Tag: Reality

Violence and Convenient Mysticism

Violence and Convenient Mysticism

Posted on by jabittan
Mysticism in the United States doesn’t really feel like it lends itself to violence. When we think of mystics, we probably think of someone close to a shaman, or maybe a modern mystic whose aesthetic is very homeopathic. Mystics don’t seem like they would be the most violent people today, but in the past, mysticism was a convenient motivating factor for violence.
 
 
In his book The Better Angels of Our Nature, Steven Pinker describes the way that mysticism lends itself to violence by writing, “the brain has evolved to ferret out hidden powers in nature, including those that no one can see. Once you start rummaging around in the realm of the unverifiable there is considerable room for creativity, and accusations of sorcery are often blended with self-serving motives.”
 
 
There are two important factors to recognize in this quote from Pinker, and both are often overlooked and misunderstood. First, our brains look for causal links between events. They are very good and very natural at thinking causally and pinpointing causation, however, as Daniel Kahneman wrote in Thinking Fast and Slow, the brain can often fall into cognitive fallacies and misattribute causation. Mystical thinking is a result of misplaced causal reasoning. It is important that we recognize that our brains can see causation that doesn’t truly exist and lead us to wrong conclusions.
 
 
The second important factor that we often manage to overlook is our own self-interest. As Kevin Simler and Robin Hanson explain in The Elephant in the Brain, our self-interest plays a much larger role in much of our decision-making and behavior than we like to admit. When combined with mysticism, self-interest can be dangerous.
 
 
If you have an enemy who boasts that they are special and offers mystical explanations for their special powers, then it suddenly becomes convenient to justify violence against your enemy. You don’t need actual proof of any wrong doing, you don’t need actual proof of their danger to society, you just need to convince others that their mystical powers could be dangerous, and you now have a convenient excuse for disposing of those who you dislike. You can promote your own self-interest without regard to reality if you can harness the power of mystical thinking.
 
 
Pinker explains that the world is becoming a more peaceful place in part because mystical thinking is moving to smaller and smaller corners of the world. Legal systems don’t recognize mystical explanations and justifications for behaviors and crimes. Empirical facts and verifiable evidence has superseded mysticism in our evaluations and judgments of crime and the use of violence. By moving beyond mysticism we have created systems, structures, and institutions that foster more peace and less violence among groups of people.
Shepherds

Shepherds

Posted on by jabittan
“It was no accident that kings and prophets styled themselves as shepherds and likened the way they and the gods cared for their people to a shepherd’s care for his flock,” writes Yuval Noah Harari in his book Sapiens.
 
 
I don’t like bucolic narratives and I don’t like the way that we equate people we don’t like with sheep in modern American political discussions. Bucolic romanticism requires a reductionist way of looking at history, and equating people to sheep is reductionist way of viewing anyone we disagree with and dislike. As Harari’s quote to open this post shows, both styles of rhetoric are much older than their current usage in modern American politics.
 
 
What Harari is saying in the paragraph that the opening quote came from is that some agrarian societies and ancient (and not too ancient) human civilizations treated their domesticated animals very well. Sheep were well cared for, in order to get the most wool possible from them. War horses and workhorses were well cared for, again for the benefit of humans. And even today we pamper our pets as if they were our children. The narrative of the shepherd comes from the care with which humans are capable of treating animals under their protection. A shepherd is a benevolent god who directs his flock to greener pastures and protects them from wild beasts and the evils of nature. Bucolic imagery calls up a simplistic time when humans lived in nature, protected and shielded from the evils of modernity. Combining these two perspectives allows people to feel a child-like protection under the watchful eye of a benevolent leader while we live in a natural peace and harmony with the planet.
 
