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Randomness Does Not Compute

April 17, 2021 by Joycelyn Campbell Leave a Comment

Have you noticed that the brain has an answer for almost everything? Not only does it work overtime to predict what’s going to happen next, it works nearly as hard to explain what happened after the fact.

The associative machinery of the brain seeks causes.

When something unexpected occurs, the brain tries to explain it and incorporate that explanation into our mental model. Random acts or events, however, are impossible to anticipate and account for.

A random act or event is one that is governed by or dependent upon chance.

Synonyms are: stray, accidental, arbitrary, indiscriminate, haphazard, unplanned, fortuitous, aimless, desultory, hit or miss, unpremeditated, purposeless, adventitious, chance, unintentional, and unexpected.

We’re continually nudged in this direction and then that one by random events. As a result, although statistical regularities can be found in social data, the future of particular individuals is impossible to predict, and for our particular achievements, our jobs, our friends, our finances, we all owe more to chance than many people realize. … In all except the simplest real-life endeavors unforeseeable or unpredictable forces cannot be avoided, and moreover those random forces and our reactions to them account for much of what constitutes our particular path in life. —Leonard Mlodinow, The Drunkard’s Walk

After the fact, everything seems inevitable. After the fact, the past appears coherent as a result of our storytelling mind imposing order on it. After the fact, we have a sense of having had far more control over the direction of our lives than we actually had. But a story is still a story, and there’s no such thing as a “true story.”

Hindsight bias is the tendency to construct one’s memory after the fact (or interpret the meaning of something in the past) according to currently known facts and one’s current beliefs. In this way, one appears to make the past consistent with the present and more predictive or predictable than it actually was. —Robert Todd Carroll, The Critical Thinker’s Dictionary

The brain makes post-hoc dot connections.

It’s not surprising that when the brain looks back, it can construct a neat cause-and-effect explanation for an event that was not expected. The hindsight bias helps all of us maintain the illusion of control by seeming to eliminate randomness. But it’s only possible to clearly and accurately separate the signals from the noise—and connect the dots—after an event has occurred and the outcome is known. Even then, our explanations are going to be coming from our brain, which means our experiences, our point of view, our beliefs, and our biases.

Our brain looks for patterns in order to explain unexpected events so it will be better prepared to predict and respond to them the next time they occur. But no matter how good it may be at figuring out and responding to a single unexpected event that has occurred, it will never be able to predict truly random events.

The question is would you want it to?

Can you recognize a random act and accept it as such or are you more comfortable having an explanation for it even if that explanation isn’t true?

The photo at the top of the post is from the movie Stranger Than Fiction. Author Karen Eiffel (Emma Thompson) has been trying to decide how to kill off the main character in her novel. She finally figures it out when she notices an apple fall onto the sidewalk and roll away.

Success: Is It Random or Predictable?

May 16, 2018 by Joycelyn Campbell Leave a Comment

The two primary definitions of success are: (1) the achievement of something desired, planned, or attempted; (2) the gaining of fame or prosperity.

But what do you think success means? Do you believe, for example, that the most successful people are the best in their fields—or that the lack of success indicates a lack of talent or of the personal characteristics that create success? What do you tend to attribute your own successes or failures to?

Is There a Formula for Success?

If you assume the most successful people are also the most competent, you may attempt to find out how they do what they do and try to emulate them in order to become successful yourself. (There’s a huge market for this.)

It’s true that successful people do have some characteristics in common, such as passion, perseverance, imagination, intellectual curiosity, and openness to experience. And of course they are not completely without talent.

But talent, along with positive personal traits and characteristics, doesn’t account for all of the variance between successful and unsuccessful people. Recent studies suggest luck and opportunity play a significant role.

People overestimate the degree to which ability can be inferred from success. —Leonard Mlodinow, The Drunkard’s Walk

What Is Talent?

Talent is whatever set of personal characteristics allow a person to exploit lucky opportunities. It can include traits such as intelligence, skill, ability, motivation, determination, creative thinking, and emotional intelligence. More talented people seem to be more likely to get the most ‘bang for their buck’ out of a given opportunity. But…

Even a great talent becomes useless against the fury of misfortune. —Allesandro Pluchino and Andrea Raspisarda, physicists, and Alessio Biondo, economist

In simulations run by Pluchino, Raspisarda, and Biondo, the most talented individuals were rarely the most successful. In general, mediocre-but-lucky people were much more successful than more-talented-but-unlucky individuals. The most successful agents tended to be those who were only slightly above average in talent but with a lot of luck in their lives.

Chance is a more fundamental conception than causality. —Max Born, Nobel Laureate

Why Isn’t Talent Enough?

In all except the simplest real-life endeavors unforeseeable or unpredictable forces cannot be avoided, and moreover those random forces and our reactions to them account for much of what constitutes our particular path in life. —Leonard Mlodinow, The Drunkard’s Walk

We have a tendency to believe, as Mlodinow says, that the combination of our personal qualities and the properties of any given situation or environment lead directly and unequivocally to precise consequences.

