Archive for the ‘uncertainty’ Category
The Only Certainty Is Uncertainty
Filed under: uncertainty | Tags: economy, politics, reality, Richard Feynman, science
Leave a Comment Uncertainty is one of our biggest issues today. With so many changes happening in the world, and with nobody in charge appearing to know how to deal with them, the uncertainty of it all can feel overwhelming.
However, it appears that some people are oblivious to the larger issue here while pushing their own dubious agenda. Some business people and politicians – especially Republicans like House Speaker John Boehner – claim that businesses can’t operate unless we “remove the shackles of uncertainty.” Boehner says:
Unfortunately, the Obama Administration isn’t taking small business owners’ concerns seriously. Last month, the Treasury Department launched “a full-fledged effort to knock back Republican claims that overregulation is slowing down economic growth” (Politico, 10/24/11), arguing in a Treasury Department blog post that one of the “most commonly repeated misconceptions” is that “uncertainty created by proposed regulations is holding back business investment and hiring.” Yesterday’s report confirms what small business owners have already made clear: “complying with government regulations is the most important problem facing them today.”
Apparently, in these folks’ eyes small businesses are in no way affected by the uncertainties related to (among other things) energy costs, credit availability in the wake of our recent financial meltdown, consumer confidence and ability to pay for what those businesses offer, potential economic and/or political crises in other parts of the world that could affect the American economy, vulnerability to the stray extreme weather event – possibly or not caused by global warming – which could wipe out their business or at least increase their insurance on it, and the potential for chaos arising out of the political mischief playing out in Washington and caused by these politicians themselves.
Nope, according to them the primary concern these small businesses have is with government regulations. Get rid of them, and everything would be swell. (Hmmm, isn’t inadequate regulation a key part of what led to our recent financial meltdown?)
The problem for Republicans and their small business friends who claim to be paralyzed by uncertainty is that uncertainty is an integral part of modern life. Unfortunately, these folks seem to be mentally stuck in time somewhere back in the pre-20th century era of classical physics, when determinism ruled the day and the workings of a clockwork universe offered an assured certainty of how things worked. (Either that, or these folks are just using “uncertainty” as a political talking point to advance their anti-government agenda – take your pick.)
In any event, the reality is that uncertainty is a fact of life. This is true on the macro level of the world we see and experience. And it’s true on the micro level, in which quantum mechanics explores the workings of the subatomic world. If we want to successfully adapt to this uncertain world, we need to understand this fact.
So what does science have to say about uncertainty? I recently came across a couple of fascinating videos of a lecture on the subject by one of 20th century physics’ leading lights.
The first is a brief 8 minute video titled Probability and Uncertainty in quantum mechanics - the introductory part of a lecture given in 1965 by Richard Feynman at Cornell University. At one point, alluding to the strange ways of the quantum world of which he’s about to speak, Feynman offers a warning:
Do not keep saying to yourself, if you can possibly avoid it, “But how can it be like that?” because you will get “down the drain,” into a blind alley from which nobody has yet escaped. Nobody knows how it can be like that.
That’s only the introduction. The video cuts out just when Feynman is about to get into the specifics. A video of the full hour-long lecture is available – which I’ll get to in a moment. First though, while Feynman was known for his ability to explain complex ideas from physics in a way that we can understand, some may still find it pretty tough going. If you’re not familiar with the double slit experiment and what it says about the dual nature of elementary particles, I’d suggest first watching this short cartoon video. I found being familiar with the concepts presented there helpful in getting through some parts of Feynman’s lecture.
Then if you’re still up for it, here’s the hour-long video of Feynman’s full Cornell lecture, titled “The Character of Physical Law.” While it’s a little more challenging to understand than the cartoon, I was interested in seeing how he presented the science behind the idea. It’s also interesting to see a lecture by one of the great minds of 20th century physics. He has a charming, alternately casual, passionate and humorous style in presenting such a profound subject.
A key point of Feynman’s lecture – and one of the major discoveries of 20th century physics regarding how the world works – is that on a basic level things are imbued with uncertainty. Before quantum mechanics, physicists and others believed everything was – while complex – inevitably deterministic and predictable. It was just a question of gathering sufficient data and you could accurately forecast what would happen. As Laplace put it in 1820:
We may regard the present state of the universe as the effect of its past and the cause of its future. An intellect which at a certain moment would know all forces that set nature in motion, and all positions of all items of which nature is composed, if this intellect were also vast enough to submit these data to analysis, it would embrace in a single formula the movements of the greatest bodies of the universe and those of the tiniest atom; for such an intellect nothing would be uncertain and the future just like the past would be present before its eyes.
Thanks to quantum mechanics, we now know this is an illusion. At the most basic level of matter, things by their very nature are uncertain. If that is true of the world at its basis, then uncertainty must be a fundamental element of the world we live in.
This fact is something we still, as human beings, are having a hard time adjusting to. Humanity has lived a long time with a confidence in certainty; it’s hard letting go of that. Some are resisting with whatever certainty they can find. But this leads to other problems. As Feynman once noted:
Looking back at the worst times, it always seems that they were times in which there were people who believed with absolute faith and absolute dogmatism in something. And they were so serious in this matter that they insisted that the rest of the world agree with them. And then they would do things that were directly inconsistent with their own beliefs in order to maintain that what they said was true.
While Feynman saw a problem with people seeking – or proclaiming – absolute certainty, he also recognized that uncertainty offered the only hope for progress and growth:
We absolutely must leave room for doubt or there is no progress and no learning. There is no learning without having to pose a question. And a question requires doubt. People search for certainty. But there is no certainty. People are terrified — how can you live and not know? It is not odd at all. You only think you know, as a matter of fact. And most of your actions are based on incomplete knowledge and you really don’t know what it is all about, or what the purpose of the world is, or know a great deal of other things. It is possible to live and not know.