 
I think the narrative associated with both narratives is deeply troubling, and untrue. David Deutsch was recently on Tyler Cowen’s podcast, Conversations with Tyler, and argued that the belief that we are living in a simulation is no different than believing that Zeus is the supreme god who directs the course of the world. His argument is that if we live in a simulation, there is a barrier at which we can no longer gain more information about the universe. A Simulation, he argues, is the same as a religion where there is a barrier at which people cannot know more about their god, the course of the universe, and why things happen. Invoking the imagery of a shepherd, to me, seems to be exactly the same. A leader comes along, invokes such a message, and says to the people they wish to lead that only they know how to help them, that there is a barrier which normal people cannot cross in terms of knowledge for what is good for them and how to live their lives. The shepherd seems benevolent, kind, and praiseworthy, but really, they are dehumanizing people. They are making statements that there is knowledge and information that only they can know and appropriately utilize, and they are hiding that from the masses. The same process happens in reverse when we call people sheep. We deny their humanity and assume they are non-thinking morons without preferences who are easily misled.
 
 
Bucolic imagery can be just as pernicious as the ideas and narratives surrounding the shepherd or equating people to sheep. Just as the idea that there is some boundary on knowledge which normal people cannot surpass, the idea of a bucolic nature to which we should return or maintain is equally flawed and inaccurate. We romanticize a past and a ‘natural’ way of living that never existed. We don’t fully understand what life with nature has been like for the billions of humans that evolved before our modern times. We fail to see the diseases, the dangers, the struggles, and the deaths of humans living in pre-modern times. We call up this idea to put people in a romantic and child-like state of mind, reassuring them that someone else will take care of them and protect them. It is a narrative that combines well with the narrative of the shepherd to create a false view of reality that we can find comforting, and that we may find the motivated reasoning to believe. Ultimately, however, I think bucolic thinking and the narratives of sheep and the shepherd should be tossed aside and discounted if we want to think more accurately and rationally. 
Dual Realities - Yuval Noah Harari - Sapiens - Joe Abittan

Dual Realities

Posted on by jabittan
A little while back I had a post about personal responsibility where I ultimately suggested that we live in a sort of dual reality. On the one hand, I suggested that we believe that we are personally responsible for our own outcomes, and that we work hard to put ourselves in positions to succeed. But on the other hand, I suggested that when we view other people and where they are in life we reduce the role of personal responsibility and see people as victims of circumstance. For viewing other people, I suggested we weigh outside factors more than internal factors, the opposite of how I encourage us to think about our own lives. This dual reality that I suggested felt strange, but I argued that it should work because it is something we do all the time in life.
In the book Sapiens, Yuval Noah Harari suggests that viewing dual realities is central to our humanity. In fact, Harari would argue that being able to perceive dual (sometimes conflicting realities) helped drive our evolution to become modern Homo sapiens. He writes, “ever since the Cognitive Revolutions, Sapiens have thus been living in a dual reality. On the one hand, the objective reality of rivers, trees and lions; and on the other hand, the imagined reality of gods, nations and corporations.” We are adept at seeing the objective reality, layering on narratives and myths, and then inhabiting a new reality that is shaped by both the objectivity underlying our narrative and the mystical nature of the narratives we create. The objective reality is incredibly complicated and our powerful brains are not enough to make sense of that objective reality independently. They need narratives and stories that can help simplify and bring order to the chaos of objective reality.
The question, as Harari ends up reaching – and as I hopelessly found out with my initial blog post on personal responsibility – is how to get people to all adopt the same myths in order to cooperate and bring about the best possible outcomes. “Much of history,” writes Harari, “revolves around this question: how does one convince millions of people to believe particular stories about gods, or nations, or limited liability companies?” My blog post, which ended with a lukewarm suggestion of viewing personal responsibility differently based on whether you were viewing yourself or others, is certainly not going to influence millions of people to adopt a narrative that makes sense from one perspective but simultaneously requires a contradictory perspective. Yet nevertheless, humans throughout history have been able to get people to believe such stories.
In the history of human myths, deities have been all knowing and all powerful, yet humans still have free will and can make unpredictable choices that leave deities baffled and angered. In some myths, humans can influence the weather and climate, change the course of rivers and streams, but gods and spirits are the ones responsible for the productivity of such natural resources. And corporations can exist, dependent upon and comprised of individuals and material objects, yet those individuals are exempt from liability when things go wrong and the individuals don’t actually seem to own any of the material goods of the company. These contradictions exist and can make our brains hurt if we focus on them too much, but we accept them and move on despite the apparent fictions and contradictions. How this happens is beyond the scope of a single blog post, and really a bigger question that what Harari fully answers and explains in Sapiens.
More on Modern Myths - Yuval Noah Harari - Sapiens - Joe Abittan

