Ever have a day when everything went wrong? You predicted you would have a normal day, but your alarm clock didn’t ring. Already running late, you couldn’t find your briefcase or backpack. Staggering out the door, your car won’t start. Later, you find out you missed a surprise meeting or maybe a quiz. It’s not you, it’s the whole prediction game…
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Spoil Sport #1: The Observer Effect
To figure out what happens next, you need to know where things are now. For example, if you hit a billiard ball, you can’t predict what will happen next unless you know the current layout of the pool table. Unfortunately, as a matter of principle, the observer effect holds that the act of finding out “where things are now” (i.e. determining the current state of the system of interest) changes it to something else (i.e. perturbs the system). In physics this is most noticeable for very small things or faint effects. In principle though, it applies to any scenario.
Light pushes on the observed thing; electrical measurements effect the electricity; asking someone something about themself changes them. And the observer effect has filtered into popular culture (http://theobservereffect.com/; Star Trekhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uWujY5Hucf0).
The list goes on of course. If you are watching over kids, they act differently (so do adults!). Publicizing economic indicators affects the economy.
Game theory could be subtitled, “Winning with the observer effect.” And the social competition theory of human brain evolution holds that game theory is the key to our intelligence. We’re watching us.
So you think you can control the observer effect?
Now just figure out the 7-dimensional position (3-D), velocity (3-D) and mass (1-D) of everything. Then crunch on a computer to tell the future, right? Alas, this just brings us to…
Spoil Sport #2: The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle
This physics principle holds that you cannot simulate a system to reliably predict its future because you cannot know both the position and the momentum of any object in it exactly. The more accurately you know one, the less accurately the universe says you can know the other. A quick, 3-minute video introducing the Heisenberg Uncertainty principle is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iFwRAvpWDB8. Note that it applies in theory to all objects, not just electrons. For example, it applies to photons (light) too: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KT7xJ0tjB4A&NR=1. You can do the experiment in that video at home. Got a laser pointer and an opaque sheet of something you can cut a narrow V-shaped notch in? I used a black vinyl notebook cover with a narrow V a few inches long and an inch wide at the widest point, cut with an ordinary sharp scissors. Shine the laser beam through the V at a wall. Move the beam close enough to the point of the V and the spot on the wall will smear – the Heisenberg uncertainty principle in action (like in the video).
The Uncertainty Principle connects uncertainty about position and momentum as follows. The uncertainty in position, delta x, time the uncertainty in momentum, delta m, equals h/4*pi where h is Planck’s constant, a rather tiny number. Since momentum is velocity*mass, we have uncertainty about velocity too (as well as mass, for that matter). So there is uncertainty about place, velocity, and mass of any object. Out of tradition, let’s focus on position and velocity.
To fully describe a system, such as the universe, or some part of the universe smaller than the whole thing, we need simply list the position and velocity of everything in it. How many numbers are needed to describe the position? Three, a side-to-side location, a front-to-back location, and a height (usually known as x, y, and z coordinates). How many numbers are needed to describe the velocity, where velocity consists of a speed and a direction? Three – a side-to-side speed, a forward backward speed, and an up-down speed. This concept is easiest to visualize in a 2-D simplified example.
In the figure, an object is shown with a location of about 3 feet in front your nose, and shifted about 4 feet to its right. (We ignore the up-to-down dimension here.) It is moving in the direction shown by the arrow in the interior of the graph. The length of the arrow symbolizes its speed – it is receding at about 3 feet/sec. , while moving to the right at about 2 feet/sec. rightward.
Returning to 3 dimensions, we need six numbers for every object to fully describe the system of objects (actually seven, since each object has a mass as well). Unfortunately those six numbers are in principle impossible to get with full accuracy, because they include both velocity and position values. The Uncertainty Principle tells us that more accurate knowledge for one demands less accurate knowledge about the other.
In short, if the observer effect doesn’t stop our prediction ambitions, the Uncertainty Principle will. But what if we could control both, enough at least to predict futures with confidence? Alas, we’re not out of the woods, because of the esoteric physics phenomenon called “quantum tunneling”...
Spoil Sport #3: Quantum Tunneling
According to quantum theory, objects are not as localized in space as we intuitively think. Instead, they have wave-like characteristics and are actually “smeared” over a space within which they may be said to exist with some probability at each point within that space. A tiny object like a subatomic particle, if near enough to a thin barrier, thus has a certain probability of being on the other side of the barrier. If it is, it has thus “tunneled” through the barrier without making a hole in it. This is quantum tunneling.
