314 - Fluke - Brian Klaas (rebroadcast)
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Welcome to the You Are Not So Smart Podcast, Episode 314.

In late October of 1926, an American couple, Henry and Mabel Stimson, crossed an ocean to visit Japan for a long overdue vacation. And upon their arrival, they loaded up their things into a train car and hit the rails.

headed for the city of Kyoto. Japan was modernizing. America and Japan were at peace in the 1920s and 30s, and the country had become a fascinating tourist destination for Westerners, most of whom would travel in a luxurious ocean liner there and back.

And once there, the Stimpsons did what Americans did when they were on vacation in Japan. They visited the temples, they walked the streets, they popped in and out of the shops and tea houses, and they strolled the reds and the greens and the yellows of the maples and the mosses and the ginkgos. And when they were resting from their adventures, they slept in and enjoyed the fineries of...

and the amenities offered at the Miyako Hotel. And all of this taken together would create rich memories, leave strong impressions, and grow within them a thick garden of emotions that they would tend to

for decades. They love the city, right? They're there for like six or seven days and they fall in love with it. That's the voice of Dr. Brian Kloss. So my name is Brian Kloss. I'm an associate professor of global politics at University College London. And in addition to his work as a professor of global politics, Brian Kloss is a researcher at the University of Oxford, a contributing writer for The Atlantic, and has in the past advised a variety of governments and political campaigns.

as well as organizations like NATO, the European Union, the International Crisis Group, and the Carter Center. I started studying bad people who do bad things, and that has led me down the rabbit hole to questions about why things happen. Why things happen. A big question, to be sure. And so, these days, Kloss is obsessed with combining historical analysis with complexity science.

and Chaos Theory, which makes this the third episode in a row exploring those same topics. But this time, we are taking a completely different angle, one that Brian takes in his book, Fluke, Change, Chaos, and Why, well, Why Everything We Do Matters. And that's what we're about to explore right now by returning to the Stimpsons and their vacation in

in Kyoto. And seemingly this is a relatively unimportant event in history until 19 years later, the husband in this couple, Henry Stimson, ends up as America's Secretary of War, who's the top civilian overseeing the targeting committee, which is deciding where to drop the first atomic bomb. And all the generals basically agree that Kyoto is the right pick. It's their number one choice.

Which dismays Stimson because he loved the city from his vacation, right? And his wife loved it as well. So he basically tries to convince the generals to take it off the list. They are totally deaf to his demands. So he goes to the top and he twice meets with President Truman, who

and begs him to take Kyoto off the list. And Truman finally relents. So the reason why, the immediate reason why Hiroshima was destroyed instead of Kyoto is because of a vacation that a couple took 19 years before the atomic bomb was dropped. And the second bomb was supposed to go to Kokura, a Japanese city few people in the West have heard of. But it's a place where they got there with the bomber and there were clouds, just, you know, unforecasted clouds that briefly covered the city and made it so they had to go to their secondary target, which is

Nagasaki. We have this bias. I mean, you talk a lot in your podcast about biases. We have this bias that big events must have big causes, right? Like there's like a deliberate set of variables that are going to go into the decision about where to drop a bomb that's going to kill 100,000 people. And yet the actual history is one couple's vacation 19 years earlier and one cloud briefly passing over a city. So

That bias that Brian just mentioned, it has a name.

proportionality bias. Some consider it a cognitive bias, others a heuristic. In fact, it has another name, which is the major event, major cause heuristic. I consider it a cognitive bias, but whatever name you call it, whatever category you place it, it's the tendency for human brains to assume big, historical, massively impactful events must have had big causes or complex machinations underlying them.

It couldn't just be the unfolding of randomness and chaos. It's one of the biases that most contributes to conspiracy theories and conspiratorial thinking. One that leads to an assumption that there must be something more going on when big, often unlikely events make the evening news. When, in fact, as Brian is about to tell you, through many different stories and through many different examples, this is rarely the case.

More often, big events are the result of lots of random interactions generating outcomes that would be very difficult to predict. But when you look back upon them, they seem inevitable in hindsight. And when I say interacting, it can be difficult to wrap your mind around just how much all of our interactions can accumulate. How much randomness and noise in the system contributes to, well, as Brian put it, everything.

For example, in a game of billiards or pool, the one with the cue ball and the eight ball and the pool stick, the mass of every person in the room during that game will in some very, very, very small way affect the physics of the game. Which means the farther out you try to predict, the more you try to simulate a single game of pool, the more you have to take into account, well, a whole lot of stuff.

at the level of like solar systems kind of stuff. We'll get into all of that in a minute. It's really fun. We're going to do that in the second half. But first, back to our story of the vacation that led to the sparing of Kyoto. Who knows what tiny moments in the lives of the Stimpsons led them to take that vacation when they did. But everything that impacted that decision would, nearly 20 years later, impact the lives of hundreds of thousands of people in the country of Japan today.

