My ideal home would have a place for everything and everything it its place. Despite what my husband says this is a perfectly normal human predilection- one which I happen to fall far short of. This labeling and classifying of people and things is a deep-rooted facet of our humanity. It allows us to classify new encounters and to tell friend from foe. America’s founding fathers thought this kind of sorting, this pattern tracking, so important they put the census in the Constitution. Ever since Americans have been looking at the data to try and figure out who we are as a people.
By almost any measure in the last few hundred years, even the last few decades, we’ve changed our world more profoundly than we did in the few thousand years of civilization that came before us. Whether this is a good thing is another blog post but I can tell you for sure that there are lots of shades of grey in that analysis. With modern technology we can now not only collect massive amounts of information we can analyze that data in ways that were simply not possible in the past.
Our brains need a lot of energy to work and they like to do it as efficiently as possible. Our brains want to shrink information processing by simplifying. This means reducing uncertainty. The computer age is the age of data. The age of patterns. Patterns mean predictability and predictability means not only being able to control the present but to control the future. Patterns make the unknowable known. But throwing ourselves into this techno-socially complex age doesn’t change the way our brains react. Merely the threats are different. We are still desperately trying to eliminate uncertainty. To do the right thing which is the one that will keep us and those we love safe.
Princeton professor Mathew Salganik is one of those that believes, in his own words that, “Yeah, pretty much, with enough data, everything becomes predictable. That idea definitely exists now.” He believed in this idea so much he orchestrated the Fragile Families Challenge. The Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study is following nearly 5,000 children born in large U.S. cities between 1998 and 2000. There are interviews with both mothers, fathers, and/or primary caregivers at birth and again when children are aged one. Moreover at three, five, nine, and fifteen in-home assessments of children and their home environment were done in addition to the continuing parent and caregiver interviews. The Fragile Families Challenge distributed this huge data trove about the kids from birth until age nine to programmers all over the world so they could write computer models that could predict their grades, among other things, at age 15. Again in Salganik’s own words the results were, “…not impressive” “…sad.” and “Disappointing.”
In converting a continuous measure (numerical, measurable values) into discrete categories (categories that can only take certain numerical values) valuable information is lost. Which means that sometimes the data, a particular pattern, is no good at all. Feelings, actions, and physiology even within one culture or ethnicity all fluctuate noticeably from one person to the next and one moment to the next. Averaging out data collected from a large assemblage people at a single given point in time offers only a glimpse of their behavior in that moment. It tells very little of the motivations and rationale behind that behavior. Data patterns can tell us what is happening. They cannot tell us why it is happening much less what will happen in the future.
Duncan Watts, a computational social scientist at Microsoft Research in New York City, is also the author of Everything is Obvious. In the book Watts shows “how commonsense reasoning and history conspire to mislead us into thinking that we understand more about the world of human behavior than we do; and in turn, why attempts to predict, manage, or manipulate social and economic systems so often go awry.” Over the years Duncan Watts has done and read quite a lot of prediction studies and found the exact same pattern everywhere: a lot of white space. As he says, “When you’re talking about individual outcomes… It’s all pointing in the same direction, which is that most things are mostly random, and the other half of this conversation is that people don’t like that answer.”
This can be how those negative thinking patterns get started. Seeing innocent people get hurt, being hurt, with no resolution of the situation violates our sense of the world as fair. Wanting to know why is a natural human desire. We crave control and security. We want to find the pattern. The answers we choose tend to be those that pacify us or that blend into our ethos. We cast people into roles: liar, thief, hero, and refuse to acknowledge that behavior is often no more stable than the situations that shape it. We see those who have achieved success as deserving of it and we see the victim as deserving of her fate. Even when the victim is us. As people we need to feel that we are in control of our lives even when our lives are shit. Perhaps especially when our lives are shit. To do otherwise would be to accept how big a role uncertainty, random chance, plays in our lives and that, ladies and gentleman is scary as hell.
This fear can make deterministic thinking tempting. Determinism is the belief that everything that happens is the only possible thing that can happen. End causes are always inevitable which means that nothing that didn’t happen could possibly have happened. Determinism is a statement about how the world works. Knowing that things are meant to be is a way to give meaning to our lives, especially when the random events that assail us are negative. When we lose a loved one to an unexpected heart attack or accident it can soothe us to know it’s Fate, Destiny, Karma, or God’s Will. If these things are random then it means these awful things have happened to us for no reason.
These beliefs hold the uncertainty at bay and make us feel like we have control. Even if we aren’t in charge someone is. Something that is looking out for us. This eases our insecurity. It can make us feel as though we have the power to find the pattern, predict things, and ultimately control things. It can make us feel confident and gives us the strength to face the unknowable of what tomorrow will bring. To invest in the now in the hope of payoff in a nebulous future.
