Belief and engineering (E)

0:00With the exception of cases involving perpetual motion, a model is not ordinarily required by the office to demonstrate the operability of a device. Hey, it's Arav, and this is a special archived episode of Akimbo.

0:22They put it in a parenthetical, but the patent office in the U.S. is clear. You can't get a patent on a perpetual motion machine unless you bring in a working model. What's this all about? It's about belief. belief came first. Being an infant is terrifying. Being a toddler is almost as scary. All species, every one of them, navigates the world because they have belief. Belief in what is going to happen next. Hope that things will be as they were. We can't possibly move forward without some level of belief. But along the way, we gain, as Socrates said, logos, reason, rational thinking, the ability to make decisions based on how the world is, not how we want it to be.

1:26That doesn't mean that belief isn't important. It remains essential. But belief, belief and engineering don't go well together. I'm carefully using the word engineering here instead of the word science, because there are plenty of scientists who have fallen into the trap of belief. Einstein had a very famous battle, decades long, with Niels Bohr, the guy who sketched out how the atom might work. Einstein, of course, is physics royalty, but Bohr wasn't far behind. Their argument was about quantum mechanics. It was about waves versus particles. It was about spooky action at a distance. It was about God playing dice with the universe.

2:19It's too complicated for this podcast, but what it's about is belief. Robert Oppenheimer, the father of the atomic bomb, one of the people who ushered in the modern age, was in the middle of it. There was a scientist who had come up with an alternative to Bohr and the Copenhagen Group's explanation of how quantum mechanics worked. About Bohm, Oppenheimer said, if we cannot disprove Bohm, then we must agree to ignore him. This is action based on belief that the cost of accepting an alternative way to think about the physics of the universe was too high for those in the Copenhagen school. And so they conspired with one another to discredit a scientist who wanted things to be done differently.

3:16What does it mean to get hung up on belief when we are facing an engineering problem? Well, an engineer who thinks that a bridge could be built, a strong bridge, a reliable, durable bridge, out of pasta, will build a bridge that will hurt someone. So what engineering is about is very simple. If you can build a bridge out of pasta, show me. And if your bridge is better than my bridge, I'll accept it. That's totally different than saying, prove me wrong because I believe I am right. In fact, what we seek in engineering is someone who eagerly wants to be proven wrong. Because if they are proven wrong, then they know they have found something better.

4:07Where does belief come from? Well, sometimes in an engineering world, belief comes from a well-intentioned desire to understand how the world is. An ancient Greek, his name is pronounced Tizas, was stationed in Persia, now called Iran. and when he was there, he saw carvings in rock of something that looked an awful lot like a horse with a horn coming out of his head. Tesis was told that this animal lived in India. He dubbed it the unicorn, not being particularly creative, and brought the story of the unicorn back to Greece. The tale of the unicorn did not show up in Greek legends and Greek myths.

4:51It showed up in books of Greek natural history. It was true. It was real. And it took thousands of years before human beings came to the conclusion that there is no such thing as a unicorn. You can't find a unicorn because there wasn't a unicorn. All there was was a sculpture of the mythical unicorn. But the belief that a unicorn is real, it stuck around. Consider the galaxy GNZ11. This galaxy is more than 10 billion light years away, which means that if you aim a powerful telescope at it, you will see light that is more than 10 billion years old. Light takes a while to travel. Light from the sun.

5:39The light you can see out your window is eight minutes old. It's stale by the time it gets here. It is not intuitive to believe that light doesn't happen instantaneously, that light from one place gets to light the other place immediately. But if you've ever been in a lightning storm, you know that light and sound travel at different rates. You will hear thunder at a different moment than you will see lightning. So we can agree that sound is much slower than light, but in fact, it's easy to prove that light is not instantaneous. So if we can accept the fact that the light from the sun is eight minutes old, the very same math will show us that light from GNZ11 is more than 10 billion years old.

6:29But if light from that galaxy is more than 10 billion years old, it means that the universe is also more than 10 billion years old. But if you are walking around with a belief that the universe is much, much younger than that, you have a problem. And your problem is that there are forces encouraging you to maintain your belief at the very same time that engineering and math and the scientific method are showing you that it can't be true. So what are the symptoms of pseudoscience? What are the symptoms of seeking to defend our belief using terms of engineering and science? Well, the first one is talking with vague, exaggerated, or unstable claims.