And those people's lives and what happened afterward, well, the ripples of all that are still being felt today.

This feels like a good place to begin discussing contingency and convergence. And here is Brian Kloss to do just that. Kokura's luck is a term that the Japanese have for a city or someone who has unwittingly avoided disaster. But most of the time when we avoid disaster, when something really good happens to us, we don't know the causal chain of events that predicated it, right? We don't understand them. So contingency and convergence is a way of thinking through these problems, right? So contingency, this comes from evolutionary biology, right?

And contingency, the easiest way of describing it, it's the asteroid that hit the dinosaurs and wiped them out, right? Because if the asteroid is delayed by a microsecond, a different set of species get killed from the dinosaurs. Potentially, maybe the dinosaurs don't die. Mammals don't rise.

Humans probably don't exist, right? So you have this oscillation in the Oort cloud in the distant reaches of space, which flings this asteroid towards us, hits it exactly the moment it does, kills the dinosaurs, mammals rise, humans eventually exist. Everything in human history would not exist but for that exact timing. Now, that's contingency, right? If you change one thing, everything shifts fundamentally. Convergence is where there's this idea that there's still order in the world because certain things work.

right? And other things don't work and the things that work actually survive. So in evolutionary biology, a great example of this is if you were to take a human eye and stick it next to an octopus eye,

They're very, very similar. And this is crazy because there's about 400 million years of separation on the evolutionary tree at which these species diverged. And yet they end up with basically the same solution because evolution just fundamentally went with something that works. So I try to apply this to human lives by saying I come up with this term, the snooze button effect, right, where it's like you hit the snooze button on a Tuesday morning. Does your life radically change?

I think the answer is almost certainly yes, 100% of the time. And the reason why I say that is, you know, there's, I was trying to figure out how to explain this to people in a way that doesn't make me sound like a lunatic. And I said, look, look, if you think about like all the stuff we think about with time travel, going back to the future, you know, the film Back to the Future or just time travel in the past, you know,

You can imagine very clearly, like if you talk to someone 60 years ago or if you squish the wrong bug a million years ago, you could accidentally delete yourself from the future or even kill off humanity if it's, you know, the right species a million years ago. And so, you know, we intuitively accept that, right? It's like, oh, yeah, like if you go back in time and you like talk to somebody who was like a friend of your parents, maybe it will change the world in a way that deletes yourself from the future. So don't do that.

But then when we get to the present, we suddenly have this different view of historical causality where it's like, oh, that's all noise. The signal will win out and nothing will change from a squished bug or talking to somebody.

And I actually think the view of historical causality in the past with the time machine is correct. I think we just pretend otherwise because it's comforting to not have to worry about all the things that we're producing for ripple effects into the future. And this is where, you know, that third part of the subtitle, why everything we do matters, was put in the book. I mean it quite literally, right? I mean, like when people say like, well, not everything. I'm like, yes, literally everything. And I talked to you, you know, I was talking to someone recently, there's a story in the book

Which I love this science behind this. There's a new discovery about a year or two ago where the researchers believe that the reason why mammals don't lay eggs, including humans, right, is that this shrew-like, a single shrew-like creature got infected with a single retrovirus 100 million years ago. And it's the origin story of placenta and therefore live births.

Now, I told this story to someone and she said, well, as the mother of two, curse that true because that would have been nicer to lay an egg. And I said to her, I was like, yeah, but the problem is that if that hadn't happened, the odds that humanity would emerge in the exact same way it did is zero, right? Because if the evolutionary path had been with eggs, it wouldn't have given rise to us.

So like, thank goodness for that shrew. Like we quite literally owe everything in our existence to it. But that's like true of everything, right? It's true of so many things because if different chimpanzee like creatures had mated, you know, 6 million plus years ago, humans wouldn't have evolved the same way either. So it's, there's, you know, there's stuff like this where I think the reason we don't acknowledge it is just because it's mind numbing, right? It's like, it's just so big, right?

that you can't put your head around it and you can't just sort of go through life. It's, you know, at first when I started thinking about it, it is a little bit crippling. You think like, okay, every word I use is going to reshape the future. But that is literally true because the most obvious example of this is with who gets born. If you were to have, you know, a baby get produced at a slightly different, like a microsecond different time, a different person is born because it's exactly which sperm cell and so on ends up fertilizing the egg. So you have

You have any slight change in that day. I mean, even stopping to sip a cup of coffee, a different person is going to get born on that day or going to get produced on that day. And so, you know, that's the kind of stuff where when you start to imagine that it's jarring. I mean, everything we do is important. And I think the model-based world that Western modernity runs on

just reflects back at us a myth that is, as long as you understand five or six variables and you control them, everything will turn out the same way because it's just sort of the rest of it is noise to be ignored.

