Predicting a Smarter You
Sometimes Looking Crazy Is the Only Way to The Truth
One of the most embarrassing things I have ever experienced was having a bunch of people say how awful I was. During a two week long leadership training session 15 years ago, I was part of a 5 person team that competed with other teams in learning games. I was quite aggressive, and stepped in to lead the team to victories a few times. Toward the end, there was an exercise where everyone in the group listed out loud the good and bad things about each group member in turn. Most people had more good things said about them than bad. Not me. My big giant sheet of paper had two good things and twelve bad. And the bad ones were pretty bad: doesn’t care about peoples’ feelings, steps on toes, bossy. By trying so hard to win the games, I had lost big, sacrificing relational points for temporary game points. This was a major intended teachable moment for that workshop.
But what struck me most is how poorly I understood myself. I had completely failed at real leadership, and in a way that caused people real pain. I had had no idea that I was hurting their feelings in these ways.
I took that 30x24 sheet of my failures, took it home, and taped it to my bathroom mirror, much to my wife’s amusement.1 And I left it up for 9 months.
I decided that this list of bad traits was pretty much Objective Truth2, and that I had been blind to Truth. I had been looking at who I was through a funhouse mirror, distorted by misperceptions, ego, and general self-ignorance. I became obsessed with knowing all my faults and fixing them, which was painful but useful…and ongoing.
“It’s really easy to point out Cognitive Dissonance in other people, but incredibly hard to see it in yourself.”
As I went deeper and deeper into self-examination, the most amazing thing that I realized, though, is that I wasn’t just emotionally blind. I was intellectually fooling myself about a lot of things.
The funhouse mirror of misperception subconsciously protected my ego from recognizing facts that challenged my preferred narratives. It’s really easy to point out Cognitive Dissonance3 in other people, but incredibly hard to see it in yourself. A major point of this article is to tell you that you have Cognitive Dissonance about some really important things in your life…because we ALL do. Yes, even you.
We now live in a world so awash in information that we can find “data” that supports just about any conclusion one prefers4. If there are millions of facts relevant to the discussion of whether a flat tax is better or worse than the current tax law, or whether String Theory is true, or whether the Yankees are better than the Red Sox…then people are always going to be able to justify their positions based on at least some facts, most of which are only a Google search away5.
It’s probably possible for me to find Seven Facts Your Doctor Doesn’t Want You To Know that indicate that 5G causes COVID-19 to mutate into a tracking beacon for the Reptilians.
Almost worse than that, sometimes I was just plain wrong because the truth was subtly hidden in details or thinking I hadn’t plumbed correctly. I would find entire edifices of one of my narrative structures had sometimes been built on a faulty foundation of just plain wrong facts6.
So if:
A) We have great capacity to fool ourselves, and
B) There can almost always be some data found to support any position,
Then how do we escape this trap?
The Method of Crazy Predictions
Our goal here is to have the most accurate possible Simulation of Reality in our heads. So we need to differentiate between competing hypotheses of how the world actually works to find the one that correctly predicts how things will play out. Einstein granted us a great clue on how to do this.
When Albert Einstein published his theory of General Relativity in 1915, a lot of people rejected it. His theory predicted that mass warps the fabric of space and time, and this warping is what makes mass change its movements. So mass sort of causes mass to accelerate7. This was one of the most bizarre theories of all time. But the thing that convinced a lot of people to take it seriously was a bold prediction made based on this theory. Einstein’s theory predicted that spacetime warped by the sun would bend the path of distant starlight that passed near the sun twice as strongly as predicted by Newtonian physics. In 1919, Eddington and others observed the deviation of the apparent position of a particular star during a solar eclipse by just the predicted amount.
Suddenly, most people became convinced of what the Truth really was: that space and time really do bend and stretch at the behest of matter; and matter speeds up, slows down, and changes directions based on this bending.
We can use this method in our own lives to sharpen our wit and prune away our faulty assumptions.
1) Look at a specific situation that is strongly controlled by your favorite theory.
2) Find a medium-term clear prediction that, if it came true, would mean your theory is true.
3) Strengthen the prediction such that it can ONLY come true if and only if your theory is true. It HAS to be something most other theories would predict would almost definitely NOT happen.
4) Say it out loud to multiple people8.
In other words, make a Public Crazy Prediction that can only come to pass if you’re right.
This is a wonderful method for two reasons. First, making bold, unique predictions is probably the most reliable way to get to Objective Truth. Second, the entire point of trying to have accurate apprehension of how the world works is in order to predict what will happen. Our brains reach out for information and collect it into frameworks mainly in order to help us know what will happen, especially to predict what each of our possible array of choices will cause to occur.
