is basically something we're allergic to. I think the other thing that's really interesting in psychology is that
00:18:44
Speaker
We have a difference in how we accept randomness depending on the content of the outcome. So positive news, we are totally fine with randomness. People who win the lottery don't have some grand scheme often that they say, oh, this was part of a huge plan. Sometimes they do, but it's less common. Whereas cancer diagnoses, car accidents, I mean, bad news, we absolutely cannot accept that it was just a random mistake. We need to make sense of it in order to cope. And so I think that's another part of the psychology of our species.
00:19:12
Speaker
And it's interesting how this narrative bias feeds into how we think about success and achievement in society. We still cling to the notion of the self-made man, of the genius who works hard, gets outcomes as a result of that, and did it on his or her own back. I imagine your belief would be that we need to somewhat discard this more traditional view of success and achievement in society.
00:19:40
Speaker
There are two angles to this. The one that I talk about in Fluke briefly is a really simple model that shows how powerful luck is in developing wealth. In the book, you can read more in detail, but basically what it shows is that when you have a simple model of how human society unfolds,
00:20:00
Speaker
It's not the people who are the smartest necessarily who always end up as the richest person in society. It's very often people who are around the average who get lucky. And the reason for that is because luck is a bit like lightning. It strikes sort of randomly.
00:20:12
Speaker
but the biggest group of people are clustered around the middle. So the people who are most likely to get struck by lightning are actually the people around the average talent and so on skill sets in society. So there's a lot of reason to believe that this is the way that the world works. I would also say just, you know, from personal experience, I think this is one of those things where, you know, I think one of the lessons that I've internalized from Fluke is like you should
00:20:34
Speaker
claim less credit for your success and take less blame for your failures, partly because we live in this really complex world with all these interactions that we don't really control. But also what I was saying before, one of the places I do field research as a social scientist is in Madagascar, one of the poorest countries in the world. 40% of the island has electricity. The average person lives on $1.90 a day. Rampant disease, it still has bubonic plague outbreaks, which has been eradicated everywhere else in the world.
00:21:00
Speaker
And I think to myself when I go there, if I was born here, I would absolutely still be here. There is no way I would have moved somewhere else. There's no way I'd be on your podcast. I would just be someone who's really desperately poor in Madagascar because there's no social mobility. You have so little life chance. And so when I think about, oh, people say to me, great job on whatever you did. You deserve it. I'm like, well, yeah.
00:21:26
Speaker
My brain produced a book, but at the same time, I benefited from an unbelievable amount of luck in life that has nothing to do with my abilities or talents. My abilities or talents, by the way, and this is going down a rabbit hole that gets towards the end of the book, I have no control over them. I don't believe in free will because I didn't produce my brain. I don't see any difference between mind and brain. I think they're the exact same thing because I'm what's called a physicalist where I believe that everything that a brain produces and a mind produces are equivalent. There's no special sauce in the brain.
00:21:55
Speaker
So, you know, when I think that way, I'm like, well, I don't know, like, do I deserve any praise for this? I don't know. I mean, I think this is something where it really does challenge our worldview. It doesn't mean we shouldn't strive, right? I mean, I still try as hard as I can. I think the question is like, what is the causal origin of anyone's success?
00:22:13
Speaker
And I think the narrative, especially, you know, I grew up in the US, like the narrative that this is the American dream and like, you know, you just work hard and, you know, you deserve all the success. And if you're a failure and you're poor, it's because you're an idiot who doesn't want to work hard. I mean, it's just a myth. I mean, I think that some of this stuff, there is a loose correlation between hard work and success. There's a loose correlation between talent and success. But it's so much looser than I think society pretends.
00:22:36
Speaker
And I think that's one of the things that I've grown to appreciate even more in writing this book and seeing the roles of randomness and chance and chaos in how our lives unfold. There was a little nugget buried in that answer, and that was that you don't believe in free will, which is fascinating.
00:22:54
Speaker
I guess the question here is where is the dividing line between free will and circumstances around you? So you decided to come on this podcast, you decided to write the book. There are obviously certain things that you can make conscious decisions about. Expand on that belief for me and where I guess you see the dividing line between free will and being constrained by forces outside of your control.