You say in the book, I'm quoting you, "We control nothing but influence everything." It's such a great way to frame this, the idea of the back to the future thought experiment. If you just pretend that when you wake up, pretend you entered a time machine and like, "Now I have arrived here from the future," you would behave in a way where you know that every possible, everything you do, every single little thing you do could affect billions of outcomes to the point that it's going to affect world history.

That's a tough way to live life, even if it's true. It has to be true that this is a thing that is actually happening. Because if you did go back in time, you'd be aware of such a thing. Keeping somebody from getting to a meeting, stepping in front of a car and causing them to stop and not be able to continue their journey the way they were doing. Every time travel movie has this. One conversation changes things. But you're already there. You're doing that right now.

That's, hey, Brian, that's a lot to think about. How did this become an interest for you? That's a lot of stuff to move to another country to study bad people, to get wrapped up in causality. What what led you into this life? It's funny, because I, you know, I started out to be a political scientist, and I was doing sort of straight laced political science things. I mean, I was studying coups and election rigging, and so on. That was sort of my bread and butter.

And there's sort of two things that happen that I think are the story behind the book. Three, I should say. One is I watched the film Sliding Doors when I was like 14 years old, which is a film from the 1990s with Gwyneth Paltrow where there's two versions of her life, one where she misses the subway train in London, the tube, and one where she makes it and her life totally changes. And that idea stuck with me as like a teenager. And then fast forward to my grad work when I was doing my PhD and I

I was studying these events. I was supposed to put them in these neat and tidy models of why things happen, the X and Y relationships that you have. But every time I looked at an actual event in detail, that just totally fell apart. And the one that really, really jarred my thinking, that's probably the origin story of the book in a way, is I was looking at a coup plot in Zambia where basically they had an idea to kidnap the army commander and hold him at gunpoint and make him announce the coup on the radio, which is a pretty good idea actually. But

He basically got out of bed when they tried to seize him and he tried to climb over his compound wall. And I interviewed one of these soldiers and he's like, yeah, I grabbed his pant leg and he pulled up and I pulled down and he got through my fingers and he got away and alerted the government to the coup plot. And the main coup plotter was found hiding in a trash can three hours later. That was like the end of the story. Right.

And I was like, you know, I took that I took away from that moment. Like, how am I supposed to put this quantitative model with four variables that explains coups when like this is a split second between the plot fizzling and being ridiculed, which is what happened or the Zambian government toppling right in a coup?

And so every time that I've come across, you know, sort of like in political science, we basically abstract the world into models and patterns and so on. History, you know, you deal with the details and the two are somewhat incompatible. And I study both history and political science on a personal level, though.

When I was 20-something, my dad sat me down and told me something that I didn't know about myself, which was he told me the story of a woman in 1905 in a little rural farmhouse in Wisconsin outside a place called Keeler, Wisconsin, who snapped one day. And presumably it was postpartum depression, although they didn't have probably the words for it then. But she killed her four young children. I think the oldest one was five years old and then killed herself. This was my great-grandfather's first wife.

And it was this jarring experience to realize that everything I have experienced in my life, my entire existence, my dad, my grandpa, etc., they're basically only alive because, as am I, only alive because of this mass murder in Wisconsin 119 years ago. Quite literally, you are hearing my voice because of that mass murder.

And he wouldn't be if the kids had survived or if he'd come home 20 minutes early, potentially. I mean, this is the kind of stuff where the ripple effects in life constantly sway our trajectories. And for some reason, we pretend otherwise. And the book was me trying to say, here's why we pretend, right? And I think it is a coping strategy, but it's something that I think is also at odds with how the world actually works. We'll be right back with a lot more with Brian Kloss.

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Early on, you say, and I have it in front of me so I quote you properly, you describe yourself as a disillusioned social scientist, and you have mentioned that already a little bit. You have this great bit of writing, and I'm quoting you here, I began to wonder whether the story of humanity is just an endless but futile struggle to impose order, certainty, and rationality onto a world defined by disorder, chance, and chaos. You continue, but I also began to flirt with an alluring thought

That we could find new meaning in that chaos, learning to celebrate a messy, uncertain reality by accepting that we and everything around us are all just flukes spit out by a universe that can't be tamed. Brian,

There's something here that I appreciate immediately. It's like, oh, wow, there are other people who think this too. That felt really nice. I too have gone down that reductionist path. I've been asked questions like this in interviews where they're like, what's the point of everything if we have all these biases and everything? And I often discuss the difference between being in atoms, molecules, and sodium ion channel places and then up here in the thunderstorm of existence being

where you almost have to lean on poetry to make sense of anything at all. And you talk about this in the book. I didn't expect to jump here immediately, but I want to talk about this, this concept of being reductionist versus living up here in the space where everything is complex and bonkers and

Let's just get in there real quick. Is this the atomist versus relational view of things? Yeah. So, I mean, I think there's basically – the reason why this is so important to grapple with is because Western modernity, which most of us, most of the people listening to this will have grown up in and be seeped in on a daily basis –

It tells us what I think is a fundamental myth about the way the world works, which is basically individualistic and atomistic, right? We're individual atoms and we don't have to worry so much about the system because we're in charge of it, right? And you see this reflected in our culture, right? You have the American dream is like this on steroids. Poor people just don't want to be rich, right? Because that's what the American dream is basically saying. It's like, if you wanted to be rich, you would just work harder and then that would work, which is obviously a myth. But

But that's also reflected in the way we think about change, right? I mean, I think there's a lot of people who view their lives as something where they're the main character. They're the driver of change.