Perhaps, as we learn to live in a troubling and uncertain world, we can take solace in this thought.
Keep the Change
Filed under: energy/flow, interconnected, uncertainty | Tags: change, conservatives, future, Newt Gingrich, presidential primaries, Republicans, Tea Party
Leave a Comment “It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.” – Charles Darwin
“So how’s that hopey, changey thing workin’ out for ya?” – Sarah Palin
It’s hard to believe that only four years ago the winning campaign for the American Presidency offered hope and the slogan “change you can believe in.” These days there is a sizable group whose attitude appears to be “keep the change to yourself – we want things the way they were.”
The Republican primary campaign currently seems to be most focused on who can best express the anger and resentment felt by the party faithful. After the South Carolina primary, the winner appears to be Newt Gingrich. As Howard Schweber observed in the Huffington Post:
…only Newt has captured the key emotive element that drives the Republican core this year: resentment. The hard right core of the Republican Party is filled with resentment, and they have found just the man to let us all know about it.
This raises questions. Why are these people so angry? What do they resent?
For much of the 2000′s, Republicans controlled the White House, Congress and (arguably) the Supreme Court. During that time they did all they could to give free reign to large corporations and the wealthy through tax cuts and deregulation. They worked to shift the balance of power firmly in favor of corporate management over the rights of workers, both in terms of work safety regulations and in terms of union power. They worked to discredit legitimate concerns about environmental degradation and climate change. They even distorted political debate to the point that even being called a liberal is a bad thing.
And yet the Republican base is still angry and resentful, saying things like “it’s time to take our country back.” From whom, exactly?
All this anger and resentment can be puzzling – if not infuriating – to those who disagree with conservative Republican ideas. And some of the results of Republican primaries can seem crazy for those out of that loop. I mean really, Newt Gingrich is the champion of family values and is a Washington outsider? Really???
But beneath all of the current drama, it’s important to realize that such behavior may be both natural and logical – once you look at the big picture.
The root of the problem is that our world has changed in fundamental ways. For the first time in human history, technology has brought all humans into close and immediate contact. It has also disrupted traditional channels of power and information.
This change has altered societies around the world in myriad ways. But such change has not been welcomed by many – especially those whose identity and values were firmly rooted in the previously established cultures. This reflects a basic but rarely considered fact: change happens differently for a culture than it does for the society of which that culture is a part.
Ideally, cultures by their nature offer enduring, lasting values. In this way they satisfy the human need for meaning and stability. In the chaos and confusion of life, we need to have a dependable framework that gives meaning to what is happening around us.
By the same token, healthy societies are continually changing. This is a reflection of changes in demographics, as well as the growth of knowledge and awareness that are a part of a dynamic society. In this way, societies satisfy the human need for freedom and creativity.
However, there is a basic conflict inherent in this dichotomy: cultural values cannot long endure unchanged within an evolving and changing society. Just as pressures build over time along fault lines until there’s an earthquake, over time pressures build up between culture and society until conflict erupts.
That is where we are now. The world has changed profoundly over the past 40+ years. We humans are much more interconnected, empowered and diverse than we used to be. This change has opened up vast arrays of opportunity for many people – especially those who were marginalized by the prevailing culture’s institutions and power structures. But it has also shaken to the foundations those institutions and structures. And such change is hard for some people to handle.
David E. Stannard discussed this issue in his book The Puritan Way of Death – A Study in Religion, Culture and Social Change. He observed:
Whereas certain individuals and certain cultures find adapting to change relatively easy, many others, for various reasons, do not. Their resistance, which may seem revolutionary because it tends so often to focus on overthrowing the new social orthodoxy, is in fact no more than an effort to forestall or at least postpone dealing with the changes taking place around them.
William O. Beeman, a professor of Anthropology at Brown University and author of “Fighting the Good Fight: Fundamentalism and Religious Revival,” also notes this varying response to change and talks about the responses of those who resist change:
In essence, all such movements are a natural consequence of human processes of cultural change. In every society on earth change proceeds at an uneven pace. Some society members embrace change with relish. Others find it oppressive and troubling. When people feel that change is being imposed on them, some will find it necessary to resist–sometimes violently. The dynamics of revitalization thus are tied to inter-group dynamics. When a group in society perceives itself as having its power and authority usurped in the course of social change, the group comes to blame both internal and external causes for its fall from power.
As far as internal issues are concerned, Beeman notes that decline is often associated with individual failings. “They accuse members of society of becoming weak and irresolute to the point where they let others oppress them.” Regarding external issues, Beeman says “…the group objectifies an Other, and identifies it as an oppressor. Usually the movement advocates resistance — sometimes violent — to that oppressor.”
Beeman also talks about the historical perspective of these movements:
All of these movements invariably create a dual myth. This myth links a supposed Golden Age in the past with a Utopian future. The past Golden Age is seen as a time when the members of the movement or those they identify with were strong, vital, and in control of the world. The Utopian future presages a time when movement members will return to that sense of group strength and wholeness.
This may sound a bit familiar to those who follow the news. Take Islamic extremism. Back in September 2001, David Plotz posted an article in Slate titled “What Does bin Laden Want?”
These extreme “Islamists,” as Bin Laden biographer Yossef Bodansky dubs them, hope to re-establish the Caliphate, the golden age of Muslim domination that followed the death of Muhammad. They regard the Taliban’s Afghanistan as a model for such Islamic rule.
