Chapter 20 – Good and Bad and Certainty

I have returned to challenge your tiny baby brain and not a moment too soon because you are already twenty chapters old! Yes, I admit, you actually a hypothetical baby and I am using this platform to confess that I did not know these things while I was growing up. I learned all of these lessons the hard way. You can find links to all of these (soon to be 100) lessons in one convenient place: Here.

Today’s Warning: Please be careful when you hear human animals talking about things that are “good” and “bad.” Most often, when human animals say something is “good,” they are telling you that something  made/makes them happy regardless of whether A) it makes other people unhappy or B) whether it will ultimately make you incredibly sad. We are such a myopic species (Remember WYSIATI).

Except for low-lying fruit on the Maslovian Pyramid, things like having food and shelter and avoiding unwanted physical pain and death, people constantly disagree about what is good and bad. The subjects of these disagreements are everywhere. They include such things as good and bad food, cities, politicians, cars, jobs, art, children, pets, technology, habits, websites, books, moral choices, friends and romantic partners.

Here’s another important lesson about “good” and “bad” things, my little pal. You will grow up in a complex adaptive system (your environment) and you yourself are a complex adaptive system. This double-complexity means that crazy-seeming things will often happen to you out of the blue. And to everyone else you know too. Yet we are incredibly arrogant in our ignorance.  Despite all of our ignorance, we continue to put human brains on extremely high and privileged pedestals. In the end, though, “A physicist is an atom’s way of knowing about atoms.” (Quote by Neils Bohr).

Human animals like to pretend that they have things under control, but they control very little. Sure, they might have a grip on what is going on right in front of them at this moment, but Life is dripping with irony. Ten years after you met that woman who never wanted children, she is a joyous mother of three. Oh, and you might have an exceedingly preachy moralistic neighbor who, ten years later, is sitting in prison for committing almost every crime on the books. Maybe this second example is more predictable based on the neighbor’s preachiness per Freud’s theory of the reaction formation.

Anyway, Life is filled to the brim with surprises and with billions of people who should be eating humble pie. Things keep hitting us upside the head. Around the corner from most predictions is a 180, yet the world is filled with people who keep getting their predictions wrong and keep predicting. I suppose that is why “they” forced us to live real lives rather than just allowing us human animals to sit around predicting. It must be very entertaining for “god.”

It doesn’t matter how careful you are in making your precautions, either. The world is filled with unintended consequences. This law dovetails with the fact that all of us are over-confident of our state of knowledge based on our laughably parochial existences. That was the topic of Chapter 14.

Here’s one more kicker: The passage of time makes laughingstocks out of us to the extent that we label things “good” or “bad.” Even if you earnestly and carefully plan out a “can’t miss” kind act, you don’t know how that “kind act” will look twenty or thirty years later. “Is it good or bad?” is a completely different question than “Was it good or bad.”  Things can get soooo complicated. Maybe that thing initially seemed like a good idea, but four years later, it was the worst thing you ever did. “Damn! Why did I take that job? It seemed like a sure thing, but it wrecked my life!  So here is the main theme from this Chapter: Whether something was a good or bad decision depends on when you take your evaluative snap shot.

To our dismay, good things often turn out to be bad things with the passage of time. And things that seem bad today often turn out to be good.

• You got fired from your job (bad), which opened up a better opportunity (good).
• You got that job you always wanted (good), but two months after beginning that job, you hated it (bad).
• WWII caused terrible suffering for millions of people (bad), but that hellacious war inspired countless acts of heroism and resulted in the defeat of tyranny (good things).
• You were late to the airport and missed the plane (bad), but the plane crashed (good for you that you weren’t on it).
• You discovered that your spouse was being unfaithful (bad) and your marriage then failed miserably (bad), but that failure allowed you to meet someone much more compatible (good).
• Your favorite baseball team had an extremely talented team in spring training (good), but the team sucked during the regular season (bad).
• An elderly family member died (bad), but it brought the family much more closely together (good).
• You lost your keys (bad), but a kind stranger came up to you and that stranger became your best friend.

What sort of dark magic causes good and bad to reverse themselves? Again, it’s the mere passage of time in that complex adaptive system we inhabit. All of us are cursed with temporal myopia. We can barely see into next week, much less the next year. Even a “perfect” understanding of the individual parts of our world does not automatically convey a perfect understanding of the behavior of the whole system. When our butterflies flap their wings, we cannot foresee the hurricanes that will result years or decades later. Life never ceases to surprise, delight and demoralize us. “It seemed like such a good idea to go get that tattoo!”

The only way to determine the long-term consequences of most things is to watch them play out. Life often proves us wrong, no matter how carefully we plan things, no matter how carefully we pay attention to our Emotional Valence Map (Chapter 11), and no matter how carefully we try to navigate homeostasis. Apparently, the fundamental purpose of Life is to humble us, to knock our confidence down again and again.

After we live a few dozen years on this planet, it would seem that whenever we announce that something is good or bad, we would also announce that our confidence level is low. At a minimum, it seems like we would learn to attach expiration dates to our judgments that something is good or bad. “This will a good thing, I think, until until at least next Thursday.” Or it seems that we would learn to attach asterisks to our judgments of good and bad, warning others that we have almost no idea what the future has in store.

This well-documented common reversal of fortune never seems to deter intrepid beings like us. When we announce that something is a “good” thing or a “bad” thing, we are making naive educated guesses, yet we tend to utter these things with absolute certitude. Again, how is it possible that we sound so confident when we are so often proven wrong?

Robert Burton warns us that feelings of certainty are not legitimate substitutes for careful fact-finding and reasoning. Burton holds that the feeling of certainty is an involuntary sensation akin to an emotion (p. xi). In the preface of his book (On Being Certain), Burton warns us that once you start seeing the feeling of certainty as a non-intellectual feeling, rather than evidence of well-earned knowledge, you will start seeing this problem of feeling of certainty cropping up everywhere you look.

I’ll end this Chapter with one of my favorite passages. Writer Harlan Ellison looked back at a lot of his excellent decisions that didn’t work out. He explains why he made those bad decisions with a simple phrase:

. . . [My] fourth marriage just sort of happened: It seemed like a good idea at the time. In fact—and this is the core of all my wisdom about love—whenever we try to explain why we have done any particular thing, whether it’s buying T-bills or why we would live in a house in the mountains or why we took the trip to Lake Ronkonkoma, or whatever it was, the only rationale that ever rings with honesty is: “It seemed like a good idea at the time.” We’re really no smarter than cactus or wolverines or plankton; and the things we do, we always like to justify them, find logical reasons for them; and then you go to court later and the judge says, “Well, didn’t you know that it was doomed from the start?” I’m waiting for someone to say to the judge, “Because, schmuck, I’m no smarter than you.

From A Curmudgeon’s Garden of Love, Compiled and edited by Jon Winokur, p. 50 (1991).