Chaos and Narratives

An essay on rounding errors, causality and innate biases

"Chaos Theory Explained" by tarotastic is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0.

Edward Norton Lorenz made an intellectual breakthrough in the 1960s that is very relevant to today to anyone who wants to think critically about the news in the 2020s. Social scientist Brian Klaas tells the tale in his excellent new book on causality, called Fluke (please see the link at the end).

Klaas says that Lorenz had always been obsessed by the weather as a child, but decided to study maths at university instead of meteorology. During World War II, the aspiring mathematician joined the army’s meteorological-forecasting unit and received advanced training in the subject before getting to work trying to predict the weather in the Pacific. At the time, though, meteorology barely gave better results than guesswork.

After the war, when computers were in their infancy, Lorenz created a simplified miniature world, with just 12 variables, to continue trying to hone his skills. He could play with the variables and study the simulations that emerged. One day, he decided to rerun a simulation. He assumed he would get the same results. However, the result was very different.

Lorenz was puzzled and spent a lot of time trying to work out why the second simulation was so different from the first. Eventually, he realised that his computer printouts rounded data to three decimal places. This meant that the initial conditions could be off by a tiny amount, which shouldn’t matter. They did, though.

Klaas says:

That led Lorenz to a realization that cracked the foundations of how we understand the world. Even in a clockwork universe with controlled conditions, miniscule changes can make an enormous difference. Just by raising the temperature one-millionth of a degree or lowering atmospheric pressure by a trillionth of a bar, the weather two months later could morph from a clear blue sky into a torrential downpour, even a hurricane. Lorenz’s findings created the concept of the butterfly effect, the notion that a butterfly flapping its wings in Brazil could trigger a tornado in Texas.

Lorenz’s findings became known as chaos theory. His insight has big implications. Although effect always follows cause like clockwork, small changes can make a huge difference. This means that our brains will perceive events as being uncertain and random, even if they are not.

To cope with a seemingly random or semi-random universe, our brains have evolved to over-detect patterns, as we discussed in a previous essay on intentionality bias. The evolutionary pressures for our ancestors were harder on false negatives (missing intentionality, which can kill us) than on false positives (seeing intentionality where there is none, which can be annoying).

In the words of evolutionary biologist Zack Blount, who Klaas quotes in the book:

I’m not sure it’s even possible to fully understand the universe, at least not for humans using brains that evolved to keep bipedal apes alive long enough to reproduce.

As social creatures, ancient humans developed storytelling as a way of bridging the gap between a universe that appears uncertain or random and our brains which are wired to expect intentionality. Klaas describes “hindsight bias” (or the “narrative fallacy”) to describe the way we still use these ancient storytelling techniques to make sense of a mysterious universe. Conspiracy theorists specialise in turning a set of unconnected data points into a coherent story, often featuring cartoon villains.

Fact-checkers and debunkers have an impossible task. Their job is to tell you - the storytelling animal - that there is no story. It’s a battle that’s already lost. Evolution determined the winner. When forced to choose between a good story or none at all, we grab the popcorn, mesmerized by a hidden plot.

I first got an inkling of the conflict between hard-to-understand events and our storytelling impulses in the mid-1990s, when I was cutting my teeth as a financial journalist in real-time news. My colleagues and I had to write market commentaries, which strived to explain why certain prices had gone up or down after millions of individual transactions.

As a geeky philosophy graduate, I was always concerned that the stories we were telling were massive over-simplifications at best; or anthropomorphising something as abstract as a market at worst. As a result, I decided to specialise in investigative reporting with a solid methodology in 2002 and moved over to becoming an editor specialising in data-backed insights last year.

Unfortunately, my words on us being suckers for a good story is as true for you, gentle reader, as it is for me, despite my career change and the subject matter of this blog. Like it or not, our brains are wired exactly the same as those of our friends who get over-excited about chemtrails, anti-vaccine disinformation and speculation about US President Joe Biden allegedly being replaced by body doubles.

The assassination attempt on former US President (and presidential candidate) Donald Trump in July was a case in point. It was immediately followed by two sets of conspiracy theories. Trump’s supporters immediately began speculating about the involvement of the Democrat party and/or the Secret Service; with an unlikely appearance from an interventionist deity in the nick of time. Trump’s opponents immediately began speculating about an improbable fake assassination in order to boost the candidate’s standing in the polls.

What is interesting about both sets of theories is that they went with the grain of our cognitive biases, which expect coherent stories. Both sides invented narratives to explain events that were hard to predict in advance; and both sets of yarns sought to provide comfort to pre-existing beliefs rather than challenging them.

Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt’s work on motivated reasoning (the way we rationalise our emotional responses) and moral foundations (the way we base our worldviews on deep intuitions) remains very relevant. Cognitive dissonance (an uncomfortable feeling we all get when faced by contradiction) is very pertinent too

Finally, although many of the themes in this blog are similar to those of a group of thinkers who call themselves “rationalists,” there is one big difference. I am very sceptical that we can ever truly escape our irrational tendencies. As soon as we think we have, our cognitive dissonance will kick in, and we will start to assume that all our decisions were correctly taken. We will claim to have a well-developed worldview, while our opponents are mere victims of their cognitive biases.

Smugness is a real risk for people who study the irrationality of other people. It is a little less likely for those of us who study our own irrationality (touch wood). The best we can do, I suspect, is to keep an eye on our own irrational tendencies. Striving to separate our worldview from our values can help; as can trying to suspend judgement when we hear stories that we feel should be true. However, both of these endeavours will always be an uphill battle. The comments are open. See you next week!

Previously on Sharpen Your Axe

Intentionality bias

Haidt on motivated reasoning and moral foundations

Cognitive dissonance

Separate your worldview from your values

Further Reading

Fluke: Chance, Chaos, and Why Everything We Do Matters by Brian Klaas

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