 Hey folks, Anambi Levine here. This week we've got another short show, our third in the modern run from George Frankly, and it's another good one. Next week we'll be back with an episode on inflation. Week after that we're digging into third-layer applications built on Bitcoin. That'll be Bitcoin as layer one, Lightning as layer two, and then new layers built on top of Lightning, which is pretty cool. Then the week after that we'll have a special episode talking about official statistics, what their purpose is, and how they change over time with special guest John Williams of ShadowStats.com. All of that's coming up. For today, here's George Frankly with a piece tying together Star Trek, black swans, and evolutionary advantages that sometimes anchor us to the now. Enjoy the show. Hello there. I'm George Frankly, and I'm going to take a look at how even the best and brightest people can make truly stupid decisions and terrible predictions, and what we can learn from them. This is Dare to Be Stupid. This time on Dare to Be Stupid, the status quo or familiarity breeds contemplation. I was raised in a devout Star Trek household. For what it's worth, I converted to Star Wars in my 20s. My mother respects my choices, I think. It was around 1990 that my family had to get our first VCR, specifically and exclusively to capture and never miss an episode of Star Trek the Next Generation. That show, in that particular stretch of its run, in that time format in place, constitutes a very precious slice of life for me, and my mother, who loved the original series before it, was quite a fan herself. And yet it was never immune to her criticism. She could be enjoying an episode plenty, and still take a moment to mumble about the silliness of the useless fabric space pajamas they wore everywhere. The convenience of every alien species looking an awful lot like an earthling with a rubber forehead, the shrug of their universal translator making everything sound like perfect English, the fact that they traveled down to the surface of every single unknown alien planet in nothing but the damn pajamas, and immediately took a big gulping breath of the local fresh air. Now, she loved the show as much as I did, but she could never take her mind off the narrowness of its syndicated budget futurism. She had a saying that she repeated throughout my childhood, and it came up particularly during these moments. She said, If you ask a 16th century farmer what new invention could help him till his field, he won't ask you for a steam-powered tractor to pull his plow, he'll ask you for a horse that can pull twice as hard but only eats half as much. Futurism, technology, honestly the whole of human prediction is held back by a simple heuristic, the familiar. We love the status quo even when we hate it, we crave the mundane even when we're tired of it, and when we make estimates of what the future holds, we tend to pick a familiar starting point, the farmer's horse, and then amplify it to the nth degree. It's the reason disruptive technology is disruptive technology, it jumps the tracks entirely from old linear progression onto whole new paths, and it often sidelines our dreams of magical life improvements in favor of less flashy, more efficient solutions. These are the cruel laws of nature that canceled my planned hover car commute to space in favor of more fuel-efficient zoom meetings. Familiarity simply doesn't breed as much contempt as we've been told. Quite the opposite. In fact, our rapid response lizard brains, not to be confused with our more cognitive higher brains, take a lot of comfort and familiarity for very good reason. To fall back on the awful old computer analogy, our brains have limited bandwidth and they want to recognize patterns and appraise situations quickly and err on the side of caution. There is an evolutionary precedent for cautiousness, even paranoia. The brain that can rapidly identify a threat is going to survive longer than the one that can rapidly identify an excellent business opportunity. We scan for threats first, resources second. In a new and unfamiliar place, our lizard brains have to process an onslaught of new variables and guess their trajectories and interactions. In a known, comfortable place, those variables are cut in half. Put another way, familiar surroundings will clear things from our active RAM and allow us a more luxurious frame rate. This is what is called cognitive ease, the state of least strain on our cognitive processing faculties. It is the lowest energy state of an atomic orbit, the most stable resonance structure of a molecule. It's the path of least resistance where our brains can find a groove and settle in without excessive effort. The low processing cost of familiarity makes it a safe starting point and a template for our prediction and our intuition. Likewise, it also narrows our view of what the future may hold. It keeps us rooted in the familiar, and it makes anything unfamiliar feel patently uncomfortable. Cognitive ease and familiarity are the source of black swan events, Nasim Tlaib's theory of highly influential, highly unpredictable events. As the titular bird suggests, Europeans spent centuries believing in a simple fact that swans are white. Everyone knew what a swan looked like. The implicit law of nature in all of their minds said, all swans are white. They had never seen otherwise and had no reason to believe otherwise. A lifetime of unchallenged familiarity had given them confirmation of a negative hypothesis. The very first sightings of dark-tinted swans in Australia completely changed the assumption. Could explorers have predicted the unpredictable discovery? Why would they have when there was never any question what swans looked like? Alright, real talk people, step back to the modern age, we're all smart folks here, listening to our smart podcast about smart people, technology, stuff. We all know that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, it's a cardinal rule. We know that. Yet we violate that rule constantly. Every day we trust that there are no blue bears, no green cows, no Clifford the big red dogs, all based on the repeated absence of evidence. We climb out of bed trusting that gravity will keep pulling in the same direction today that it did yesterday because if a single day had ever been an outlier in the gravity department by God we'd remember it. We predict that today will be like yesterday but newer, tomorrow will be like today but flashier and if it isn't like that we don't like it. And so futurists in the 90s said that the internet was a fad that would slink into obscurity right away. Different is bad. Economists in the early 2000s thought that currency would go from gold commodities to digital e-gold. The future is like the present but fancier. They didn't predict that the internet would become the inextricable lifeblood of all technology because how could it? They didn't predict that digital currencies would take the form of cryptography-based network-distributed consensus-validated ledgers because what the hell does any of that even mean? Star Trek didn't predict space explorers wearing 3D printed pressure suits and using digital haptic interfaces because there was no familiar path from the status quo to the status unknown. In the years since Tlaib wrote The Black Swan, he has been booked on countless shows and interviews and guest spots to discuss his theorem of unpredictable events and half of them have asked the same question in one form or another. Oh wise wizard of unpredictability, what then is the next grand unpredictable event that we're all failing to predict? As if that wasn't the point. Tlaib never pretends to predict the unpredictable because no one can. His warning, usually towards deaf ears, is that we should never rule out the unlikely events and we need to build our systems and our organizations to be adaptable in the face of the unexpected. Familiarity and unpredictability are not arcane riddles in need of a magic solution. They are forces of nature that will break us if we can't learn to bend. Our structures, whether brick and mortar or metaphorical, need to be open to new and disruptive changes without immediately collapsing into obsolescence. Our policies and beliefs need the flexibility to accept new information instead of simply repeating back the old information louder. We have to fight our easy, familiar urges and put cognitive effort into embracing the unexpected, unpredictable and unusual when it happens. It's true that Star Trek failed to predict the sciences of the future, but it hadn't really set out to make real predictions about tomorrow. It meant to suggest a sort of better brighter today on a modest budget. But Star Trek's creator, Gene Roddenberry, always had that dichotomy between fear and familiarity in mind when he proposed a show about strange new worlds. In his words, If man is to survive, he will have learned to take a delight in the essential differences between men and between cultures. He will learn that differences in ideas and attitudes are a delight, part of life's exciting variety, not something to fear. Thanks for listening. As always, I'd like to remind you that nearly all of my illustrious job titles come with the prefix armchair. If you're an expert and you're hearing me get something wrong, I'd like to hear from you. If you've got any feedback for George, go ahead and send me an email at adamantspeakingofbitcoin.show and we'll pass it on to him. And until next week, keep the conversation going.