The Cosmetic Because

The Cosmetic Because

Silent evidence can greatly weaken the notion of “because” that is often propounded by scientists, and almost always misused by historians. We have to accept the fuzziness of the familiar “because” no matter how queasy it makes us feel (and it does make us queasy to remove the analgesic illusion of causality). I repeat that we are explanation-seeking animals who tend to think that everything has an identifiable cause and grab the most apparent one as the explanation. Yet there may not be a visible because; to the contrary, frequently there is nothing, not even a spectrum of possible explanations. But silent evidence masks this fact. Whenever our survival is in play, the very notion of because is severely weakened. The condition of survival drowns all possible explanations. The Aristotelian “because” is not there to account for a solid link between two items, but rather, as we saw in Chapter 6, to cater to our hidden weakness for imparting explanations.

Apply this reasoning to the following question: Why didn’t the bubonic plague kill more people? People will supply quantities of cosmetic explanations involving theories about the intensity of the plague and “scientific models” of epidemics. Now, try the weakened causality argument: had the bubonic plague killed more people, the observers (us) would not be here to observe. So it may not necessarily be the property of diseases to spare us humans. Whenever your survival is in play, don’t immediately look for causes and effects. The main identifiable reason for our survival of such diseases might simply be inaccessible to us: we are here since, Casanova-style, the “rosy” scenario played out, and if it seems too hard to understand it is because we are too brainwashed by notions of causality and we think that it is smarter to say because than to accept randomness.

My biggest problem with the educational system lies precisely in that it forces students to squeeze explanations out of subject matters and shames them for withholding judgment, for uttering the “I don't know.” Why did the Cold War end? Why did the Persians lose the battle of Salamis? Why did Hannibal get his behind kicked? Why did Casanova bounce back from hardship? In each of these examples, we are taking a condition, survival, and looking for the explanations, instead of flipping the argument on its head and stating that conditional on such survival, one cannot read that much into the process, and should learn instead to invoke some measure of randomness (randomness, in practice, is what we don't know; to invoke randomness is to plead ignorance). It is not just your college professor who gives you bad habits. I showed in Chapter 6 how newspapers need to stuff their texts with causal links to make you enjoy the narratives. But have the integrity to deliver your “because” very sparingly; try to limit it to situations where the “because” is derived from experiments, not backward-looking history.

Note here that I am not saying causes do not exist; do not use this argument to avoid trying to learn from history. All I am saying is that it is not so simple; be suspicious of the “because” and handle it with care—particularly in situations where you suspect silent evidence.

We have seen several varieties of the silent evidence that cause deformations in our perception of empirical reality, making it appear more explainable (and more stable) than it actually is. In addition to the confirmation error and the narrative fallacy, the manifestations of silent evidence further distort the role and importance of Black Swans. In fact, they cause a gross overestimation at times (say, with literary success), and underestimation at others (the stability of history; the stability of our human species).

I said earlier that our perceptual system may not react to what does not lie in front of our eyes, or what does not arouse our emotional attention. We are made to be superficial, to heed what we see and not heed what does not vividly come to mind. We wage a double war against silent evidence. The unconscious part of our inferential mechanism (and there is one) will ignore the cemetery, even if we are intellectually aware of the need to take it into account. Out of sight, out of mind: we harbor a natural, even physical, scorn of the abstract.

* The best noncharlatanic finance book I know is called What I Learned Losing a Million Dollars, by D. Paul and B. Moynihan. The authors had to self-publish the book.

* Doctors are rightfully and vigorously skeptical of anecdotal results, and require that studies of drug efficacy probe into the cemetery of silent evidence. However, the same doctors fall for the bias elsewhere! Where? In their personal lives, or in their investment activities. At the cost of being repetitive, I have to once again state my amazement at the aspect of human nature that allows us to mix the most rigorous skepticism and the most acute gullibility.

* Silent evidence can actually bias matters to look less stable and riskier than they actually are. Take cancer. We are in the habit of counting survival rates from diagnosed cancer cases—which should overestimate the danger from cancer. Many people develop cancer that remains undiagnosed, and go on to live a long and comfortable life, then die of something else, either because their cancer was not lethal or because it went into spontaneous remission. Not counting these cases biases the risks upward.