In order to bring this method home, some examples are useful.
Example 1: Why Is There No Inflation?
In 2009, I thought that then-profligate “money printing” would lead to inflation. If the Keynesian economists were right, this inflation would not happen until 2012, but would come strongly after the economy recovered. If the Austrian economists were right, it would come sooner, perhaps in 2010.
I waited and waited, but the US inflation rate stayed very low all the way through 2016. I thus knew that we were in a paradigm explained by neither, so I made my own theory on the cause. But how could I know I was right?
Well, the government went on “printing money” at almost record rates throughout 2016 and 2017, so I predicted to many of my friends that inflation, on an annual basis, would stay below 2.7% through 2019. Most of them thought I was crazy, because the money supply was exploding. But I was right. Inflation stayed low 2018-2020.
And because no other economic theory was predicting this inflation would stay so low despite the money printing, I was able to become confident in my theory.
Example 2: Biden Will Drop Out
This is a completely non-partisan, non-political blog, so please forgive this jarringly political example. But it provides a great case of me being wrong.
During the 2020 US Presidential election campaign, I thought I saw some concerning evidence of age-related decline in the candidate Joe Biden. To know whether I was right, I predicted in June 2020 that he would drop out of the race by September 15th. If his state were really as bad as I feared, they would have to switch him out before the first debate. But if I were wrong, this would never happen.
I made that prediction publicly and to many people. I was wrong.9 And when my prediction failed, I knew I was objectively wrong. Candidate and now President Biden simply is (thankfully!) not experiencing anywhere near that level of decline that I though was the case. I had fooled myself by looking at cherry-picked clips of candidate Biden.
“If I had not said it publicly, I would have been able to mentally sweep my wrongness under the rug.”
This brings up an important point. If I had just mumbled to myself, “I bet he drops out by mid September,” it would have been very easy for me to forget or dismiss my own prediction.
Crazy Predictions have to be public so that we are accountable to ourselves.
If I had not said it publicly, I would have been able to mentally sweep my wrongness under the rug instead of learning that my theory was Objectively Wrong.
Example 3: The Flu Has Flown
In the spring of 2020, I was trying to catch up and learn a lot about epidemiology, just like the rest of us. Thankfully, I had already known about a few basic things, like exponential functions, Ro (the number of people, on average, that each infected person infects), and ways to collect good statistical data.
In order to test how well I was understanding this tragedy and how it would play out, I made an absolutely insane prediction about influenza.
Multiple studies had shown that the Ro of Influenza is about 1.3, meaning each person that gets it infects, on average, 1.3 people. This is enough to get spread the flu to tens of millions of Americans each year, because any Ro significantly above 1.0 will spread throughout large portions of a population. But I also saw that based on Covid-19 transmission deltas, social distancing seemed to cut Ro in about half. Since influenza and Covid-19 have similar sinus/throat airborne infection pathways, I surmised influenza’s Ro would also be cut in about half. But half of 1.3 is only about 0.65, which is way below the Ro needed for wide spreading.
So in May 2020, I loudly predicted that instead of many millions of flu cases in the coming Fall and Winter, there would be almost none.
And this is what happened. Cases of influenza were just a few tens of thousands instead of tens of millions, with almost no flu hospitalizations. (Genetic tests, administered to every hospital admission, easily differentiate influenza and Covid-19.)10 This means my estimate for Ro reduction was very likely true, and I used it to alter my behavior and predict the ebb and flow of the pandemic, at least until Delta came along with its Ro 3-4 times higher than “vanilla” Covid.11
All in all, I have used this method over a dozen times in order to determine what the actual Objective Truth is in complex situations. It’s not foolproof, especially if your predictions are not bold, public, and crazy.
But if you do it right, you will predict your way into a smarter you.
I didn’t bother to ask her what she thought of what they had written, but I caught a few glances she had intended to be hidden. She has a great sense of humor and propriety.
In relational cases like this, perception is reality.
Motivated reasoning comes in many forms, but is all stems from reaching the conclusion and then working back from that.
Biased information search, sometimes knows as confirmation bias.
This can often be a result of biased evaluation of data.
I simplify a bit here…there will be a future article delving into the depths of this theory more accurately.
This can be thought of both as a commitment device and a preregistered trial.
Guess I should have checked my own level of decline.
If your theory is that flu cases got misdiagnosed as covid cases, then you can test this with a post-diction: In 2018, how many people did you personally know that were hospitalized or died from influenza? In 2020-21, how many people did you personally know that were hospitalized or died from Covid-19? Personally, those numbers are zero for 2018 and well over a dozen for 2020-21. Covid isn’t misdiagnosed flu.
Delta is such a beast, as are high exponentials.