Elsewhere, while we haven’t heard much about it in the United States, Israel is having problems with members of its ultra-Orthodox Haredi population. Among other things, this group has been pressuring other members of Israeli society regarding the segregation of women from men. In writing about this issue in Jewish Ideas Daily, Yehudah Mirsky refers to “…an imagined Haredi idyll in the shtetl that never was. “
Meanwhile, back here in the USA we have Newt Gingrich expounding on an “historic America.” This prompted one of his acolytes at the American Spectator – former Reagan aid Peter Ferrara – to invoke a “Golden Age” and to “objectify an Other” in claiming:
Gingrich is the only candidate remotely capable of carrying the flag for the true, original, historic America in this fundamental, existential battle for national survival. He so rightly identified the public mood in his South Carolina speech, saying, “The American people feel that they have elites who have been trying for a half-century to force us to quit being American and become some kind of other system.” He further identified the pending danger, “If Barack Obama can get re-elected after this disaster, just think how radical he would be in a second term.”
Obviously, there are many differences between Islamic extremists and conservative Republicans. But one thing they appear to share is a certain myopia about the source of today’s social change. This change isn’t the result of an invasion by infidels or a conspiracy by shadowy elites. Instead it’s a product of modern technology, with its concomitant interlinking of humanity. As Walter Truett Anderson observed in his book “Reality Isn’t What It Used to Be”:
The collapse of belief we have been witnessing throughout the twentieth century comes with globalism. The postmodern condition is not an artistic movement or a cultural fad or an intellectual theory — although it produces all of those and is in some ways defined by them. It is what inevitably happens as people everywhere begin to see that there are many beliefs, many kinds of belief, many ways of believing. Postmodernism is globalism; it is the half-discovered shape of the one unity that transcends all our differences.
There is an absurdity inherent in much of the resistance we see to modernity and its attendant social change: the resisters are frequently using the tools of modern technology to advocate resistance to its effects on society.
If resisters truly object to how the world has changed, they should live their lives in accordance with their supposed Golden Age – whether it’s the 12th century or the 1920s. They should at least have the integrity of groups like the Amish and do without televisions, telephones, computers, the internet and the like.
But as soon as they begin using modern technology they are co-opted by it. There is no logically consistent way you can protest modernity with a videotaped message, or claim to be an anti-government individualist while using communications technology that was developed by the government and that was created to link people together.
It is this inherent conflict between past values and present facts that inevitably dooms the aspirations of those who resist the social changes we are confronting today. As Stannard says regarding those resisting social change:
…such movements rarely enjoy long-range success. They result from an opposition of the needs of the emerging social structure with those of the existing group culture…and when such incongruity is not resolved by effective integration of the two competing elements, it has historically been the almost inevitable fate of the traditional culture to give way to the needs of the ongoing social structure.
Today’s changing world is unsettling to most of us; an unfortunate fact of life is that when you’re in the middle of an era of great change you’re unlikely to have much confidence in how things will turn out. We humans are not comfortable with such uncertainty.
In times like these, perhaps we can seek counsel and solace in the wise words of others who were confronted with similar times in the past. Consider, for example, the words of Thomas Carlyle:
Today is not yesterday: we ourselves change; how can our Works and Thoughts, if they are always to be the fittest, continue always the same? Change, indeed, is painful; yet ever needful; and if Memory have its force and worth, so also has Hope.
All Together Now
Filed under: interconnected, uncertainty | Tags: conservative, decoherence, Democrats, Occupy, Occupy Wall Street, opposites, progressive, Republicans, Tea Party
Leave a Comment We’re all in this together.
That’s not a popular thought these days.
These days we prefer to think of how we’re different: conservative, progressive, young, old, white, black, Republican, Democrat, Tea Partier, Occupier, Christian, Moslem, Jew, vegan, meat eater, Yankee fan, Red Sox fan, soccer mom, NASCAR dad, beer drinker, wine swiller, etc., etc.
We’re eager to proclaim our differences whenever we can – on the radio, TV, the web, email, and Facebook. For support, we gather together with those who share our values. After all, there’s strength in numbers. We feel embattled and oppressed by those who are different than us. To buck up our spirits for the fight we must fight against our enemies we tell ourselves:
We’re all in this together.
Against THEM.
You’ve got to watch out for THEM. You can’t trust THEM. THEY want to destroy the country. THEY want to destroy our way of life. You can’t believe the crap THEY pour out on the radio, TV, the web, email, and Facebook. THEY are wrong. THEY are liars. THEY don’t know what THEY are talking about. Or maybe THEY know exactly what THEY are doing, spreading lies, half-truths and propaganda to have THEIR way against US.
Sometimes it’s hard to tell what their tactics are. But one thing is clear: THEY are responsible for what’s wrong with today’s world.
WE had better watch out, WE had better be on our guard against THEM. WE had better use all the tools WE have available these days to fight back against THEM: radio, TV, the web, email, Facebook. WE have to be strong and stand together as one against THEM. And remember:
We’re all in this together.
In the fight against THEM.
WE are ready for this fight. THEY deserve whatever WE can do to them: THEY have it coming. The world would be a wonderful place, WE would have peace and happiness, if it wasn’t for THEM. Because THEY fight US, WE must fight THEM. WE have no choice. The world is a jungle because of THEM.
Sometimes it’s hard to imagine a better world, a world free of fear and hatred and conflict. Sometimes it seems hard to believe that THEY have enough power to ruin the world for US. Is that really possible? Can THEY really do that all on their own?
Or do they need US to help THEM create this jungle world? Is this a Fight to the Death? Or is it a Dance? We react to what they do; they react to our reaction; we react to their reaction; they react to our reaction; we react to their reaction… And so forth.
This raises a question: if their actions are in response to our actions, to what degree are we responsible for their actions? Conversely, to what degree do their actions determine our reactions? Do THEY have some influence over OUR actions?
This raises another question: what would THEY do if WE didn’t react? What if we just did our thing, followed our beliefs, went on our way, and ignored THEM? Would the Dance end, the music stop?
What would THEY do if WE weren’t there?
What would WE do if THEY weren’t there?
And what would the world be like if the music stopped and the Dance ended?
