On the Limits of Human Understanding –or- Even Nate Silver Doesn’t Know

After Trump had won the Republican nomination, I heard a wonderful interview with one of the many pollsters who had gotten it wrong. He was from a web site that was known for its thoroughness and unbiased approach. Over the past two elections cycles, their predictions had been unusually accurate. (Spoiler alert: they did not get it right this time.)

The pollster reported that every time they had compared Trump’s position to the position of similar political figures in the past, they came up with the prediction that his candidacy would quickly fade away.

The problem, he said, was that Trump’s political trajectory was unlike anything they had seen before. Since their models are based seeing the patterns in data from the past and extrapolating into the future, they could not have predicted the emergence of this particular new pattern. At the end, the interviewer innocently asked: ‘So our predictive models and our capacity to forecast the future are only valid as long as everything stays as it has been?’ The interviewee had no reply.

The 20^th century anthropologist and philosopher Gregory Bateson explained it using number patterns. In the pattern 1, 2, 3, 4, 5… what is the next number? If you said ‘6’, you probably did well on your SAT’s and got into a good college. But, in truth, the next number is 11.   With the series being 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15… and you know the rest….only you don’t. The next number could be 21 or 111 or 67. The pattern holds until it changes. Than all bets are off.

And so here we are with a looming Donald Trump Presidency that none of the mainstream authorities saw coming. Many of us are still in shock, trying to deal with the failure of our internal models of who and what our country really is. It is important for us to begin to make sense of how this happened. What are the realities that were not included in our understandings? How do we use these difficult times to come to a richer and more nuanced acceptance of the many realities of our country?

We can use our predictive failures to enrich our understanding and increase the accuracy of our capacity to predict what will happen next. AND we also might be well served to remember the limits of what we can know. We live in an emerging and creative universe. While this can be wildly disturbing, it also means that what is yet to come is the adventure of a lifetime.