Reflections on Randomness [and reality TV]
There are many lessons to draw from Netflix’s “Squid Game: The Challenge,” a reality competition show. The most important — that capitalism subsumes even its most violent critiques? That satire is impossible in America? That someone at Netflix over-bought on jumpsuits? — are beyond the scope of this blog. But setting those aside, one can view the show as a poignant parable of the human relationship to the nature of randomness.
There are a few moments in the show that best demonstrate this. The first is on the glass bridge. For those who haven’t seen the show [and who don’t mind spoilers!], the glass bridge is a sequence of binary choices. At each step, there is one pane of glass that will hold a person’s weight and another that will shatter. To progress forward, some player has to guess and leap forward onto one of the next two panes, and if it shatters, the player is eliminated. There are too many steps in the glass bridge for a single player to have a decent chance of making lucky guesses all the way across, so players in the front are essentially sacrificed to gain information for the remaining group. In the original fictionalized Squid Game show, the players mostly stick to the order they were told to play, with (most) of the players in the front dutifully jumping to their deaths. In the reality show version, the players make a pact to each take one jump, thereby equalizing everyone’s chances of survival. This moment is a neat illustration of how randomness can be a leveling force — neutralizing advantages and fostering fairness. Naturally, one contestant temporarily breaks the pact [Ashley kinda sucks! Justice for Trey!] … but it’s a still a nice demonstration of humans using randomness to make fair group decisions.
And then — almost immediately — there is a failure to use randomness well in an individual decision. One player burns precious time because he wants another player to tell him which way to jump. In a human sense, it is an understandable moment where he surrenders his fate to his friend in a show of trust. In a mathematical sense, it is infuriating nonsense! None of the players have any insight into which of the two choices is safe and which would result in elimination from the game, so it is a 50–50 shot no matter who takes it! But his abdication of responsibility, and her reluctant acceptance of it, reveal something interesting about the role of human emotion in decision-making. This decision is “hard” because it feels hard — the stakes are high! He could be eliminated from a 4 million dollar prize! [enough to put out a contract in a John Wick movie — which seems wrong? — but I digress]. But this is also a decision where more time, more input, more anything, won’t help. It’s a perfect time to just flip a coin and get on with it, because no matter what you do, the odds will stubbornly stay fixed at 50–50.
How often are humans really able to recognize this and act accordingly? How efficiently or inefficiently do we make decisions? Our decisions probably feel easier when one alternative is obviously more appealing, so we may spend the bulk of our decision-making time and energy on cases where the alternatives are fairly similar in value: ramen vs. udon [both good!], improv comedy vs. experimental theatre [both bad?], bourbon vs. rye [trick question — always bourbon!] But then — aren’t the decisions we fret over the most actually the ones that matter the least? If the options are similar enough that we’re torn, we should probably just pick one randomly and move on with our lives.
Even embracing randomness in the moment though may not get us all the way to optimal decision-making. There is also a human tendency to rewrite history based on how our decisions turn out.
This tendency is on display in the final reflections of the squid game challenge’s winner. Despite the clear and explicit role that randomness played throughout the sequence of games, the winner claims that the outcome is proof that a hardworking, resilient person really can achieve the American dream! In fairness to the show, there is nothing more American than this — the willingness to take a single token lottery winner as evidence that the system is not irredeemably rigged. But of course the more uncomfortable truth is that you can do everything right, you can work as hard as it is possible to work, you can dust yourself off, pull yourself up by your bootstraps, and then … still fail by bad luck. For the rest of your life. This does not negate the fact that it was technically possible that you could have succeeded. But the quantity of possibility matters quite a lot, and is often far from fairly distributed.
Randomness tends to get a bad rap in the rewrites of personal history. It gets blamed for our failures and left out of our thank-yous in award acceptance speeches. We villainize it in the Batman universe [Two-Face, the Joker] and in Coen brothers’ movies [No Country for Old Men]. Randomness becomes the enemy when we have gained something to protect — our pride, our success — that we don’t want to risk surrendering back to chance, even if it was chance that got us there in the first place. So we lie to ourselves — creating a narrative of what we “deserved” and expanding the scope of what we think we control so that we can stay psychologically comfortable.
This is bad for others because we may blame them for their misfortune, lest we confront the fact that it could have happened to us. But perhaps more persuasively — this is bad for us too! That cocoon of psychological comfort doesn’t come for free. It corrupts our own decision-making going forward, perhaps even ironically making us more likely to lose the things we are desperate to preserve. Mathematical models of randomness are powerful decision-making tools — both in helping us to properly account for external uncertainty, and in helping us to make efficient decisions in the face of uncertainty. When we fail to internalize their meaning in favor of false causal narratives, we handicap ourselves intellectually.
Maybe that’s just the Joker in me, laughing as I fall through the wrong pane of the glass bridge. [“See you in hell, Ashley!” Trey could have said, but perhaps they edited that part out.]
