Predicting the Future
This article explores how prediction influences behavior.
>> If you had perfect foreknowledge of the blessings and tragedies that will come in your life, would you make the same choices anyway? <<
Some things yes, other things no.
However, I already have a strong extrapolative ability and much more tendency to use facts than emotions alone to make decisions. The emotional aspect, for me, comes after I have generated possible outcomes, when I'm whittling down to a decision. Which of these situations could I live with, and which could I not live with? My ability to do these things, and the choices are make, are among the many reasons people declare me to be not human. I really don't think like one. Most of them can't see ahead into the future any better than a horse can on a trail.
One of the bigger differences is my strong preference to avoid avoidable miseries. Most humans seem to lack this trait and do not understand mine. They'll get hungover repeatedly and complain about it and throw a fit if you point out that it was a choice they made knowingly. It seems that they get drunk deliberately, but not mindfully.
>>When we decide to act, we either are incredibly bad at thinking through the implications or give very little thought to the future at all.<<
This seems to be the norm. But it is not the only option. There are plenty of instructions on how to make good decisions and how to think consciously. It's just that most people don't use them.
* What is the situation?
* What are the variables?
* Which of those can be controlled, and how?
* What are the possible outcomes, good and bad?
* Are there obscuring factors that make it likely for there to be outcomes which cannot be predicted?
* What is the probability of each outcome, or at least, the ranked likelihood of the outcomes?
* What if anything can be done to raise the probability of desired outcomes and/or lower the probability of undesired outcomes?
If you can't generate multiple possibilities fluently, distinguish more or less likely outcomes, or manipulate the odds in your favor, then you're fucked. If you can do those things but are merely mislead by your emotions, that's a much smaller problem that comes with its own set of lessons for you to learn at your own speed how to balance logic with feelings.
>> Immanuel Kant argued that hope is essential to motivating our action. Without the hope that things will turn out well, why bother to do anything at all? <<
Oh, there are lots of other reasons.
Right now, I don't do activism out of hope. I do it so I can say "I fucking told you so," and for harm reduction.
Another is hitting back. In many scenarios where you can't win, it is often still possible to make sure that your enemy also loses; and in another large subset, even if you can't drag him down with you, it may still be possible to do enough damage that someone else can bring him down. If nothing else, you can make the bastard work for it and make the process unpleasant for him.
Hope has its uses, but it is not applicable or even desirable in all situations. False hope can fuck you as thoroughly as not being able to make good decisions, and the disappointment is usually worse.
>> Imagine what life would be like if you spent the entire time dwelling on the probabilities of how things might turn out. <<
Well, not the entire time, but ... I kind of do live in a sea of possibilities. It's more, hmm, tactile most of the time, like being able to feel a scale tilting or stronger currents in a river. For certain key events there's a very loud "click" like a ratchet slipping into place or a lock engaging. I can't sense everything, but apparently I can sense a lot more than most humans, and this makes me behave differently as a result. Some of it comes from farmemory, but some is simply an ability to put fresh pieces together into a logical progression.
>> How would you behave if you had a flashing statistic saying, "One percent of the population will die in a car crash," every time you turned on the ignition? <<
Small risks I often ignore. But warnings I find very off-putting, not necessarily because of the risk, but the goddamn nagging. There are things I won't use because of the nagware.
How serious is the risk, and how big is the need or reward? America is all but impossible to live in without owning a car. Choosing to avoid car use requires major life changes beyond the ability of most people to reach, although there are people -- even whole communities -- who have done so.
>> Or how would you feel if, as you got married, someone piped up from the back, "There's a high chance this won't last!"? <<
See now, that one's all about variables. That is studyable and influenceable. What causes people to start and end relationships? What are successful relationships doing right and unsuccessful ones doing wrong? These things fascinate me. And I'm in a long-term relationship because I don't have the patience to re-have the same fight 20 times. We may spend 6 hours arguing and come out of it feeling like crap, but we almost always have at least one actionable point to work on going forward. Thus, we aren't having the same fights now as when we started. That's because both of us are interested in what makes relationships work or fail.
If you know that a venture is risky, then you equip yourself as best you can to approach it, and you expect to do a lot of troubleshooting along the way. Not informing and equipping yourself in advance? Largely explains those failure rates. It doesn't mean you can't be overwhelmed by circumstances, but it does mean you won't fail because you couldn't be arsed to apply yourself.