And so I'm sort of grappling with that at the same time that a lot of Eastern philosophy and a lot of Eastern religions and so on have a radically different conception, which is often referred to the relational strand in philosophy, which is basically, look, even if you understand the components of the system, if you don't understand how they interact, you're going to totally misjudge what's going on because everything is defined by its relation to everything else. Right. And I have this sort of

quip in the book where I said, no one introduces themselves as a human at a cocktail party because we define ourselves socially, relationally to everybody else. But, you know, there's so much in science that has shown how unbelievably true the relational viewpoint is.

And this is the juxtaposition, which I could have probably done more with in the book, but it's like the reductionists are very, very good at being pragmatic. Like breaking down a machine to its components makes a better machine because you can make iterative adjustments and you can learn how to have pragmatic improvements in reductionism. It's been highly, highly successful in giving us extraordinary technology.

On the other hand, though, the sort of pragmatic aspect is still sort of like an illusion, right? Because it's not actually telling you how the system is operating as a whole. And so when I think about modern society, for example, we have all these like black swans. We have all these things where I think most people today feel like the world is falling apart more regularly than it used to.

That's because we are focusing on the components and not the system and we've made a system that is really prone to shock So, you know, I think both in our lives and in society there's a huge advantage to thinking relationally more and thinking less about that sort of delusion of individualism, but it's a hard sell to people to be all of a sudden said Oh, no, everything that you think about like the sort of basic underpinnings of reality is slightly wrong. It

is a difficult thing for a lot of people to stomach. But I think it's true. I think this is something where physicists have internalized this lesson while the rest of us continue to live in this sort of pretend reality. What I want to talk about is Newton and the Laplace's demon, and then we get to weather systems and things.

You talk about this when you were discussing individualism, which is kind of what we're talking about here. You call individualism the lie that defines our times. And you tell this really cool story about a dude named Ivan. Let's start there. What happened to Ivan? He's a guy who's swimming off the coast of Greece, right? Just goes for a swim on his vacation.

and a riptide sucks him out to sea and he gets he disappears you know in the distance and and his friends can't find him now this persists for like over 24 hours and like when someone is out at sea for 24 hours you presume they're dead right so everyone sort of assumed that Ivan had died now what ended up actually happening is as he's like about to drown this soccer ball just like bobs into him right like he just like reaches out and grabs it and he's able to float and

for over 24 hours clinging to the soccer ball until he's eventually rescued. And this isn't the amazing part of the story. The amazing part of the story is when they cover this on the news in Greece, this woman's like watching it. You can imagine sort of like out of a film scene. She's like turns on the TV and she sees this and she looks at the soccer ball on the TV. And it's like, I'm imagining her like dropping like a cup of coffee or something like that with this astonishment. But she recognizes it because she lives 80 miles away from where Ivan was swimming.

And 10 days earlier, one of her kids had kicked that exact soccer ball off the cliff. And so for them, it was this invisible moment that they would never have known about but for the news where they just sort of shrugged and said, oh, we lost a soccer ball. We'll buy another one, right? Like, it's fine. But for Ivan, it's why he's alive.

It's just this clear cut glimpse of what I think is constantly happening. It's just like, you know, the story is a lot of people read that and say, oh, wow, what an amazing feat. And I'm like, no, this is constantly happening. It's just not so obvious. Right. It's not it's not so clear cut that you have this one kick and then this person doesn't die.

Instead, you're just sort of constantly rewriting the world. You have this thread of your life and you tweak any little bit of that thread. It's not just your thread that changes. The whole tapestry image shifts. Now, it might be slight, right? It might be a little bit turns a different color or might be totally, totally different. And we can never know that. I mean, I think that's the maddening part of being alive is that we just cannot see the sliding doors alternative realities that we'll never inhabit because we're in this one world. And so-

I think this is the stuff where, again, I think people can come to this and take their own conclusions from what this means for them and how they process it and so on. I think a lot of malaise in the modern world is from people feeling interchangeable and unimportant. You think about AI. You think about people who work in an Amazon warehouse. A lot of those people feel unimportant, and it's causing a lot of social dysfunction to feel so interchangeable and disposable.

I think the implication of this idea is that, no, like if somebody else was doing your job, if somebody else was living your life and talking to your friends and being a good family member, the world would change, right? Now, some of it might be good. Some of it might be bad. But unimportant is something that we are not. And that's the thing that I think is worth reiterating to people is that there is a sort of profound shift that we are constantly producing, even as we pretend we're relatively powerless to shift the course of history.

