"Risk" and "Futurebabble" by Dan Gardner

Over the last 50 years, experiments have revolutionized our understanding of the way humans make decisions.  In "Risk" and "Futurbabble", Gardner farms the futile new fields of Experimental Psychology. An excellent summary of experimental findings themselves can be found in "Beyond Pleasure and Pain - How Motivation Works". Gardner puts on his journalist hat and works out the consequences of modern psychology in two areas. He could easily use he same approach to generate an endless series of books on, say, military history or investment advice.

In "Risk", Gardner demonstrates that we are horrible at evaluating risk. We over-estimate most risks (such as terrorism) while accepting greater ones (car accidents). We create theories about risks, such as the "danger" of breast implants and use "confirmation bias" to cherry-pick evidence that confirms our theories.

In "Futurebabble", Gardner uses the same approach to destroy the impression many of us have that anyone, especially the "experts" can offer meaningful predictions of the future. In is closing chapters, he offers some valuable insights into how we should change our thinking about predictions, since, after all, we cannot possibly move from our chairs without making some predictions. To my way of thinking, this is the most valuable part of the book, attempting to provide the reader with a rational way to think of the future. However, on a deeper level, his recommendations are crippled by an extremely narrow and misleading picture of the human thought process - what I call his "head/heart" metaphor.

In both books, Gardner uses his journalistic talents as a researcher and a writer to pile up impressive anecdotes to make his point. Paradoxically, by his own reasoning, these storie will convince the reader of the truth of his thesis: not facts, experimental results or statistics.

Underneath it all is a sweeping review of laboratory studies that uncover the reason why we are so gullible. There are well-known fallacies, such as confirmation bias as well as more surprising and subtle ones, such as the tendency for people in a group to become more radical in their opinions rather that move toward some kind of "average" consensus and the fact that he more certain we are of our opinions, the more likely they are to be wrong. Risk and Futurebabble are just case studies and, in fact, draw on much of the same psychological studies and real-world examples.

The bottom line is that human beings believe what they believe for many reasons other than "rational analysis". "Reason" is mainly used to justify conclusions reached by other means. This is hardly a new conclusion but Gardner provides convincing evidence along with solid "Scientific" reasons for why this is the case. Without this type of analysis, it's easy for us to think, for example, that other people have irrational beliefs (not us) and that the problem is a moral failing, not a problem with the way all human brains work. A similar point is made from a different angle by the classic "Being Wrong", which asks the question, Why is it so hard to admit we are wrong? The same question gets extensive treatment in "Futurebabble", with endless examples of pundits wriggling out of spectacularly wrong "predictions". Why is it that the future is so clear in the minds of the experts when they so quickly forget their own mistakes in the recent past? In fact, this could be another Gardner book: "The Past-Revised Standard Version". It's not just the future we get wrong - our memories of the past are just as muddled.

So far, so good. Gardener digs up a lot of examples from history and current events, along with a psychological theory, apparently supported by masses of experimental evidence, that "explains" his examples. But has he "connected the dots" correctly? Is his Head/Gut thesis the only way to explain how we get things so wrong? I'll pick up a totally different way of connecting the dots in another posting. In summary, I think Gardner is totally right in thinking that we are, as a species, terrible at evaluating risk and predicting the future. As far as I know, he has drawn upon a wide range of experimental results. The problem is that he has failed to link the two and has done so by introducing his vision of "primitive" man, along with pop evolution. In fact, he has fallen victim to a fallacy that he himself points out: the fallacy of the "Example". He knows (or thinks he knows) one thing about how brains evolved and brings that in as an explanation of everything.

Gardner tries to explain subjects that are clearly beyond his expertise. For example, he doesn't understand Chaos, which is about systems that are unpredictable in principal. He provides wonderful examples of tiny changes that produced huge impacts, but fails to drill down to a precise definition of Chaos, which would have helped him sew up his case against the impossibility of significantly accurate predictions concerning future human history.

This points up Gardner's weak understanding of his favourite subject (Science). There is an important difference between Science and Technology. Technology is constantly coming up with ways to create things that were previously regarded as impossible (such as space travel). While Scientific investigations are always discovering weird and unexpected things, he core discoveries of Science are constantly lengthening the list of things that are impossible but previously thought possible. Progress in Science is chiefly a matter of disproving theories that once seemed sensible.