7:18My favorite one is the third one, unstable claims, meaning that if one of your claims is disproven, you just change it. There was someone in my town a few years ago who was busy selling hydrogenated water, a machine that would magically add an extra hydrogen atom or ion or something to your H2O, and that it had tons of purported health benefits. Now, in a minute, we're going to talk about belief and health benefits, but the point is that you must answer the following question. What test would need to be done for you to change your mind? If you went to a meeting of the Flat Earth Society, where people, and there are tens of thousands of them, gather to talk about the fact that the earth is not, in fact, spherical, if you asked somebody there, what test would we have to perform for you to change your mind?

8:18Would it be sufficient for you to get in a plane and fly from Los Angeles to Sydney, and then from Sydney to Cape Town, and then from Cape Town to Miami, and then Miami back to Los Angeles, would that change your mind? Would it be sufficient for you to fly in a Virgin Galactic orbital vehicle and watch as you travel around? What would it take for you to change your mind? The second thing, an over-reliance on confirmation rather than refutation. If you're an engineer building a building or working on a life-saving device and you're doing your job properly, what you are doing is eagerly looking for something to prove you wrong because changing your mind is proof that you're doing something right, that you are getting closer to a rational understanding of how things work, not confirming that you were right all along.

9:19This is one of the magic signatures of direct marketing. Direct marketers don't seek to prove that they are right when they put together a flyer or a sponsorship of a podcast. All they seek to do is beat the control. It doesn't matter who wrote the control. If you beat the control, if you do better than the standard, that's how you get a promotion. The third rule is a lack of openness to testing by others, by others who don't have the same agenda you do. If your perpetual motion machine is a secret because you're worried that if you showed people how it worked, they would steal your idea, it's entirely likely that you are not an engineer.

10:02And it's certain that you don't have a perpetual motion machine. The fourth one is the absence of progress. And we see this over and over again, that guess what? Your predictions based on astrology aren't better than they were 20 years ago or 40 years ago or 80 years ago. And if there is no progress, then show me where the understanding lies. Where is the rational approach to how to make things better? The next one is personalization of feedback. If you view criticism of your approach, if you view criticism of your assertions as personal, then it's extremely likely you are not acting like an engineer.

10:51Because an engineer says, show me how to make a better bridge. She doesn't say, oh, you don't like my bridge, therefore you don't like me. And the last one is the use of misleading language, vague language, language that's mushy. Because back to the very first point, what test would I have to do for you to be able to change your mind? Now, I want to point out a huge exception to most of what I just talked about. And that is the magic, the power of the placebo effect. because belief actually changes how humans live. Belief will heal an illness in many cases. Belief will increase performance. Wade Boggs famously ate chicken before every single game.

11:40Is there a direct connection between chicken and playing baseball? Extremely unlikely. However, However, did having a comforting superstition help Wade Boggs play better baseball? It's entirely likely. Or consider the length of the shorts that they wear in the NBA. If you look at games from the 60s or the 70s on television, they look positively skimpy. Why are the shorts so long now? The reason they're so long is that for most of his career, Michael Jordan wore a pair of shorts under his shorts. Shorts from the University of North Carolina, which he wore to remind himself of how to play better, which he wore because he was superstitious, which he wore because he had belief.

12:30Did it make Michael Jordan play better? It's entirely possible, but it's belief that made him play better, not the fact that he was wearing a particular pair of shorts. The astonishing thing is that in a survey of more than 2 ,000 sports fans, 27 % of them insisted that their sports superstition, the way they dressed, where they sat, how they talked, the fact that they changed channels now and then, that their superstition had helped their team win more than once. That the team, of course, doesn't know that these people are doing these crazy things, But they believe, a quarter of them, that their superstition is helping the team.

13:19This is not engineering thinking. This is not logos. This is someone telling themselves a story because it makes them feel better. One more thing about sports. If you watched Saturday Night Live in the old days, you saw a sketch about a hamburger joint in Chicago. Cheeseburger, cheeseburger, cheeseburger, two chips. Cheeseburger, cheeseburger, cheeseburger. One cat. It's a real place, the Billy Goat Tavern. The Billy Goat Tavern used to be run by a guy named Billy Cianus. And yes, he owned a Billy Goat. And yes, in 1945, he brought his Billy Goat to a Chicago Cubs baseball game. Actually, I believe it was the playoffs.