>> And would you stop playing the lottery if you knew that you had a greater chance of being killed by a tornado, struck by lightning, or even hit by a meteorite than winning? <<
I usually don't play the lottery, and when I do, it's actually when the pot is biggest and the odds are lowest. Why? Because I'm providing an opportunity in case the gods want to hand me a large amount of cash to do things they would like to have done. I'm literally not using the same system to pursue a win as the people who are gambling the numbers.
>>Humans are experts at either utterly ignoring what might happen in the future or being embarrassingly bad at basic probability. The result is that when we choose any action or decide on any path, we usually do not give much meaningful thought to the possible future outcomes or implications of that choice.<<
Aaaaand that's why the world is the mess it is today. It's pretty obvious that burning fossil fuels, smoking cigarettes, or banging the neighbor's wife are all bad ideas, but that doesn't stop people from doing them.
I figure my life is going to be challenging enough without me stepping into traps that I can see. I'm particularly hostile about other people dragging me through traps that I can see but they don't believe in until after the damn things have already gone off.
>> Now, imagine how different things would be if you knew, with perfect accuracy, everything that would happen in your life. <<
There's a substantial difference between a single fated path and a malleable probability. The former is a lot harder to deal with than the latter. You really only stick with the former if it's like rereading a favorite book: you like the whole experience well enough to put up with the rough spots. Nobody wants to finish a shitty book. Conversely, being able to perceive probabilities gives you better chances of influencing them to fall as you wish.
>> Does knowing how something ends ruin the present? <<
That depends on how much you enjoy the present, how bad the end is, and whether there are any lasting gains.
>> What if you knew your best friend would betray you in three years' time? <<
Well, that's the end of that friendship. If that person had access to necessary resources, I might try to keep them thinking we were friends; but it would be instrumental rather than emotional, and I'd do my best to stay on guard. My preference would be simply to walk away.
>> Or that your boss is going to fire you tomorrow? <<
It's usually better to quit than to be fired, especially if you can do it in a way to avoid whatever corporate shitstorm is brewing.
>> What if you knew the day of your death? <<
This one depends on context and method.
If you can see time as globular or planar rather than linear, death is just one part of the whole, and trying to avoid or change it would wreck the pattern.
If you can extrapolate different possible deaths, and you are not driven by blind panic, then you can choose the one that best fits your goals. In particular, if you don't want the standard American death -- alone, in pain, in a hospital, with all your agency stripped away -- then you must take steps to obtain some other death before that one is forced upon you. Most Americans are so thanatophobic that their berserk efforts to avoid death greatly increase their suffering and that of others around them. I would prefer a sooner, quick-and-clean death over a later one with lengthy suffering. This is because I have extensive memories of diverse deaths, and while I'm not much daunted by death itself, there are angles of approach I'd really rather avoid. I am in the extreme minority in this. But because I am so fluent in this area, there's a good possibility that, as my time approaches, I will know it with some confidence. This is often a useful thing.
I will give one piece of advice: Don't act like a dumb movie lead and leave everything to the last minute. Say and do the important things now. The next minute is never guaranteed; that's the nature of mortality.
>> Louise learns this language and comes also to see time in this way. She starts to see, with certainty, her entire life path, as well as a great tragedy up ahead. She knows that she will meet her husband, they will have a child, and that child will die young from some incurable disease.
Despite knowing this, she has the child anyway.<<
The choice of this is straightforward: she loves the child, so she chooses to have the child to experience that love.
The ethics are much more fraught. Is it ethical to knowingly and deliberately insert a soul into a body that will definitely cause massive suffering? I do not believe that is an okay thing to do. Making someone else suffer because you want their company is a shitty thing to do. Is it ethical to procreate with someone, knowing it will cause a devastating disease, without telling your mate before so procreating? I do not believe that is an okay thing to do. It is reproductive misbehavior because most people would not knowingly beget a child doomed to a horrible disease. That's a basic point of genetic counseling for families with serious risk factors: discuss it with potential mates. In fact, one reason some people don't get tested is so they won't know and will feel more justified not mentioning it -- a possible risk is less obligatory than a known risk to disclose.