00:23:21
Speaker
Yeah, so the free will debate is one that is endlessly divided by definitional quibbles.
00:23:27
Speaker
But what it really boils down to is what is the origin of human decision-making, right? The ultimate causal origin of it, okay? So yes, humans decide things all the time. Our brains make choices, and then we implement them, right? Now, the thing that I think is the area where I don't believe in free will, and this is the fundamental problem, is I don't think there's some special thing inside of my head that is not my brain. I think it's just my brain. And I have no causal control over my brain.
00:23:54
Speaker
In other words, there's a chemical reaction happening in my brain right now, which is producing my speech. And if I tried to stop cell division in my brain, if I tried to change the chemical content in my brain, I couldn't. It's a complex chemical structure and set of neural networks that has been shaped by my genes, my upbringing, my experiences through life, which all shift my brain slightly. And then that produces my behavior. So the divide here is, and this is a way that a lot of people think about free will, but I don't think there's a scientific basis for it.
00:24:22
Speaker
is a lot of people think of themselves as sort of like a disembodied self that is separate from their brain. It's why we have the word mind as a different word from brain, right? Now, linguistically, it makes sense because we feel like we're a mind. We don't feel like we're a brain, right? I think it's a complete mistake to believe that. I think there's no difference. I mean, in the past, if you believe in the soul, and some people still do today, of course, and I'm not trying to insult people who are religious believers, I'm not, but if there are people out there, it's a difference of opinion here.
00:24:51
Speaker
I think that if you believe there's a soul, then you could have free will explained in some way that would be separate from the brain. Because there would be this non-physical entity in your head or in your body, your soul, that could somehow control your brain. And because I don't believe in that, I don't believe there is free will in the causal origin story of why I do things. So the idea here is basically it doesn't mean I can't make decisions. Of course I can. It's just a question about
00:25:19
Speaker
Do those decisions derive from something that is not a physical set of matter, which is basically my body, mostly controlled by my brain. So that's that's the issue here, right? And I think this is something where there's questions around the way the world works, which I talk about in fluke towards the latter chapters and how cause cause and effect operate.
00:25:37
Speaker
I think most scientists believe one of two things, either that there is no free will, as I've just described, or there is free will because what we mean when we say free will is that we can pursue our preferences. So one of the ways they say it is we can't want what we want, but we can will what we will. And it sounds like this BS philosophy stuff, but it's basically saying you can't control whether you like something or not.
00:26:05
Speaker
you can control whether you pursue something that you like. And that is still free will in our definition. So like, I give the example in the book, I watched this film Gettysburg when I was eight years old, and then went to the Gettysburg battlefield, the US Civil War battlefield. And I was like, utterly hooked. And I like wanted to become a Civil War reenactor. And my parents thankfully saved me from social suicide and didn't let me do that. But like, you know, I subscribed to like two magazines about this US Civil War, like when I was an eight year old,
00:26:29
Speaker
Now, I did not wake up one day and be like, you know, the coolest thing to be as a child is like a civil war aficionado, right? It's like, it's, it's totally bizarre. But like, I was just drawn to it and I had no control over it. And it's like, so, so to me, those sort of moments were like, you know, you think about like thirst, like when you feel thirsty, we accept that like, you're not consciously saying like, I would love to drink some water. You're just like, I'm thirsty.
00:26:49
Speaker
And I think that basically all of human behavior is equivalent to that impulse for thirst, but we just rationalize it through conscious thought in a way that gives us the illusion of
Compassion in a Deterministic World
00:26:58
Speaker
control. That's basically what I think about free will. There's a risk here and it's a risk that I'm sure you were cognizant of when you were writing the book. And that is that that type of attitude.
00:27:08
Speaker
can be misinterpreted as a form of nihilism. I have no free will, so what's the point? Or alternatively, it can excuse bad behavior. I have no free will, so I'm going to go out and do something which is bad or wrong or illegal. How do we make the point that you're making whilst mitigating against the risk that it is interpreted in that way?
