AVALANCHES OF OPINIONS
There has been an avalanche of opinions and think pieces about the future. I have written before about the dangers of taking these accounts at face value.
But we just can’t help ourselves.
BRAINS LOVE STORIES
That seems like a positive statement. Especially coming from an author who spends all her time writing stories. But it isn’t.
We make meaning out of anything and everything. This concept is ubiquitous in modern psychology and difficult to trace to a specific source. There are thousands of articles that reference the concept and yet no single origin.
Essentially we create a logical chain of cause and effect for everything that happens in our lives (even though the universe is mostly random chaos).
Sometimes we know we’re doing it and name it, like with superstitions. We know that we didn’t get the job because of the tie we wore, but it’s better to be safe than sorry at the next interview and wear it. Or astrology where we know that a bunch of long-dead Greek men looking at a sky that doesn’t even match today’s stars could not possibly have codified billions of humans. But sometimes it’s impossible not to see the pattern.
SOMETIMES OUR STORIES HURT LIKE HELL
We get a bad grade on a couple of math tests and believe for decades that we are bad at math. Worse, sometimes our math teacher treats us differently because we don’t look like someone who is good at math, and we believe them, for decades. Sometimes, horrible things happen and there has to be a grand design behind it proving we are awful people.
Think about that. It’s insane. It’s easier for our brain to believe we are horrible than it is to acknowledge random chance.
In fact, designers have to make random number generators less random because we are so prone to detecting (creating?) patterns. We won’t believe numbers are truly random unless we take out things like runs and repeated numbers. (From The Drunkards Walk, by Leonard Mlodinow, a great book about randomness.)
WHY MAKING UP STORIES (EVEN IF THEY’RE WRONG) IS MOSTLY AN ADVANTAGE
Paul Zak researches story and posits that they aid us as social creatures who associate with strangers. More than random facts, telling a story evokes an emotional reaction, and emotions are motivation, especially to engage in survival behaviors.
Story turns out to be a huge survival advantage.
We don’t have to see a lion to panic. Someone else can tell us that when he was walking along this stretch of road yesterday, he almost got mauled. We will be as motivated as he was with just a few words.
Contrary to popular opinion, we’re not the only animal out there with language.
Dolphins, whales, other primates, and a host of other animals have ways to communicate with each other. From whistles and clicks to a bee wiggling its little body in a specific way, animals tell each other stories, but they are an order of magnitude simpler than a single text message.
BUT IT HAS LEFT US WITH A MAJOR WEAKNESS
The universe is super chaotic.
We want everything that we do, everything that happens to us, and everything that happens to other people to have a beginning, a middle, and an end. We want our lives to have a cause and an effect. We search the world over for our purpose. Or at the very least, we expect hard work to mean something and meanness to be punished. And most days, even though none of that is true, it’s far healthier to act as if it is. Because in a universe of random chance, there’s always a chance we get what we want too!
But it can really shoot us in the foot when there’s a massive upheaval and social change and many people are predicting the end of the world.
We have a real blind spot when it comes to chaos, randomness, and sheer bloody chance.
When you really look back at history, and try to extract it from the beginning and middle and end that has been superimposed on it, you’ll find a great deal more randomness than I think anyone is really comfortable with.
THE VIETNAM WAR STARTED BECAUSE OF FREAK RADAR ECHOES AND SQUIRRELY SONARMEN
American ships were damaged in the Gulf of Tonkin in a brazen attack in the middle of a thunderstorm on August 4, 1964. Thus justifying and precipitating the first direct American attack on North Vietnam. And everything that came after it.
Except… They weren’t attacked.
It turns out, now that communications have been declassified, that there was no actual evidence of torpedoes or other boats. No one will ever know for sure, but looking back, the Navy thinks the equipment malfunctioned in the storms, and the sonarmen, seeing something on their displays, declared it had to be an attack. And then higher-ups cherry-picked the data to enhance the certainty over the next few days to argue for an attack.
I personally am shocked. So extremely shocked. This is my shocked face.
Arguably, America was funding South Vietnamese raids and had two carriers in the gulf, and it was only a matter of time. But… we’ll never really know.
ONE INVENTION STARTED A NEW AGE
I have a favorite encyclopedia entry. I also read the dictionary as a kid for fun. Don’t judge.
James Watt was a Scottish inventor who took someone else’s steam engine, (It wasn’t even his steam engine!) and came up with a separate condenser. Just a tiny little tweak.
Basically, he separated heating the steam and cooling the steam, so it was insanely more efficient. And with that one invention, he managed to kick off both the industrial revolution and the entire Anthropocene age. He also got a unit of power named after him, just for fun.
And now for my favorite encyclopedia entry:
REMEMBER THAT AS YOU LOOK AT THE NEWS THIS WEEK AND THE COMING MONTHS AND YEARS
Do not fall into the trap of believing that the future is written, foreordained, or inevitable. It’s none of those things.
Do not think that the odds are overwhelming or that this is forever because none of those things are true.
Do not think that a small action will not make a difference, because sometimes a radar signal helps your plane land and sometimes it starts a war. And sometimes a tweak to a design gets you a microwave with 15 buttons (why? Seriously, why!?!) and sometimes it starts a new epoch.
No, I’m not trying to say it’s not going to be bad. We don’t know what the next radarman is going to see. It could be worse than anything we predicted. I’m just trying to say, we truly, madly, deeply don’t know.
The stories we are telling with a cohesive narrative feel like they’re true, but that’s only because of the way our brains evolved. Reality does not have a beginning, middle, and end. It’s just all middles all the time, where anything can happen.