That’s a mechanistic mental model that doesn’t reflect reality. We are complex adaptive systems living within multiple other complex adaptive systems. As a result, life isn’t always fair, good doesn’t always triumph over evil, and talent doesn’t always lead to success.

In The Hidden Brain, Shankar Vedantam talks about the often invisible undercurrents that may boost—or impede—our success, depending on whether we’re flowing with or against a particular current:

When undercurrents aid us…we are invariably unconscious of them. We never credit the undercurrent for carrying us so swiftly; we credit ourselves, our talents, our skills.

Our brains are expert at providing explanations for the outcomes we see. People who swim with the current never credit it for their success because it genuinely feels as though their achievements are produced through sheer merit.

And it isn’t just the people who flow with the current who are unconscious about its existence. People who fight the current all their lives also regularly arrive at false explanations for outcomes. When they fall behind, they blame themselves, their lack of talent. Those who travel with the current will always feel they are good swimmers; those who swim against the current may never realize they are better swimmers than they imagine.

When we assess the world, Mlodinow says, we tend to see what we expect to see. We define degree of talent by degree of success—and then reinforce a cause-and-effect relationship by noting the correlation. So although there may be little difference in ability between someone who is hugely successful and someone who is not, there is usually a big difference in how they are viewed.

Our assessment of the world would be quite different if all our judgments could be insulated from expectation and based only on relevant data. But our brains aren’t wired that way.

What Can We Do About It?

Be clear about our desired outcome
Recognize the extent and the limit of our personal agency
Develop solid habits
Follow through on our intentions
Persevere

L Is for Luck

January 18, 2017 by Joycelyn Campbell Leave a Comment

Plans, practice, and preparation are all useful, even essential, if you want to accomplish anything significant in life. But no matter how rock-solid they are, your plans, practice, and preparation cannot immunize you against random occurrences, aka luck. Your luck in a given circumstance may be good or bad, but by its nature it isn’t predictable.

A good definition of luck is:

The chance happening of fortunate or adverse events.

It’s important to recognize that, statistically speaking, random events occur far more often and have a far greater impact on us than we recognize. Events outside our control will occur. When everything goes according to plan or falls into place, we can thank our lucky stars. But we can’t count on being lucky. And we can’t take credit for luck.

The fact that luck is something we can’t control automatically casts it in a bad light. Both the nature of it and the outcome are uncertain and uncertainty gives the unconscious part of our brain the heebie jeebies. We prefer to operate under the illusion of control, maintaining our belief that we can influence outcomes even in the face of significant irrefutable evidence to the contrary.

Thus there are people who believe they create their own luck. “Chance favors the prepared mind,” said Louis Pasteur. And in some circumstances that’s true. You can’t necessarily take advantage of advantageous circumstances if you don’t know how to respond or are not prepared to do so. You can, to an extent, be ready to open your arms to random good fortune—which would certainly be more welcome than bad fortune.

Estimating Impact

However, good fortune does not always lead to good outcomes. Take lottery winners, a group that has been the subject of numerous studies. Not everyone who wins the lottery ends up worse off than they were before—but a surprising number of winners do. And most report being no happier after winning than people who didn’t win.

Our beliefs about outcomes are strongly affected by one of the cognitive biases we’re afflicted with. This one is known as the impact bias, and it has two parts. We think we know whether a future potential event will affect us in a positive or in a negative way. And we’re usually pretty good at getting that prediction right. We also think we know how large or small that impact will be and how long it will last. That’s where we often miss the mark by anticipating that both good and bad events will affect us more—and for longer—than they actually will.

Something that is pretty predictable is that you’re more likely to overreact to bad luck when you aren’t fully committed to your current plan of action. If you’re more or less going through the motions, it won’t take much to blow you off course or permanently derail you. You might think what you’re up to is just not meant to be or that you don’t have what it takes.

That’s why it’s critical to get very, very clear about your desired outcome ahead of time. If you have a strong commitment to what you’re going after, you’re more likely to consider bad luck a bump in the road. Maybe it’s a small bump or maybe it’s an enormous boulder. Nevertheless, you’ll be more inclined to figure out how to navigate around it and continue on your way if you really want what’s on the other side and if you know the next steps you need to take.

Enter the Black Swan

Sometimes luck, good or bad, has a relatively minor effect. On the other hand, luck—in the form of what Nassim Taleb calls Black Swans—can be life-changing. Taleb describes a so-called Black Swan this way:

First, it is an outlier, as it lies outside the realm of regular expectations, because nothing in the past can convincingly point to its possibility. Second, it carries an extreme impact. Third, in spite of its outlier status, human nature makes us concoct explanations for its occurrence after the fact, making it explainable and predictable.

The majority of swans are white, so black swans are unexpected. As Taleb says, on September 10, 2011, the events of September 11 were not reasonably conceivable. If they had been, something could have been done to prevent them.

A Black Swan event can permanently alter your course or at the very least make it vastly more difficult to pursue. But you can’t anticipate such events or know whether they will be positive or negative. What you can be certain about is what is meaningful to you. If the course you’re on is massively disrupted, you will still have the knowledge of what’s important to you, even if you have to find a completely different way to create it in your life.