00:27:30
Speaker
Yeah, so there are two separate questions. The nihilism one I disagree with completely. I think that actually this point of view, I feel incredibly uplifted by what I've written in this book because the philosophical implications of chaos theory, when you think about them carefully, mean that everything that you do has a ripple effect.
00:27:46
Speaker
And it may be short term, it may be long term, it may be something that's visible, it may be something that's invisible, right? And sometimes it's good and sometimes it's bad. So like my great grandfather's first wife murdered a whole bunch of kids and now I exist. Like for me, this was a positive event, even though the sort of original part of it was totally immoral as a horrible tragic act by a person who killed their own children.
00:28:09
Speaker
So the point here is that everything that we do has ripple effects. We reshape the future constantly. And that makes me feel like my life has worth because I'm affecting the future and I'm affecting the lives of other people all the time, right? Some good, some bad, and so on. So I don't feel nihilistic at all. I feel actually much more important for shaping the future than I did before I started researching and thinking deeply about these topics. On the question about how to mitigate harm,
00:28:32
Speaker
There's a great quote from, there's a neuroscientist named Sam Harris who's got some views that I find objectionable on other realms, but he has a very good quote when it comes to free will where he says, if we could imprison hurricanes and tornadoes, we would do so. And what he's trying to say there is that it doesn't matter that they don't have free will. It's not like the hurricane has chosen to destroy a city, right? It's that when something produces harm, regardless of the causal origin, we should try to mitigate that harm.
00:28:57
Speaker
So if somebody commits a crime and we know that we can stop them from committing a crime by putting them in prison after the fact and deterrent effect and all these sorts of things, those still apply. The really interesting wrinkle about this philosophically with punishment is that if you don't believe in free will, the idea of punishment for the sake of retribution makes no sense.
00:29:15
Speaker
But the sake of punishment for the sake of rehabilitation or deterrence absolutely makes sense, right? Because you're trying to basically just minimize harm. But there's no point in punishing someone for something they can't necessarily control. And I think this is where, you know, I talk about this in a book with a case of a guy who killed a whole bunch of people in the 1960s. He shot a whole bunch of people in Texas.
00:29:35
Speaker
And you tell the story and you're like, OK, lock that guy up, right? Now, the wrinkle here is that he asked before he committed these murders for them to look at his brain because he was having these really disturbing thoughts and he couldn't control them. And sure enough, they opened up his brain. He has a brain tumor that's pressing on his amygdala. And the question is, OK, does that change your view of him? For most people, the answer is yes, right? Like he's got this cancerous tissue that is changing the way he's emotionally regulating his thoughts and so on.
00:30:03
Speaker
My point is, in what world do we think that unhealthy tissue is somehow causally different from healthy tissue? I have no control over my brain the same way I would have no control over a tumor. So if both of those things are morally mitigating, I think at the ultimate end of the day that people who are thinking certain things, I don't think we can control our thoughts very much.
00:30:23
Speaker
It's a point of view where I think it doesn't fundamentally change how you design society, I don't think, because regardless of what the original story behind our actions is, we still need to basically treat people as though they are morally culpable for their actions because that's the way you mitigate harm. It's something where I don't think it's like you abolish jails or whatever. It's just you have to think carefully about how to best mitigate harm given this philosophy.
00:30:49
Speaker
This will only become more, this will become a bigger question as we learn more about the brain. And I've heard you talk about this where in a future where we can get a better understanding of how the human brain works and therefore potentially how it drives particular actions. That is a good thing, but it also potentially leads to some troubling philosophical implications at the same time.
00:31:16
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, one of the things I say to people when they ask me about the free will thing is just imagine that it was true, what I said was true, right? So a lot of people disagree with me. I know that. It's a very, like I was vehemently opposed to this point of view for many, many years, right? And I came around the more I thought about it logically. I just couldn't, I couldn't, the arguments that I was making, I was like, I think this, I just think this is correct. And I think there's, you know, a lot of people who've made this, Robert Sapolsky does it very elegantly, Sam Harris does it very elegantly and so on.