More on Modern Myths

Posted on by jabittan
In the book Sapiens, Yuval Noah Harari writes, “People easily acknowledge that primitive tribes cement their social order by believing in ghosts and spirits, and gathering each full moon to dance together around the campfire. What we fail to appreciate is that our modern institutions function on exactly the same basis.”
My post yesterday gave several examples of modern myths that we believe in, even though we don’t recognize them as such. Harari focuses on the things in our world that are not tangible, but nevertheless are agreed to and recognized by humans across the globe. Many of our institutions are based on little more than trust and agreement, but those two factors, shared among enough people, are able to create shared myths. These shared myths allow us to make real, tangible objects. They allow us to organize and manage huge numbers of people. And they also allow us to come together, enjoy being social humans, and to have shared stories and legends.
I think the easiest way to see how modern humans are not much different than primitive tribes in terms of myths and community cementation is within sports, especially college sports. We will root for a team, often unreasonably given a team’s performance, and come together in unison to yell special chants meant to boost our team’s performance while hindering the performance of the other team. After the game we will discuss miracle plays, debate the performance of gifted, sometimes god-like individuals, and we will share the experience of being present to watch the special ritual of a comeback win or buzzer beater. The part of humanity which brought primitive tribes together around a campfire for bonding is still on full display in sports stadiums and college towns around the country.
But Harari goes further in his book than sports fanatics when exploring institutions, human organizations, and myths. Yesterday’s post referenced corporations, nations, and even human rights as being myths that humans have developed to bring people together around something intangible. Harari explains that human rights have been invented and agreed upon, that you cannot find human rights inside a person the way you can find lungs, bones, or livers. They exist because we agree that they do, much like the deities of ancient civilizations.
Harari also compares lawyers to shamans in his book. A corporate lawyer tells a story by making an argument from a certain point of view. Their words, how they phrase, present, and describe certain actions and situations, can ultimately change the reality of the world. It is not unreasonable, even if it is a creative stretch, to compare a modern lawyer to an ancient shaman who could mutter special incantations to cure the sick or bring rain.
What Harari is ultimately trying to argue is that the myths which helped kickstart societies and human cooperation never really left our human species. The myths changed over time, perhaps became less mystical and less magical, but still exist. We still rely on rituals and hidden forces to bring humans together, but we have shaped them as specific institutions that feel more grounded in reason and rationality than the institutions present in ancient myths. Ultimately, we still depend on stories to hold our societies together and connect millions and billions of humans peacefully and cooperatively.
Cooperation Through Beliefs in Common Myths

