27 May
Dear Ian Stewart,
Firstly, I wanted to thank you for writing your book Do Dice Play God?. I enjoyed the tour you took readers on across the “Ages of Uncertainty”. We forget sometimes that quantum mechanics and chaos theory are relatively new discoveries. And that modern probability theory, econometrics, and actuarial studies are not that much older.
I’d argue, however, that while our collective understanding of the nature of uncertainty has improved over the last two thousand years, most of us today continue to think about probability in the same way that our ancestors once did. Indeed, the number of people who believe in spirits, deities, and superstitions far outweigh those who understand quantum physics, chaos theory, and the complexity sciences.
At my workplace, a number of colleagues pool their money together every month to buy lottery tickets in hopes of striking it rich. They devise all sorts of heuristics and patterned rules in the semi-belief that it will improve their odds, if ever so slightly. Now, they aren’t clueless folk. They’re of the college-degree-toting sort. But when it comes to the lottery, rational thinking appears to fall by the wayside. They “feel compelled to try something”, one tells me. Effort, sensible or not, confers hope and psychic utility.
Similarly, one of my buddies will refuse to play poker, Monopoly, and other games of chance unless he gets to wear his lucky pair of socks. From what I can tell, these socks aren’t magical. But like an expensive pair of jeans, they seem to boost his confidence. He ends up making decisions with greater gusto and clarity. So in a weird roundabout way, his superstition makes sense (even if his original reasoning was nonsensical).
Moreover, classical views of uncertainty continue to persist in big business and government. During my day job as a management consultant, an executive once asked me to forecast the market prices of various rare-earth commodities over the next five decades. I told him politely that if I could predict long range prices with high confidence, I would not be working for him. He did not appreciate my joke, and pointed to the economic models that other competitors were selling.
This executive isn’t an isolated case, of course. I am often asked to develop “optimum” strategies knowing full well that “good enough” is all we can really hope to achieve in a fuzzy, uncertain world. People like certainty.
I guess what I’m trying to say is that in some ways, modern society is not dissimilar to the old Ages of Uncertainty. Where chieftains looked to rain dancing shamans for good fortune, Fortune 500 executives today look for people with fancy suits, MBA degrees, and expensive economic models. They confuse uncertainty reduction with uncertainty transfer, and pay their fortune tellers and management consultants well for it.
Now, I know the interplay between uncertainty and human nature wasn’t a big focus in your book, Ian. But I do wonder if any interesting anecdotes, observations, or reflections on this theme came to you during the writing process. I’d love to hear your thoughts.
Warm regards,
Tobias
Tobias Lim
Tobias Lim