variation

Toward the end of my last post I suggested that it was my preference that everyone use an evidence based approach to decision making and that I believed everything would be better (based on my own personal value system) if we all did. I wrote in error. On further consideration I absolutely do not think things would be better if everyone thought that way. Instead what I want is for a majority of people to choose on that basis, but definitely not everyone.

There are two main reasons I do not prefer this. The simpler one is more a matter of personal preference. The world would be a less colorful, less interesting place if everyone used ANY form of reasoning to guide their decisions. There is beauty in variation. There is a sort of joy one gets from seeing things in a different light and coming to understand how someone really thinks deep down and what the guiding principles are behind their choices. If we were all perfect masters at marshalling our observational prowess to bring to bear on our decision making processes we would lose out on the uniqueness and creativity inherent in insanity and creativity and unstructured reasoning. I would not want such a world even if it could be proven that in basic raw data terms the world would be filled with entities that are more free, more happy, have longer and better lives, etc. I have no particular evidence based reason for that preference only an instinctual one.

But the other reason is more compelling and more concrete. That is that there must be variation in order for there to efficient speedy progress. Let’s set aside whether we actually value progress for the time being so that I can explain what I mean. Here’s the thing. Let’s imagine a world where everyone everywhere examines the best available scientific evidence, draws the best most likely conclusion from that evidence, and then acts upon it. Clearly one can see that would result in all of us more or less acting the same. When it comes for example to our diet and exercise regime we’d all come up with very similar best guesses as to what our diet out to be and how much exercise we should do and we’d do it. Great right. We’re all as healthy as we best know how to be given the current state of scientific knowledge. When we learn new things we’ll adjust our diet and exercise routines based on the new data and act on that. So what’s the problem with that?

Well, in effect it’s like running only one experiment at a time. The entire population tries something out sees what happens compares it to the past result and then changes to something else. That’s dirt slow. It’s WAY better to have the world we actually live in where lots and lots of people develop crazy ideas for how to diet and exercise based on the universe only knows what and then we can examine and compare ALL of these results. We can learn the apparent advantages and disadvantages across lots of competing strategies to maximize health and fitness and even if a large quantity of those are well disastrous we still gain a lot of knowledge about the nature of the human body and how it responds to different behavioral trends. That’s great for us as a species even if it’s not so great for every individual involved.

Similarly when we have nation states choosing to act in certain ways there is an inherent advantage to lots of them choosing to act differently from one another. We can examine each country and see oh this country benefited from legalizing marijuana, or this country benefited from a more targeted regulatory regime, etc. And we can learn from that and figure out some kind of conclusion about what a nation can best do to maximize the well being of its citizenry.

The problem with this is of course that the wisdom gained from studying the living experiments out in the wild don’t often result in altered behaviors. In particular those who chose to act in a certain way based on some un-evidence based or mistakenly believed to be evidence-based reasoning methodology are unlikely to change and choose to act differently even when the unassailable evidence becomes available. In effect these experimenters who ultimately benefited all of humanity by their choice can themselves be left behind and fall victim to their own ignorance. Worse, said ignorance can at times be persuasive and corrupting and can lead far larger numbers of the populace to ignore the evidence when the argument made for a course of action is compelling in spite of its disconnection from fact.

But I have a degree of confidence in humanity. I believe that these psuedo experiments can and do ultimately yield wisdom that spreads to the bulk of the populace. It’s just that that path is slow. The ideal system is one where the majority does act in accordance with the best guess that we know but where there is a significant subset of the population going their own way doing their own thing counter to that guess. How large that subset should be should be directly proportional to our degree of confidence in our theorized evidence based action plan. That is to say if we think eating sugar is inherently bad for us but we’re only say 10% sure of that, then I want a TON of people out there trying to eat varying levels of sugar. I want people trying different types of added sugars. I want people trying no added sugar. I want people overloading on natural sugars and people trying to avoid even natural sugars. And I want to glean from all of that what results in the best life for the most people. Then as our certainty grows that say a certain type of added sugar really is entirely harmful well then at that point I want fewer people going against the grain and trying to behave differently with respect to sugar. At some point we may well know with something like 99.99999% confidence the exact mix of sugar in our diet is best. In that world I would similarly want something around or above 99% of the populate to be eating at least near to that best mix sugar diet. Or at the very least believing they SHOULD eat that way (though of course other factors may prevent people from actually doing it).