00:31:42
Speaker
But let's just let just put yourself in the mindset where this is true, that people literally don't have free will and that we are effectively unable to control our brains and our brains are producing our behavior. The question is, would you rather just imagine the illusion is not true or would you instead adapt society to be more compassionate to people? Right. I mean, I think the thing about accepting the lack of free will, at least the limits of it, softer version that some people can stomach more, is that society needs to be a little bit more forgiving to people, but also
00:32:12
Speaker
designed in a way where when people do bad things, even if they can't control them, the consequences are still aimed at minimizing that harm, right? So I think this is, again, it's that idea of the sort of jailing the hurricanes with tornadoes. It's like, you can, I mean, no one looks at a tornado and is like, wow, that is a morally bad bit of error, right? We accept that intuitively, it's not.
00:32:34
Speaker
But we still want to stop it. We don't want to have tornadoes, like destroy our houses and kill people. So I think it's one of those things where initially people say, oh, no, no, no, this will absolutely affect the criminal justice system. I think it will have less effects than people imagine. And I do think it's a useful thought experiment to just put yourself in the framework of like, let's just accept that neuroscience proves this. What would this mean? I think it's something that is not that far away. And I think neuroscience is getting closer to being able to showcase some of the dynamics that I'm talking about, even if it won't be ironclad proof.
Embracing Uncertainty
00:33:04
Speaker
Okay. So we live in a world of contingent convergence. We probably have much less control over what happens to us and potentially even what we do then, then what we may may think. I want to turn to the, so what, what are the practical implications across a few different realms? The first for me is individual decision-making. So.
00:33:28
Speaker
The Black Swan, Nicholas Taleb, came to mind for me a couple of times throughout the book. There are some crossover concepts. One of my favourite quotes is from that book, and it is, if you'll indulge me, sees any opportunity or anything that looks like an opportunity. They are rare, much rarer than you think.
00:33:47
Speaker
Remember that positive black swans have a necessary first step. You need to be exposed to them. Many people do not realize they are getting a lucky break in life when they get it. Collect as many free non lottery tickets or those with open ended payoffs as you can. And once they start paying off, do not discard them.
00:34:07
Speaker
I guess that's a elegantly phrased way of saying you make your own luck. Do you believe you make your own luck or do you believe that is falling into the we define our own destiny trap?
00:34:18
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, I slightly disagree with this because I think the thing is that humans are not very good at knowing what's the best choice for them. I mean, this is something that my alternative take on this. I'm not trying to say that like, you know, you're, you know, here's this professor telling you, you don't know what you want. It's that there's a lot of evidence that in uncertainty, which we live within, right? We have massive amounts of uncertainty about how the world works and how our lives are going to unfold. The lesson, which is also the wisdom of evolution, by the way, it's the engine of evolution, is to experiment.
00:34:45
Speaker
And experimentation is something that is the opposite of top-down control and seizing opportunities, right? It's because the sort of idea of just seizing opportunities and also sort of designing your life, it's like, imagine if evolution just said, we know exactly how this works.
00:35:02
Speaker
it would not have the benefit of all the random experimentation that produced an incredible diverse array of different types of life that all survive, right? And so in human terms, the way I describe this is a few examples in the book, but one of them is this aspect of a study that was done by economists where they looked at a tube strike that happened in London. So the subway shuts down, nobody can get to work using their old method. So they have to find a different way to get to work, right? It's forced experimentation.
00:35:28
Speaker
And what the economists found using anonymized mobile phone data is that 5% of the population of London ended up sticking with the new plan of how to get to work because they realized it was better. So they had thought they knew the best way to get to work, and then they were forced to experiment. And 5%, I mean, huge number of people had now chosen a different pathway to work that they stuck with then, right? And so the lesson there is that that sort of forced experimentation is at odds with us saying,
00:35:54
Speaker
Oh, I know what I want and I'm going to go get it. And I think one of the things that I realized in my own life as well is a lot of the best things that have happened to me have been random. They've been chance events, chance encounters, a conversation with someone, a meeting with someone that diverted the pathway of my life. And if I tried to sketch everything out in advance,
00:36:13
Speaker
I wouldn't be where I was. And I also wouldn't be able to respond to the flukes of life in ways that, oh, but that's actually really nice. I hadn't thought about that, but it turns out I like it. So I think there's a sort of self-help world that is telling you something that's at odds with my worldview. Because the self-help world says, you make your own luck, have a checklist existence where you optimize to the absolute limit. And if you only do these five things, then you'll be rich and successful.