Actually, the term quantum tunneling is applied to the ability of objects to “tunnel” through other kinds of barriers than a solid one. For example, consider the somewhat notorious example of an idealized pencil balanced on its tip.
If the tip sharp, except for a tiny flat spot (say, a couple of atom wide) it might be difficult to balance, but one might think that with sufficient care it could be done. Well not exactly. Because the pencil is actually “smeared” a little bit, it has a certain, rather small probability of being tipped enough to lose balance and fall. Since the smearing is symmetric, it could in fact fall in any direction. The probability of being tipped enough to lose balance is small enough that a single such pencil would be unlikely to fall for a long time (Easton, 2007, p. 1103). But get enough pencils together and one will fall soon enough. For example, balance an array of 1000 x 1000 pencils and one will fall, knocking over other pencils and leading to a general domino-like conflagration with an average (but unpredictable) delay of around a month. What pencil will start the general crash and in what direction the pencils fall is impossible to predict.
But maybe the system we’re interested in predicting the future of is not so finely tuned. Maybe we can handle the Observer Effect, the Uncertainty Principle, and now quantum tunneling adequately for our system. Our troubles are still not over, because of the "Butterfly Effect"...
Spoil Sport #4: the Butterfly Effect
A butterfly flapping its wings will create a small atmospheric disturbance. That disturbance will propagate unpredictably. Months, perhaps years later, a hurricane may track in your direction – because of those tiny flaps.
Models of certain atmospheric cycles are indeed known to depend unpredictably on seemingly trivial present events. Special water wheels have been built to illustrate this process. See video clips of some of them: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zhOBibeW5J0;
In the words of Butterfly Effect discoverer Edward N. Lorenz, “When our results concerning the instability of nonperiodic flow are applied to the atmosphere, which is ostensibly nonperiodic, they indicate that prediction of the sufficiently distant future is impossible by any method, unless the present conditions are known exactly. In view of the inevitable inaccuracy and incompleteness of weather observations, precise very-long-range forecasting would seem to be non-existent.”
As goes weather prediction, so goes prediction questions in other areas. Such questions may plausibly include, “How long Homo sapiens be the dominant species on planet Earth?” “How will the average human lifespan change, and when?” And many others from personal to planet-wide, and from politics to science and technology. And weather, of course, and maybe climate too.
But suppose you could control the Butterfly Effect? You’re still not in charge of the prediction game…because of external perturbations...
Spoil Sport #5: External perturbations
To figure out what happens next, you need to know where things are now. But you also need to know what outside influences will impinge on the system between “now,” and “next” whenever that is. Those influences can affect the evolution of the system – that’s why they’re called “influences.”
Imagine for example the Lorenz water wheel (or watch one:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zhOBibeW5J0). Given a predictable, steady stream of input water, it still spins forward and backward seemingly unpredictably due to the butterfly effect. But it gets worse if it is spinning in the rain. Now, the input is no longer steady and predictable. Every raindrop is another unpredictable butterfly whose tiny effects change the direction of the wheel at some future time. More generally, every external nudge to a system is like that butterfly.
Let’s identify some external influences likely to affect the future course of some systems of interest. If the system is a nuclear family whose dynamics we understand (let us assume), any attempt to simulate it will soon founder on the realities of day-to-day events that impinge on it. If a troublesome child commits nuisance vandalism, say, whether he is caught or not, and by whom (parents? victim? police?) will likely have great impact on the evolution of the family. Moving up in scale, if the system is a country, the results of the next election depend on much more than the political dynamics. They also hinge on unpredicted international events – even if the reaction of the country to each event could be predicted, whether and which events occur is also critical to know, yet unpredictable from the dynamics of the system itself. What about human affairs generally? There, unpredictability from external perturbations results from everything from butterflies flapping their wings, to volcanoes going off, to solar storms, and on and on.
Other systems have the same problem besides Lorenz water wheels and human dynamics, because every system – save one – is subject to external perturbations. The one exception is the entire universe in every detail, and you can’t simulate that. Even if you could, it generates its own perturbations that even in principle are unpredictable due to quantum tunneling, like when and in which direction a pencil perfectly balanced on its point will fall. Since those perturbations are impossibe to predict from within the system even in theory, they are effectively external to it.