>> The question is: would you do the same? If you knew that your choice would end in such incredible grief and desolation, would you still commit to that path? <<
I would not knowingly entrap a soul into a miserably flawed body. Sure they all run out eventually, but there are good rides and bad ones. *ponder* But then again, that's influenced by my awareness that souls aren't bodies and lives aren't singular. My grief over a death, while still real, is not the same as people for whom death is an unknowable, uncrossable chasm. I would choose to avoid trapping someone in a diseased body, when it could easily be avoided, not to avoid my grief over losing them (since I'd already be without them) but to prevent them from suffering. Lengthy deaths really suck.
>> In this instance, we can only perform all our daily actions, moral or mundane, if we thought that there was some end point or product at the end of it. <<
*chuckle* Chop wood, carry water. Some actions are their own point. It's the longer-term things that tend to rely on a payoff later.
Morality in particular is much better off NOT doing that. You should do the right thing because it is right, because of how you feel about it, rather than in hopes of a payoff that may or may not ever materialize. There are practical aspects of morality that rely a lot on hope vs. fear -- like treat people kindly so the world will be worth living in, and don't steal other people's stuff so the world doesn't turn into a raidfest -- but consequential morality only works as well as the accuracy of its reward/punishment rigging. Since most of that has very low accuracy, it's not a great guide. Internal motivations will remain whether or not the external factors are functional or dysfunctional.
>> The problem Chiang raises is this: if we knew the future, and so lost that ignorant optimism that defines hope, would we ever do anything? <<
One place this applies is relationships, but for a different reason. Privacy is the foundation of civilization. It is what allows humans to get along, more or less, in groups beyond intimates. Because humans are annoying as fuck. If you know all their flaws before you know them as individuals, you probably won't want to know them any better. This kills relationships before they can really start, and that's a very serious danger with social media today.
If you meet people online by reading their comments, getting intrigued, and gradually finding more about them as you converse, that's great. The inevitable flaws will probably not come up until you already know each other well enough to consider whether the relationship is valuable enough to outweigh them. If instead you cyberstalk people as soon as they catch your notice, and find out lots of shit immediately, there's no "weight" to the relationship yet so it will almost always collapse as a result.
It's not so much ignorance that is necessary, but boundaries and discoveries. With future probabilities, what's important is malleability, agency, and the process of thinking through possibilities.
Whatever you do, aim to do it mindfully.
>> If you had perfect foreknowledge of the blessings and tragedies that will come in your life, would you make the same choices anyway? <<
Some things yes, other things no.
However, I already have a strong extrapolative ability and much more tendency to use facts than emotions alone to make decisions. The emotional aspect, for me, comes after I have generated possible outcomes, when I'm whittling down to a decision. Which of these situations could I live with, and which could I not live with? My ability to do these things, and the choices are make, are among the many reasons people declare me to be not human. I really don't think like one. Most of them can't see ahead into the future any better than a horse can on a trail.
One of the bigger differences is my strong preference to avoid avoidable miseries. Most humans seem to lack this trait and do not understand mine. They'll get hungover repeatedly and complain about it and throw a fit if you point out that it was a choice they made knowingly. It seems that they get drunk deliberately, but not mindfully.
>>When we decide to act, we either are incredibly bad at thinking through the implications or give very little thought to the future at all.<<
This seems to be the norm. But it is not the only option. There are plenty of instructions on how to make good decisions and how to think consciously. It's just that most people don't use them.
* What is the situation?
* What are the variables?
* Which of those can be controlled, and how?
* What are the possible outcomes, good and bad?
* Are there obscuring factors that make it likely for there to be outcomes which cannot be predicted?
* What is the probability of each outcome, or at least, the ranked likelihood of the outcomes?
* What if anything can be done to raise the probability of desired outcomes and/or lower the probability of undesired outcomes?
If you can't generate multiple possibilities fluently, distinguish more or less likely outcomes, or manipulate the odds in your favor, then you're fucked. If you can do those things but are merely mislead by your emotions, that's a much smaller problem that comes with its own set of lessons for you to learn at your own speed how to balance logic with feelings.
>> Immanuel Kant argued that hope is essential to motivating our action. Without the hope that things will turn out well, why bother to do anything at all? <<
Oh, there are lots of other reasons.
Right now, I don't do activism out of hope. I do it so I can say "I fucking told you so," and for harm reduction.
Another is hitting back. In many scenarios where you can't win, it is often still possible to make sure that your enemy also loses; and in another large subset, even if you can't drag him down with you, it may still be possible to do enough damage that someone else can bring him down. If nothing else, you can make the bastard work for it and make the process unpleasant for him.