Another question: to what degree are WE defined by our opposition to THEM? To what degree are THEY defined by their opposition to US? Who would WE be without THEM? Who would THEY be without US?
In quantum physics, all things exist in a state of potentiality until they encounter something that forces them to be defined as THIS rather than THAT. Physicists have a term for this: decoherence.
Maybe that’s what is happening here: our beliefs exist in a state of potentiality until we encounter the beliefs of others. Confronted by those beliefs, we are forced to choose: do we agree or disagree? It is only in encountering the beliefs of others that we come to know more clearly what we believe.
Just as we can only know light when we’ve encountered darkness, we can only know who we are when we encounter others who are not us. We are inextricably linked to our opposite, as black is to white.
If that’s the case, then there’s only one possible conclusion:
We’re all in this together.
Failing Tests
Filed under: complexity, uncertainty | Tags: audit, education, Enron, internal controls, No Child Left Behind
Leave a Comment There’s been much talk lately about problems with the No Child Left Behind law. So many states are falling behind on meeting some of its provisions that the Obama administration has announced it will issue waivers to free them from its shortcomings. But maybe the problem isn’t with the specifics of certain provisions of the law. Maybe the problem is with its whole approach: evaluating the quality of a student’s education by giving them a standardized test.
Cathy N. Davidson, who teaches at Duke University, believes that approach is out of place in today’s world. In a Washington Post opinion piece she notes that “When Frederick J. Kelly invented the multiple-choice test in 1914, he was addressing a national crisis.” That crisis was caused by an explosion in the number of secondary school students:
The ranks of students attending secondary school had swollen from 200,000 in 1890 to more than 1.5 millionas immigrants streamed onto American shores, and as new laws made two years of high school compulsory for everyone and not simply a desirable option for the college bound. World War I added to the problem, creating a teacher shortage with men fighting abroad and women working in factories at home.
According to Davidson, Kelly drew on the mechanical mindset of the time to propose a solution:
The country needed to process students quickly and efficiently. If Henry Ford could turn out Model Ts “for the great multitude,” surely there was an equivalent way, Kelly wrote in his dissertation at Kansas State Teachers College, to streamline schooling. What he came up with was the Kansas Silent Reading Test, sometimes called the “item-response” or “bubble” test.
Such tests have been with us ever since, from high school aptitude tests (like SATs) to end-of-course and/or exit exams used by many states to meet the requirements of No Child Left Behind. Unfortunately, as Davidson points out, these tests are ineffective:
In a decade of researching digital education, I have never heard an educator, parent or student say that the tests work well as teaching tools. Beyond the flaws of these rigid exams — which do not measure complex, connected, interactive skills — there is little room in the current curriculum or even in the current division of disciplines (reading, writing, math, natural sciences and social studies) for lessons about key questions that affect students’ daily lives.
Interestingly (to me anyway), there’s been a similar conundrum in the audit field. Auditing has traditionally focused on hard controls (things like procedures, segregation of duties, supervisory oversight, etc.). However many of the biggest business failures – like Enron, Tyco and the recent debacle on Wall St. – were rooted in soft controls (things like employee morale, ethics, philosophy, values, integrity, etc.).
What we’ve learned is that having great hard controls won’t matter if a company’s leaders and/or staff are not inclined to follow them. Author James Roth described a situation he encountered during the Savings & Loan crisis:
During the S&L crisis, I was working for a banking organization in Minneapolis, where a $3.5 billion S&L failure occurred. After the S&L was dissolved, our bank acquired six of the S&L’S branches. When we began the first audit of those branches, we expected to find their internal control systems riddled with holes.
We were surprised to find instead that those branches were beautifully controlled according to our audit tests. They had every policy, procedure, and checklist imaginable. A teller could not swipe $10 from her drawer without getting caught. In spite of the control activities, the president and founder was able to play games; and he, his daughter, and several members of the upper management team went to jail.
After that, I asked myself if I had been an internal auditor working at that organization and using our control activity-based audit program, would I have had the foggiest notion of what was happening? Not from my audit work. The only way you would ever find out something like that is if someone tipped you off. That sort of realization makes you feel really uncomfortable about your status as a professional evaluator of control.
As Roth noted seven years ago in talking about the Sarbanes-Oxley Act that was passed after the failures of major companies like Enron and Tyco:
Companies are spending enormous time, energy, and consulting fees documenting and testing detailed financial control activities to comply with Section 404 of the U.S. Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002. But if all this resource-intensive work had been performed at Enron, WorldCom, or Parmalat, would it have prevented what happened? For that matter, would it have prevented any of the recent financial reporting disasters? Such frauds are not caused by noncompliance with low-level accounting procedures. The root cause is always a breakdown in the control environment, usually the ethical climate and the behavior of executives. Testing of accounting procedures to the extent it is done today is not only expensive, but also–for the most part–misses the point.
Why have auditors traditionally focused on hard controls rather than soft when examining businesses? In large part because they’re much easier to measure and evaluate. Why do politicians and administrators favor standardized tests when evaluating schools? Most likely for the same reason.
It reminds me of an old joke:
A cop saw a blonde down on her knees under a streetlight. “Can I help you?” he asked.
Replied the blonde, “I dropped my diamond ring and I’m looking for it.”
Asked the cop “did you drop it right here?”
“No,” she responded, “I dropped it about a block away, but the light’s better here.”
Just being able to test for something doesn’t mean the results will be relevant.
If we really want to ensure that America’s children are being properly educated, it’s not enough to simply make them take standardized tests. As with auditing, we must make sure those tests aren’t missing the point.
Winning With Uncertainty
Filed under: energy/flow, uncertainty | Tags: Bode Miller, Olympics, skiing
Leave a Comment One of the big surprises in the 2010 Winter Olympics is the success of Bode Miller in alpine ski racing. Bode had been a notable “failure” in the 2006 Winter Olympics, not winning any medals even though he had been dominating the regular ski racing circuit. This recent turn in fortune has lead to much comment, like this and this.
