影響力 vs. 控制力：布萊恩·克拉斯談機率、混亂與人生抉擇 (繁體中文)

Introduction

In this article, we delve into the fascinating insights shared by Brian Klaas in his book "Fluke: Chance, Chaos, and Why Everything We Do Matters." Klaas challenges our conventional understanding of the world, arguing that the smallest moments can have the largest impacts and that chance, randomness, and chaos play a much bigger role in our lives and societies than we realize.

Part One: Understanding Flukes

The Core Argument of "Fluke"

• Klaas's book explores chaos theory, chance, randomness, and how arbitrary and accidental forces divert and change our lives and societies.

• He argues that we tend to believe in a neat and tidy story for why things happen, but when we look closer, we find that this is not true.

• "Fluke" investigates these ideas and tries to flip our traditional worldview on its head, arguing that the arbitrary, accidental, and chaos of life matter more than we imagine.

What is a Fluke?

• A fluke is often seen as a lucky or chance event that changes the world, but Klaas uses it in a broader sense for anything that is contingent.

• Contingent refers to the idea that a small change can have a profound impact, like a forking path.

• Chaos theory tells us that there is sensitivity to initial conditions, meaning that any small change can lead to very big effects over time.

• This is why we can't predict the weather beyond 7 to 10 days.

The Personal Story of Brian Klaas

• Klaas shares a personal story about his great-grandfather's first wife, who had a mental breakdown and took the lives of her four young children and herself.

• His great-grandfather remarried, and Klaas realized that his existence was predicated on this tragic event.

• This shows how flukes work and how the ripple effects of our decisions can have profound consequences that we don't anticipate.

Contingent Convergence

• Klaas argues that the nature of change is contingent convergence, where small flukes may divert the trajectory, but once on a new path, the order of life takes hold.

• Solutions that work tend to win, and there is order within chaos.

• However, contingent events can still cause significant changes, like a car accident that changes someone's life path.

A Concrete Example of a Fluke

• Klaas shares the story of Mr. and Mrs. H.M. Stimson, who took a vacation to Kyoto in 1926 and fell in love with the city.

• 19 years later, Mr. Stimson became America's Secretary of War and was overseeing the decision of where to drop the first atomic bomb.

• The target committee recommended Kyoto, but Stimson convinced President Truman to take it off the list because he didn't want to destroy his "pet city."

• The first atomic bomb went to Hiroshima instead of Kyoto, and the second bomb was supposed to go to Kokura but ended up in Nagasaki due to a passing cloud.

• This shows how a 19-year-old vacation and a passing cloud can have a huge impact on history.

Invisible Pivot Points in Life

• Klaas argues that we often think about big obvious pivot points in our lives, like choosing a college or a partner, but we don't think about the invisible pivots that we don't know could have existed.

• The people of Kokura and Kyoto almost got incinerated, but for a passing cloud and a 19-year-old vacation, respectively.

• We are completely oblivious to these invisible pivots until a major event makes them obvious.

The Snooze Button Effect and "Sliding Doors"

• Klaas uses the snooze button effect and the movie "Sliding Doors" to illustrate how a small change can have a big impact on our lives.

• We only experience one version of reality, but there are infinite possible paths that our lives could have taken.

• Sometimes, consequential events make us confront these invisible pivots in really upsetting and tragic ways.

The Question of Whether Everything Happens for a Reason

• Klaas argues that we are told that we are in control of our path through life and that everything happens for a reason, but both of these things are untrue.

• We control nothing but influence everything, and this illusion of control causes us to misunderstand the world and make mistakes.

• A lot of things just happen, and when we look at the causal chain of events, it is not neat and tidy.

• We are told to ignore the noise and focus on the signal, but the noise is where many of the most important and consequential events in life take place.

The History of Ideas and the Illusion of Order

• Klaas argues that the history of ideas is a history of trying to cram the complexity and messiness of the world into a neat and tidy story for why things happen.

• This is partly derived from religion and the idea of a divine plan, but it also persists in science and the clockwork models of physics.

• We have always tried to find an explanation that fits everything into an ordered and rational framework, but this is a mistake.

• We need to accept the uncertainty, complexity, and randomness of the world and stop pretending that it doesn't work this way.

The Evolution of Our Brains and the Illusion of Pattern Detection

• Klaas argues that our brains have evolved to make sense of patterns because it is advantageous to survive to over-detect patterns.

• This means that when random or seemingly random things happen to us, we are allergic to the explanation that it was just arbitrary.

• We stitched together a neat and tidy story from A to B, but this is a problem because when stuff happens to us that we don't have control over, we mislearn the lesson.

• We need to understand that we are constantly reshaping the future and that every act we have has unforeseen ripple effects.

The Delusion of Individualism

• Klaas argues that Western modernity has an obsession with the delusion of individualism, which is the idea that we are in control of our own lives and that our lives unfold the way we want them to.