00:36:38
Speaker
And I think, you know, there's a lot of people for whom that advice is really poor, where it's not necessarily the best advice for how to live their life. And it's also a one-size-fits-all approach that asserts control over an uncontrollable world. I think the lesson here is to have a bit more resilience, and I can talk about this more in societies in a minute if you want to, but in our own lives, I think this aspect is, you know, yeah, you're gonna get lucky sometimes if it works for you fine, but experiment more. I think experimenting is a really, really important aspect of navigating uncertainty.
00:37:08
Speaker
That makes sense. And as an aside, having endured the London tube many times in my life, I can completely understand the rationale of the 5%. Okay. So an experimentation mindset and resilience are two attributes of, I guess, people that would handle flukes well, or have a tendency to handle flukes well. Are there patterns? And again, I'm conscious of using the word patterns now, but
00:37:35
Speaker
Are there patterns amongst people who potentially don't handle flukes well, the flip side of that coin?
00:37:41
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, I think it's difficult to generalize psychologically, but I would say that people who believe that they can control their lives in every way, you know, control freaks and so on, are way less resilient. I mean, because the thing that that pattern of behavior is reflective of a worldview where you already know the right path through life, right? Like you already know this is the way I wanna go through life and I just have to get it. And if I don't get that path, then everything is falling apart and I'll be sad, right? I'll be upset.
00:38:09
Speaker
And I think that's the kind of mentality that actually makes you way less resilient, but also way less happy. I mean, I think control freaks are often not the happiest people. And I think the reason for that is because they live in an uncontrollable world. So you get all this stuff thrown at you, you know, the pandemic hits you and you're like, what am I supposed to do with this?
00:38:25
Speaker
I can't control anything. This is why so many people were disoriented during the pandemic is because the myth of control just stared them down in the face. It's like, hold on, it is a myth.
Policy-Making and Randomness
00:38:35
Speaker
You really cannot control your life because this random person in China has gotten infected with the virus and now everything that you thought was going to happen for the next two years is different.
00:38:43
Speaker
So I think there's this aspect of this where also the mentality that I think, I mean, this is where the final chapter of the book gets into a bit of life advice and some of the pontificating around how to live in uncertainty. And it's something I've very much
00:39:00
Speaker
you know, changed about my own life and so on in writing the book, letting go a bit of control in my own life and so on, is that, you know, I think, especially growing up in the US, like, there's a quote in the book by a philosopher named Hart McRosa, where he says that the lesson of modernity that we're all told is to basically grab as large of a share of the world as you can possibly obtain, right? And that's how most of our societies are set up. And it's how most of like success metrics are set up.
00:39:25
Speaker
And actually, I think that's not true for a lot of people, that that's going to produce the maximum happiness. A lot of my happiest moments in life, I was actually totally broke. I was super broke as a PhD student, almost getting a payday loan because I had no money. I was really happy. I was with interesting people. I was talking to people who I really liked and spending time with them. I was also in moments where, writing this book,
00:39:48
Speaker
happiest moments were walking my dog and going camping. And I just think back on this stuff. And I'm like, I think there's a lot of people who are told that the only way to live a good life is to have top-down control where you maximize your share of the world. And I think if you accept interconnectedness, which I talk about in the book, and also these sort of flukes that divert our trajectories,
00:40:08
Speaker
you're more willing to roll with the punches, you're more willing to let go, and I think you have a more resilient path through life. Some listeners will hear this and think, oh, this is a BS, self-help, new age guru style way of thinking. I think it's just one of those aspects where it's the philosophical implication of a world defined by chaos. I think that's the aspect of this. The reason I put it in the book was because you do actually have to think about the world differently if you accept that the reason you're listening to my voice right now is a 119-year-old mass murder.