A common point made by pundits is that Bode has changed – become a parent, become more mature, etc. There’s probably an element of truth there, as most of us tend to mature a bit over four years.
But it’s also true that the circumstance of these Olympics is different for Bode than it was four years ago. Back then, he was a featured member of the US Olympic team – a fact that wore on him:
“I had no intention of blowing it,” Miller said Sunday. Yet that was how his results were labeled, a choke job by a prima donna who didn’t care. He is so talented — he is a two-time winner of the World Cup overall championship, perhaps skiing’s most difficult title — he was the obvious focus of the pre-Games coverage. He did not, he said, enjoy being the vehicle by which the International Olympic Committee promoted its product.
“The Olympics is definitely, in my mind, a two-sided coin,” he said. “It has all the best things of sport. It has amazing energy, enthusiasm, passion, inspiration. It’s what changes lives. In that sense, it’s the pinnacle of what sports and camaraderie and all that stuff is.
“On the flip side of that is the opposite, and that’s the corruption and the abuse and the money. I’m not pointing fingers, but that’s what was bothering me, and being thrust in the middle of that, and being the poster boy for that, when it’s the absolute thing I despise the most in the world was really draining on my inspiration, my level of passion. . . I just had the plug pulled out on my most important fuel source, and it had been happening for a year, and it was just too much.”
This year, things are different: Lindsey Vonn is the face of the US Ski Team, and Bode has been able to do his thing somewhat out of the limelight. That seems fine with him:
He arrived here overshadowed by fellow American Lindsey Vonn, which was just fine. He won two medals, and spoke after each about how the Olympics had reinvigorated him.
Maybe, more than Bode “growing up,” the different context this time has been crucial to Bode’s successes. Perhaps this reflects a human variation of the Uncertainty Principle. This principle states that on the subatomic level, things can’t be definitively pinned down: we can never know exactly both the location and the speed of a particle. The more precisely we know one of those traits, the more uncertain we will be about the other.
Perhaps there is a human kind of Uncertainty Principle, in which people have a tendency to resist efforts by others to impose external definitions of who and what they are – especially if those definitions conflict with deeply held personal beliefs and values. Perhaps, in these situations, they may wind up acting in unexpected ways that may seem out of character for who they really are.
Essentially, it comes down to a question of control: if a person like Bode feels that he is no longer in control of his life – if instead he feels his life is being controlled by those who have deeply different values – then his or her personal energy will feel drained away. In such cases, these individuals will seek a degree of uncertainty, a sense that they are no longer controlled by others.
I’ve written several times about uncertainty – generally as something people wish to avoid. But as with Bode’s depiction of the Olympics, uncertainty is a two-sided coin. On the one side, too much uncertainty can be unsettling. If we feel uncertain about key aspects of our life – our relationships, our job, our beliefs – then we are likely to wish for more certainty.
On the flip side, if we feel we are too much under the control of others – especially in ways that conflict with our deeply held values – then we are likely to wish to be less controlled and more, well, uncertain. After all, uncertainty is very much tied into a sense of freedom. As Richard Feynman once said:
If we will only allow that, as we progress, we remain unsure, we will leave opportunities for alternatives. We will not become enthusiastic for the fact, the knowledge, the absolute truth of the day, but remain always uncertain… In order to make progress, one must leave the door to the unknown ajar.
******** POSTSCRIPT ********
In a way, the story of Bode Miller sounds a lot like like a story I wrote about regarding sled dogs in the Iditarod.
Cargo Cult Science
Filed under: relativity, uncertainty | Tags: conservatives, science
Leave a Comment Many conservatives these days appear to view science in ideological terms. When science conflicts with their own beliefs, they feel it’s totally appropriate to disregard the science and stick with their beliefs.
When it comes to science, it appears these people haven’t got a clue.
I started thinking about this recently when I came across an item about relativity in Conservapedia. Apparently, Conservapedia was created under the assumption that Wikipedia had some sort of liberal bias. This isn’t my interpretation; they actually claim it.
Anyway, it appears Conservapedia – “The Trustworthy Encyclopedia” – doesn’t care much for the Theory of Relativity. According to them, “Relativity has been met with much resistance in the scientific world.” One proof of this is that “To date, a Nobel Prize has never been awarded for relativity.” Except, that is, for – “Professors Joseph Taylor and Russell Hulse, who …were awarded the 1993 Nobel Prize for Physics, which is the only award ever given by the Nobel committee for the Theory of Relativity.”
Apparently, in Conservapedian Math, “never” and “once” are equivalent.
Conservapedia dislikes relativity so much that if you land on their page for Theory of Relativity, you’re redirected to their page Theory of relativity. How dare someone capitalize that R!
They claim that the reason we haven’t heard about this resistance is because of academic bias: “Despite censorship of dissent about relativity, evidence contrary to the theory is discussed outside of liberal universities.”
I looked for some examples of this resistance in various scientific web sites. When I learned New Scientist had a cover story titled “Why Einstein Was Wrong About Relativity,” I thought this might be an example. But this article was basically about how the speed of light is irrelevant to the Theory of Relativity, which continues to be valid:
“Einstein, the ultimate physics revolutionary, probably would have afforded himself a wry smile at the picture that is now emerging. The startling edifice of the new physics he built remains undisturbed, even as its logical foundations are being greatly strengthened.”
With no luck there, I tried the Christian Science Monitor. Given the name, I figured they’d be able to give me the Christian perspective on Science. However, it turns out they recently ran an article about the confirmation of one part of Einstein’s theory that even he thought he’d gotten wrong.