If there’s something you want to do and the main thing holding you back is uncertainty, try imagining a world where all is preordained, everything is known in advance, and there is no possibility of surprise. Is that really a world you’d want to live in?

You can’t predict the future no matter how much your brain wants you to believe you can. Although you can—and should—plan ahead, it’s important to remember that the path from here to there is rarely a straight line. Randomness and luck often play a larger role in both process and outcome than we’d like to acknowledge.

In the long run, how you respond (persevere) in the face of setbacks and random events is more important than achieving instant or quick success. And you can take all the credit for persevering.

Part of the series A-Z: An Alphabet of Change.

Roll the Dice

April 12, 2014 by Joycelyn Campbell 4 Comments

English: A pair of dice Español: Dados cúbicos. — (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I’ve been thinking lately about randomness and probabilities. And then there’s this poem by Charles Bukowski.

On the face of it, it seems to have more to do with commitment than with rolling the dice. But maybe he’s talking about taking a chance–or taking the chance. The big one.

if you’re going to try, go all the way.
otherwise, don’t even start.

if you’re going to try, go all the way.
this could mean losing girlfriends,
wives, relatives, jobs and
maybe your mind.

go all the way.
it could mean not eating for 3 or 4 days.
it could mean freezing on a
park bench.
it could mean jail,
it could mean derision,
mockery,
isolation.
isolation is the gift,
all the others are a test of your
endurance, of
how much you really want to do it.
and you’ll do it
despite rejection and the worst odds
and it will be better than
anything else
you can imagine.

if you’re going to try, go all the way.
there is no other feeling like that.
you will be alone with the gods
and the nights will flame with fire.

do it, do it, do it.
do it.

all the way
all the way.

you will ride life straight to
perfect laughter, it’s
the only good fight
there is.

Everything Happens…

January 6, 2013 by Joycelyn Campbell 1 Comment

Whenever I hear someone say that everything happens for a reason, I have to bite my tongue. The words are usually uttered either to comfort someone or to explain something that is very painful or difficult and often sudden. But I’ve never been sure how that’s supposed to work. Are we supposed to feel better because there was a reason for what happened? Are we supposed to be less devastated, injured, or cold and hungry (if we were to end up on the street, say)? I’d certainly want to know the reason why that happened.

But the point of the proverb is that we don’t or can’t know the reason, so we just have to trust that there is one. We are also supposed to believe that no matter how awful whatever it is is, it is in our best interest. Our long-term best interest, needless to say, since in the short-term it seems to be a monkey-wrench of major or minor proportion.

But reason implies intent on the part of someone or something—God or maybe the universe that is reputedly poised to align itself with our wishes. So God or the (sentient?) universe intentionally set this up as a means to some end. Since we aren’t privy to knowing why, we’ll just have to stumble along, suck it up Job-like, and wait for the outcome to be revealed.

In the meantime, we can try to wrest some meaning from it.

A Narrative Device?

Theological and philosophical minds much greater than mine have wrestled with this issue and arrived at their own conclusions. A simple explanation is this. Humans began making up stories to explain the world around them as soon as they had the language for it. It’s what we do. We crave explanation and certainty and the logical narrative structure that stories provide. Everything happens for a reason is merely a device for tying up those loose ends in the story that can’t otherwise be satisfactorily explained. Perhaps the reason will be revealed in the sequel.

All any of us can say with certainty is that everything that happens happens. Events we don’t expect may feel random, but there are plenty of here-and-now cause-and-effect explanations for most of what occurs. Those explanations may not be particularly satisfying, however. Bad things happen to good people. And it can be very difficult to come to terms with them when they do. Believing that everything happens for a reason might make someone feel less isolated and victimized and more hopeful that the terrible circumstance will eventually lead to a greater good.

It’s interesting, though, that we don’t use this expression or seek to find the deeper meaning when sudden and inexplicable good fortune befalls us. Shouldn’t the corollary be that unexpected happy events will eventually give rise to painful ones?

Maybe

Have you heard the Taoist story Maybe?

An old farmer worked his crops for many years. His horse ran away one day. His neighbors heard about this and came to visit. “Such bad luck,” they said.

“Maybe,” replied the farmer.

The next morning, the farmer’s horse returned, bringing three other wild horses with it. “Wonderful!” the neighbors exclaimed.

“Maybe,” said the farmer.

The following day, the farmer’s son was trying to ride one of the wild horses but was thrown from it and broke his leg. The neighbors sympathized with the farmer’s misfortune.

“Maybe,” the farmer replied.

The day after that, some military officials came to the farmer’s village to draft young men into the army. Since the farmer’s son’s leg was broken, they did not take him. The farmer’s neighbors congratulated him on how well things had turned out.

“Maybe,” he said.

Is this story implying there was a master plan in place that caused the farmer’s horse to run away, find and return with the wild horse the farmer’s son tried to ride but couldn’t, thereby breaking his leg and exempting himself from the military draft? Of course not.

The meaning of events is determined by the contexts within which they occur. As contexts change or are redefined, our interpretation of the meaning of events changes, too. We can count on the fact that contexts–and perspectives–will change. Does that mean that an event that seems disastrous today will look totally different down the road? Maybe.