Reality is Far More Vicious than Russian Roulette

 

 “Reality is far more vicious than Russian roulette. First, it delivers the fatal bullet rather infrequently, like a revolver that would have hundreds, even thousands of chambers instead of six. After a few dozen tries, one forgets about the existence of a bullet, under a numbing false sense of security. Second, unlike a well-defined precise game like Russian roulette, where the risks are visible to anyone capable of multiplying and dividing by six, one does not observe the barrel of reality. One is capable of unwittingly playing Russian roulette - and calling it by some alternative “low risk” game.”

                                -Nassim Nicholas Taleb, “Fooled by Randomness”

We think about and make decisions every day; this is how we have survived. Historically speaking, those who were quickest to act survived, and those who were silent and took time to ponder future outcomes were probably eaten by some wild animal. This is why we have involuntary reactions. However, presently we have the luxury, and sometimes the misfortune, of being able to have, for the most part, as much time to postulate the future as we would like.

Enter survivorship bias.

Survivorship bias is essentially humans’ tendency to over-estimate our chances of success because only success is advertised. Rolf Dobelli in The Art of Thinking Clearly does a very good job explaining this phenomenon; the book is worth a read. The combination of our ability/fortune to fanaticize about future outcomes and our systematic tendency to overestimate our chances of success leads to serious miscalculations. We observe the sea of randomness present in our everyday lives; take out little bits and pieces that we find worthy enough to serve as a good defense of our preconceived notion of our high-probability of future success.

We do not see the tens of thousands of athletes who don’t go pro, we do not see the vast majority of musicians who never get a record label; we are constantly deceived by those on the big screen who have “made it.” An additional catalyst to these cognitive miscalculations is that we think that if we do what those who are famous did, or at least a derivative of it, our chances of success go even higher. These thoughts are of course additional reorganization of randomness into a beautifully laid out map to success: this is a sham. Instead of gathering facts to form a theory we form a theory and then gather facts to support it; this leads to further inaccuracies in the decision making process.

What I think we forget is just how little is in our control. If we were born a thousand different times in a thousand different homes we would have a thousand different parents with a thousand different value sets. It is simply too convenient that we were born to parents or guardians that had the “ideal” value-set or “perfect” belief-system. As a matter of fact, I believe that those “core-values” and “core-beliefs” are the things that we should be most skeptical of. This is because the younger we were when an idea or belief is introduced to us, the higher our bias to believe it is: the less it is in our control. This goes back to the classic argument that a Hindu, if born in a Jewish home, would probably end up being Jewish. There is just too much that is out of her control, too may occurrences and teachings that will prevent her from stumbling her way to a different religion.

Objective evaluation of beliefs and value sets is becoming increasingly important to me on my quest towards procuring wisdom. To quote Taleb for a second time:

“Probability is not a mere computation of odds on the dice or more complicated variants; it is the acceptance of the lack of certainty in our knowledge and the development of methods for dealing with our ignorance.”

-Luke