Reality Check: There Are Many More Ways To Make The World Worse Than Better

The best way to change the world for the better is to set small but realistic goals. Unfortunately, many people, especially young people, are being encouraged to do the opposite, making them preoccupied with large, unrealistic goals. Many of our young people are huge idealists, believing they can make the world significantly better with their political and social causes. When they grow older, most will come to realise that the world doesn't often improve in this way, as virtually all improvements, even the biggest ones, are small, gradual and incremental. We'll return to this shortly.

To make improvements, we need to think, and apply those thoughts to life - and to do so, we need a coherent mental process of sifting and selecting to build a corpus of views and beliefs we think are correct and beneficial to humanity. Although it's not visible to the naked eye, the brain is undertaking these computations with great frequency in quick execution time - sifting and selecting to expunge the mind of all incorrect data - a bit like how an anti-virus scan on your pc sifts and selects the data that's potentially corrupt (whether the mind embraces truth and facts is an altogether more complex matter that we don't have time to explore here).

For simplicity, let's divide the thought system into 3 categories: correct views, agnostic views and incorrect views:

1) I believe x is correct, and x does happen to be correct. (Correct)

2) I am unsure whether x is correct because I have kernels of ideas but don't know enough to be wholly confident. (Agnostic)

3) I believe x is correct, but x does not happen to be correct. (Incorrect)

Every view or belief you have falls broadly in one of those three categories. These also fall under a scale of varying complexity. Take the proposition of exertions of mutually attractive forces as examples. I would be a category 1 on the proposition that macroscopic objects in the universe exert a mutually attractive force proportionally to their masses, and that therefore force is inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them. I would also be a category 1 on the proposition that with a telescope, the size of the smallest object it can see at any given distance is inversely proportional to the diameter of the telescope lens. These are scientific facts about which we should all be category 1.

But on the proposition that, given a large sample of data, the frequency of any element of that data is at a certain size inversely proportional to its rank in a table that measures frequency - well, I am more of a soft agnostic. That doesn't mean it does not hold for a multitude of cases, just that if examples came out of the epistemological woodwork to undermine the consistency of the rule, I would be all set to revise the strength of my conviction.

This is the sifting and selecting heuristic we use, as best as possible, to guard against being wrong. The fact that many people have faulty cognitive software in this process is not down to the hardware (not usually anyway) - it is usually down to bad learned behaviour. This is why falsehood and being wrong has a negative effect on a person's well-being - and why there is collateral damage on the mind's emotional well-being when it is in a state of cognitive dissonance.

I think we should always pay careful attention to laws of nature that are also rules that govern human beings. One such example is this: it is a lot easier to fail than to succeed. It is a lot easier to make a cacophony of discordant noise on a piano than it is to play a tune; it is a lot easier to drop an egg on the floor than it is to clean it up; it is a lot easier to write a rubbish play than it is to write a masterpiece. But why? The main reason is to do with numbers: there are astronomically more ways to do something badly than do something well; there are astronomically more ways to make a mess to be clean; and there are astronomically more ways to write a load of rubbish than there are to write high quality plays.

We shouldn't be surprised: this law runs through the heart of evolutionary biology. Think of genetic mutations - that is, the genetic material that is duplicated, transposed, deleted, and inserted. The measure of success of any mutation is related to the differential probability of reproductive success that it confers on the mutated offspring. New information comes from the random mutations that take place in the reproductive process of every single offspring. Every offspring gets the DNA from the parents, with a small number of mutations. If an organism gets to reproduce, it will pass on those differences along with the additional mutations that take place in the next generation. So the rule of survival is that mutation creates variation, and selection preserves helpful mutations. Those mutations, once preserved in this manner, propagate and their novel genes are distributed throughout the population. New mutations arise, selection favours or disfavours these mutations, and the complexity builds. Most evolutionary changes are the result of gene duplication and subsequent mutation.

Now here's the kicker: most mutational effects are either neutral or negative - relatively few are beneficial. Just as with the above examples we touched upon, the reason most mutational effects are not beneficial is because there are astronomically more ways to be non-beneficial than to be beneficial. It is this principle to which people who want to make a significant impact on the world should pay closest attention. Give a teenager a set of tools and a dismantled car engine, and he'll soon discover that there are many more ways that he can make a mess of assembling it than there are ways he can assemble it correctly. Compared to a global society and its economies, a car engine is very simple. Imagine, therefore, how many ways there are to make a society worse compared with the number of ways there are to make it better.

It's here that we return to the wisdom that the best way to change the world for the better is to set small but realistic goals. Let me offer an illustration. Imagine an island of 100 people trying to create a better society. The inhabitants who prioritise improving themselves, by seeking the truth, learning facts, embracing goodness, utilising their talents and skills and striving for personal progress are much more likely to make the island a better place than the inhabitants who disregard all that and go all out to change the island with an abstract collectivist agenda.

Another reason why there are so many more ways to get things wrong than right is because the world is highly complex, and because it is not easy to manage highly complex things efficiently from on high. This is because humans are adaptive systems that operate in a world that thrives on collective, bottom-up contributions, based on local knowledge and personal incentives tailored to individual goals. To understand why this is so, just consider what you had for lunch today. I had paella, which consisted of rice, chicken, prawns, chorizo, peas, peppers, saffron, and paprika. To gather all the ingredients of that paella, and get it onto my plate, required the interactions of millions of people - each with unique tastes, skills and knowledge - and innumerable local decisions that are based on the decisions of others, all of which dictate how much that paella costs to buy, and how much of it needs to be produced.

Extend that to every person in the world and the billions of local decisions and tens of billions of goods and services that are supplied, and you can see it is an object of staggering complexity that works better than anything else that has ever existed. The economy is the ultimate success in spontaneous order. The corollary of this is just as telling. Because value is created every time there is a single mutually beneficial transaction between buyer and seller, the aggregation of the value created in a global economy and the exponential progression that occurs the more markets become interconnected is built on those tens of billions of local transactions that occur every day on the planet.

I hope that paints a picture of why there are so many ways to make the world worse than better - and why, if you want to make the world better, far and away the best way to do it is to get your own house in order, and encourage everyone you know to do the same. Everyone doing their best to seek the truth, work hard, improve themselves, apply their skills, do good, and use resources efficiently is the best way to reduce the impact of the rule that there are so many ways to make the world worse than better. Conversely, people who have big visions but uncultivated minds are going to heighten the effect of the rule, and make a mess far more than they ever clean up one.