Chaos Theory is a case in point. It was once thought that if you knew everything about a system at a given time, you could predict everything about it in the future. This turns out to be false, a result that comes out of two of the most important advances in 20th century physics: Quantum Theory and Chaos Theory. Toward the end of "Futurebabble" Gardner admits the possibility that some future technology might conceivably allow us to forecast the behaviour of chaotic systems, which explicitly denies the very definition of chaotic systems. It would have hugely helped Gardner if he had understood and explained the nature of a chaotic system. "Science" can, in fact, prove that you can't do some things. Even the movement of the planets (quoted by Gardner as perfectly predictable) is chaotic if you have more than two bodies to work with (such as Earth, Moon and Sun). An arbitrarily small change in the initial conditions (as small as you like, say the diameter of a proton) will eventually lead to an arbitrarily large difference (as large as you like), given enough time. That's Chaos.

Gardner is also weak in the strongly-related field of probability and statistics, frequently getting the math wrong in simple calculations such as he probability of being hit by a big asteroid in the next 100 years. Such mistakes never seem to compromise his main point, however.

In "Risk", Gardner uses the terms "head" and "gut" as a shorthand reference to his theories about how the "primitive" brain works (the one we still have). Although there is much discussion of how evolution has stuck us with these "primitive" brains, his picture of the past is pulled out of thin air. His analysis relies on a common fallacy: the idea that whatever our brains and bodies are like now must have been shaped by the environment of he past (in fact, we an argue back from current structures and figure out what the past must have looked like!)  Or, working the other way up the circular argument, the he current form of our minds and bodies is somehow a "solution" to problems we imagine to have existed in the past. All of Gardner's amateur evolutionary speculation is unnecessary for his argument. Experimental evidence for the way our minds actually work now is strong. His "reasons" for why our minds work this way just clutter up the argument and subtract from his credibility. Actually, it turns out that there are evolutionary reasons that go a long way to explaining our errors of logic, but they are not at all what Gardner thinks.

For readers who share Gardner's "pop" evolutionary theory, it's hard to spot the problem. We inherit particular structures from our ancestors, whether or not they are the "best" - they just work. Examples of this are the COX genes that show up with little variation in everything from fruit flies to humans and are responsible for duplicating structures (fingers and wings). Whatever evolutionary "problems" that a species must solve by variation and selection, it must solve them with the equipment it has, such as the COX machinery. Our brains (and presumably our minds) have a structure that can be traced back all the way to primitive vertebrates. Again, any "solution" to the problems of existence that humans face must involve relatively small kluges to the equipment we inherited from our ancestors. This equipment (mainly neurons and synapses) never had the ability to make a photographic record of experience or make accurate statistical calculations, so it's not surprising that our brains don't either. However, it's not hard to imagine that creatures (say from another star system) might have built their brains on structures that did create such a record. The fact that ours don't is not (as Garner seems to think) a response to the needs of cave men. It's structural limitation of the way brains work that doesn't leave evolution the option of evolving in the direction Garner imagines would be more "rational". It's a subtle point, but it undermines everything that Garner has to say about "gut" and "brain". He could have just left out the evolutionary mythology and strengthened his case or asked himself what, exactly, humans bring to the table that is genuinely new and knocked the ball out of the park.

Both of these books would have been improved by a review by experts in the fields Gardner relies on. I am left with an uncomfortable suspicion that his central ideas, that rest on results in experimental psychology, could also be wide of the mark. This is an important matter, since the point is to gain a reliable picture of how our minds work, how we reach decisions and how we could improve the process. I personally regard Gardner's "head/heart" thesis as little more than a hint at the underlying process that leads us astray, which ultimately leads to a notable lack of prescriptions for avoiding error.

Bottom line: Gardner is a journalist and a good one. He provides the layman with an honest and entertaining introduction to many Scientific disciplines along with encouragement to apply the results of Science and reason to important problems facing us all. He falls down whenever he tries to develop theories of his own: going beyond simple marshalling of interesting stories. Readers interested in the Science itself would be encouraged to "drill down" to his sources and take his conclusions with a grain of salt, as he himself would undoubtedly recommend.