Hope has its uses, but it is not applicable or even desirable in all situations. False hope can fuck you as thoroughly as not being able to make good decisions, and the disappointment is usually worse.
>> Imagine what life would be like if you spent the entire time dwelling on the probabilities of how things might turn out. <<
Well, not the entire time, but ... I kind of do live in a sea of possibilities. It's more, hmm, tactile most of the time, like being able to feel a scale tilting or stronger currents in a river. For certain key events there's a very loud "click" like a ratchet slipping into place or a lock engaging. I can't sense everything, but apparently I can sense a lot more than most humans, and this makes me behave differently as a result. Some of it comes from farmemory, but some is simply an ability to put fresh pieces together into a logical progression.
>> How would you behave if you had a flashing statistic saying, "One percent of the population will die in a car crash," every time you turned on the ignition? <<
Small risks I often ignore. But warnings I find very off-putting, not necessarily because of the risk, but the goddamn nagging. There are things I won't use because of the nagware.
How serious is the risk, and how big is the need or reward? America is all but impossible to live in without owning a car. Choosing to avoid car use requires major life changes beyond the ability of most people to reach, although there are people -- even whole communities -- who have done so.
>> Or how would you feel if, as you got married, someone piped up from the back, "There's a high chance this won't last!"? <<
See now, that one's all about variables. That is studyable and influenceable. What causes people to start and end relationships? What are successful relationships doing right and unsuccessful ones doing wrong? These things fascinate me. And I'm in a long-term relationship because I don't have the patience to re-have the same fight 20 times. We may spend 6 hours arguing and come out of it feeling like crap, but we almost always have at least one actionable point to work on going forward. Thus, we aren't having the same fights now as when we started. That's because both of us are interested in what makes relationships work or fail.
If you know that a venture is risky, then you equip yourself as best you can to approach it, and you expect to do a lot of troubleshooting along the way. Not informing and equipping yourself in advance? Largely explains those failure rates. It doesn't mean you can't be overwhelmed by circumstances, but it does mean you won't fail because you couldn't be arsed to apply yourself.
>> And would you stop playing the lottery if you knew that you had a greater chance of being killed by a tornado, struck by lightning, or even hit by a meteorite than winning? <<
I usually don't play the lottery, and when I do, it's actually when the pot is biggest and the odds are lowest. Why? Because I'm providing an opportunity in case the gods want to hand me a large amount of cash to do things they would like to have done. I'm literally not using the same system to pursue a win as the people who are gambling the numbers.
>>Humans are experts at either utterly ignoring what might happen in the future or being embarrassingly bad at basic probability. The result is that when we choose any action or decide on any path, we usually do not give much meaningful thought to the possible future outcomes or implications of that choice.<<
Aaaaand that's why the world is the mess it is today. It's pretty obvious that burning fossil fuels, smoking cigarettes, or banging the neighbor's wife are all bad ideas, but that doesn't stop people from doing them.
I figure my life is going to be challenging enough without me stepping into traps that I can see. I'm particularly hostile about other people dragging me through traps that I can see but they don't believe in until after the damn things have already gone off.
>> Now, imagine how different things would be if you knew, with perfect accuracy, everything that would happen in your life. <<
There's a substantial difference between a single fated path and a malleable probability. The former is a lot harder to deal with than the latter. You really only stick with the former if it's like rereading a favorite book: you like the whole experience well enough to put up with the rough spots. Nobody wants to finish a shitty book. Conversely, being able to perceive probabilities gives you better chances of influencing them to fall as you wish.
>> Does knowing how something ends ruin the present? <<
That depends on how much you enjoy the present, how bad the end is, and whether there are any lasting gains.
>> What if you knew your best friend would betray you in three years' time? <<
Well, that's the end of that friendship. If that person had access to necessary resources, I might try to keep them thinking we were friends; but it would be instrumental rather than emotional, and I'd do my best to stay on guard. My preference would be simply to walk away.
>> Or that your boss is going to fire you tomorrow? <<
It's usually better to quit than to be fired, especially if you can do it in a way to avoid whatever corporate shitstorm is brewing.
>> What if you knew the day of your death? <<
This one depends on context and method.
