If ...
If only I would have studied computer science in college I would have earned twice as much as I am earning today. If Modi would have been born in the era of Nehru, India would have been a developed country today. If Hitler would have died in the assassination attempt there would have been no holocaust. If Kennedy wouldn't have been shot then America would have seen far more development. If I would have brought that stock 5 years ago for $10,000, I would have been a millionaire today. If ...
How many times you have come across similar phrases? Sometimes you would have felt that you have let a huge opportunity pass right under your nose. Or maybe if you'd have done things differently you would have been in better circumstance than what you are in now. There is a possibility that it would have come true exactly as you have predicted. But there is a much larger probability that it would not have happened exactly the way you would have thought it will.
There are two problems with this line of thinking - unpredictability inherent in nature called chaos and the other is hindsight bias. Starting with unpredictability let's start with the famous phrase called - "The butterfly effect". Somewhere around early 1960's, a mathematician names Edward Norton Lorenz was working with computers that were used to weather forecasting. You would punch in the set of initial conditions and the computer would predict how the weather would be in the next few days. One day while doing this he left out a few and far off decimal numbers, maybe by accident or maybe he was just being lazy, and found out that the outcome of prediction swayed wildly. What he eventually did was to discover a phenomenon called the "chaos". This one is different than the one that happens in your life when you have kids. The chaos theory predicts (irony) that even a very tiny difference in the initial set of conditions can have wildly different outcomes over a period of time. The larger the time is, the harder it is to predict. You can probably predict what you will be doing in the next 2 minutes, than what you'd be doing in the next 2 years and 2 minutes from now. Thus a butterfly flapping its wings in Brazil can create an initial set of conditions, a few molecules of air here and there, that can eventually add up to form a tornado in Texas. Well it could be Tunisia as well or maybe no tornado at all. You simply cannot predict because there are so many variables that have to come together just at the right place and at the right time. And this is known as - "The butterfly effect". Not only does the initial condition and so many other tiny initial conditions that come together to form an event makes accurate predictability impossible, unpredictability is also inherent into our fundamental laws. The Heisenberg's uncertainty principle says that not only it is impossible to predict what is going on in world of the very small but it is a natural law of the universe. For example, you cannot predict where the electron around an atom's nucleus would be the next moment. Not only you cannot accurately predict what will happen in future, you also cannot accurately predict the initial set of conditions required to cause an event. Just imagine the coincidences at every step that came together for Hitler to be born. But to say that if he would not have been born some events in history could have been avoided is not entirely correct. Maybe it would have avoided the holocaust but maybe someone else in his place would have pulled the nuclear trigger.
There are two problems with this line of thinking - unpredictability inherent in nature called chaos and the other is hindsight bias. Starting with unpredictability let's start with the famous phrase called - "The butterfly effect". Somewhere around early 1960's, a mathematician names Edward Norton Lorenz was working with computers that were used to weather forecasting. You would punch in the set of initial conditions and the computer would predict how the weather would be in the next few days. One day while doing this he left out a few and far off decimal numbers, maybe by accident or maybe he was just being lazy, and found out that the outcome of prediction swayed wildly. What he eventually did was to discover a phenomenon called the "chaos". This one is different than the one that happens in your life when you have kids. The chaos theory predicts (irony) that even a very tiny difference in the initial set of conditions can have wildly different outcomes over a period of time. The larger the time is, the harder it is to predict. You can probably predict what you will be doing in the next 2 minutes, than what you'd be doing in the next 2 years and 2 minutes from now. Thus a butterfly flapping its wings in Brazil can create an initial set of conditions, a few molecules of air here and there, that can eventually add up to form a tornado in Texas. Well it could be Tunisia as well or maybe no tornado at all. You simply cannot predict because there are so many variables that have to come together just at the right place and at the right time. And this is known as - "The butterfly effect". Not only does the initial condition and so many other tiny initial conditions that come together to form an event makes accurate predictability impossible, unpredictability is also inherent into our fundamental laws. The Heisenberg's uncertainty principle says that not only it is impossible to predict what is going on in world of the very small but it is a natural law of the universe. For example, you cannot predict where the electron around an atom's nucleus would be the next moment. Not only you cannot accurately predict what will happen in future, you also cannot accurately predict the initial set of conditions required to cause an event. Just imagine the coincidences at every step that came together for Hitler to be born. But to say that if he would not have been born some events in history could have been avoided is not entirely correct. Maybe it would have avoided the holocaust but maybe someone else in his place would have pulled the nuclear trigger.
Now coming back to the second 'predictability' problem called the hindsight bias. I call it predicting the future when you have that future already in the past. You would have heard the phrase - I told you that this would happen, so many times, on so many occasions by so many people. When you are at the moment you make a guess, not a prediction. And what happens with guesses is if you make hundreds of them in a year, you will have a few hits and surely a large number of misses. Most of these 'predictions' are boolean (either true or false) with 50% chance of happening. You would have heard that invest in so and so stock and it will go up in an year from now, and lo and behold it does. But wait, ask those advisors what will be the price of the stock in an year from now, and you have trapped them. As we have seen that it is almost impossible to predict those prices accurately. When you are in the moment you make decisions given the other parameters in hand, but those might not necessarily work out in your favor. One reason, of course, is that the events are out of your hands and uncertainty plays a major role. Do not blame yourself. No human can actually do it accurately.
So next time when you miss betting on number 27 on the roulette table, and the number 27 then shows up on the wheel, and you miss your chance of winning a few thousand bucks, don't regret. You could have been a victim of hindsight bias. When someone tells you that if Edison would not have been born then we would still be using candles today, smile at them. You now know better.
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