• This is a comforting idea, but it is not true.

• We are all connected, and our lives are constantly being affected by the actions of people we will never see and never meet.

• The pandemic is a great example of how a single person can have a huge impact on the lives of billions of people.

The Importance of Science in Understanding Flukes

• Klaas argues that science can help us understand the nature of flukes, especially evolutionary biology.

• Evolutionary biology tells us that the outgrowths of life have come through an unbroken chain of causes and effects.

• The debate between contingency and convergence in evolutionary biology is useful for understanding change in our own lives and societies.

• Contingency is where a small change occurs and everything ends up different, while convergence is where there is a set of order because certain things work.

• The snooze button effect is an example of how contingency and convergence can play out in our lives.

The Butterfly Effect and the Limits of Prediction

• The origin story of chaos theory goes back to the 1960s with Edward Norton Lorenz, who discovered that a tiny rounding error in a computer model could lead to a completely different outcome.

• This is the origin of the butterfly effect, which is the idea that a butterfly flapping its wings can create a hurricane many days later.

• This helps us understand why physics is showing us that the nature of change is contingent on small events.

• We don't have complete control over the world, and the world is uncontrollable.

Laplace's Demon and the Limits of Knowledge

• Laplace's demon is an idea from Newtonian mechanics that suggests that if we had a perfect intellect that could understand everything, we would be able to see the future as clearly as we saw the past.

• However, this is not the case because it is impossible for an intellect to know everything about every atom in the universe.

• Chaos theory and quantum mechanics also show the limitations of our ability to forecast and predict the future.

Part Two: Understanding Complexity

The Features of Complex Systems

• Complex systems involve diverse parts that are interconnected, interact with each other, and adapt to each other.

• Human society is a complex system, and old models that ignore this are going to be very bad at understanding change on human timescales.

The Sandpile Model and Self-Organized Criticality

• The sandpile model is a subset of self-organized criticality, which is the idea that a system will tend to move towards an evolution over time.

• The sandpile model shows how a single grain of sand can cause the entire pile to collapse, which explains the nonlinear dynamics of the system.

• Modern society is on the edge of chaos, and we are prone to avalanches.

• We need to build a slightly smaller sandpile to make our social system more resilient.

The Concept of Basins of Attraction

• A basin of attraction is where a system will tend to move towards an evolution over time.

• Traffic on the highway is an example of a basin of attraction, where the speed limit is the equilibrium that the system evolves towards.

• However, modern basins of attraction are on the edge of chaos, and we are prone to disasters.

• We need to prioritize efficiency and optimization slightly less and build a more resilient system.

Black Swans and the Limits of Prediction

• A black swan is a highly consequential rare event that was unpredictable.

• People interpret black swans differently, and some people say that the pandemic was a black swan.

• Critical slowing down is a new branch of science that can provide an early warning system for black swan events.

• We need to understand that the systems we have designed have made it more likely that black swans will hit us and that the consequences will be larger.

The Research Model of Social Change

• When we think about social change, we have been drawn to very simple explanations, but the world is far more complex than it's ever been.

• The first assumption is that there is a clear cut cause behind everything, but this is not always true.

• The second assumption is that if you understand the components of an individual system, you will understand the entire system, but this is not true for complex systems.

• The third assumption is that if something was a pattern of cause and effect in the past, it will also be a pattern of cause and effect in the present or in the future, but this is not true for rapidly changing systems.

Linear and Non-Linear Dynamics

• Linear dynamics is the idea that the proportion of a cause is directly related to the outcome that occurs, but the way the world actually works is non-linear.

• Complex systems theory and the world of complexity science understand non-linear dynamics and try to incorporate it into their models.

• However, linear models are still used in a lot of social research, and this is a huge mistake.

The Silos of Knowledge and the Future of Social Research

• The silos of knowledge in university research are holding us back from understanding change.

• Complex systems theory connects the dots between different disciplines and fields of knowledge and brings them together to understand change.

• This requires non-linear thinking and the idea that small changes can have huge impacts.

The Upside to Uncertainty

The Cosmic Accident of Existence

• Klaas realizes that he doesn't think he has a cosmic purpose and that he is an accident in a short sense and a cosmic accident in a long sense.

• This is something that a lot of people have a hard time accepting, but Klaas thinks there is significant upside to it.

• The idea of certainty is actually really awful, and the serendipity of life is where a lot of the joy comes from.

Letting Ourselves Off the Hook

• Klaas thinks that the idea that everything happens for a reason and that we are in control of our lives is a terrible idea.

• When something bad happens to us, we tend to blame ourselves, but this is often not our fault.

• We should take less credit for our successes and less blame for our failures because we are part of a system that we don't fully understand.

Enjoying Life and Making a Difference

• Klaas thinks that the best thing to do is to enjoy life and try to make other people's lives a bit better.

