Reading the Entrails

I often come across arguments to the effect that humans aren't really unique or special, we're just one animal among all the others. I find this assertion, frankly, just silly. Every species is unique in some ways, of course, that's why we can classify them. But humans are highly unusual in very important ways. For example, the biomass of domesticated mammals exceeds that of all the other mammals on earth combined; and the biomass of domesticated poultry -- mostly chickens -- is three times the biomass of all other birds on earth.

This happened in part because of language, which is an absolutely unique human capacity that allows for an unparalleled degree of cooperation, and for the accumulation of knowledge and technological advancement over time. But what I want to talk about today is our very rich awareness of the future and out intense interest in it. We can't really say to what extent other creatures have foresight. Some mammals are affected by the death of relatives in ways that suggests they may be aware of their own mortality. Many engage in behaviors that are tied to future benefit, such as squirrels storing nuts, but whether there is any real awareness of the future associated with this we cannot say. 

Humans are entirely unique in the elaborate and flexible ways we plan for the future. Building a house requires the assumption that we're going to live in it, and we think carefully about the kind of environment we want to create, in the context of the expected climate, possible extreme weather or earthquakes, possible future children, and much more. Unlike birds or bees, we create an unlimited variety of houses depending on our individual desires, the available resources, and the future we anticipate.

But what struck me today is the problematic value of uncertain predictions. The prognosticators spent the past few days spouting alerts and warnings at us, even talking about roofs collapsing, because of a "high impact," "long duration," "powerful northeaster" with heavy, wet snow and screaming winds that was going to knock out power to tens of thousands of Connecticut customers. They did say that the deepest snow would be in the higher elevations of the northwest part of the state, but where I live they were predicting four to eight inches of snow and they stuck with that right to the end. The schools dismissed at noon yesterday because of the coming apocalypse. I just happened to need to go shopping and the grocery store was mobbed, people apparently fearing they would starve if they didn't strip the shelves of milk and eggs. Hundreds of events were cancelled, businesses closed, the snowplows geared up.

We got 12 hours of chilly rain. Total snow accumulation here was zero. No snow at all. There was a lot of snow farther north and  west, but they got the rain/snow line badly wrong. That we would get no snow at all was not within the range of uncertainty they presented. So the possible benefit of correct predictions has to be weighed against the harm that may come from wrong ones. 

 

The problem is compounded when predictions themselves affect the future.This is particularly evident in the economy. Investors are always trying to predict the future and obviously, many of their prophecies are self-fulfilling. If they think stocks will go down,  that's what happens. The reason for the recent bank failures is not, as Republicans ludicrously claim, because the banks had gay board members or diversity and inclusion policies, but because many of their depositors, all at once, started to fear that the banks might fail and went to withdraw their money. The banks' assets were illiquid, the result of incorrect predictions on the part of the bank managers, and they couldn't meet their obligations. 

Prediction is very problematic in medicine as well. Physicians' prognoses determine people's decisions about painful or expensive treatments, or foregoing treatment at all. I've decided to have cataract surgery but it's entirely possible that I'd be able to get by just fine with glasses for years. We had to make a guess and act on it. Right now people are filling out their NCAA basketball tournament brackets and hoping to win a few bucks in the office pool, but in case you didn't know the odds of filling out a perfect bracket are 1 in a number that exceeds the number of stars in the universe. (Or something like that, it's a really big number.)

I'm not saying we shouldn't make predictions. We have to. But we should be very reluctant to do so and keenly aware of the possibility of error. I think people generally have a bias toward too much confidence in prediction. Trust Yogi Berra on this one.