00:40:38
Speaker
There are philosophical implications that flow from that idea, which is fact, and they're not the ideas philosophically that I think most of us are taught when we're growing up in Western modernity. And that's why I think it's really important to call these out, because you have to struggle against very deeply ingrained societal constructs. I go back to the way we think about success, the way we think about a linear career ladder,
00:41:05
Speaker
The way we think about cause and effect so again there is this really unusual internal struggle between something which you may intuitively get. Then all of this social this social construct around it that almost encourage you to think in a different way i had this internal. Struggle quite a lot actually reading the book.
00:41:29
Speaker
We'll go to governments, go to government decision making. So Western governments are addicted to modeling. Modeling has had a profound effect on the lives of everyone listening to this podcast, everyone. You know, when it comes to, say, dictating COVID policy, it will continue to have a profound effect in terms of, say, economic and climate policy. Should we place as much faith as we do in models?
00:41:53
Speaker
Yeah, so I'll start with what you just said a second ago, which feeds into this question very, very well, which is that people, I think, intuitively accept that the way the world works is actually more like what I'm talking about with chaos when they look at their own lives. Like when I talk to people about this book, they always say, oh, the reason that I met my spouse or like the reason I ended up in my job, oh, it was this totally random thing. I was having coffee and then this person tripped into me and then, oh, this
00:42:16
Speaker
I think there's loads of stories I've heard from people already. And I think everyone has these moments, right? Now, what models do is they write those moments out because you can't model the noise by design, right? I mean, it's like a classic bit of wisdom you see on LinkedIn is like, ignore the noise, focus on the signal.
00:42:33
Speaker
And I hate that saying because I think the noise is actually really, really important. And all of us know that in our own lives. But then when it comes to like, oh, let's let's like blow this up to the entire world of the way the economy works, like, no, no, no, the noise is unimportant. Ignore it. Right. So what models do is they allow us a possible way to navigate an uncertain world that is sometimes useful, but always wrong. This is a quote from George Box of saying that all models are wrong, but some are useful. Right. Which is exactly the way I think about modeling.
00:43:01
Speaker
So the problem comes when you start to think the model is the world. And when I tell you, you know, look at Google Maps, right? You're navigating with Google Maps. Nobody in the world thinks that Google Maps is nature, right? They're not like, oh, wow, like, you know, now that I'm in my Google Maps environment, I can understand the forest because they know that there's just the green blob on the screen that is not the forest.
00:43:23
Speaker
That's not the same when we do economic models. I think a lot of us start to think the model is the economy. The forecasts are the economy. The GDP growth numbers are the economy. And I think the problem with that is you start to have the slippage between what is a rough and very dirty abstraction of an extraordinarily complex world into a straight jacket model with neat and tidy edges and a few big variables to explain change.
00:43:47
Speaker
When you make the mistake of thinking the model is the world or as some people will say the map is the territory you start to really mistake the cause and effect dynamics and you also get hubris that you can control them and this is where the danger comes into my mind because if you think you perfectly understand the economy then you will optimize to the absolute limit and I talk about the perils of this in fluke and of
00:44:09
Speaker
different chapter on something called self-organized criticality in the Sandpal model, which I won't go into
Policy Experimentation and Resilience
00:44:13
Speaker
the details. But the point is that if you think you know the system and you perfectly understand it, which is what models can seduce us into believing, you will squeeze every ounce of inefficiency out of the system and every optimization possible change that you can make, you'll make. But that means the system becomes brittle.
00:44:29
Speaker
And so I worry, and I think this is borne out by the 21st century, that we have designed systems that are inevitably going to be swayed by black swans and shocks way more often than they used to be because the social systems we've engineered have no slack. And this means that resilience has been basically jettisoned in favor of optimization. Now, optimization and efficiency are generally good things.
00:44:50
Speaker
But if you do them to the absolute maximum, then you get things like the Suez Canal, where in 2021, a boat gets stuck in it, and it causes $54 billion of damage around the world. Or you have a moment where a little tiny change can blow up a region, where in the Arab Spring, the entire Middle East was sort of on edge, and a lot of people were really unhappy with their dictatorships.