13:59They kicked him out of the game because the goat stunk. Well, Cianus was furious, so he sent a telegram to the owner of the Cubs, putting a curse on the team. and saying that they would never win a World Series because they had been mean to his goat. And the curse lasted for almost 70 years. In 2002, some fans brought a goat with them from Chicago to Houston to go to a Houston Astros game against the Cubs. As predicted, they were also barred from entering the stadium. I guess there's a good reason, but goats seemed to be barred from Major League Baseball games. Prepared for this, they unfurled a scroll and reversed the curse, taking it off of Chicago and putting it on Houston.

14:52And several years later, the Cubs won the World Series. I have no doubt that the curse on the Cubs affected the way some of the players played. But the curse on the Cubs could not be described as having a causal reaction on how baseballs bounced or on how players hit the ball. But people are complicated. Belief runs deep. We stick with our beliefs for several reasons. One, peer pressure, tribal belonging. What will the others think? If we are part of a community that believes something, an engineering thought shows up that demonstrates in the video replay, that demonstrates through the logic of math that we are wrong, we will stick with our idea.

15:42Ponzi, Charles Ponzi, I talked about him on a podcast a couple years ago, raised more than half of the money he stole from people after he was profiled on the front page of the Boston Post as a con man. After, how could that be? How could working people take their hard-earned money, wait in line, and invest it with Ponzi after the con had been revealed? Well, the answer is simple, because we trusted our friends, because we wanted to fit in, because tribal solidarity was more important than looking at the truth. The second reason might be status-seeking. It might be that trotting out our belief, insisting on our belief, not only helps us fit in, it helps us stand out with the people that we seek to have respect from.

16:37That over time, people in science have developed a reputation for being putoffish, for being a little bit snobbish. That going along with whatever is proven doesn't feel brave or bold or heroic. Whereas sticking with your beliefs in the face of proof that you are wrong in some communities will improve your status. And the third one is cognitive dissonance. We don't want to admit that we are wrong because if we believe in something, we must be right. If we are doing this, we must be right. If you've gone five, six, seven years in a row to a meeting of some flat earthers, admitting that you are wrong is more than just saying, I've looked at the numbers.

17:22It means that there's something wrong with you. So what does this have to do with culture and the problems of our moment? Well, here's the problem. The problem is that for the first time over the last 20 years, many of us have been asked to put our beliefs in writing, put our beliefs online, put our beliefs in front of everyone. Many of us have been asked to show our allegiances to join whichever tribe we want to be a member of and to do it in public. And thanks to the explosion of social media in which attracting a crowd is how Twitter and Facebook make money, crowds have been attracted by people who are lying, by people who are trotting out beliefs they know to be untrue, simply to pit groups of people against one another.

18:11and now as we enter the realm of artificial intelligence of deep fakes of stuff that could be true it's even hard to tell from the video it's getting easier and easier to defend one's pseudoscientific non-engineering beliefs and now we have a real problem and the reason we have a problem is the bridge is going to fall down it's one thing to believe in the abominable snowman or Frosty the snowman or Rudolph or any other belief that gives you solace and puts a smile on your face. It's another thing to believe that something didn't happen that did. It's another thing to carry around a set of explanations for how the world works that isn't accurately explaining how the world works.

19:01Because when we collide those two things in a row, we end up losing our life savings to Charles Ponzi, when those two things collide, when two groups who both claim engineering truth collide with one another, we don't have a useful way to adjudicate the argument. Back to Robert Oppenheimer, if we need to smear and destroy the career of a scientist simply to insulate ourselves from how it feels to change our mind, we've made a tragic mistake. Because forward motion in rational thought is one of the things that has created the best parts of the modern world. Too often, though, we have forgotten to take forward motion in belief.

19:53forward motion in how do we create beliefs and adhere to them in ways that help more and more of us? How do we create unity, not division? How do we build beliefs that are resilient in the face of engineering truth? Because if we are going to fight against the world as it is, so that we can have the peace of mind that comes from believing that we are right about our beliefs, the world as it is, sooner or later, is going to stand up and smack us in the face. Because the thing is, if the universe is more than 10 billion years old, plenty of things happened long before someone invented the law of attraction.

20:38The law of attraction doesn't create coincidences. Human behavior in a particular town does not cause a storm to appear in retribution. Storms and coincidences were around long before people invented beliefs around them. Now, what we have now is the chance when more of us have access to more accurate explanation of how the world really works, what we have is the opportunity to build on that, to find resilience with each other so that we don't have to deny engineering truth in order to get back to being the people we seek to be. That's my rant. I hope it resonates. Go make your ruckus. Hey Seth, it's Maria.