• We should not worry about having a grand purpose and should just focus on the present moment.

The Global Instability of Modern Life

The Inverted Dynamics of Existence

• Modern humans experience a different world and a different dynamic of our existence than anyone who has ever come before us.

• We have flipped the dynamics of how our lives unfold, from local instability and global stability to local stability and global instability.

The Hyperconnected and Hyper-Optimized World

• Our world is hyperconnected and hyper-optimized, which makes it more prone to shocks and flukes.

• We have engineered a volatile world that is upended by flukes much more than it used to be.

• We need to focus a little bit less on optimization and a little bit more on resilience.

The World of Self-Help and the Illusion of Control

The Self-Help Industry and the Lie of Control

• The self-help industry is pervaded by simple life hacks that promise to bring wealth and joy to your life if you just do X.

• This is a lie because the world is far more complex than that, and there are many factors that contribute to our success and happiness.

The Importance of Taking Responsibility

• Klaas thinks that we should strive to make our lives as good as we possibly can, but we should not take so much credit for our success and so much blame for our failure.

• We should not believe the lies of the self-help industry that tell us that we can control our lives and that if we don't, it's our own fault.

The Question of Free Will

The Physicalist View of the Mind

• Klaas is a physicalist, which means that he believes that the substance in his brain is the thing that is making decisions.

• He doesn't believe in a disembodied soul or a magical property within his head that is different from his brain.

The Three Main Camps of Free Will

• The first camp is libertarian free will, which is the idea that we have an independent ability to determine what our brain decides to do.

• The second camp is compatibilism, which is the idea that we can have determinism and free will at the same time.

• The third camp is hard determinism, which is the idea that there is no free will because everything is determined by a chain of causes and effects.

The Problem of Quantum Mechanics

• Quantum mechanics is the study of the behavior of matter and energy at the atomic and subatomic level.

• Some interpretations of quantum mechanics suggest that there is some undiluted randomness at the atomic and subatomic level, which could mean that the world is not deterministic.

• However, we don't fully understand the meaning of quantum mechanics, and there are different interpretations of it.

The Importance of Understanding Free Will

• Klaas thinks that understanding free will is important because it can help us understand the nature of causation and the way the world works.

• It can also help us make sense of our own lives and the decisions that we make.

The Myth of Genius

The Correlation Between Wealth and Talent

• Klaas argues that the correlation between wealth and talent is not as strong as we think.

• Some human traits are normally distributed, while others are not, and wealth is one of the traits that is not normally distributed.

• This means that in order to produce the long tail of wealth, you need to have some serious luck.

The Role of Luck in Success

• Klaas shares a study that shows how luck plays a much bigger role in success than we realize.

• In the study, the richest person in the fake world is not someone of extreme talent but someone who is marginally above average on talent who happens to get lucky.

• This is the way the world works, and we need to understand that luck is an important factor in our lives.

The Overconfidence of Billionaires

• Klaas argues that billionaires are often overconfident and believe that they are geniuses because they have been successful in one area.

• However, their success is often due to a combination of talent, luck, and other factors, and their genius may not be transferable to other areas.

• We need to be more critical of the claims of billionaires and not assume that they are always right.

The Rise of Conspiracy Theories

The Psychology of Conspiracy Theories

• Klaas argues that the modern world is full of conspiratorial thinking, where people see an event and come up with an extraordinary story to explain it.

• The problem with this is that it is often wrong, and sometimes things just sort of randomly happen.

• Our brains are driven to find explanations that fit a pattern and a narrative, and conspiracy theories are often very good stories.

The Three Main Cognitive Biases of Conspiracy Theories

• The first cognitive bias is magnitude bias, which is the idea that any big event must have a big cause.

• The second cognitive bias is narrative bias, which is the idea that we make sense of the world through storytelling.

• The third cognitive bias is teleological bias, which is the idea that everything happens for a reason.

The Information Pipeline and the Rise of Conspiracy Theories

• Klaas argues that the information pipelines that we use to get knowledge about the world have completely shifted, from few-to-many communication to many-to-many communication.

• This means that the barrier to entry for crazy ideas is significantly lower than it used to be, and people are routinely exposed to conspiratorial thinking in their daily lives.

• This combination of the information pipelines shifting and our evolutionary predisposition to storytelling and pattern detection is a perfect storm for the rise of conspiracy theories.

The Importance of Debunking Conspiracy Theories

• Klaas argues that debunking conspiracy theories is really difficult because people are evolutionarily predisposed to believe stories and are allergic to explanations that involve randomness or small, seemingly unimportant changes.

• However, it is important to try to debunk conspiracy theories because they can have a significant impact on our lives and society.

• The best way to debunk conspiracy theories is to engage with people on the terms that they understand the world through and to provide detailed fact checks that grapple with the parts of the conspiracy theory that make the good story and explain them in clear ways to show why it is incorrect.