Why Does the World Feel Like it is Ending?
Dealing with a sense of doom and uncertainty
Ironically, for the past week I have been listening to JP Saxe’s “if the world was ending” trying to grapple with this reality that we are living in. Showered with notifications about the unprecedented number of jobless claims (surpassing those during the Great Depression) and updates about the rising death tolls, I sit in my childhood bedroom with a sense of uneasiness, disbelief, and prolonged nervousness. The world feels like it is ending because of the increased uncertainty in our lives and more specifically how we deal with uncertainty. Leading up to March, we have all heard too many times from world leaders or officials or family or friends that there is absolutely no way that everything would shut down. I listened to them, and I agreed. However, now with everyone sitting at home, it makes me question who is right, who should I have trusted, and how should we deal with or think about uncertainty.
I found solace in Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s Black Swan not because I agree with everything he proposes, but because it challenges me to reanalyze how I think about the world. A black swan is an improbable positive or negative event that bears significant consequences and is difficult to predict. (I would characterize COVID-19 as a black swan). Taleb explores common human heuristics and the unknown consequences of the highly improbable. The book emphasizes our inability to deal with black swans. Here are my three key takeaways in relation to what is happening now.
We rely too heavily on past events.
How many times have you heard people compare the time we are in now to SARS, Spanish flu, 2008 financial crisis, or the great depression? You probably hear it everyday.* I am not saying that we should completely ignore history; events of the past happened for a reason. However, like Taleb argues, over-reliance on history blinds us to potential Black Swans and underestimates the odds of these extreme events happening. I thought a full city lockdown was impossible because it has never happened in the past with other pandemics like SARS. In the beginning, some argued that COVID-19 was a virus much like the flu and treated it as such. This line of reasoning is what the famous philosopher David Hume calls the problem of induction: the idea that the future will resemble the past. Bertrand Russell’s turkey story best illustrates this point. Imagine you are a turkey who gets fed every single day at 9 am. It has been so for the past few months. However, on Thanksgiving day, you are killed.
Based on past events, there is no reason why you would imagine the next day your throat would be cut. The turkey problem illustrates a more simplified version of what we do on a day to day basis: heavily using the past to predict our future. I am sure that while making your five year plan, you didn’t allot time for a pandemic. The downfall of drawing conclusions or making predictions using the past makes the shock of the consequences from the “impossible” event much greater than anticipated and in turn creates a bigger sense of doubt, a bigger sense of doom.
*I find it ironic that we have been using the word unprecedented to describe the events of today while still continuing to try and draw similarities to past crises.
We look to gather and interpret evidence that confirms our conclusions.
Think of the following scenario. You are trying to test whether or not someone has COVID-19. The test comes back negative. Would you conclude that there is evidence that the person has no coronavirus or no evidence that the person has coronavirus? A simple switch of words that draws different conclusions using the same evidence. Saying there is evidence that the person has no coronavirus is too definitive. In fact, researchers suspect that “there may have been flaws in the testing process whereby low levels of the virus failed to be picked up”. The way we look for evidence to corroborate already made conclusions can tunnel our vision and lead us down the wrong path. Just because you have not seen someone steal in front of you doesn’t mean that they are not a thief. As with my first takeaway, if we treat past events as evidence to confirm our desired conclusions about the course for COVID-19, we are headed in the wrong direction.
We have too much faith in expert predictions.
In a time of uncertainty, of course we would love some definitive answers. However, it is important to realize that experts don’t have all the answers. In order to accurately predict the future, you would need information from the future. Experts can build intricate models trying to predict how many respirators would be needed or when will be the peak of COVID-19, but predictions about black swans or events with no fixed outcomes are usually wrong. Remember, models are inherently wrong. These models make assumptions about COVID-19 using past crises as evidence which should already raise questions about the robustness of the models. In fact, one of the most heavily relied on models by hospitals and the White House (the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation) was found to have seriously flawed projections. As Taleb emphasizes, there should be a stronger focus on the consequences rather than the probabilities of events happening. Instead of trying to provide a single estimation or statistic, perhaps experts should focus on the consequences of making a decision based on a wrong statistic. The truth is everyone is trying to make decisions with imperfect information, and it is unreasonable to expect the experts to have accurate predictions of the future.
Humans are wired to rely on the past, to gather evidence to confirm our already drawn conclusions, and to yearn for certainty. These natural tendencies left from evolutionary tracks make us simplify and categorize the world so that it appears less random. And so, when black swans do happen we are more shocked, more caught off guard, and more unprepared. We are simply not equipped to deal with unexpected events which is why we are all feeling like the world is ending. We love patterns; we love the expected, but we often forget that the world is not so. I have been trying to change my mindset to one that is more open and to take a different view of the future than I have before. Instead of thinking about decisions in terms of probabilities, I started thinking in terms of the consequences of making these decisions. It has not completely helped me grapple with the realities of today, but it has allowed me to be less closed minded when dealing with uncertainties. I challenge you to do the same.