21:24Hey Seth, my name's Kyle. Greetings, Seth. This is Stephen out in Madison, Wisconsin. Hi Seth, Alicia from Charleston here. Hi Seth, this is Anupam. Hi, this is Caitlin. Hi Seth, warm greetings from Curacao. Hey Seth, my name is Nick Ryan from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Hey Seth, this is Rex. Hey Seth. Hi, this is Vasilis from Greece. Hi, this is Roberta Perry. My question is... And that completes my question. As always, I love to hear from you. If you've got a question, visit akimbo.link, that's A-K-I-M-B-O dot L-I-N-K, and press the appropriate button. Heard from a few people about my comment about efficient markets theory last week.

22:06They didn't call in their questions, but basically what they were getting at is, of course, some stock pickers do better than others. What about Warren Buffett? And one person kindly sent me an article by Warren Buffett in which he explained why he's such a good stock picker. Well, here's the deal. if you can consistently beat the market in terms of the risk that you are taking you can do the following you can borrow money for less than the money you're going to be able to make with that money you borrow and you can do it till infinity because the risk will even out and you will be ahead and if you can do it till infinity you won't be a billionaire you'll be a trillionaire And we don't have any trillionaires, at least not yet, because sooner or later, risk evens it all out.

23:07Warren Buffett later, years later, in an interview, admitted that no, investing in Berkshire Hathaway is not actually more efficient or more profitable than buying an index fund. Warren, let's talk about some of the things that really resonated with people and maybe start where you began the annual meeting this year. And that was talking to your investors and telling them a little bit about investing some tips and lessons along the way. You kind of used it as a teaching experience at the top. Yeah. Normally, I don't do that. I mean, in fact, I can't remember when I did it. We just go right into questions and answers.

23:44But I really thought that maybe you were giving a little bit the wrong lesson, because all the questions would naturally tend toward current events. And so this time I went back, actually, to 1942 when I bought my first stock as an illustration of all the things that have happened since 1942. We've had 14 presidents, seven Republicans, seven Democrats. We've had World Wars. We had 9-11. We had the Cuban Missile Crisis. We have all kinds of things. The best single thing you could have done on March 11, 1942, when I bought my first stock, was just buy an index fund and never look at a headline, never think about stocks anymore.

24:32Just like you. So there are flaws with efficient market theory. But in general, you can't in public without secret information or going behind the scenes consistently and regularly beat the risk average. Because if you could, the risk average would be wrong. Now, here's a two-part question. So generous. Hey, Seth. This is Maria from Raleigh. Okay. So I kind of have an Oreo for you because I have two questions and one comment. so my first question is when you go to parties do people like try to ask you lots of deep questions and you're just like I'm trying to have fun and is that annoying I'm really asking because I've never had that problem and I just really am curious as to what it's like just like what the experience is like.

25:25So then my comment is that I am doing your creatives workshop and it's fantastic. And I did the storytelling workshop in November, December, and that was also fantastic. And I just really appreciate the culture that you created online. And I feel like I learn so much from the lessons. Like there's like a lingering effect where like I learn more and more like even as time goes on. So I just am really appreciative of that. And so then my last question is whether you've considered doing a workshop like one of those but geared towards like teenagers or kids in college. And it really wouldn't even matter, like the subject matter wouldn't even be as important as just sort of like showing them how to interact online in a positive way.

26:20I was just wondering if you've ever thought about that because I just feel as though what you're doing is really important. Well, thank you for this. I think you and I might be going to the same sort of parties. My take is that I would rather have a deep conversation and talk about the issues that I get to talk about in our workshops and on this podcast than just trade banal inanities with people at a cocktail party. But that basically never happens. So for fun, my fun is having conversations like this one, not asking people about the weather, etc. So there you go. That's my short answer to the quandary both you and I face at cocktail parties.

27:05Thank you for the kind words about our workshops. We run our workshops for people like you. But the takeaway for me, the key part is that learning is different than education. and the fact is that when we learn something, it gets stronger over time. Education fades. After the test, we forget what we memorized. But learning, learning persists because we start to see the world a different way and it compounds forward and forward. Thanks again for listening. We'll see you next time.