Cooperation Through Beliefs in Common Myths

Posted on by jabittan
“Large numbers of strangers can cooperate successfully by believing in common myths,” writes Yuval Noah Harari in his book Sapiens. Outside of insects, and I don’t know enough to write any thoughts on insects, it is rare to see any animals cooperating in large groups of more than a few dozen individuals. There is evidence that ancient human tribes used to consist of upwards of 150 to 250 individuals, and those large tribes were outliers within the animal world. Few animals cooperate in large groups, and outside humans (and those insects I don’t understand) no animals effectively cooperate across millions or billions of individuals. Many animals migrate together and schools of fish will swim together, but they seem to largely be moving and reacting to the world around them as a pack, and not deliberately coordinating their efforts and actions in a social manner.
As social beings, humans have figured out how to coordinate actions and lives together between huge numbers of individuals. As Harari’s quote suggests, we have done this largely through the invention of myths. The myths which hold us together come in a lot of varieties. We have had myths about deities, myths about certain family lineages, and myths about special objects that can be used as trade. Myths create stories that we can build upon to form trust between each other. They help us establish institutions that can be used as the foundation for modern societies. Myths allow us to invent something that didn’t exist before, doesn’t truly exist in the real world, and make it real across the minds of billions of people so that we can orient ourselves and our action accordingly.
The kinds of myths that Harari discusses, and that I reference above, are not just myths about gods and creators of the universe. Those myths exist and can clearly give humans the feeling that they have a reason for existing, but we also have more tangible myths that drive our society. Harari compares modern corporations, humans rights, and nations, and currencies to myths. The company you work for isn’t a real thing, it is just an organization that we agree exists because it has a name and because some employees come together to organize their efforts under that name. The organization pays you money that isn’t tangible. Even if you take physical money out of the bank, that money isn’t useful on its own. We rely on and believe in myths about corporations and currencies, and those myths consequentially help us live in a complex world. Going even further, Harari explains that even nations are little more than myths. There is no clear reason why the United States has to exist between what we call Canada and what we call Mexico. We all agree that it does exist, but only because history has decided it does. And if you take an American, who has human rights that the government and society has decided exist, and autopsy them, you won’t find human rights. They don’t exist the way a stomach or liver exist, they are myths that help us organize our society.
Humans have large brains and create myths. Because we do, we are able to live in huge numbers, coordinating the actions, movements, and behaviors of humans across the globe. Myths are in some ways a super power that has allowed humans to become the most powerful species on the planet.
Shooting Accuracy & Movie Expectations

Shooting Accuracy & Movie Expectations

Posted on by jabittan
The other day I started a blog post with the main idea being that movies about war give us a false impression of what it really is like to fight in a war. The post was based on a quote from Mary Roach’s book Grunt, but it got a bit too off topic from the original contnext of the quote so I scrapped the post and re-wrote it. Today’s quote from Grunt allows me to revisit the idea in a more direct way. In the book Roach writes, “The average police officer taking a qualifying test on a shooting range scores 85 to 92 percent, [Bruce] Siddle told me, but in actual firefights hits the target only 18 percent of the time.”
In movies, the good guys never miss the target during practice. In the actual battles their accuracy is diminished, but definitely much higher than 18 percent. Their misses also usually seem to be on point, but the bad guy gets lucky by a passing car, an exceptional dodge, or some type of near-magic shield to protect themselves. For the good guys, missed shots are not so much missed shots as much as lucky blocks for the bad guy. The bad guys of course can’t hit anything and might as well not even have weapons.
The reason why I think this is important is because it presents a false sense of what it is like to be in active shooter situations. In our minds we all like to picture ourselves as the hero who can’t miss a shot and who can’t be hit by the bad guy’s bullets. In reality, trained police officers only manage to hit targets in firefights 18% of the time. Research shows that states with Stand Your Ground laws, which provide legal immunity to individuals who defend themselves with lethal force if attacked or within their own homes, have higher rates of men who die from gunshot wounds. The men who die are not the intruders or attackers, but the men who chose to stand their ground. Certainly these men thought they had a better than 18% chance of hitting their target and thought they would be the hero who couldn’t be hit by the bad guy’s bullets.
Public policy is often shaped by narrative more than fact, and our popular movies influence that narrative, even if we know the movies are impossible fictions. When we tell a narrative that assumes we can stand our ground and hit our target in a firefight, when we assume that we need concealed carry weapons so that we could protect ourselves in an active shooter situation, we are basing our narrative on a fiction of how effective we would be with a firearm. Reality suggests that untrained individuals will hit their target less than 18% of the time, if that is the hit rate of trained police. In a world that wasn’t influenced by movies, we would assume that concealed carry and stand your ground laws were pointless, because we would have a terrible chance of defending ourselves and stopping an active shooter. This is why it is important that we realize how far movies are from reality. It is important that we spend more time accurately understanding how humans respond in high stress situations, like active shooter events, and develop policies that are reasonable given the fact that trained police officers don’t hit anything when they fire their guns in active shooter situations. We can change the way the public responds to such events and possibly even the way police respond.
Pessimist, Optimist, or Just Mist? - George Herriman, Michael Tisserand, Joe Abittan

