Before Heading to the New Year, Sit Back, Relax, and Challenge Some Assumptions

High school is a time for enthusiasms. Mine were all about paradoxes. One of the oldest I have read about was imagined by Zeno of Elea and recounted by Aristotle in Physics (VI:9, 239b15). It states, “In a race, the quickest runner can never overtake the slowest, since the pursuer must first reach the point whence the pursued started, so that the slower must always hold a lead.”

It took me a couple of books, a patient mathematics teacher, and a few nights of study to understand where the logical flaw was. It was all about making the wrong implicit assumptions. In this case, Zeno assumed that an infinite sum of randomly smaller quantities can’t be finite. After going through limit theory and infinite series, I knew it could.

Finding the trick is thrilling, but it is hardly the end of the story. Great paradoxes have the power to stick because they feel so intuitive, so real, despite all explanations. And the longer we hold a belief, the harder it is to let it go.

A different reality, I learned, however logical, is not always easy to envision. Particularly today. After decades of economic growth, social development, and (relative) peace, it’s easy to think yesterday’s recipes will still work—with incremental adjustments.

But every now and then, events remind us of the fragile balance of assumptions we rely on. An unexpected election, a new conflict, a massive cyberattack, a pandemic; these are our living paradoxes. So, now that we are leaving behind a most unusual year in a most unusual decade, which assumptions should we challenge?

Assumption #1: We live a world of “things”

I am not pulling an argument from “The Matrix” here. I still believe the physical world is relevant, but on close examination, many of its usual limitations are becoming irrelevant. Borders, for example, made sense when countries needed to protect against invading soldiers or smugglers. Do they make sense when cyberattacks can cripple the health system of a country like WannaCry did in 2017? Does it work when a 3D printer that costs $400 allows the exchange of weapons via simple emails?

Even without invoking external threats, most democratic systems assume that we live in the equivalent of a global small city, where great debates happen in the marketplace and exceptional oratorial skills rally public opinion toward the truth. The reality is that, in addition to the traditional grassroots work, political campaigns nowadays rely on a combination of industrialized social media listening tools and targeted digital advertising that has the ability to show each voter what has the highest probability of shaping his personal choice, given his location, age, gender, likes, etc. In the physical world, this is the equivalent of having the time and the workforce to knock on each door, interview every individual to understand his or her preferences, then on the spot, craft the right political argument to win his or her vote. This is of course impractical, but the digital equivalent, both in terms of data and algorithms, is a commodity you can buy if you have enough funds.

Today, we live in a world of “information” where the constraints of speed and reach have dramatically shifted, but the rules of our democratic systems have not (yet).

Assumption #2: What we see is all there is

I borrowed this phrase from Daniel Kahneman in his book “Thinking, Fast and Slow.” He uses it to describe how we tend to make fast (and often erroneous) decisions based on the information we can access quickly, even if it is incomplete or inaccurate, as long as we can tell ourselves a coherent story about it.

But the phenomenon goes beyond the “fast thinking” process. A famous quote misattributed to Lord Kelvin, which in fact seems to be a paraphrase of something said by another physicist, Albert Michelson, claimed, “There is nothing new to be discovered in physics now; all that remains is more and more precise measurement.” This was at the end of the nineteenth century!

The pandemic has recently reminded us that we don’t know what we don’t know. Did it change our ingrained feeling about the predictability of the world? Hard to say. In my recent conversations, I get the sense that pandemics have entered the realm of possible scenarios organizations need prepare for. It is unlikely they will be the next surprise. It reminds me how since 2009, many economists had been predicting when the next financial system failure would happen to trigger yet another recession—and it ended up happening. Except it was not because of a financial system failure.

Looking at how the science of anything and everything has evolved and how sophisticated our laws and institutions are, we can give into the illusion of control. This illusion is reinforced by a dominant mechanistic view of the world as a giant machine, within which we know how each piece fits, and how it can be repaired or replaced without disturbing the rest of it. I would look at our world more as a living biological ecosystem that evolves continuously, and where each change generates second and third order implications that no one had anticipated.

This applies to companies of course, but also to countries and political institutions. We should not be afraid of admitting that we have reached a point where, with divisive elections and uncharted health and economic policies, democracy as we know it reached its limit. I understand that we are blaming social media for undermining the political process, but we should also ask: is infrequent, census-led, adult- and male-dominated vote-counting still a workable governance model for the 2020s?

Assumption #3: We can prove what is true and disprove what is false

While wandering in the world of paradoxes years ago, I stumbled upon another mathematical curiosity that shattered any sense of intuition I had left. It was actually not a paradox, but a theorem proven by the Kurt G?del in 1931 to answer the second of 23 problems posed by David Hilbert as major challenges for mathematicians in the 20th century. The theorem states that in any formally logical system that allows us to at least do basic arithmetic, we will have an infinite number of statements that are truths, but will remain indefinitely unprovable. Take a pause. Breath. Read again. Yes, it says what you think it says and it is unnerving.

The first time I read it, I too have asked myself: why has no one ever told me about this? It would have made for fun digressions in any science or philosophy course. But once we get over that, let’s contemplate what it means for our world today: how much uncertainty should we tolerate about the “truth”? How should we tackle “fake news” in this context? Can regulation ever work?

Two years ago, the Government of Singapore initiated with great foresight a series of public hearings to debate the regulation of “deliberate online falsehoods,” a more precise term than “fake news.” Irrespective of the outcome, I found the process enlightening. It involved politicians, researchers, private sector leaders, and ordinary citizens. Discussions lasted between 30 minutes and (for the most controversial) 5 hours. The closest thing I have seen to an Athenian-style debate!

For me it showed how hard it is to distinguish false statements from opinions, or what is a deliberate falsehood from a genuine mistake. Don’t get me wrong, there are plenty of cases where we can and we should be clear about what it right and what is wrong, but gray spaces exist, and even if these are not in the majority, we have enough of them to fuel divisions, discrimination, and dangerous behaviors. Many have called this a post-truth era. I would argue it is just a gradual discovery of the gray spaces that always existed. It makes our jobs harder, our individual morals and judgment more important in how society is shaped, our individual responsibility to family and community greater.

With increased state-sponsored hacking and perfected deception techniques (see the DeepFake video from the Queen for this Christmas), my speculations is that the problem will not be solved by a set of laws. We will need to rely on the individual sense of responsibility of each one of us to constantly course-correct whenever we see a deviation from our community values—exactly the same way a biological system always corrects genetic mutations. Once in a while, we will stumble upon one that gives us superpowers. We can test it, codify it, keep it, but even then, never let our guards down.

What now?

If we put it all together, it seems we are living in a world of information, in which our knowledge is limited, and uncertainty is the norm. Quite a challenge, huh?

To be fair, I don’t think we need to feel this every second of every day, just as we don’t need to use Einstein's theory of general relativity to calculate the curve of a tennis ball before hitting it back. But from time to time, just for fun, when you are sitting in your favorite comfortable armchair with a fragrant cup of tea in your hand, and just the right level of background noise, it feels great to let the mind wander and think: how did we come so far, so suddenly?