The Dream of Predictability and Control: I Don't Like It

It took me a long time to realize that there are people who not only believe that human social life is determined by a few, simple, underlying principles, but actually want that to be true. Paul Krugman, for example, told The New Yorker years ago that he was influenced as a young person by reading Asimov's Foundations series. I haven't read those books, but my friend described them as centering on a set of heroic historians "armed with math skills and big computers" who can see where their society is heading centuries ahead of time. Not surprisingly, when Krugman took up a history major at school, he was disappointed. So many details, no grand narrative.

Leaving aside the philosophical question of whether it is true or useful to think that way, let me speak from the crudest most basic emotive perspective. On a gut level, I don't like it. It seems boring and dull. Who wants to live out a life watching predictable people do predictable things you've already predicted? But it also it seems vaguely frightening. If it's other people who have the knowledge, their control over you is vast. Forget being the wily underdog in a fight: your wiles count for nothing against these people.

So gut-instinct-wise, I've always been on the side of unpredictability and complexity. One of my early feelings in this regard was in reaction to Gödel's Incompleteness Theorems. The Second Theorem says "no consistent system of axioms whose theorems can be listed by an effective procedure (i.e., an algorithm) is capable of proving all truths about the arithmetic of natural numbers. For any such consistent formal system, there will always be statements about natural numbers that are true, but that are unprovable within the system."

In other words: if you try to write down the basic assumptions of math, no matter how you choose them, there will always be statements that are not provable or disprovable from those basic assumptions.

It took me a long time to realize that there are people who find this result disappointing and even "nihilistic": that "because there were truths that weren’t provable, nothing mathematical was truly knowable." Because I have always found it not only beautiful but also inspiring and even comforting. So did Gödel, evidently. This biography review says he "drew optimistic inferences ... choosing to emphasize that there would always be new mathematical truths to discover."  

Admittedly, since Gödel probably thought the mathematical objects were "out there" waiting to be discovered, and I don't, our joy probably takes on a different tinge. Rather than "building new paths to the truths ... out there, waiting to be found," I'm more likely to think that when you're choosing fundamental axioms and none of them is more obvious than any other, you're getting into real human judgment and culture territory. And I love that sense that you go far enough into math, what you get is people being like "wait, do the cardinal infinities and the ordinal infinities relate to each other this way? or that other way?"

The past few years, there is a new version of the things I don't like: instead of "a few, simple, underlying principles," it's Big Data. Get enough data points, the thinking goes, and you're going to finally figure stuff out. Predictability, prediction, control. No longer will we have the forces of chaos and who-knows-what's-going-to-happen.

Leaving aside the philosophical question of whether it is true or useful to think that way, let me  let me speak from the crudest most basic emotive perspective. On a gut level, I don't like it. Like the "few, simple principles," thing, it seems boring but also frightening. But unlike the "few, simple principles" thing, it feels like a con: like a thing people will try to get you to believe, even when it isn't true.

Obviously I am pro-using data to solve problems. And I'm sure we will solve problems -- like how to treat cancer patients more effectively. Yes, bring it on, please.

But the weird excitement and optimism about how everything is going to change because now we've got a real handle on things -- that is what freaks me out. We don't, and thinking we do feels not only annoying and creepy, but also disturbing and menacing.