Pessimist, Optimist, or Just Mist?

Posted on by jabittan
In his biography of George Herriman, author Michael Tisserand included numerous comics from Herriman to demonstrate his artistic skill, wit, and general approach to comics. One of the book’s chapters started with the written words from one of Herriman’s Krazy Kat comics from April 23, 1921, and stood out to me:
 
 
“Ignatz: Now, “Krazy,” do you look upon the future as a pessimist, or an optimist?
Krazy: I look upon it just as mist–”
 
 
I really enjoyed this line of dialogue when I first read it in Tisserand’s book, and still get a chuckle as I read it now. It is a witty pun, an accurate reflection of our predicament with looking toward the future, and feels entirely fresh 100 years after it was written.
 
 
I feel like I notice false dichotomies everywhere. It is easy to see the world in black or white and tempting to live in a world defined with dichotomies. They make our lives easier by slotting things into neat categories and helping us reduce the amount of thinking we have to do. Unfortunately, living a life that accepts false dichotomies is dangerous and deluded.
 
 
The false dichotomy that the comic pulls apart is the false dichotomy of pessimism versus optimism. If pressed, probably all of us could say we were more of an optimist or pessimist, but it is probably not very accurate to really define ourselves as one way or the other. At any given time we may be more or less optimistic or pessimistic on any number of factors and our views for any of them could change at any moment. We may also be deeply pessimistic about one important area, but very optimistic in another area with no clear reconciliation between those two optimistic and pessimistic feelings. For example, you could be very optimistic about the direction of the economy, but pessimistic about the long-term sustainability of current economic practices given climate change. It is hard to pin yourself as either pessimistic or optimistic overall regarding the economy in this situation.
 
 
Some of us may try to avoid this false dichotomy with a trite response that we are neither an optimist or pessimist, but a realist (or nihilist or other -ist). This dodge acknowledges that the distinction between optimist and pessimist isn’t necessarily real, but fails to provide a legitimate alternative. Is there any exclusionary factor between a realist and an optimist or pessimist? A nihilist might be optimistic that society is going to collapse, even if they feel pessimistic about what will happen to them. My suspicion is that people who call themselves realists simply want to avoid looking like they are optimistic or pessimistic without merit, and as if they base their optimism or pessimism off data and not vague feelings.
 
 
I think that Krazy in the comic is addressing the dichotomy in the most reasonable way possible, by acknowledging the difficulties of predicting the future and accepting that he is overwhelmed with the mist. His answer rejects the false dichotomy of optimism and pessimism and embraces the conflicting factors that might make us happy or sad, financially well off or ruined, or lead to any number of potential outcomes. Rather than trying to hold positive or negative views regarding our futures, the best thing to do is admit that we don’t really know what will happen, but to try to place ourselves in a position where we can have the best outcomes no matter what takes place, even if all we see is mist.
The Representation Problem

The Representation Problem

Posted on by jabittan
In The Book of Why Judea Pearl lays out what computer scientists call the representation problem by writing, “How do humans represent possible worlds in their minds and compute the closest one, when the number of possibilities is far beyond the capacity of the human brain?”
 
