Flex or Fail
How quantum uncertainty, climate change and modern politics all punish rigidity and reward relentless adaptation. It's time to take The Sniff Test.
When Plans Meet Reality
“Events, dear boy, events” replied Harold MacMillan, when asked what was the greatest challenge for a statesman.
Mike Tyson preferred, “Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the face”, before noting they then froze in fear. Adaptability is the hallmark of successful politicians and fighters.
How much should you plan ahead? Those who like control recoil in frustration at colleagues who show up and wing it. The more relaxed are exasperated with checklists for everything. It’s not as if the world is fixed in place. Or is it?
A Quantum Experiment
At the end of last month scientists at MIT settled a debate between Albert Einstein and Niels Bohr. Einstein believed the world was fixed, while Bohr argued that we impact it by observing. Einstein was wrong.
There is a longstanding demonstration of this, called the quantum double slit experiment. The scientists at MIT performed it in highly controlled and extremely cold conditions to verify the results. It works like this.
Imagine firing paintballs at a screen with two narrow slits. You’d expect two neat stripes of paint behind the screen, because each paintball goes through one slit or the other.
Now replace the paintballs with atoms or photons of light. Firing them one by one builds up a striped light and dark pattern like a barcode, rather than two neat lines. This is called an interference pattern. It’s what we see when dropping two stones into a pond and watching the ripples interfere in peaks and troughs. It’s waves.
When you put a detector at the slits to see which path each particle takes, the barcode pattern disappears. We’re back to two stripes, as if the act of measurement forced each particle to choose one slit or another. This is an accessible explanation of the experiment from The Royal Institution.
Settling the debate between Einstein and Bohr only helps us a little. We don’t know why light appears to travel as both a wave and a particle. The most common explanation is called wave-particle duality and says that light behaves in waves, but collapses to particles when observed. We don’t know why, it just does and we deal with the consequences.
Progress not Protest
One consequence is quantum computing. Performing calculations one by one makes it impossible to solve the most complex puzzles without an infinite amount of time. This is why long alphanumeric passwords and cryptocurrency keys cannot be broken.
Quantum computing allows waves of calculations with results that reinforce each other, like the peaks and troughs of an interference pattern. The peaks are accepted and the troughs discarded. This makes it much faster to get results.
Once we solve the challenges of instability, working close to absolute zero and the high cost of realigning misbehaving qubits (the quantum equivalent of computer bytes), we’ll crack every code out there.
The most common school of scientific thought says that we learn by observing nature. But we’ve just seen that the act of observing can change an outcome. This is why The Sniff Test follows David Deutsch in arguing that knowledge is at first the conjecture of an explanation and then its demonstration. Nonetheless, the idea that there is a natural state that we mess up when we make a change, is embedded in many walks of life.
Consider the environmentalist argument of Spaceship Earth. We have a finite amount of resources and when they run out we’re toast. Except knowledge allows us to keep making new things and overcoming challenges. For example, we need energy to survive but no longer must generate carbon dioxide to get it.
Fossil fuels could be wiped out by 2065. All it takes is a long term growth rate in renewables of 5% a year, continued global growth of 3.3% as it’s been since 2000, and improvements in energy efficiency at the historic rate of 1.3%. This can be shown with a four-line Excel model, as Michael Liebreich explains.
The solution to a warming planet caused by CO2 emissions is on track to be solved. We don’t need protesters to defile great works of art, hold up traffic and refuse to have children, because what is any of that solving? We don’t need government to set arbitrary deadlines and fine everyone when we don’t achieve them. Extremism is what kills the support for climate action.
Conservatives and Progressives
This week my LinkedIn channel is full of posts by a guy whose data science company just launched. He used to be head of an institute and now has the definitive model for financial and economic forecasting. It shows that Brexit shrunk the economy by 4.2%.
