Epidemic of dealing with Uncertainity

Climate change, Covid, unemployment, and rising prices appear to be shaking even the most upbeat of people today. Negativity has taken over debates, leading to the rise of politicians who are further validating such fears to be accurate in order to win elections. Violence in many forms is becoming a common behavior and widely tolerated. Road rage, flight fury, and other forms of rage are all too frequent. Something is fundamentally wrong with humanity's existing system, and I am confident of it.

Except for the scientific research I'll cite, I don't wish to claim that what I'm writing is true. Since 2013, this has been my own observation. I've seen folks who appear to be calm and pleasant throw vitriol at coworkers on social media over trivial stuff. People are taking a very rigid stance over their beliefs and justifying their beliefs with no rationality behind them. People are losing faith in organizations and processes, and they are questioning everything, regardless of the scientific evidence.?The kind of conspiracy theories that exist for 5G technology and other technologies in different parts of the world are a clear example of the world we live in and the potential danger of believing in something that does not exist.

Surprisingly, we know more about humans than we ever knew before. Dr. Daniel Kahneman won Nobel Prize in Economics for Human judgment and decision making under uncertainty also called Prospect Theory. He demonstrated various biases and how ill-equipped humans are at making a critical decisions. To demonstrate the magnitude of our handicap in decision making, Kahneman says

"Subjectively, it feels like you believe in something because you have the arguments for it," he says. "But it works the other way around. You believe in the conclusion, and then you create supporting arguments. That’s fundamental "

No doubt, this explains why dictators exist or how millions followed Hitler and did not question his crimes against humanity.

Another important sentence that Kahneman says:

He argues that when people think of the future, they think of the near future far more than the distant future. Changing the perspective from people looking to obtain long-term wealth, to people not wanting to lose tomorrow, significantly alters our understanding of behavior. "People put much more weight on losses than gains. People hate losing."

Essentially, when you combine these 2 sentences from Kahneman, the result is that a person will firstly believe in something which doesn't exist, and if that belief matches his fears, he will want to solve it and will most likely look the other way, regardless of how immoral or unethical the solution is. While the reality is that neither the belief exist nor the fear. Furthermore, if such a condition exists on a societal level, it has the potential to start a Hitler-like era.

We have not forgotten our errors, and Kahneman was naturally asked the inevitable question: Will we learn from the history of mankind and avoid mistakes?

Kahneman says that he’s an eternal pessimist and not able to solve such problems.

Kahneman's pessimism is sad, given his contributions to our understanding of human decision-making. It does not, however, prevent us from debating whether or not we will learn from our mistakes.

Kahneman is not the only shining light in our hope to find a solution and there are many studies and scientific knowledge that exist today to solve our issues. It wouldn't be possible to condense all of those studies in this article but they do exist.

The conclusion that I draw from reading various articles including the studies of Kahneman's prospect theory that our system lacks in terms of:

• Our education system is not updated for new findings and advancements in human psychology. Decision-making under uncertainty should be a subject in itself in school education at early age.
• Society, TV channels, or other information media does not consider it as a significant topic to discuss
• We currently believe just remembering our mistakes in the past will stop them from not happening. Despite clear evidence to the contrary that our problems persist and we remain as vulnerable as we were back in history. Our leaders only do lip service to address the problem.

Humans may not be good at decision making but we are very good at problem-solving. However for that to happen we first need to recognize our lack of decision-making as a serious problem and only then any improvement can happen. On other hand, it is also true that certain governments have started thinking about it and discussing the very fundamentals of our economic activity. It is being discussed that our model on GDP as a measure of growth and prosperity is not the right indicator because it does not take into account the losses made in our personal life, environment and ways of living. Humans are only motivated to create leading to an unending desire to consume our creations. We have a lot to work on in order to co-exist peacefully with each other and our environment. Let's keep the discussion going...