There are many different things that play into this, that feeling of I'm not actually a person unless I do something that puts me way out there where everybody knows my name. Either I achieve something incredible or become one of these content creators, these influencers, or a celebrity, or a billionaire. And if I'm not doing that, then I'm just in the background of existence.

I'm merely a consumer. I am merely a audience member, not part of the grand drama of human existence. Your book just straight up is like, you're wrong. Every single thing you do is having an impact on every single thing that's going to happen after you make that decision. Am I reading this correctly? Am I hearing this correctly? Yeah. And I, you know, there's, there's a, there's a question of like what you do with that, right? Like how do you process that knowledge? I mean,

So for me, like when I think that story I gave you about the shrew being infected with a retrovirus and that's part of the reason why humans are the way they are. Like there's an arbitrary nature to this. Like part of the aspect of fluke is to say like there's all these things that are sort of arbitrary, accidental, almost random chance-based events that are why we exist.

Now, some people come to that with, OK, this is proof of God. Right. I mean, I personally I'm not a believer. I'm totally respectful of those who are. But but for those people, I mean, it's it's an interesting interpretation of the science because it's one where it's like, oh, yeah, God chose to infect the shrew in exactly this way so that humans would emerge and so on. So people make their own judgments and meanings out of the arbitrariness of it.

But for me, what I, the way I think about this and the way I process it was like, look, I, I don't think that there's like a cosmic purpose to my life. I don't, I don't personally believe that. I don't think that I think that if I hadn't been alive, somebody else would, if humans hadn't existed, something else would, but,

But that doesn't really matter to me that much in the sense that I still think I'm part of this like an unbelievable thing that is existence, right? And like I am part of the tapestry I was talking about. And like there's been 13.8 billion years of all these things unfolding. And like I get just because of this luck that I've had to be alive, you know, I get to write part of it.

And like, that's fine for me. I like, I, for other people, it might feel really bewildering and like upsetting and so on. And I totally get that. But I, you know, for me, it's like, yeah, but I'm, I'm actually like shaping the world. I'm helping decide which people exist in the future and which society they live in and what evolutionary track, uh, you know, might, might take place next and so on. So I,

I find that really uplifting. It doesn't mean there's some grand purpose to life. Whether you believe in God or not, if you do, then of course you can see it that way. But if you don't, then it's like, well, do you need to have a purpose, right? There's this great line from Vonnegut. He's one of my favorite authors and he's got this book, Cat's Cradle. It's my favorite book. He has this thing where there's this religion in the book called Bokanonism. And I'm paraphrasing, but he basically says, you know, there's this encounter between man and God. And man says, what is the purpose of everything? And God says, well,

Does there need to be a purpose? And man says, well, of course. And God says, well, then I'll leave it to you to think of one. And he walks away. Maybe it's okay that we just get to exist and have really cool lives with interesting people and enjoy interesting experiences. I don't know. For me, that's enough. That's the sort of aspect, yeah.

I see it more as like proximal versus distal impact, right? Like I, everything I'm doing is causing ripples in the entire system and who knows how it's going to impact things. I may have already done the thing that leads to World War III. I don't know, possibly, but, or I may have done the thing, I may have made a choice in the last week that will lead to the cure for a widespread disease that

But here up against the proximal things that happen in my life, I can be useful to people. I can pull some of the poison out of the world that I have a witness to. I can make decisions that help other people wrestle with all of this. Like they're really proximal things you can have some control on. And it reminds me of the concepts you have in the book. And I was so thrilled to see this get explored.

Well, if I could predict every single atom of molecule, then wouldn't I know everything that's going to happen? And then, so I don't know, this is an idea. I just want to throw it to you and see what comes out of you. Yeah. I mean, so I think, I think there is a real necessity to bring in chaos theory into the way that we think about our lives and our societies. And I,

I mean, I'm still sort of baffled about this, why this hasn't happened more. Yeah, it had that Jurassic Park moment. It had that one Jurassic Park moment. And then we're, we kind of left it. Well, exactly. I mean, it's also like a throwaway line where like most people don't really know exactly what it's referring to because it is sort of just this weird thing that Jeff Goldblum sort of talks about, right? It's just, but like, I think there's,

To me, there's this obvious necessity to apply it to our own lives. And the origin story of chaos theory, very briefly, is a weatherman named Edward Lorenz, meteorologist named Edward Lorenz, who tries to model the weather. And one day he decides to sort of restart a simulation halfway through and he plugs in the data points for all the variables.

And all of a sudden, the weather has radically changed. And he's really confused because he checks the numbers. They're all right. And it's like, why is this different? Because I have the same numbers. It should be the same outcome. And what ended up happening was that the printout for the numbers truncated the end of the decimal point. So it only rounded to the top three decimal points. And so when he inputted it, he was off by like a thousandth of a decimal point or whatever.