And I believe that kind of path does happen fairly frequently. When we take away the obstructionism and the moral judgments a lot of times what happens is we think something is good so we kinda start following it, we get more convinced that it is good so we follow it more and more until we are near certain that it is good and we speak of it as if you’d have to be crazy not to live that way.

Of course there are phenomena where we re-examine a near certain conclusion something very irrationally like say questioning the value of vaccines even after we are about as certain as we can get about it. This is the kind of irrational departure from evidence that I want to avoid as much as possible. Not ALL departures from evidence.

And even that kind of irrationality I would not wipe out completely. Because there is such a thing as communal delusion. We can as an entire society be wholly convinced of a thing that can prove untrue. So we must always allow for the heretical few to continuously challenge even the most certain of results even if that means there could be harm caused to those few or the ones influenced by them. It is necessary that we live in a world of dynamically evolving experimentation. We need to keep running the alternative experiments less we fall into complacency and miss a tiny detail here or there that could upend our entire world view revealing a deeper more substantive truth beneath it.

Sounds like a good system to me. It is the one I believe we currently approximate though imperfectly and I think it’s been pretty good for us as a species and I want us to continue with it and get better at it. But am I really justified in wanting that?

One could easily argue vociferously that this world order is inherently and deeply Unjust. Here’s what I mean. Why should it be that some people on this planet even if it is by virtue of their own ignorance should suffer more than others for those others benefit? Why in any sense of the word can it be Just for us to allow someone to choose to try being extremely obese their entire life because they believe the spirits of their ancestors are telling them to do so resulting in horrendous unpleasant health outcomes for them? The fact that we may well as a society ultimately benefit from their having chosen to do so by learning more about the effects of extreme obesity on the human body cannot justify the harm caused to that poor individual. Surely we should MAKE it so that person cannot become obese. Surely we know ENOUGH about obesity to be able to say that we have a right to force them to live a better life, don’t we?

And don’t give me that slowness argument. Yeah so what if all of us take on a course of action and all of us believe say that eating bacon is bad for us but drinking a glass of alcohol a day is good for us because that’s the best available evidence at a time so we all do that? Sure we’ll all learn before long that we’re wrong and have to change those expectations and alter our behavior. But so what? Why is that a problem exactly. At the very least we’re all in it together. If drinking alcohol is poisoning us then at least we’re all being poisoned together, if withholding from eating bacon is lowering the richness of our lives out of a mistaken fear of heart disease, at least we’re all less enriched equally at the same time. No particular person is suffering for the benefit of the others. Nobody is being exploited. Maybe it’ll take a while for us to reach the best outcomes but what’s the rush? There’s no reason to value speediness over equity.

When we look at this deep down like this we see that the real reason our society chooses to be ordered in this way is not because it is inherently more moral but because we have certain values that lead us to prefer this. And I don’t even think the value that is driving this choice is one about a devotion to science, a love of experimentation, a great desire to see the wheel of human progress revolve as quickly as possible. No, those play a part but were they the dominant instinct we would accept direct human experimentation and social manipulation on a scale that would repulse us. No. The value here that is resulting in our dynamic system instead of a more static slow moving system is our value for freedom. We are deeply and inherently choosing to value freedom over equity. We say that it’s fine for someone to choose to do something that harms themselves so long as it is their informed choice. We even say it is wholly ok for a culture, for a government to engage in an act that harms their entire populace or a significant subset of their populace so long as it is that population’s informed choice expressed usually through democracy. All else is moot in our minds so long as the principle of freedom is upheld. The fact that that degree of variation can often benefit us by creating a plethora of natural pseudo experiments that can be studied and examined for correlations is just an added bonus. Indeed, I’m fairly sure that in the society in which we currently live even if we lost that benefit altogether we would still choose to continue to live by that principle of freedom. Indeed when it comes to climate change and nuclear warfare we may well ride that principle of freedom to our species annihilation.

And you know I am so very much a product of this society and this culture and civilization in which I am born that I cannot blame us for it. For me too it seems clear that this is right. That this is in fact Justice. That it is fair because choice trumps equity. Because choice matters more. Because freedom is all that we really have. It’s what makes us… us.

Perhaps a time will come when said values will change. I don’t know. But I’d probably take a huge amount of convincing. I’d hate such a world.

Still it is fascinating to think about and keep in our minds how utterly devoted we are to the significance and priority of the freedom value above all others and how intrinsically linked that value is to the plethora of variations in human behavior we see in our natural world even though we see ourselves as a society that acts on a basis of science and evidence.