But suppose you could control external perturbations, or at least control them enough? You’ve not won the prediction game yet…because until predicting is shown to be worth the effort, why do it? More on this next time…
Spoil Sport #6 – Why care I? Existential unmeaning, or why predict if it doesn’t matter?
Handsome woman — lovely bust. Fine young fellow — woke up lust. Babies’ diapers, bottom wipers. Years of struggle. Coffin. Dust. (Unix Fortune)
Is that all? Is there no point to life? Because then, there is no real point to the future, or to predicting it. If you find this perspective a downer, you’re not alone. Existential depression is said to be a risk among gifted children, for example, so it can start early. Existential nihilism – the distressing feeling “that the world lacks meaning or purpose” is the cause.
It is easy to ask if the future matters, and conclude that it does not. It is likewise easy to argue that the existence of humanity itself is no great gift to the Earth. And in that case, why worry about the future of the human race? Even if humanity never destroys itself, in 10 or 100 million years our descendants will as different from us as our ancestors were 10 or 100 million years ago – i.e. not humans. Some turn to religion for meaning. Though there is little objective evidence to justify one religion over all the others (thus invalidating them), plenty of people fail to understand that.
So what to do? If concern for the future is ultimately pointless, then just “Eat dessert first.” “Eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we shall die.” And “Don’t worry, be happy.”
In fact, that is essentially what happens. Business decisions focus on short term payback, with “long term planning” designating horizons as short as 3 years out. Political decisions focus on the short term, perhaps one reason why “democracy is the worst form of government except all those others that have been tried” (Winston Churchill, who also said, “It is a mistake to try to look too far ahead. The chain of destiny can only be grasped one link at a time.”). Of course, it’s not just businesspeople and politicians who focus on the short term. Many ordinary people do as well. In that, we heed our roots: animals are quintessentially short-term in their behaviors.
By failing to predict the future, we act (or react) only in the short term, but there is at least one good reason to do just that. The further out we go in predicting, the less likely we will be right, and thus the higher the risk that the effort spent preparing will end up wasted. That is an overarching lesson behind all of the spoil sports of the prediction game.
On the other hand, blindly focusing on the near term is a kind of tunnel vision. The risk there is failing to prepare as the future silently approaches…then suddenly jumps up and bites society on the butt. We can choose to try to anticipate the future, yet all too often, when “societies choose to fail or succeed,” they choose incorrectly when there is no second chance.
Solution
Happy and distressed states exist in humans and many animals. An intrinsic property of such states is that they matter. When you as a child fell and scraped a knee, it hurt. The hurt is not the root of the problem, nor is the ground. The scrape is. When the scrape heals, it no longer hurts. Similarly, reality or a chemical imbalance may “scrape” the mind, causing the hurtful feeling that life is meaningless.
The real problem is not the distressing feeling itself, nor the bumper sticker-shallow slogan about universe that it wears. Like changing the ground, changing the universe is hard, perhaps impossible, and at best a slow and indirect solution.
Søren Kierkegaard (1813 – 1855), Danish philosopher, theologian, and father of existentialism, concluded that both problem and solution lie within the sufferer him- or herself. The first problem is the person’s own mind, brain, or both, with the solution to be reached accordingly. The ground or universe is only the second problem. Ancient philosopher Hillel the Elder identified a third as well: “If I am not for myself, who will be for me? And when I am only for myself, what am I? And if not now, when?”
Spoil Sport #7 — Why care II?…the “so what?” horizon
How much is the future of the human race worth? We’ll increase it later, but let’s start with an admittedly bargain basement $100. If you had $98.04 now, and put it in the bank at an interest rate of 2% per year, then in a year you’d have $100. That means getting $100 one year from now is only worth having $98.04 now, at least from a “Time Value of Money” perspective. Similarly, getting $100 in 2 years is only worth $96.12 now, because adding 2% to $96.12 gives $98.04 in one year, and compounding by adding another 2% gives $100 a year later. Extending this reasoning further, the human race in a modest 233 years would be worth just under a dollar now. In 466 years? Less than a penny.
It’s safe to say that a hundred dollars is an underestimate for the value of the entire human race, at least to us. So let’s increase it to a fair (or at least fairer) price. We might multiply the number of people by the value of the life of each and every person on the planet. What is the value of a person’s life? Economics (known as the dismal science, even to economists) tells us that the de facto value society places on a human life can actually be calculated, and courts of law in fact sometimes do such calculations. Answers vary, of course, but a few million dollars is often not that far off the mark. Multiply that by the number of people in the world and you get a biggish number, $100 quadrillion at the most for the value of the human race.
