​Observer Selection Bias

As the non-daylight-savings-assisted days get longer here in central Mexico, the late arrival of Easter this year means the many catholic-pagan rituals are happening under somewhat disorienting summer-like conditions. In other words for us Estatdounidense serial winter refugees, it’s just one more visceral reminder, this time delivered by the movement of the planets, that the world we’re now inhabiting isn’t normal.

Yes, it is Lent after all, where we’re supposed to stop our habitual inward-facing living and take stock of our resultant sins, contemplate the consequences of our self-centered lives, make some sacrifices that change our narcissistic habits to both improve the world we occupy and give us a better shot at redemption in the next life (or in the remaining alternative universes we haven’t yet destroyed, depending on your beliefs). It’s why our Mexican neighbors carry the enormous weight of religious statutes on their shoulders for miles in posadas. They’re sacrificing, atoning, yes, but also preparing, toughening-up for the real pain that that could (and probably will) descend at any moment on their lives but for the mercy of God (or the whims of the gods,) or of blind fate or (stay tuned below) The Observer Selection Bias.
In the last installment of this interminable diary of our late-life sojourn in Mexico, I teased that I might make an attempt at explaining the seemingly unexplainable politico-cultural (overused but for once apt adjective) existential chaos swirling around us. I’m not talking about getting all pundity on how or why what has happened, happened. Please, there’s way too much Monday-morning QBing already available on that subject from those much more (but mostly less ) qualified than I. No, thanks. I do, however, feel oddly obligated to try to tackle perhaps a bigger question really. Why, under the current U-turn whiplash of a 50 day old not unexpectedly extreme governmental regime in our native land, are so many of us frozen in a mixture of disbelief, anger, fear, awe, despair, hope, hopelessness, expectation, excitement, panic, vengeance, spite, impatience, and resignation?

Why? Blame it on The Observer Selection Bias!

OK, I came across this concept reading an article on the latest findings in cosmology (a hobbyhorse of mine) in The Atlantic. It’s sort of a duh explanation of why, among other wildly inconsistent findings modern applied and theoretical physics keep bumping into, we can’t find any other intelligent life out there. It’s because we’ve been so lucky to have existed for so long, it’s skewed our cosmic expectations or We’re way too optimistic!
What we expect to find out there is based on what we’ve observed and our observations are biased by the fact that we’ve miraculously survived, many times over, an extremely violent universe (or universes) that should not have allowed us to exist in the first place. Thus, our models are biased, incomplete if not wrong which is why sometimes the science doesn’t work. (Watch the “3 Body Problem” on Netflix to get the idea.) That’s why we can’t find more intelligent life out there and, I believe, why we are frozen with inaction in the present political sitch. We’ve dodged too many bullets to be able to even conceive of getting hit much less know how to remove the slug and carry-on.

We’ve known from 1776 onward that the political system the forefathers came up with was novel, ingenious but severely compromised, even for its time. But it somehow survived test after test, crisis after crisis, even a civil war, and two world wars. How many times have we heard how “delicate” our “democracy” was, but still it stands, it always comes through, proving it is better than any other form of government, the very meaning of “American Exceptionalism”. So our expectations for its present and its future has been so biased by our observation of its unlikely survival many times over the past 250 years that we can’t compute how quickly and easily it can (and could always) simply collapse given the right (or wrong) circumstances.

Now that those circumstances are here, we’re naturally stumped. We have no precedents. It’s not that the prevailing world culture of the past 80 years has suddenly devolved into a global herd of amoral sheep with tonic immobility. It’s just that given our liberal observer selection bias, the science doesn’t work any longer. Can we, will we snap out of it? I hope so. But we should understand we may well be living in a different universe then we’ve incompletely observed till now.
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Next, I promise no more social studies and more about our beloved Mexico and perhaps the vagaries of to rent or not to rent as we prepare for Estados Unidos re-entry in a fortnight.