And this means that these tiny fluctuations in like wind speed, you know, changing the variable by like one one thousandth of a mile per hour was changing the weather like a week later.

And this is the reason why, you know, it's the origin story of chaos theory. It's the origin story of the butterfly effect, which is the idea that, you know, a butterfly, you know, flapping its wings can cause a hurricane later down the line. And it's also the reason, I mean, today, right? Like, why can't we predict the weather more than like seven to 10 days in advance? Chaos theory. It's literally the same thing. It's just that we don't have the precision.

So Laplace's demon is this idea from sort of, you know, several hundred years ago thought where it's like, well, what if we could, right? What if we had perfect information? And there's a lot of problems with the thought experiment that philosophers take issue with. But in principle, you know, you may not be wrong, right? In other words, if you actually could know everything about the world, then maybe you could predict the future. If you understood the mechanism, the relationships, the complex system, et cetera. I mean, we'll never get there, right?

If we had an incredible supercomputer, we're talking about something that uses the power of several suns all go into this one thing. And it's the great, like we're talking 200 million years of technological improvement have led to this thing that can make, we're calculating everything.

every field, every force of the universe in every atom. And we take a little figure of Hulk Hogan from the 80s and we light fire to it and we watch it kind of melt down into a pile. And then to demonstrate to like they're having the CES of that future world. They're like, we're going to show you how amazing this computer is.

They roll out this little pile of goop and it goes, and then it can just reverse what happened based off just the laws of physics and say, oh, this was a figure of Hulk Hogan. So we could go backwards. Yes. We could then imagine what if you use this computer to go forwards and

This is Laplace's demon. The idea, if we had, we could note everything. Shouldn't we be able to predict everything that's ever going to happen ever, including all the decisions that we're going to make, everything I'm ever going to think, feel, and do. And this is sort of where we're at. So,

Tell me how come that we can't do that. Why can't I do that, Brian? Yeah. So there's basically – I mean Newtonian mechanics after Isaac Newton really I think demystified the world in a way that a lot of us in the modern world don't appreciate where it's like prior to this, there was like no explanation for why things were happening really well, right? Like you wouldn't know exactly where a baseball would go if you threw it because like you didn't have the laws of physics to explain that.

Newton demystifies this and all of a sudden there's this like belief in a clockwork universe where we're basically just a bunch of billiard balls knocking against each other. And, you know, I use that analogy because it is true. Like if you shoot a billiard ball for the first several bounces, like Newtonian mechanics will completely perfectly predict exactly where it's going to go. The chaos theory comes in where it's like, okay,

However, as you referenced before, if there are a couple people in the room, then all of a sudden the gravitational pull of the ball is slightly different. And after probably seven or eight bounces, it becomes totally unpredictable. And this is where it becomes chaotic, right? Now, the lesson there isn't that the laws of physics have stopped applying. The lesson is that you have to be perfect. You have to know every tiny minute detail about the gravitational force in the room to an infinite number of decimal places. Because if you're off by even a tiny, tiny bit,

you will eventually be very, very wrong about the way the world is going to unfold. Now, in principle, I think the logic of Laplace's demon, personally, I think it's right. I think that if you theoretically could do this, you would be able to predict the future.

The problem is the philosophers have is they say, okay, but yeah, but by building Laplace's demon, it would mess up the causality. There's all these things where they sort of talk about how it's impossible. You'd have to have it outside the system and that would need to be something that's outside the universe. Because it affects, because the prediction affects the thing. Okay. Yeah, exactly. But in principle, I think that the thought experiment is useful because I do, I do think that the way that things happen is basically a series of reactions. And,

And, you know, physics basically takes this as given. They say, look, there's complex systems that we can't predict because of chaos theory. But what's actually going on in those systems is following the laws of physics. So why would human matter be different? Right. I mean, that's a question that I think religious people will have a different answer to it because they'll say, OK, there's a soul or there's something that's nonphysical. So therefore, that's what accounts for the difference from the laws of physics. But for those who are inhabiting this sort of purely scientific rationalist worldview, right.

where, you know, religion is, is, is, is discounted, then you would say something like, no, I mean, we, our lives are literally just a series of reactions, but yeah, my, my, I mean, this is the stuff where it's like, hold on, like this starts to be sort of weird because now everything that's happening in my head is just a series of physical reactions. I think that's true, but a lot of people would take very, very strong issue with that. And,

Everyone's going to grapple with these ideas and come to their own conclusion. And that's one of the most beautiful things about human consciousness is you've got 8 billion people who can think about reality and end up with 8 billion different answers for what it is and why it exists. And that's basically what our world is.

There's this philosophical question I want to ask you. You're the person to give me an answer on this. And I'm not suggesting that any answers we come up with are the answers. I just want to talk about it. I have had this asked of me and I have asked it of other people. Let's imagine that we wipe out all of human knowledge, all gone. And we have to start over some sort of zombie or nuclear apocalypse thing. And I don't know, it has some sort of magnetic field, whatever we need to hypothetically imagine that we have to start over.