If you can see time as globular or planar rather than linear, death is just one part of the whole, and trying to avoid or change it would wreck the pattern.
If you can extrapolate different possible deaths, and you are not driven by blind panic, then you can choose the one that best fits your goals. In particular, if you don't want the standard American death -- alone, in pain, in a hospital, with all your agency stripped away -- then you must take steps to obtain some other death before that one is forced upon you. Most Americans are so thanatophobic that their berserk efforts to avoid death greatly increase their suffering and that of others around them. I would prefer a sooner, quick-and-clean death over a later one with lengthy suffering. This is because I have extensive memories of diverse deaths, and while I'm not much daunted by death itself, there are angles of approach I'd really rather avoid. I am in the extreme minority in this. But because I am so fluent in this area, there's a good possibility that, as my time approaches, I will know it with some confidence. This is often a useful thing.
I will give one piece of advice: Don't act like a dumb movie lead and leave everything to the last minute. Say and do the important things now. The next minute is never guaranteed; that's the nature of mortality.
>> Louise learns this language and comes also to see time in this way. She starts to see, with certainty, her entire life path, as well as a great tragedy up ahead. She knows that she will meet her husband, they will have a child, and that child will die young from some incurable disease.
Despite knowing this, she has the child anyway.<<
The choice of this is straightforward: she loves the child, so she chooses to have the child to experience that love.
The ethics are much more fraught. Is it ethical to knowingly and deliberately insert a soul into a body that will definitely cause massive suffering? I do not believe that is an okay thing to do. Making someone else suffer because you want their company is a shitty thing to do. Is it ethical to procreate with someone, knowing it will cause a devastating disease, without telling your mate before so procreating? I do not believe that is an okay thing to do. It is reproductive misbehavior because most people would not knowingly beget a child doomed to a horrible disease. That's a basic point of genetic counseling for families with serious risk factors: discuss it with potential mates. In fact, one reason some people don't get tested is so they won't know and will feel more justified not mentioning it -- a possible risk is less obligatory than a known risk to disclose.
>> The question is: would you do the same? If you knew that your choice would end in such incredible grief and desolation, would you still commit to that path? <<
I would not knowingly entrap a soul into a miserably flawed body. Sure they all run out eventually, but there are good rides and bad ones. *ponder* But then again, that's influenced by my awareness that souls aren't bodies and lives aren't singular. My grief over a death, while still real, is not the same as people for whom death is an unknowable, uncrossable chasm. I would choose to avoid trapping someone in a diseased body, when it could easily be avoided, not to avoid my grief over losing them (since I'd already be without them) but to prevent them from suffering. Lengthy deaths really suck.
>> In this instance, we can only perform all our daily actions, moral or mundane, if we thought that there was some end point or product at the end of it. <<
*chuckle* Chop wood, carry water. Some actions are their own point. It's the longer-term things that tend to rely on a payoff later.
Morality in particular is much better off NOT doing that. You should do the right thing because it is right, because of how you feel about it, rather than in hopes of a payoff that may or may not ever materialize. There are practical aspects of morality that rely a lot on hope vs. fear -- like treat people kindly so the world will be worth living in, and don't steal other people's stuff so the world doesn't turn into a raidfest -- but consequential morality only works as well as the accuracy of its reward/punishment rigging. Since most of that has very low accuracy, it's not a great guide. Internal motivations will remain whether or not the external factors are functional or dysfunctional.
>> The problem Chiang raises is this: if we knew the future, and so lost that ignorant optimism that defines hope, would we ever do anything? <<
One place this applies is relationships, but for a different reason. Privacy is the foundation of civilization. It is what allows humans to get along, more or less, in groups beyond intimates. Because humans are annoying as fuck. If you know all their flaws before you know them as individuals, you probably won't want to know them any better. This kills relationships before they can really start, and that's a very serious danger with social media today.
If you meet people online by reading their comments, getting intrigued, and gradually finding more about them as you converse, that's great. The inevitable flaws will probably not come up until you already know each other well enough to consider whether the relationship is valuable enough to outweigh them. If instead you cyberstalk people as soon as they catch your notice, and find out lots of shit immediately, there's no "weight" to the relationship yet so it will almost always collapse as a result.
It's not so much ignorance that is necessary, but boundaries and discoveries. With future probabilities, what's important is malleability, agency, and the process of thinking through possibilities.
Whatever you do, aim to do it mindfully.