Category: Culture

The Law of Averages

On By Michael TolbertIn Culture, Philosophy, ScienceLeave a comment

If we want to be right, or more accurately, if we want our predictions to conform to expected results, out judgements should cluster around the largest data sets. That’s the safest bet one should make. When meeting a stranger for the first time, you should expect them to be approximately of average looks, average intellect, average tastes, average opinions, etc. I am always struck when someone meets a friend of mine, then later confesses in private that they were expecting someone different. What pieces of data were used to cobble together the image of the person they thought they were meeting? I’m not even sure they would know beyond a rudimentary sense of how they came to form their initial assessment.

I suspect, though, many of us do not apply the law of averages in many circumstances. Hearing the mention of another is already enough to elevate that imagined person above and beyond our standard estimation, but above and beyond what? The average, something we are loathe to identify in ourselves. But this betrays our low opinion of averages and the attended connotations (e.g., ordinary, commonplace, trite, uninteresting, boring, dull, unremarkable, unintelligent, etc.) We live in the average and despise the average, whether from vanity or a need to think the story of our individual lives important enough to be told. To tell a story implies a remarkable, extraordinary event.

No wonder we are unhappy beasts. It would be far better to embrace the average, emphasize the remarkable found within the ordinary, and discard the negative connotations. Think of it in this way. An average dog smells at a capacity that far exceeds the most exceptional human. By contrast, the average human intellect greatly exceeds the smartest dog. The point is not to compare ourselves to others but to appreciate the extent of the spectrum. Within averages, truly remarkable things are happening.

Immortality, oh you Immortals!

On By Michael TolbertIn Culture, ScienceLeave a comment

A cottage industry has been built up around the prospect of achieving human immortality. Far be it from me to point out the folly of this endeavor, or to point out any number of intractable problems that will surely arise as a result of this fabled achievement (e.g., compounding of stress effects on resource scarcity); rather, I must point out that the problem of immortality has already been solved, the puzzle cracked, many eons ago by the power of Natural Selection. Indeed, none of this hand-wringing, civilization-building, awe-inspiring economic, scientific, technological prowess could be brought to bear on this singular question without immortality via Natural Selection.* We just don’t like the solution. We, more specifically, the I of the ego, find our future immortality quite disturbing precisely because 1) the I/Ego has been left entirely out of the solution and 2) current fitness can not guarantee future success. Thus, my objection is more of a quibble, perhaps semantic, but nevertheless important if we are to grasp what it is we are trying to achieve. An altogether different kind of immortality, grafted on to the current one, one aimed as preservation, stasis, and dare we say, a living death? But what kind of future is this? A mausoleum or hall of animatronics? One imagines future AI robots powering us up to play the old hits, pre-recorded scenes from earlier times. Death comes because we have served our function. Our purpose is this: the immortal world we leave behind.

* A qualified immortality, of course. We can always aim a Death Star at our planet, or simply die by accidental causes. But this qualified immortality would exist even if science extends the lives of individuals indefinitely.