All gone. All the knowledge is gone. We have to start over. There's this thing that's like all the science textbooks would get rewritten eventually because you're just describing the fundamental mechanics of the universe. Physics and then everything physics assumes. Chemistry, biology, and on and on and on. However, there's an argument to be said that there are other things that will not be rewritten, like the works of Shakespeare. And I'm wondering just what do you think about that concept? Because there are some people who say,

Yeah, and the works of Shakespeare would also be rewritten. And I feel like you have a very awesome answer to this question. Yeah, so I think that the works of Shakespeare would absolutely not be rewritten if this happened and we replayed history. I mean, I think, look, there's two types of questions here. One is about how the world works. And I think that determinism is this idea that everything will unfold in exactly the same way and you can't change it. But let's throw that out for the purpose of the thought experiment because now we're imagining we can change things. We're wiping out human knowledge.

If you changed anything, I think everything would be different. And I accept that some of the laws of physics would be discovered. They would be discovered in different ways at different times, and they would have different effects.

So if Isaac Newton had lived 200 years earlier, I think the world would have changed from that, even if he'd come up with the same sort of discoveries. He probably wouldn't have because it was contingent on what technologies existed at the time and so on, the measurement ability that he had, all these sorts of things, the math that had come before him. There's a great example about Darwin because there's a great contingency with Darwin.

where the person who was previously the captain on the Beagle, the ship he went on, killed himself. And the replacement was worried that he would go into depression. And so he wanted to find a shipmate. And Darwin was suggested, he was the third person suggested. But the person who was the captain, the new captain, believed that you could tell something about people's personalities from the shape of their nose and from their face, right? And Darwin's nose was apparently displeasing to the captain. So he almost realized

rejected him purely on the basis of the shape of his nose. So Darwin almost doesn't go on this voyage, right? Now, the reason this is important is because Darwin has trotted out as this example that science will always end up finding the same things because

Another naturalist named Alfred Russell Wallace basically discovered evolution at the same time Darwin did. And the reason why the origin on the origin of species was published when it was is because Wallace wrote to Darwin and was like, hey, what do you think of my theory? And Darwin's like, oh, my God, it's the same theory. I had better publish it rather than keeping it in my desk drawer where it's been for the last 18 years.

So he rushes to publish it. And of course, we know Darwin is the father of evolution. But the reason this is important is because Wallace was himself someone who believed in seances and the ability to conjure things from thin air and so on. And you think about like how much of an uphill battle evolutionary theory had as it was, right? Trying to convince people about evolution and

Now, Darwin was a person who was totally accepted by the scientific community, had totally mainstream scientific ideas. Wallace is this sort of guy who grows up outside the scientific mainstream. He's sort of a renegade. No one's really heard of him for a while. And then he's got all these crazy ideas about like seances and ghosts and conjuring things from thin air. And you think, OK, even if evolution had been presented in exactly the same time, like 1859,

By Wallace instead of Darwin, I think it would radically have changed, not just because people might not have accepted it for much longer, but because Darwin's cousin was Francis Galton, who is the father of eugenics. And if Darwin had not been the one to create this sort of new branch of evolutionary theory and it had been Wallace, the eugenics movement would have unfolded differently.

Right. So like even when you change the messenger of an idea, the world shifts. And this is where I just, you know, I take issue with this. There's there's so many people who look at science and say, well, you know, they're going to discover it because it's just the way it is. I mean, plate tectonics, you know, was basically delayed from being accepted for about 50 years.

because the person who proposed it was a hot air balloonist who was German right before World War I and all the Western anti-German scientists were like, no. And also like, why is this balloonist coming up with geological ideas? But he was right. And so, you know, like the stuff where you think, okay, how would the 20th century have been slightly different?

if we had understood how volcanoes work. I mean, I don't know, but it would have been different. And I think there's stuff like this where this belief that, oh, it would all iron itself out in the end. I mean, I just vehemently, vehemently disagree with this. The last thing I'll say on this, which I grapple with this and tried to think about how I think about this differently from a lot of people is the story I told you about Kyoto, right? And how the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima rather than Kyoto because of the vacation.

I told this story to a historian friend of mine and he said, well, okay, fine. But like they would have won the war anyway. Right. Like the Americans would have won the war still. And I was like, well, yeah, like probably, but like, do you not think the world would be different if like a hundred thousand different people are alive today, like in Japan and like a different city exists. And he's like, well, but like the war would have been the same. And I, this is, this is a point that I feel so, so profoundly as a mistake about how we think about the world is that

We think about outcomes in categories, right? So you win the war or you lose the war. But that's not the way the world works. There's no category. The world just unfolds in a continuous pattern. Whether the U.S. wins the war or not, the way it wins the war is super important. And if you have a different day, if the atomic bomb had been dropped on August 8th in Nagasaki instead of August 9th, it would have been a different outcome. So I think these things are just the hubris to believe that there's just going to be

everything will be washed out in the same is I just fundamentally and thoroughly disagree with that concept. And I think the Darwin story and the Nagasaki story and Kyoto story tell that pretty, pretty clearly. I dig that this like riles you up because you're like, stop thinking in these gigantic categories and these signpost cause and effect things. If you feel that way, then please go back in time when we, with your time machine and just run naked through the streets of New York city in 1910 and see what happens.