 
In the Marvel Movie Infinity War, Dr. Strange looks forward in time to see all the possible outcomes of a coming conflict. He looks at 14,000,605 possible futures. But did Dr. Strange really look at all the possible futures out there? 14 million is a convenient big number to include in a movie, but how many possible outcomes are there for your commute home? How many people could change your commute in just the tiniest way? Is it really a different outcome if you hit a bug while driving, if you were stopped at 3 red lights and not 4, or if you had to stop at a crosswalk for a pedestrian? The details and differences in the possible worlds of our commute home can range from the miniscule to the enormous (the difference between you rolling your window down versus a meteor landing in the road in front of you). Certainly with all things considered there are more than 14 million possible futures for your drive home.
 
 
Somehow, we are able to live our lives and make decent predictions of the future despite the enormity of possible worlds that exist ahead of us. Somehow we can represent possible worlds in our minds and determine what future world is the closest one to the reality we will experience. This ability allows us to plan for retirement, have kids, go to the movies, and cook dinner. If we could not do this, we could not drive down the street, could not walk to a neighbors house, and couldn’t navigate a complex social world. But none of us are sitting in a green glow with our head spinning in circles like Dr. Strange as we try to view all the possible worlds in front of us. What is happening in our mind to do this complex math?
 
 
Pearl argues that we solve this representation problem not through magical foresight, but through an intuitive understanding of causal structures. We can’t predict exactly what the stock market is going to do, whether a natural disaster is in our future, or precisely how another person will react to something we say, but we can get a pretty good handle on each of these areas thanks to causal reasoning.
 
 
We can throw out possible futures that have no causal structures related to the reality we inhabit.  You don’t have to think of a world where Snorlax is blocking your way home, because your brain recognizes there is no causal plausibility of a Pokémon character sleeping in the road. Our brain easily discards the absurd possible futures and simultaneous recognizes the causal pathways that could have major impacts on how we will live. This approach gradually narrows down the possibilities to a level where we can make decisions and work with a level of information that our brain (or computers) can reasonably decipher. We also know, without having to do the math, that rolling our window down or hitting a bug is not likely to start a causal pathway that materially changes the outcome of our commute home. The same goes for being stopped at a few more red lights or even stopping to pick up a burrito. Those possibilities exist, but they don’t materially change our lives and so our brain can discard them from the calculation. This is the kind of work our brains our doing, Pearl would argue, to solve the representation problem.

Objective Reality, Rationality, & Shared Worlds - Joe Abittan

Objective Reality, Rationality, & Shared Worlds

Posted on by jabittan
The idea of an objective reality has been under attack for a while, and I have even been part of the team attacking that objective reality. We know that we have a limited ability to sense and experience the world around us. We know that bats, sharks, and bees experience phenomena that we are blind to. We can’t know that the color red that I experience is exactly like the color red that you experience. Given our lack of sense, the fact that physical stimuli are translated into electrical brain impulses, and that there appears to be plenty of subjectivity in how we experience the same thing, an objective reality doesn’t really seem possible. We seemingly all live within a world created by many subjective measures within our own brains.
But is this idea really accurate? I recently completed Steven Pinker’s book Enlightenment Now in which he argues that reason depends on objectivity and that our efforts toward rationality and reason demonstrate that there is some form of objectivity toward which we are continually working. The very act of attempting to think rationally about our world and how we understand the universe demonstrates that we are striving to understand some sort of objective commonality. A quote from The Book of Why by Judea Pearl seems to support Pinker’s assertion. Pearl writes:
“We experience the same world and share the same mental model of its causal structure. … Our shared mental models bind us together into communities. We can therefore judge closeness not by some metaphysical notion of similarity but by how much we must take apart and perturb our shared model before it satisfies a given hypothetical condition that is contrary to fact.”
Pearl wrote this paragraph while discussing the human ability to imagine alternative possibilities (specifically writing about the sentence Joe’s headache would have gone away if he had taken aspirin). The sentence acknowledges a reality (Joe has a headache) and proposes a different reality that doesn’t actually exist (Joe no longer has a headache because he took aspirin). It is this ability to envision different worlds which forms the basis of our causal interpretations of the world, but it also reveals a shared world in which we live and from which we can imagine different possible worlds. It hints at an objective reality shared among individuals and distinct from unreal and imagined, plausible worlds.
Reason and rationality demonstrate that there seems to be an objective reality in which we are situated and in which we experience the world. There are undoubtedly subjective aspects of that world, but we nevertheless are able to share a world in which we can imagine other possible worlds and consider those alternative worlds as closer or further from the world in which we live. Doing this over and over again, among billions of people, helps us define the actual objective reality which constitutes the world we share and from which we have subjective experiences. It is from this world that we can discuss what is subjective, what causes one phenomenon or another, and from which we can imagine alternative realities based on certain interventions. If there was no objective reality for us to all share, then we would never be able to distinguish alternative worlds and compare them as more or less close to the world we share and exist within.
Anecdotal Versus Systematic Thinking

