Uncertain Probabilities

Nate Silver became a prominent political forecaster with his wildly accurate prediction of Obama’s 2012 Presidential victory. His web site, FiveThirtyEight, gave Obama a 90% chance of winning the Electoral College. He also correctly predicted the results of the Presidential election in every state that year.

Silver’s political predictions are always framed with probabilistic language. Through most of 2016, FiveThirtyEight gave Clinton a reassuringly high chance of winning the Presidency. But even then Silver reminded his audience that a high probability is no a sure thing. The chances of surviving in Russian roulette may be quite good, but no reasonable person risks their life on good odds.

By election day, FiveThirtyEight gave Clinton somewhere around an 70% chance of being elected our next President. 70% means that seven times out of ten, in a similar situation, she would win the election. But seeing as there is only one election, a probabilistic prediction can be right and feel wrong at the same time. Technically, a probabilistic prediction can be considered correct in any outcome as long as the odds were between 1% and 99%.   The only way to judge the ‘accuracy’ of a prediction is over time and is of little consolation in this world of singularity.

In his thought-provoking book THE SIGNAL AND THE NOISE: WHY SO MANY PREDICTIONS FAIL—BUT SOME DON’T, Silver writes: “The amount of information was increasing much more rapidly than our understanding of what to do with it, or our ability to differentiate the useful information from the mistruths. Paradoxically, the result of having so much more shared knowledge was increasing isolation along national and religious line. The instinctual shortcut we take when we have ‘too much information’ is to engage with it selectively, picking out the parts we like and ignoring the remainder, making allies with those who have made the same choices and enemies of the rest.’ (page 3)  

Silver is referring not to the internet, but to the invention of the printing press, which he claims was one of the prime contributors to the next 200 years of wars between religions and nationalities. Whether historians would agree or not, his observation that more information can actually lead to a narrowing of perspective rather than a broadening, feels true to our time of false news cycles, tweets and information hacks.

In THE SIGNAL AND THE NOISE, Silver points out the poor track records of most predictions: many ‘expert’ predictions are ‘barely better than random chance’ and the clarity and specificity of a prediction may have a negative correlation to its accuracy. Silver engagingly educates us in the ways of uncertainty, risk, chaos and complexity. Reading the book, we can become better consumers of information and perhaps even a little more at home in this probabilistic and unpredictable world.

Waiting and Watching

Our President-Elect, whose name I am increasingly reluctant to say, will clear one more hurdle on Monday with the vote of the Electoral College. While I think the members of the College should break ranks and vote against the presidency of this incompetent and dangerous demagogue, this will not happen. And even if it did, it would only throw the election into the Congress which would promptly confirm the current candidate rather than face the terror of a Democratic president.

There’s nothing to do now except wait, watch and not get lost in numbness or fear. The time will come soon enough when we will be called on to stand up and act.

I recommend two pieces for you media diet today:

• Gail Collins’ op-ed essay in the New York Times yesterday about Trump’s self-imagined bromance with Putin.Trump & Putin, in the Barn
• Saturday Night Live’s cold opening last night with the wonderful Alec Baldwin and Kate McKinnon about Putin coming for Christmas.S.N.L. Trump Chistmas

Both pieces are disturbing and humorous. I guess that is about as good as it gets these days.

Winter Prayer

Secretly, I always pray
for snow—lots and lots
of snow. I long for the high
mounds and deep banks—
for the innocent fluffy descent
that defeats the orderly intentions
of angry plows and easily shackles
the rushing cars to slowness
and creep. Now no urgency
on earth can defeat the downward
reign of whiteness. Schools everywhere
close and parents are allowed again
to see their children. At home, only
essential people are called out,
while the rest of us snuggle up
together in this great white world
with only a few good books
and a cup of tea.

Who Is This Strange Man In Our Midst?

The reality of the impending Trump presidency is sinking in and I am finding it difficult to remain both open and suspicious. My natural tendency is to put Trump into the ‘danger to democracy’ category and then interpret everything he does or says in that light. This may be true, but I also know the world is not simply black and white and I want to be as flexible and effective as I can in meeting what is arising.