I hope you come back to, uh, I hope you don't just disappear. That would actually be a great science fiction story where someone is like, I'm just going to go and I'm not going to do anything weird. And they just go back and they disappear almost immediately. Like within five seconds, they disappear. They just like, because they go, excuse me, could you give me that? Just disappear. Yeah.

That being said, you do wax poetic quite a bit on the idea of experimentation. Because you start thinking these ideas and you're like, well, now what do I do with my life? You talk about it both in the terms of the random mutations that took place that led to, well, everything. And that also is the idea that what do I do with my will, be it free will or not? What do I do with my decision-making process? Well, one thing you can do is experiment a bunch.

Just want to hear your thoughts on that. Yeah. So, I mean, the, the, the beauty of evolution, when you look around at all the different organisms that exist in the world, the beauty of it is undirected random experimentation, right? Like it's, it is, it is stuff where like stuff gets just tried. And oftentimes the mutation kills the organism and,

And sometimes it like makes an eye, right? Like it's like, and the one time it makes the eye, that's really good. And then we have eyes. So there's a lot of, you know, wisdom in evolution's experimentation.

And I think for humans, one of the problems that is correlated with our lack of experimentation sometimes is tied to the worldview that involves certainty models where there's only four or five variables that matter. And the sort of idea of the sort of, you know, atomistic worldview where you have a reductionist mentality, et cetera, because that gives you a sense of control.

And if you have control, then what you should do is optimize, right? So if you understand how the world works and you can control it, then therefore you should absolutely squeeze every ounce of efficiency and optimization out of everything. On the other hand, if you have a healthy sense of uncertainty, you should experiment. And that's what evolution did. It's like the world is constantly changing. Sometimes this will work, sometimes it won't. And the constant experimentation yielded these results. I mean, I have one example that I think is nice in...

In the last chapter of the book, which is it's this it's this culture in, you know, it's basically a hunter gathering society and they have cultivation of both rice and rubber. Right. And the thing is, they because they're a non sophisticated in terms of their technology society with modern methods and so on, they can't predict the weather. So like they don't know what's going to happen. They don't know whether the growing season is going to be good, etc.,

So what they do is with rubber, every time that you cultivate it, if you plant it in basically the same spot, it will just keep producing. It's a very surefire thing. Rice is different. Rice is very weather dependent. And if they get it wrong and they plant it in the wrong place, they'll potentially starve. But what's really cool about this group is that they have a religious belief where they decide where to plant things based on the movement of sacred birds.

And so there's like seven birds that they watch the movements of them and then they interpret them with like shamans and so on to determine where to put the rice. What's cool about this is they basically invented a randomization technique because the birds are basically just moving randomly.

And they're interpreted almost randomly. And it turns out that this is like the most resilience of any of the surrounding groups, precisely because in this uncertainty of the weather patterns, by diversifying the choices they make through randomness, they actually thrive. And they do much better. There's a lot less crop failure in their group than there is in other surrounding groups. Now, you know, the lesson I think for humanity is like,

Look, we have hyper-efficient, hyper-optimized lives more than any humans that have ever existed. I mean, everything that you do, you can have information about. Like, where should I go to dinner? I mean, you can look up reviews. There's nothing that you do blind, basically.

And the problem with that is like, you know, other people's preferences aren't necessarily your own. And also, you know, things change. Like what if the chef has changed and you don't know, right? You can make a mistake. There's a great study from economics that I love, which is there was a tube strike in London. The subway shut down because the driver struck, went on strike. And the economist modeled the geographic locations on anonymized cell phone data of people who found a different way to work.

because of the strike. And 5% of them stuck with the new route, right? Because it was better for them. They liked it more.

And the point was like they were forced to do something that they thought was not in their self-interest. And then 5% of the public found a different way to work because of that. And you think you amplify that times all sorts of other things. I mean, the wisdom of experimentation, it doesn't mean you do it all the time, right? If you like this, if you like a restaurant, go to it, fine. But like 5% to 10% more experimentation in our lives would probably make us happier. That's my view on this anyway. Thank you.

That is it for this episode of the You Are Not So Smart podcast. For links to everything we talked about, head to youarenotsosmart.com or check the show notes right there in your podcast player. My name is David McCraney. I have been your host. You can find my book, How Minds Change, wherever they put books on shelves and ship them in trucks. Details are at davidmccraney.com. And I'll have all of that in the show notes.

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