But wait – maybe you don’t trust the financial and legal wizards with something so important. After all, we already trust them with some pretty important things, and they periodically betray that, seriously screwing things up. Maybe we should use a higher number, just to be more sure we aren’t under-valuing ourselves.
How about a dollar for every single atom in the known universe? That’s around $10^80 (1 followed by 80 zeroes dollars)? It is a lot of cash. Way (way way) more than the United States has ever printed. There are literally not enough atoms in the known universe to even print that much money. Yet, if that is the value of humanity’s existence 9070 years from now, the value at present would be…$100! A scant 466 years after that? Less than a penny. How about the present value of humanity existing in a million years? The answer is a fraction of a penny so tiny that popular spreadsheets, calculators and computer programming languages can’t even state it. They typically just think it is 0, but if you must know, it’s actually about $0.000[insert 8,513 more zeroes here]0001.
Wait – someone in the back has a question – yes? “But it’s not just the value in year on million we’re after. We also need to add in the value in year 1,000,001, year 1,000,002, etc., forever and ever. That’s got to add up, eventually.” Well, only a little, it turns out. The value now is “bigger,” but still less than $0.000[insert 8,511 more zeroes here]0001 even at a dollar an atom. The upshot of all this is that there is no good reason to care whether humanity exists in ten thousand or a million years, at least according to the time value of money approach favored by economists. Therefore there is no need to plan that far into the future, or go to trouble and expense to preserve the Earth indefinitely, or even to bother predicting that far ahead. The time value of money seems indeed to be a spoil sport of the prediction game.
Making it personal. Maybe you are still unconvinced. Such sophistry fails to capture the real facts at a gut, common sense level, you might say. Then consider the following argument.
You care about yourself, so you don’t want humanity to end while you are still alive (it might not be pleasant). You care about your children (or you will if you have any some day, or maybe you care about some or even all other children), so you don’t want humanity to end during their lifetimes, even if you are already gone. You probably even care (or will care) about your grandchildren because you will hopefully get to know them personally. Furthermore, you care about theirgrandchildren (if maybe a little less) simply because you care about your grandchildren, who care about theirs. But you have no gut level reason to care about the generations after that, because neither you, nor anyone you care about will ever know them. To put it another way, how much do you care about your grandparents’ grandparents, and how much did they care about you? Still care in some more abstract, dispassionate sense? Then see the previous paragraph.
Maybe you are a fast enough breeder, and long enough liver, that you’ll care about your great grandchildren and theirs, instead of just grandchildren. Yet that is still only 6 generations into the future, not even the biblical 7, a couple of centuries or so at the most. So relax, quit worrying, eat dessert first…. In particular, don’t bother with predicting past the 2-century “care horizon,” because there’s little point to it. The care (or “so what?”) horizon is, thus, our last spoil sport of the prediction game.
References
D. Easton, The quantum mechanical tipping pencil – a caution for physics teachers, European Journal of Physics, vol. 28 (2007), pp. 1097-1104.
“Existential nihilism – belief in the idea ‘that the world lacks meaning or purpose’… .” E.g. http://www.allaboutphilosophy.org/existential-nihilism-faq.htm.
“Eat dessert first.” Quote attributed to Ernestine Ulmer.
“Eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we shall die.” Isaiah 22:13.
“Don’t worry, be happy” Meher Baba, 1930’s http://www.avatarmeherbaba.org/erics/glossc-d.html), e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Don’t_worry,_be_happy.jpg, 1966. Borrowed as title of Grammy award-winning song by Bobby McFerrin, 1988).
“In fact, that is essentially what happens. Business decisions focus on short term payback, with long term planning applied to horizons as short as 3 years out.” According to e.g. http://www.corporateexecutivecoach.com/long-term-planning-in-business.htm.
“Since it is within our power to try to anticipate the future or not, all too often, when ‘societies choose to fail or succeed’… .” J. Diamond, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, Penguin Group, 2004.
“If I am not for myself, who will be for me? And when I am only for myself, what am I? And if not now, when?” R. Hillel, Pirkei Avot 1:14.
“Time Value of Money”: TVM is standard terminology in the finance and accounting world.
“Well, only a little, it turns out.” There is a formula for calculating the sum of a geometrically decreasing, infinite series. Look it up (or play with a spreadsheet instead).