One place I did find a discussion about this so-called controversy was The American Catholic. However, the discussion was in an article titled “Are the GOP and/or Conservatives Anti-Science?” The author’s conclusions didn’t sound very supportive of the Conservapedia point of view:
The common thread behind each of the above would seem to be the view that experts aren’t to be trusted combined with the idea that the best way to determine the validity of a scientific theory is by reading a couple of articles about it in conservative magazines. I’m sure you could find examples of scientific literacy or anti-science sentiment among progressives too, but as someone with conservative sympathies I find the right-wing examples more disheartening.
The problem with conservative arguments against so-called “liberal” science is that they don’t reflect an understanding of science. Instead, they engage in what the great physicist Richard P. Feynman called “cargo cult science”:
In the South Seas there is a cargo cult of people. During the war they saw airplanes land with lots of good materials, and they want the same thing to happen now. So they’ve arranged to make things like runways, to put fires along the sides of the runways, to make a wooden hut for a man to sit in, with two wooden pieces on his head like headphones and bars of bamboo sticking out like antennas — he’s the controller — and they wait for the airplanes to land. They’re doing everything right. The form is perfect. It looks exactly the way it looked before. But it doesn’t work. No airplanes land. So I call these things cargo cult science, because they follow all the apparent precepts and forms of scientific investigation, but they’re missing something essential, because the planes don’t land.
Now it behooves me, of course, to tell you what they’re missing. … It’s a kind of scientific integrity, a principle of scientific thought that corresponds to a kind of utter honesty — a kind of leaning over backwards. For example, if you’re doing an experiment, you should report everything that you think might make it invalid — not only what you think is right about it: other causes that could possibly explain your results; and things you thought of that you’ve eliminated by some other experiment, and how they worked — to make sure the other fellow can tell they have been eliminated.
… In summary, the idea is to try to give all of the information to help others to judge the value of your contribution; not just the information that leads to judgment in one particular direction or another. – Richard P. Feynman, 1974 Caltech commencement address
There are many things in this world that are uncertain. Instead of talking about certainties, it’s wiser to talk about things in terms of probability. For example, while it’s currently winter in upstate New York, it’s not certain that we will have cold weather. (In fact, it got up to 55 degrees today around here.) But we can say it is very likely that we will have wintry weather on any given day in January.
From that perspective, I’d suggest that any “scientific” argument that starts from the premise that science is or can be liberal or conservative is highly likely to be a prime example of cargo cult science.
And anyone who believes in such science should be prepared for the high likelihood that he or she will look as ridiculous as a guy sitting in a hut with two wooden pieces on his head for headphones, expecting a planeload of cargo to miraculously arrive out of the sky.
The Value of a Liberal Arts Degree
The New York Times recently ran a story about a shift in attitudes regarding the purpose of a college education. Quoting a survey by the University of California, Los Angeles, they note:
In 1971, 37 percent responded that it was essential or very important to be “very well-off financially,” while 73 percent said the same about “developing a meaningful philosophy of life.” In 2009, the values were nearly reversed: 78 percent identified wealth as a goal, while 48 percent were after a meaningful philosophy.
I’ll admit that I was one of those in college in 1971, and “developing a meaningful philosophy of life” was my #1 interest at the time. So I have something of a bias in this matter.
I’ve also seen something of the current career orientation in person; a couple years ago I was on an alumni panel that addressed current students at my alma mater regarding what one could do with a political science degree. I was struck at the time by the way many students were focused on their career choice. They seemed to approach it with the sense that this was an extremely important question for which there were right and wrong answers, and making a wrong choice might irreparably harm their future.
This was not the way I’d felt when I was in college, and I was not alone. My class graduated in the mid-1970s, when the economy was in recession and jobs were scarce. After we graduated many of us took whatever jobs we could; my first job after college was as a photographer for Olan Mills for a year and a half. But far from damaging me, that job gave me an education in life in the real world as opposed to that of academia. It also had some lighter moments, much like this.
I’d like to say I shared my worldly experience and wisdom while on that panel, but I had a spirit of the stairs moment and didn’t have an insight until the session was over and I was on my way to my car. If I had it to do over, I would have pointed out to the attendees that in my work I generally work on a PC, design and maintain web sites, design and maintain databases, and communicate with others via email. Pretty much none of those things existed when I graduated from college; if I’d focused on learning whatever it was that preceded that technology, I would have been faced with having to unlearn it and learn the new stuff when it came along.
My college likes to say that a liberal arts degree teaches you how to think and learn. It’s not focused on getting you your first job; it’s focused on enabling you to succeed in life. This is a point that was made by the New York Times:
…Dr. Neuhauser finds the careerism troubling. “I think people change a great deal between 18 and 22,” he says. “The intimate environment small liberal arts colleges provide is a great place to grow up. But there’s no question that smacks of some measure of elitism now.”
There’s evidence, though, that employers also don’t want students specializing too soon. The Association of American Colleges and Universities recently asked employers who hire at least 25 percent of their workforce from two- or four-year colleges what they want institutions to teach. The answers did not suggest a narrow focus. Instead, 89 percent said they wanted more emphasis on “the ability to effectively communicate orally and in writing,” 81 percent asked for better “critical thinking and analytical reasoning skills” and 70 percent were looking for “the ability to innovate and be creative.”
As in so many other parts of life, people get spooked by uncertainty when looking forward to their careers. Many react by seeking out a solid, career-oriented major that will get them their first job. But the problem with such an education is that it doesn’t help you much after you get that job and the world starts changing. Then you realize that uncertainty has never gone away, but you still aren’t equiped to deal with it.
Looking back from the twilight years of my regular career life, I’m very grateful for my liberal arts education. Not only have I found it useful in my job; it has helped me develop interests (like this blog) that I can continue to pursue when I retire.