This is based on counterfactual modelling. A counterfactual is speculation about what would have happened, if what did happen, hadn’t. The Man in the High Castle is an Amazon show based on the counterfactual that the Nazis won World War II.
This chap’s model is so good it can look past covid, wars, tax hikes and tariffs and tell us what could have been. To one decimal point. It’s just a surprise he’s stuck shilling it on LinkedIn.
Inertia is built into most professional forecasts. Rises in government spending are baked in so that any attempts to control debt are framed as cuts. A compliant economist then projects slower growth as if the current course is perfect and any deviation a sin. That said, change for its own sake is no better.
Conservatives prefer inertia and want to preserve as much of the current situation as possible. Progressives aim to keep moving in a particular direction. This means they become more radical and the distance between the two sides grows. This is not only a left-right distinction and the right has its own radicals.
Podcaster Rory Stewart identifies as a Tory. He believes in Church and State and disapproves of the Whig tradition of wanting to tear things down and start over. This is experimentation for its own sake. For Stewart and the Tories, Brexit is the epitome of this.
In the US, Trump is accused of tearing down. He’s attempting to control institutions that Congress set up to be beyond the reach of the White House. His supporters claim he is paring back, restoring balance where things have gone too far. They argue it’s a traditional interpretation of the Constitution, while others are convinced he rides roughshod over it. The American people will judge the outcome.
Frozen in Fear
Carol Kirkwood penned an apology for weather forecasters this week. Collating large quantities of data into short answers is a challenge. It’s not as simple as sun, snow, or rain. Tiny details, such as a measure of temperature being 0.01C off, can have a major impact on the accuracy of a forecast.
To get around this, weather forecasters run many different models. When your app says there is a 10% chance of rain, it’s often because one in ten of the models predicts it. There is so much going on that, unlike economic forecasters, there is no certainty about the outcome.
Politics and economics deal with multiple possible courses of action and hence are hard to predict. There is an argument that leaders cannot know what will happen and that competent ones will be flexible and adapt. At times, this can look like incompetence.
There was a plan to invade Iran and Afghanistan and remove bad people from power. There was little idea about who and what would replace them. This now looks incompetent.
Offering refuge to those claiming political oppression seems compassionate. Packing them into Ballymena and Epping without a plan for integration lacks compassion. Conducting a witch hunt against those who protest does not address the issue. It looks more those punched by Mike Tyson, who “Then, like a rat, they stop in fear and freeze”.
There was no state to look after the millions of immigrants who made America. New arrivals were taken in by family and religious communities, on the understanding they had a short time to learn to fend for themselves. They were welcomed as Americans, provided they respected the law and integrated into US society.
Multiculturalism means not integrating. It is a policy without a plan. It’s the hope that people will rub along together. History shows this is naïve at best and deliberate incompetence at worst. Despite the evidence it is not working, the government doubles down on forcing the natives to acquiesce, rather than the immigrants to integrate.
Last week I presented the argument that identity is fluid and requires the ability to adapt. Change is inevitable, as the scientists at MIT proved beyond doubt this week. The ability to adapt is humanity’s greatest asset.
Deutsch called his book The Beginning of Infinity because our ability to adapt means we are always at the start of something new. In it he describes the Many Worlds explanation of the quantum split experiment. It fits the facts but is hard to get your head around.
Meanwhile, the forces of inertia rely on old knowledge and fight a losing battle with the tides of change. Progressive forces are little better, because they only accept one direction of travel.
The British Election Study shows that between 2014 and 2024, the proportion of people with low to no trust in MPs rose from 54% to 76%. We think the politicians are in it for themselves. When they claim to have a plan and cannot handle when it doesn’t work out, this loss of faith is easy to understand.
What we need is policies subject to regular review with sunset clauses when they don’t work out. Model forecasts should have sensitivity ranges rather than single-number certainties. And compassionate policies must be married to practical plans, covering housing, language and jobs. Humility is needed, but it’s not what we expect of famous fighters, or politicians.