But What If We're Wrong? Thinking About the Present As If It Were the Past

"I believe that the best books on a topic aren’t necessarily academic. You have to intermingle academic work with examples from the real world and hear from various decision-makers. Chuck Klosterman, who wouldn’t be considered an academic decision theorist, is a great writer who provides that viewpoint. But What If We’re Wrong? asks what it would mean if your priors were wrong. The central theme of the book is the human tendency to think that our current belief systems and worldviews are correct, which sounds tautologically true. No one would say, ‘My view of the world today is incorrect.’ But we should be saying that more often. Klosterman cites a few great examples of this. William Thomson, Baron Kelvin of Largs, also called Lord Kelvin, believed that the world was between 20 million and 400 million years old. This was considered a revolutionary insight at the time and entire scientific communities adopted this ‘fact’ as a basis to build their theories on. We now know it’s wrong. “Decision-making is even more difficult than people realize” Another quintessential example is the geocentric model of the universe. There were entire physics models and entire learning models based on the indisputable truth that the Earth was the center of the universe. If you have that view and assume that to be true, you can generate your own laws of physics based upon that. That’s scary. While Noise explores the idea that there are variations in the world, But What If We’re Wrong? explores the possibility that your priors are wrong. If so, you may have to reevaluate your priors and question the assumptions underlying your world. The quintessential example provided in the book is our current inability to merge quantum and Newtonian physics. Anyone who has studied physics knows the laws of gravity and has likely heard of quantum physics. The rules that govern each of these fields work, but they don’t interact with each other. That means something is wrong. A cohesive theory of physics requires merging these two that do not merge right now. We’re basing our understanding on these two different models that don’t work together. At some point, when one of these models is likely to be proved incorrect, that could mean an entire branch of physics will simply disappear. That’s crazy. It boils down to living with uncertainty and being okay with that. I think it’s perfectly reasonable and rational to be uncertain about things. It’s important for us to live our lives according to the best of our knowledge at that moment in time while recognizing that it may be wrong. Consider our changing attitudes towards health and nutrition. American perceptions of nutrition have changed dramatically over the last forty years and even in the years preceding that. First, fats were bad for you. Then trans-fats, then sugar, then carbs. Now who knows? People form very strong beliefs with regard to food. They believe absolutely in Atkins or keto, or whatever other diet. We must learn to live with the fact that we’re doing the best we can. We try to eat as healthily as possible. When the science changes and the experts tell us something else is better, we pivot. The Public Health Agency of Canada currently says that no amount of alcohol is safe to consume. Based on our current understanding of science, this is probably true. But from the 2000s until about six months ago, the guideline for an adult male was that as long as you’re consuming fewer than ten to fourteen drinks, you’re probably fine. Now the recommendation is that any amount above zero is bad for you. How do you logically equate the two? Should we consider the previous recommendation to be wrong and the current recommendation canon? Is it somewhere in between? The answer is that we’re uncertain. We’re going to keep learning new things and receiving new information. As we learn, we’ll go from there. When you were drinking fourteen drinks a week, if you started feeling really bad, perhaps you should have asked yourself whether the guidelines were wrong and go from there."