After the formal Q&A part of our panel discussion about political science and careers, a young woman came up to me with a question. She was intrigued by the Obama for President campaign and was thinking about doing some volunteer work for it. She seemed to be asking me if that would be ok career-wise. I found the question surprising, as well as a bit ironic. The surprise was that the question was asked; back in my day we just volunteered for such work, without thinking about its career ramifications. The irony was that I had volunteered for the Carter-Mondale campaign in 1976 just because I wanted them to win, but that had led to my making contacts that led to my first job with New York State.
My recommendation to her, as well as to any other college students who might come across this post? Follow your passion and what brings the best out in you, and the future will tend to work things out for the best. You may not become rich, but then there are lots of unhappy rich people around. Following what truly interests you is the best way to find personal fulfillment.
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Steve Jobs made a similar point in his Stanford commencement speech.
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The New York Times recently ran another article, this one about the value of liberal arts training in business school. They note:
…even before the financial upheaval last year, business executives operating in a fast-changing, global market were beginning to realize the value of managers who could think more nimbly across multiple frameworks, cultures and disciplines. The financial crisis underscored those concerns — at business schools and in the business world itself.
As a result, a number of prominent business schools have re-evaluated and, in some cases, redesigned their M.B.A. programs in the last few years. And while few talk explicitly about taking a liberal arts approach to business, many of the changes are moving business schools into territory more traditionally associated with the liberal arts: multidisciplinary approaches, an understanding of global and historical context and perspectives, a greater focus on leadership and social responsibility and, yes, learning how to think critically.
You Can’t Believe Your Eyes
CNN’s web site recently had a piece called “Don’t believe your lying eyes” by R. Beau Lotto. Lotto, the founder of a hybrid art studio and science lab in London called Lottolab, says that what we see is not necessarily what we are actually looking at:
Seeing lightness and color are the simplest sensations the brain has. And yet even at this most basic level we never see the light that falls onto our eyes (called the retinal image) or even the real-world source of that image.
Rather, neuroscience research tells us that we only ever see what proved useful to see in the past. Illusions are a simple but powerful example of this point. Like all our perceptions, we see illusions because the brain evolved not to see the retinal image, but to resolve the inherent “meaninglessness” of that image by continually redefining normality, a normality that is necessarily grounded in relationships, history and ecology.
He argues that this fact is a key to understanding ourselves and the world around us:
Understanding this point is I believe critical to personal and social well-being, since the typical barrier to a deeper insight into oneself and others is the overriding, but necessarily false impression that what “I” see, what “I” hear and what “I” know is the world as it really is.
While Lotto’s work appears to be just one more example of the uncertainty that seems to ripple through so much of life today, it may help us actually deal with it:
Resolving uncertainty is essential to our survival. Hence our fear of ambiguous situations is palpable — e.g., the inability to resolve sensory conflict between the eyes and ears can result in nausea (like seasickness). And yet it is only by embracing the unknown within education, science, art and most importantly within our own private lives that we will find new routes to more enlightened ways of seeing and being.
What We Measure Is What We’ll Get
Filed under: dual nature, uncertainty | Tags: economy, reality, systems thinking
Leave a Comment Many people share the belief that there is a solid, objective reality “out there” somewhere – outside our heads, presumably – and that we can perceive this reality by assuming a detached, objective approach to understanding things. It’s also assumed that numbers, being abstract and seemingly objective themselves, are a key ingredient in achieving an objective knowledge about, well, things.
And so we hear every day a litany of numbers – the Dow Jones indices, unemployment rates, durable goods orders, interest rates, the GDP, etc. – from which we are supposed to conclude (objectively, of course) how we are doing economically. Being Americans, it’s taken as a given that if we’re doing well economically, then we’re doing well in general and all is right with the world.
The only problem is that our faith in the value of objectivity is just that – an article of faith. We don’t have any way of proving that our presumed objectivity, and objective reality, are the be all and end all of things.
As it turns out, quantum physics has discovered that reality can be understood in a number of ways, but it is not just some giant slab of objective Truth. As is demonstrated by the famous double slit experiment, what we measure for will have a major influence on what we get.
I was reminded of this fact by a piece in the New York Times titled G.D.P. R.I.P. The author, Eric Zencey, argues that using the Gross Domestic Product as a way to measure our economic well-being is flawed because it is incomplete. Only certain things are measured by the GDP:
A mundane example: If you let the sun dry your clothes, the service is free and doesn’t show up in our domestic product; if you throw your laundry in the dryer, you burn fossil fuel, increase your carbon footprint, make the economy more unsustainable — and give G.D.P. a bit of a bump.
The incompleteness of the GDP winds up shaping our priorities:
In general, the replacement of natural-capital services (like sun-drying clothes, or the propagation of fish, or flood control and water purification) with built-capital services (like those from a clothes dryer, or an industrial fish farm, or from levees, dams and treatment plants) is a bad trade — built capital is costly, doesn’t maintain itself, and in many cases provides an inferior, less-certain service. But in gross domestic product, every instance of replacement of a natural-capital service with a built-capital service shows up as a good thing, an increase in national economic activity. Is it any wonder that we now face a global crisis in the form of a pressing scarcity of natural-capital services of all kinds?
Zencey goes on to explain:
The basic problem is that gross domestic product measures activity, not benefit. If you kept your checkbook the way G.D.P. measures the national accounts, you’d record all the money deposited into your account, make entries for every check you write, and then add all the numbers together. The resulting bottom line might tell you something useful about the total cash flow of your household, but it’s not going to tell you whether you’re better off this month than last or, indeed, whether you’re solvent or going broke.
As I said before, we have a great faith in the power of numbers to give us a perceived objective reality. But this faith is misplaced if we don’t cover all aspects of a system. An in-depth study of what happens when we shoot photons through a single slit will show us one objective reality; a similar study of what happens when we shoot photons through a double slit will show us another. Only when we cover all the bases and account for reality’s multiple facets will we approach a deeper understanding of the way things are.