The flip side of this is that the idea that if we are less in control of, and thus less responsible for, what happens to us it also makes choice illusory. The essence of free will is that people do have more than one possible response to any given situation. Choice is fundamental in human life. Everyday people face by multiple possibilities. Some of them are easy: Should I go for decaf or the strong stuff? Some of them are hard: Feed the addiction or fight it? And sometimes, there are no good choices. When faced with the difficult decisions determinism can make us feel better by giving a perceived meaning to the randomness of life. However believing we are not in control of lives can lead us to feel exactly the anxiety and depression we were trying to avoid.
Some people are more susceptible than others to the anxiety and depression uncertainty can cause. It’s like poison oak. When we first moved into our house in Louisiana the backyard was covered in the stuff. If my husband so much as brushes against it he’s having a reaction that can set off a cascade of autoimmune responses. While I avoid it the few times I’ve found myself wrapped up in it I’ve had not reaction at all. The same is true with how different people respond to uncertainty. Some of us have a high tolerance for it while others (me!) may find it downright painful.
In new research out of Dartmouth College lead researcher Justin Kim and his team had 61 students fill out a questionnaire designed to evaluate their capacity to cope with uncertainty about the future. The students then underwent MRI scans. The results showed that the volume of a person’s striatum appears strongly connected to a low intolerance for uncertainty with lower tolerance equaling a more voluminous striatum. Other research has indicated that role that the brain chemicals acetylcholine, dopamine and noradrenaline all play a role in uncertainty. Noradrenaline has been linked to our ability to estimate how unstable an environment is. Acetylcholine seems to helps us adapt to changing environments. While dopamine motivates us to act on our perceptions about uncertainty. The lizard brain once again comes into play.
The Uncertainty Scale (IUS) (link leads to pdf) was developed in 1994 by a team of researchers in Quebec. The IUS gauges how much people want and look for predictability. It also measures how we react in uncertain situations. A higher intolerance for uncertainty, a high IU, has been linked to anxiety disorders and depression. People high in IU are more likely to be the victims of negative thinking and other cognitive distortions including going out of the way to approach or avoid the uncertainty. Even for those who have a “normal” level of intolerance uncertainty can be more uncomfortable than knowing something bad is going to happen.
Human beings crave certainty. Uncertainty causes stress. The physical manifestations of stress negatively affect our health. This why we love a pattern. Our brains hate the unknown, the unfamiliar. If there’s a pattern, then there’s something we can do about it. Patterns are predictable, controllable. Safe. Even before computers people looked for patterns, in the stats and in our behavior. We want the world to be just and ordered. In our desire for understanding and certainty we convince ourselves that people and things are more predictable than they are. This is exacerbated by our tendency towards dichotomy. We don’t like those shades of grey. They are uncomfortable and unstable. We prefer things and people be either good or bad, black or white, wrong or right, always and forever.
I’ve said for years that people in mass suck. People in mass are a mob with a mob mentality. Big data, data analytics, patterns, they can give us the odds on the mob. On average those who grow up in poor families will do worse than those from wealthy families. In the US being white and middle class will generally give someone slightly more of a leg up than being middle class but not white. In aggregate these structural differences can have enormous significance. However applying mob data to any single person means propagating scientific theory and experimentation that is a mismatch to the differences between individuals. Randomness means at an individual level our lives can shoot off in any direction. Individually we have the ability to make choices, to be better (or worse) than the mob.
At the end of the Invisibilia interview Salganik is still hopeful. In response to the idea there may simply be a large degree of randomness in our lives he replies, “No. I think we just have more work to do.” This was my husband’s response as well. More data, faster computers, more understanding of the variables and we will finally be able to eliminate uncertainty. I’m with Watts. I believe that “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” (Hamlet, I.5) Sometimes people are simply in the right place at the right time. Others are in the wrong place at the wrong time. Watts says that “…accepting the real role of randomness, when judging ourselves and the people around us, is just as important as recognizing the power of pattern because it has profound implications for fairness and for justice.”
The strongest patterns in life are the exceptions.
Life is layered.
Sources
https://www.fastcompany.com/3062984/a-guide-to-uncertainty-for-people-who-hate-not-knowing
https://www.psychologytoday.com/gb/blog/cultural-animal/200902/just-exactly-what-is-determinism
https://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?storyId=597779735
https://www.cio.com/article/2466321/big-data/3-mistaken-assumptions-about-what-big-data-can-do-for-you.html
https://hbr.org/2018/10/help-your-team-understand-what-data-is-and-isnt-good-for
https://news.berkeley.edu/2018/06/18/big-data-flaws/
https://msalganik.wordpress.com
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/duncan-watts-book/
https://medium.com/@duncanjwatts/the-non-inevitability-of-donald-trump-and-almost-everything-2a78e764183f
https://www.thecut.com/2017/06/a-biological-reason-some-people-cant-stand-uncertainty.html
https://neurosciencenews.com/uncertainty-three-chemicals-5521/
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/11/161115145930.htm
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ry_72l1SvHU