How do we see a situation clearly without limiting its full possibilities with our rigid expectations? Byron Katie says that we can fight reality all we want, but reality always wins. But we often confuse our perspective on reality with reality itself.   Is Trump a pathological liar with narcissistic personality disorder or is he a ruthless politician who just wants power or is he an agent of change who wants to disrupt the status quo and create an America that works for everyone?

It’s probably helpful to hold a number of simultaneous positions. Each one of us contains multitudes. But depending on a pathological liar to tell the truth is an exercise in futility. We should observe closely and see the patterns and work with what is rather than what we wish were true.

A friend recently sent Melissa an article called ‘Coping with Chaos in the White House*.’   The author claims to have a lot of experience dealing with people with Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD). And while Trump may or may not suffer from this very real condition, and this author may or may not be a true ‘expert’ in this field, his/her suggestions on how to deal with someone with NPD seemed both accurate and helpful in thinking about living with our new President Elect.

I recommend the whole article*, but a few of the helpful things she/he said about living with someone with NPD:

1) It’s not curable and it’s barely treatable. He is who he is. There is no getting better, or learning, or adapting. He’s not going to “rise to the occasion” for more than maybe a couple hours. So just put that out of your mind.

4) Entitlement is a key aspect of the disorder. As we are already seeing, he will likely not observe traditional boundaries of the office. He has already stated that rules don’t apply to him. This particular attribute has huge implications for the presidency and it will be important for everyone who can to hold him to the same standards as previous presidents.

6) It’s very, very confusing for non-disordered people to experience a disordered person with NPD. While often intelligent, charismatic and charming, they do not reliably observe social conventions or demonstrate basic human empathy. It’s very common for non-disordered people to lower their own expectations and try to normalize the behavior. DO NOT DO THIS AND DO NOT ALLOW OTHERS, ESPECIALLY THE MEDIA, TO DO THIS. If you start to feel foggy or unclear about this, step away until you recalibrate.

So I offer this resource this morning as one more perspective, one more tool for us as we live into the new reality of our country’s formal leadership.

*Coping With Chaos

Just Now

The full moon is hanging clear in the dark sky of the early winter morning. It’s twenty-five degrees and predicted to get colder all day until the temperature is zero by tomorrow morning. Welcome to winter in New England.

Another winter morning twenty-five years ago I was in Maine on a dog sled expedition with Outward Bound. The temperature was ten below zero. The snow was shockingly loud as I trudged a short distance from the tent to pee in the still darkness of early morning. Every part of my body felt sick with cold, lack of sleep and fear. I was sure my feet would never be warm again. How would I find the strength to meet the rigors of the trip? I saw no way out of this fearful place. And we were still at base camp.

A brisk walk in my four-layered insulated mouse boots and a bowl of hot cereal with lots of brown sugar was enough to warm my body and revive my spirits. The rest of the trip was a journey of beauty into the white forests and frozen lakes of the north country. There were a few other challenging moments, but I most remember the enthusiasm of the dogs as the pulled the sled which held our food and camping gear. And laughing with each other as we struggled like turtles to right ourselves each time we fell on our cross-country skis. Who knew that having a large pack on your back would so radically alter the physics of the problem? And I remember one afternoon when the temperature rose up into the mid-twenties. The sun was bright and the wind was calm. At the crest of a hill overlooking the frozen white lake, we stripped down to one or two layers and basked in the warmth of the afternoon.

It’s all relative.

The essential question for the human mind is: ‘Compared to what?’ Tall refers to short. Warm is only meaningful when we know what cold is. Our language and our analysis of a situation is a product of comparison: how is this moment like and unlike other situations I have known?

But the essential question for the human heart is: ‘What is this?’ When we hold the direction of this question and don’t fall off into analysis and comparison, we can find our way into the aliveness of each moment. Along with our wondrous capacity for analysis, we are invited to find our home in the moment that has never happened before. The singularity of THIS is an unparalleled opportunity to find our place right where we are.