As Zencey notes, having an economic measuring system that only accounts for one aspect of the economy will inevitably lead to an incomplete and unbalanced sense of economic well-being:
We’re in an economic hole, and as we climb out, what we need is not simply a measurement of how much money passes through our hands each quarter, but an indicator that will tell us if we are really and truly gaining ground in the perennial struggle to improve the material conditions of our lives.
Uncertain Times
A recent op-ed in the New York Times has sparked discussion among bloggers and pundits about uncertainty. Apparently, according to Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert – in his piece “What You Don’t Know Makes You Nervous” – people don’t feel comfortable with uncertainty. He concludes:
Our national gloom is real enough, but it isn’t a matter of insufficient funds. It’s a matter of insufficient certainty. Americans have been perfectly happy with far less wealth than most of us have now, and we could quickly become those Americans again — if only we knew we had to.
Now I would think proclaiming that people are uncomfortable with uncertainty is stating the obvious – kind of like saying teenage boys think a lot about sex. Many of us have lives filled with routines that lend an element of predictability and certainty to our world. And we often assume roles that society has defined as appropriate. This reminds me of a dialogue in the movie My Dinner With Andre:
ANDRE: You know, that was one of the reasons that Grotowski gave up the theater. He just felt that people in their lives now were performing so well that performance in the theater was sort of superfluous, and in a way obscene.
WALLY: Hum!
ANDRE: I mean, isn’t it amazing how often a doctor will live up to our expectation of how a doctor should look? I mean, you see a terrorist on television: he looks just like a terrorist. I mean, we live in a world in which fathers, or single people, or artists, are all trying to live up to someone’s fantasy of how a father, or a single person, or an artist, should look and behave! They all act as if they know exactly how they ought to conduct themselves at every single moment. And they all seem totally self-confident. Of course, privately people are very mixed up about themselves.
In any case, a number of pundits and bloggers have picked up the discussion about uncertainty. Beyond the blogs that simply repeat Gilbert’s entire article or make some brief comment about it, there are those who use its mention of uncertainty to spin their own perspectives. Kathleen Parker used the column as a springboard for saying why conservatism is good and a social safety net is bad:
Certainty may be the promise of government, but uncertainty is the grease of free markets. Uncertainty was also America’s midwife. Without a tolerance for uncertainty — and unhappiness — our nation’s Founders might have remained in their rockers.
Hmmm…I guess that explains why the United States was such an unproductive place in which everyone “remained in their rockers” and nothing happened during the 40′s, 50′s and 60′s, when New Deal and Great Society programs were in their heyday.
Meanwhile, various letters to the editor of the Times reached a variety of other conclusions, including some diametrically opposed to Parker’s argument:
Mr. Gilbert’s observations help explain why, in studies of happiness and life satisfaction, the countries of northern Europe repeatedly top the list, well ahead of the United States. These countries thrive on capitalism underpinned by a safety net of socialist institutions that relieve their people of many of the uncertainties and anxieties that plague us here.
Apparently, even the significance of uncertainty is uncertain today.
I would suggest there are different kinds of uncertainty that can be at play in our lives. Some types of uncertainty are nearly universal, like a teenage boy getting up the courage to ask a girl out on a date. For him at that moment, it may feel like the most stressful thing in the world. But it’s really an experience that spans cultures and generations. The same could be said for people starting a business or seeking a job.
But there’s another kind of uncertainty that’s a product of something bigger: a revolutionary shift in our perception and understanding of how our world works. Such events are rare, but their effects can be devastating to the existing societies and cultures of their time. When Copernicus argued that the earth rotated around the sun rather than the other way around, it set in motion events that led to the rise of science and the demise of many irrational superstitions. The Industrial Revolution likewise shook to their foundations the cultures and societies with which it came in contact.
We are currently going through another of these epochal shifts, thanks to the scientific revolution that started in the 20th century and that led to the creation of the technologies that have reshaped our world today. That revolution created a great sense of uncertainty among scientists at the time, like Werner Heisenberg:
The violent reaction on the recent development of modern physics can only be understood when one realizes that here the foundations of physics have started moving; and that this motion has caused the feeling that the ground would be cut from science.
There are many times today when we may feel “the ground has been cut” from our familiar world. The uncertainties we experience in dealing with today’s new world can make us even more nervous than an economic downturn. After all, we can read histories about other recessions and even depressions and learn how people survived them. But nothing in human history can compare to the tightly interconnected world we find ourselves in today.
But in a way that’s not entirely true. As his statement illustrates, scientists like Heisenberg and Einstein were as unsettled by their discoveries as we are today by the world those discoveries have created. And yet eventually scientists moved beyond this discomfort. Perhaps if we follow their lead we can learn how to find new certainties in this uncertain world. In his book Quantum Soup; A Philosophical Entertainment, Chungliang Al Huang wrote about paradox - a primary facet of our current uncertainty. His observation seems as relevant as ever today:
Perhaps we need to look at paradox in a new way — more naively and accepting — recognizing the reasonableness of accepting yes/no, at the same time finding a new logic in the illogical, a new consistency in the inconsistent, and embracing absurdity as making quite good, if different, sense.
Albert Einstein said he did not believe that “God plays dice with the universe,” and so he remained uncomfortable with the new quantum theory when it came along, a theory that abounds with chance, randomness, and paradox. Yet now we have a whole new generation of physicists who are quite at ease with paradox. In fact, they encourage us to take their hand, let go of old patterns and open the way to new worlds for ourselves and for our children. They ask us to leave behind the world of either/or for the world of both/and. Paradox is part and parcel of the new physics.
Paradox – and uncertainty – are also part and parcel of our world today. It’s time we stopped fretting about it and began dealing with it. I suspect even Daniel Gilbert would agree that would make us happier.
