Continued from the social uncertainty principle post, using the analogy of Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle.
Like virtually all of the ideas I’m describing in this series, the social uncertainty principle is a heuristic for observing ideas-in-action and overcoming fallacies that affect them.
Specifically it’s a rule of thumb for working out a balance between ideas that are based exclusively on statistics and ideas that are generated exclusively via intuition.
Heisenberg veralised it as “the more precisely the position [of a particle] is determined, the less precisely the momentum is known, and conversely…”
Thanks to Phronk’s comment I recognize an adjustment needs to be made to that — emphasizing what we should do rather than what we don’t know.
Heisenberg would have taken for granted there’s still work to be done, but when it comes to understanding human dynamics, there’s always a temptation to assume we already understand things so we don’t need to look further — which is precisely the opposite of what I meant.
So for my purposes the principle should be stated “the more precisely we’ve determined quantitative factors, the more we must qualitatively consider possibilities, and vice versa.”
Consider the rational choice model in economics, according to which agents are supposed to maximize the utility of their decisions within certain boundary conditions.
It’s an abstract slice of time in which the decision-maker is supposed to be a static object calculating a bunch of static variables.
Life doesn’t happen like that.
In reality a decision-maker’s mind is humming with thoughts and feelings, the circumstances would be undulated by an ever-varying drama of nudges, irritations and stimuli.
But rational choice serves as a baseline of reference. Without it we’d have a much harder time recognizing the variations caused by irrationality; we wouldn’t have an objective framework for assessing and comparing qualitative factors (not to mention our perception of those qualitative factors).
As a partial aside, some things we might assume are irrational can be interpreted as attempts to optimize utility. For example the willingness to pay more for a red car might seem irrational (or “merely” aesthetic) but it can also be interpreted as an investment in future status and bargaining power, signaling virility which can maximize attention, choice of potential mates, etc. Ultimately I don’t think we can reduce and quantify mating decisions (at least not most) but by framing it like that we get a clearer and more usable understanding of the storybook aspect of romance.
There’s another huge difference between applying an uncertainty principle to physics vs applying it to social and economic circumstances (stress the word applying, I’m not necessarily referring to pure academic research): when we apply statistical models we can significantly determine what kind of responses we’ll get.
There’s supposed to be an observer effect in physics too but this goes way beyond that. It’s more like a “designer effect.”
Products are framed to consumers in ways that direct them (often quite aggressively) according to which factors the seller believes are most important. When only given those options, consumers will select accordingly because they can only choose from within the framework that’s offered.
There are always more untested variables than anyone in the market is aware of.
While the basic models might work for a while, eventually a black swan is going to come along and break the framework (do I even have to mention the finance crisis as a still-looming reminder).
Think of how American car manufacturers marketed vehicles a few decades ago, think of how confident they were that they knew the American consumer better than the Japanese or European companies entering the market.
American companies underestimated the value of quality, safety, and fuel efficiency because they were too busy trying to beat each other on other factors.
They weren’t seeing all of the information that was potentially available, they weren’t trying hard enough to think of new questions to ask. It wasn’t even that they weren’t listening; consumers can’t be expected to ask for something that doesn’t exist yet, sometimes someone has to offer them something before they know they want it.
Think of how Southwest Airlines disrupted their industry by reframing how people can choose to fly. Go down the list of disruptive and highly successful companies and you’ll find people using a bit of imagination and trusting their own judgement.
Likewise within organizations.
Your survey feedback is affected by which questions you ask. If you ask employees to rank the relative importance of, say, 6 different measures of job satisfaction, those statistics aren’t going to tell you how to satisfy employees, those statistics should primarily be a tool for making personal-level interactions more informative.
In turn, the information coming out of informal interactions (as it pertains to professional decisions) should be formalized and tested as objectively as possible.
The imaginative folks who started Southwest and all the rest didn’t move forward without a lot of diligent research to corroborate (and correct) their instinct and judgement.
It’s too hard to control the sample and ensure information is coming from an appropriate selection of sources, and second because we can’t see how our attitude and biases are subtly affecting those conversations, and third because our biases and intuitions can further affect our interpretations.
It’s by working with the static slices of time and learning how to interpret them that we learn to understand what’s happening.
Understanding isn’t a thing we hold, it’s an activity we learn and maintain through practice.
It’s also worth considering that putting data and intuitions together isn’t just prescriptive, it’s descriptive; i.e. we never handle facts without affecting them with emotions or intuitions.
Look at politics and conspiracy theories.
Look at how some Republican extremists have taken hold of a few bits of information (if “information” is even the right word) about Obama and his policies, which have interpreted through their existing feelings and biases. Going a step further they’ve arrived at theories about how the “facts” fit together, then converted those theories themselves into supposedly certain facts.
The same thing happens on the left.
What ought to happen is instead of using little bits of information as reasons to be outraged, people should stop for a moment and ask what information might disprove these theories and actively look to see if that information exists.
If and when it becomes clear the theories are false, then everything becomes information for assessing what went wrong, it becomes a platform for improving intuitive judgement for the future.
For example, the idea that Obama was setting up “death panels” is untrue as it pertains to Obama, but as it pertains to people who believed the stories it’s useful information — it’s data for understanding those people’s biases and intuitions.
Specifically, it’s information they should be looking at themselves, using it to try and monitor and ameliorate their irrational impulses.
That’s the ultimate verification or falsification we should be watching for: not just how accurate the ideas themselves are themselves, but how effective we are at managing our ideas.
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