Fostering an atmosphere in which tweets and headlines define the depth of conceptualization and comprehension, is like performing brain surgery with a scalpel dipped in pig shit, with similar consequences.
In this day of text messaging, tweets, and sound bites, billions of people are becoming inured to communicating, and in fact thinking, in tiny little packets. This is all well and good for many purposes. For some purposes it may even be superior. But in other situations it can be nothing less than catastrophic. Making major life-altering choices is at the top of the list. Choosing who shall represent you in a social, economic, legal, or political sense are on that list. Yet the tendency toward this shallow thinking as a preferred, or perhaps only, method of decision making is epidemic.
One of the keys to adapting with agility to rapidly changing conditions is the ability to see how events are most likely to unfold. The accuracy with which we see these things is largely dependent on the clarity of our insight into the processes involved. And that insight is in turn dependent on the depth at which we see and understand what is happening. In short, the greater our intimacy with the “nature of the beast,” the greater the certainty with which we can see developments clearly before they actually arrive. All of which hinges on our ability to think things through thoroughly and accurately.
To illustrate the principles involved, let’s look at the way in which computer programs have been developed that can defeat even a Grand Master chess player. There are three basic approaches used. One involves what amounts to teaching the program everything an expert player knows about chess. However, even if this is done to perfection, the highest level of skill attainable would be equal to that of the “teacher.” To beat the teacher requires some additional abilities that the teacher doesn’t have.
The second approach to chess programming follows an algorithm, a methodology, which assures victory. In this strategy, every possible combination of legal moves is played out all the way to an end game, then the best series is evaluated and the first move of that sequence is made. The limitation of this approach is that it would take a tremendous amount of time to play all those move sequences to end game. Another approach is clearly needed.
The third approach would be for the computer to memorize every possible game and just make the moves it already knows lead to victory. But when one considers that there are an incredible number of possible games (something on the order of ten with forty zeros games), this would take an incredible amount of computing capacity, both in terms of speed and memory. So this strategy is not practical, either.
The answer, thus far, has been to combine all three methods. Here’s how it typically works. First, the opening moves of thousands of famous matches are memorized. These were cataloged long ago as Modern Chess Openings, so there’s no mystery there.
Then, as moves are made, and as long as they follow one of these known games, the next move is dictated by the best move according to the archive of past games. Once a move is made that does not agree with match play, it is time to shift to the second strategy.
Now the program is in unknown territory. So it begins to explore all combinations of legal moves from the current board position forward. But, as has been noted, this can involve trillions of trillions of moves. A limit is therefore set as to how many moves ahead the program will play the game out to. It can be any number that is within the time constraints of the computer to accomplish. Many chess programs allow users to set a level of difficulty, which is usually accomplished by preventing the computer from looking ahead beyond a certain point.
The final assessment that leads to choosing a move is done by using chess knowledge programming to evaluate the advantages and disadvantages of all the possible games to that point. To do this, each sequence is evaluated and given a score. The move with the highest score (i.e., the highest probability of eventually winning) is then made.
For the purposes of our discussion here, the middle strategy of looking ahead a certain number of moves is the most relevant. It should come as no surprise that, all other things being equal, a program that looks ahead ten moves is almost certain to beat one that only looks ahead two moves. Why? Because it is more likely to judge accurately the relative advantages and disadvantages of one series of moves over another.
The process that people go through in evaluating their choices in life is remarkably similar. And so is the predictability of their choices. The farther we follow the consequences of choices out from an initial decision, the more likely we will see clearly and accurately the consequences of those choices. This allows us to take actions that are more reliably beneficial.
Conversely, if we only look at the first one or two levels of choice/result, we should expect to find unexpected, and often unpleasant, surprises before all is said and done. For those who live this way most of the time, life is an endless series of unexpected outcomes that seldom live up to their advertising. For them, life is a crap shoot, and they don’t have particularly good luck.
The life experience of those who do think things through farther is quite different. When they make choices, based on a deeper insight into the chain of consequences that follow from their choice points, they more often meet with results that are more or less what they expected. It is not that they are never surprised, but more that even unexpected outcomes are more likely to be beneficial rather than catastrophic.
One classic example of the difference between what is seen by the short-sighted person compared to a far-sighted one is found in the views of top ranking naval officers of the Imperial Japanese Navy after their successful bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1941. Some of them felt that the obviously total victory of the attack was proof that it was a stroke of military genius. They were jubilant, almost as if they had already won the war.
Others, however, were not so sure. One was later quoted as expressing his fear that all they had accomplished was to “awaken a sleeping giant.” Few took this view seriously at the time. Nonetheless, by the time the war was over, it was clear whose thinking was most thorough.
The problem we all face is that few of us are at all well schooled in the kind of thorough thinking that leads to the development of a strong ability to adapt quickly to rapidly changing conditions. Yet that is, if nothing else, exactly what the twenty-first century promises to give us: conditions that change more quickly than they have ever before in human history.
The answer is as simple as it is daunting. We must each take it upon ourselves to upgrade our ability to think our choices through farther than we ever have before. Ideally, we would all develop these skills to the point where they were habitual and automatic. At the very least we should become far more aware of the full scope of situations and what they require of us, and do what we can to respond appropriately.
These principles apply not only to our personal lives, but perhaps even more so to our collective, sociopolitical lives. And make no mistake: there will be consequences no matter what we choose to do. The question is which consequences will we court: those that bring us joy, or those that bring us pain. As the century progresses, it seems likely that there will be less and less mid-ground. It’s a little like skydiving: you either come down safely or you die. There is seldom any mid-ground.
