Chances Are (50 page)

One of the subtlest and most destructive failures of the probability mechanism produces the personality first identified in the 1940s by Hervey Cleckley: the psychopath. The psychopath suffers no failure of rational intelligence; he (it is usually he) is logical, often clever, charming. He knows what you want to hear. In situations where there are formal rules (school, the law, medicine) he knows how to work them to his advantage. His impulsiveness gets him into trouble, but his intelligence gets him out; he is often arrested, rarely convicted. He could tell you in the abstract what would be the likely consequences of his behavior—say, stealing money from neighbors, falsifying employment records, groping dance partners, or running naked through town carrying a jug of corn liquor; he can even criticize his having done so in the past. Yet he is bound to repeat his mistakes, to “launch himself” (as the elderly uncle of one of Cleckley's subjects put it) “into another pot-valiant and fatuous rigadoon.” The psychopath's defect is a specific loss of insight: an inability to connect theoretical probability with actual probability and thus give actions and consequences a value. His version of cause and effect is like a syllogism with false premises: It works as a system; it just doesn't
mean
anything.

 

We have pursued truth through a labyrinth and come up against a mirror. It turns out that things seem uncertain to us because certainty is a quality not of things but of ideas. Things seem to have particular ways of being or happening because that is how we see and sort experience: we are random-blind; we seek the pattern in the weft, the voice on the wind, the hand in the dark. The formal calculation of probabilities will always feel artificial to us because it slows and makes conscious our leap from perception to conclusion. It forces us to acknowledge the gulf of uncertainty and randomness that gapes below—and leaps are never easy if you look down.

Such a long story should have a moral. Another bishop (this time, in fact, the Archbishop of York), musing aloud on the radio, once asked: “Has it occurred to you that the lust for certainty may be a sin?” His point was that, by asserting as true what we know is only probable, we repudiate our humanity. When we disguise our reasoning about the world as deductive, logical fact—or, worse, hire the bully Authority to enforce our conclusions for us—we claim powers reserved, by definition, to the superhuman. The lesson of Eve's apple is the world's fundamental uncertainty: nothing outside Eden is more than probable.

Is this bad news? Hardly. Just as probability shows there are infinite degrees of belief between the impossible and the certain, there are degrees of fulfillment in this task of being human. If you want a trustworthy distinction between body and soul, it might be this: our bodies, like all life forms, are essentially entropy machines. We exist by flattening out energy gradients, absorbing concentrations of value, and dissipating them in motion, heat, noise, and waste. Our souls, though, swim upstream, struggling against entropy's current. Every neuron, every cell, contains an equivalent of Maxwell's demon—the ion channels—which sort and separate, increasing local useful structure. We use that structure for more than simply assessing and acting, like mindless automata. We remember and anticipate, speculate and explain. We tell stories and jokes—the best of which could be described as tickling our sense of probabilities.

This is our fate and our duty: to search for, devise, and create the less probable, the lower-entropy state—to connect, build, describe, preserve, extend . . . to strive and not to yield. We reason, and examine our reasoning, not because we will ever achieve certainty, but because some forms of uncertainty are better than others. Better explanations have more meaning, wider use, less entropy.

And in doing all this, we must be brave—because, in a world of probability, there are no universal rules to hide behind. Because fortune favors the brave: the prepared mind robs fate of half its terrors. And because each judgment, each decision we make, if made well, is part of the broader, essential human quest: the endless struggle against randomness.

Index

A1 standard

Abraham

Adams, Henry

aerodynamics

aerospace industry

African Americans

Agathon

agronomy

AIDS

Albuera, battle of

Alembert, Jean Le Rond d,'

Alfonso X, King of Castile and Leon

algebra

algorithms

Allen, Woody

Alpha Arietis

al-Qaeda

altruism

amygdala

annuities

antidepressants

Aratus

Aristotle

Ars Conjectandi
(Bernoulli)

artificial intelligence

artillery

Art of War, The
(Sun)

Asad, Muhammad

ascending sequences

Asclepius

Astor, John Jacob

astrology

astronomy

Astruc, Jean

atmospheric pressure

atomic bomb

Auden, W. H.

Augustus, Emperor of Rome

authorship

autism

average individual

Aviatik DD 1 bomber

Avicenna

Aviva

Axelrod, Kenneth

axioms

Azo of Bologna

 

 

Bach, Johann Sebastian

Bacon, Francis

Ball, Patrick

balloon flights

Balzac, Honoré de

Barbon, Nicholas

barometers

barratry

base-rate effect

Bass, John

Bayes, Thomas

Bayes' theorem

Belgium

belief systems

bell curve (normal curve)