00:45:12
Speaker
And the system was at its absolute limit so that when a guy in central Tunisia lit himself on fire in late 2010, it sparked multiple regimes to collapse and also ended up producing a civil war that killed hundreds of thousands of people. So my view on this is that the mistake that modeling does, it's not dangerous if you understand it's not the world. It's really dangerous if you start to believe that the model is the world and then you act with hubris and try to assert control in a counterproductive way.
00:45:39
Speaker
makes sense and it leads to what will be my final question. And that is just like, I think there are really valuable lessons for individuals for how they can live their lives, taking into account the randomness of what happens around them. I think there are also lessons for governments on how they can better create policy, on how they can better communicate, on how they can have more responsible governance. What are those lessons for governance that come out of your book?
00:46:07
Speaker
So the main one actually mirrors the ones that I was talking about with individuals. It's resilience and experimentation. So what we don't do enough of is policy experimentation. There was a study that was done, it was actually a real world policy experiment in Vancouver where they were trying to figure out what was the best way to tackle homelessness in the city. And everyone has an ideological view about this. There's all these ideas, it's got to be this, it's got to be this. We have a sense.
00:46:32
Speaker
What they said is like, let's just try a bunch of stuff and see what happens. And we'll randomly assign which persons get which policy interventions and we'll see what works. And one of the approaches they had was just giving people a bunch of cash, right? And another approach they had was to give them drug treatment and temporary housing and counseling and so on.
00:46:49
Speaker
And what turned out to be the case was the cash actually had way better outcomes. And you would never design this if you were a politician. You would never say, what we're going to do now is just give money to homeless people with no strings attached. But actually, through the experiment, they found that this was the thing that produced the best rates of reducing homelessness with the lowest rates of drug use among the population that had this intervention. So I think for public policy, when we don't know the answer to something,
00:47:15
Speaker
We should trial and error until we do find the answer. And I think what we do instead is we have ideological divides where one party says this is the way to solve the problem. The other party says this is the way to solve the problem. An election determines which policy wins and we never have any idea whether it's the best idea or not because we don't experiment. So that's one lesson. And then the other resilience idea is the example I use in the book
00:47:36
Speaker
There was a power grid in Latin America where they decided basically to have the system be, you know, let's say five percent less efficient and 10 percent more expensive. And the reason they did that was because they could create regional hubs rather than a national grid such that if a blackout happened, it would be localized. And it did cost more money and it was less efficient. But then blackouts happened and the economic damage was completely compartmentalized.
00:48:01
Speaker
because they had designed resilience. And the economic cost of a national blackout would have obliterated the amount of money that they lost in terms of inefficiency or a more expensive system. So it's sort of that penny wise, pound foolish aspect of this. I mean, there's so many things where we think about getting absolute optimization and then we embed systemic risk into our economies such that every so often there's a financial crash or something like that that wipes out all of the previous gains.
00:48:29
Speaker
I think we'd be much better off with a more sustainable but slightly less optimized, slightly less efficient system.
Conclusion and Book Promotion
00:48:35
Speaker
Well, the lesson of the last 20 years is that whilst the events in of themselves are unpredictable, bad stuff is going to happen from the GFC onwards. I think that's the story of, of, of the last, last period. Right. This is an incredibly interesting and I think an incredibly important book. And it's a, it's quite rare actually that you read something which fundamentally changes how you look at the world. And I think for myself personally and for many other people, I think this book will do that.
00:49:02
Speaker
Congratulations on what is a wonderful piece of work and thank you for coming on Australia. Thank you for having me and thanks for that incredibly kind praise that's what authors all want to hear that they've changed someone thinks about the world so I appreciate that.
00:49:16
Speaker
Thank you very much for listening to this episode of Australiana. If you enjoyed the show, please leave us a rating and a review. And if you really enjoyed the show, head to spectator.com.au forward slash join. Sign up for a digital subscription today and you'll get your first month absolutely free.