Anecdotal Versus Systematic Thinking

Posted on by jabittan
Anecdotes are incredibly convincing, especially when they focus on an extreme case. However, anecdotes are not always representative of larger populations. Some anecdotes are very context dependent, focus on specific and odd situations, and deal with narrow circumstances. However, because they are often vivid, highly visible, and emotionally resonant, they can be highly memorable and influential.
Systemic thinking often lacks many of these qualities. Often, the general reference class is hard to see or make sense of. It is much easier to remember a commute that featured an officer or traffic accident than the vast majority of commutes that were uneventful. Sometimes the data directly contradicts the anecdotal stories and thoughts we have, but that data often lacks the visibility to reveal the contradictions. This happens frequently with news stories or TV shows that highlight dangerous crime or teen pregnancy. Despite a rise in crime during 2020, we have seen falling crime rates in recent decades, and despite TV shows about teen pregnancies, those rates have also been falling.
In Vices of the Mind, Quassim Cassam examines anecdotal versus systematic thinking to demonstrate that anecdotal thinking can be an epistemic vice that obstructs our view of reality. He writes, “With a bit of imagination it is possible to show that every supposed epistemic vice can lead to true belief in certain circumstances. What is less obvious is that epistemic vices are reliable pathways to true belief or that they are systematically conducive to true belief.”
Anecdotal versus systematic thinking or structural thinking is a useful context for thinking about Cassam’s quote. An anecdote describes a situation or story with an N of 1. That is to say, an anecdote is a single case study. Within any population of people, drug reactions, rocket launches, or any other phenomenon, there are going to be outliers. There will be some results that are strange and unique, deviating from the norm or average. These individual cases are interesting and can be useful to study, but it is important that we recognize them as outliers and not generalize these individual cases to the larger population. Systematic and structural thinking helps us see the larger population and develop more accurate beliefs about what we should normally expect to happen.
Anecdotal thinking may occasionally lead to true beliefs about larger classes, but as Cassam notes, it will not do so reliably. We cannot build our beliefs around single anecdotes, or we will risk making decisions based on unusual outliers. Trying to address crime, reduce teen pregnancy, determine the efficacy of a medication, or verify the safety of a spaceship requires that we understand the larger systemic and structural picture. We cannot study one instance of crime and assume we know how to reduce crime across an entire country, and none of us would want to ride in a spaceship that had only been tested once.
It is important that we recognize anecdotal thinking, and other epistemic vices, so we can improve our thinking and have better understandings of reality. Doing so will help improve our decision-making, will improve the way we relate to the world, and will help us as a society better determine where we should place resources to help create a world we want to live in. Anecdotal thinking, and indulging in other epistemic vices, might give us a correct answer from time to time, but it is likely to lead to worse outcomes and decisions over time as we routinely misjudge reality. This in turn will create tensions and distrust among a society that cannot agree on the actual trends and needs of the population.