Bentham, Jeremy

Berchtold, Count

Bernard, Claude

Bernoulli, Daniel

Bernoulli, Jakob

Bernoulli, Johann

Bernoulli, Nicholas

Bertrand, Joseph

Bethmann Hollweg, Theobald von

Bible

billiard balls

Bills of Mortality

bingo

Bird, Alex

Bird, John

birth defects

birth rate

bivariate distribution

Bjerknes, Vilhelm

Black, Joseph

blackjack

blicket detectors

bloodletting

Body Mass Index

Boethius

Boltzmann, Ludwig

bookies

Booth, Charles

Borel, Émile

Born, Max

Bortkiewicz, Ladislaus

bottomry

Boyle, Robert

Brahe, Tycho

brain function

“breaking the line” maneuver

breast cancer

Breslau

bridge

Brooke, Rupert

Brooks, Juanita

Brothers Karamazov, The
(Dostoyevsky)

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett

Buckle, Henry Thomas

Buckminsterfullerene

Buffett, Warren

Bull, Phil

bumper pool

Bundy, McGeorge

Byron, George Gordon, Lord

Calculated Risks
(Gigerenzer)

calculus

Caligula, Emperor of Rome

cancer

Cantor, Georg

capital investment

carbon

Cardano, Girolamo

card games:

cheating in

probabilities in

shuffling in

strategy in

see also
specific card games

Cassel, Ernest

Cassiopeia supernova (1572)

Castro, Fidel

cataracts

Cathars

Catholic Church

census data

Chadwick, Edwin

Challenger
disaster (1986)

chance:

calculation of

distribution of

in experimental results

fate and

mythology of

randomness as

time as

see also
probability

chaos theory

Charles I, King of England

Charles II, King of England

chartists

Chaucer, Geoffrey

chemotherapy

chess

children

cholera

Christianity

Church of England

Cicero

circles, chords of

Civil War, U.S.

Clark, Christopher

Clark, Harry

Clark, Sally

Claudius, Emperor of Rome

Clausewitz, Carl von

Cleckley, Hervey

Clerk of Eldin, John

climate change

Cochran, William

Code
(Justinian)

coefficients, binomial

cognitive function

coincidence

coin-tossing:

probabilities in

Saint Petersburg Paradox in

sequence of

Cold Harbor, battle of

Cold War

Colenso, Bishop John

Collins, Janet

Collins, Malcolm Ricardo

colorectal cancer

combinatorics

common sense

communications systems

communism

computers

Comte, Auguste

“Concerning Hope” (Laplace)

“conditioning your priors,”

Condorcet, Marie-Jean-Antoine-Nicolas de Caritat, Marquis de

confounded variables

contingent decisions

contradiction

control groups

Copernicus, Nicolaus

Cornish Man Engine

correlation

Cortéz, Hernán

counting

Course of Experimental Agriculture
(Young)

Coxwell, Henry

crabs, Neapolitan

craps

credibility

credit

crime

Crimean War

Croesus, King of Lydia

Cromwell, Oliver

Crusades

curves:

approximation of

concave vs. convex

distribution

error

of functions

normal (bell)

sine-

cyclical calculation

 

 

Darkness
(Byron)

Darnborough, William Nelson

Darrow, Clarence

Darwin, Charles

data:

accuracy of

clusters of

comparative

scientific

statistical

weather

Daubert ruling

D-Day landings

Decisions
(Justinian)

definitions

“degree of enlightenment,”

Delphic oracle

de Méré, Antoine Gombauld, Chevalier

demon

Demosthenes

De nova stella
(Brahe)

depression

Descartes, René

determinism

Deuteronomy

Diaconis, Persi

“diagnosis-related group” reimbursement

dice

cheating in

for divination

historical importance of

numerical combinations of (permutations)

odds calculated in

probabilities in

randomness in

throws of

Dicing with Death
(Senn)

Dickens, Charles

Diderot, Denis

Dieppe raid (1942)

Digest
(Justinian)

dilemmas

divine revelation

DNA

Doctrine of Chances
(de Moivre)

Domesday Book

Don Juan
(Byron)

Doob, Joseph

Doomsday machine

Dostoyevsky, Fyodor

double-entry bookkeeping

Dow Jones Industrial Average

Dreyfus, Alfred

“DRG creep,”

Dunkirk evacuation (1940)

 

 

earth, rotation of

Ecclesiastes

eclipses

economics

education

Eggleston, Richard

Einstein, Albert

Eisenhower, Dwight D.

Ekholm, Nils

electrons

Eliot, T.S.

Ellsberg, Daniel

El Salvador

Employers' Liability Act (1880)

energy demand

Enlightenment

ensemble prediction

entropy

Epigrams
(Martial)

equations:

algebraic

binomial

differential

geometric forms as

non-linear

odds expressed by

squaring of

variables in

equilibrium

Essay on Man
(Pope)

Essay Towards Solving a Problem in the Doctrine of Chances, An
(Bayes)

Euclid

Eudaemonic Pie

eugenics

European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts

Evelyn, John

events:

collective

events (
cont.
)

independent

mutually exclusive

occurrence of

random

excess-of-loss reinsurance