Brian Klaas
speaker
544 appearances
4 recordings
3 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard 7 Feb
Brian Klaas’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Feb 2026 with 1.
Appearances
But it taught me a lot about the way that we understand the world because what stuck with me and was always just sort of in the back of my mind when I was trying to practice social science as I do professionally is if they had just been a millisecond faster,
That they would have actually captured Zambia's government and that when I was taught all about models and data and trend lines and so on, the details, what people would call the noise, is what I thought was really, really important in that coup plot. And it was all reduced to one number, which was zero, a failed coup plot.
This is the big problem of social research and why it's so unbelievably difficult to do effectively. Because if you were trying to model where the atomic bomb is going to be dropped, you wouldn't include the vacation histories of U.S. government officials. But all of these things matter.
And what I've realized is that intuitively, when we think about the trajectories of our own lives, we take this stuff seriously. When we think about how we met a partner, why we ended up going to this school rather than that school, the little bits of noise always matter in our life histories.
When we aggregate it out to the social level and we try to make predictions and talk about trends and so on, all that detail gets treated as though it's meaningless. And my argument in a nutshell is that that is a mistake, that the noise is really important because the small changes can create massive social differences over time.
The magnitude bias is the belief, often the false belief, that any big event must have a big cause that triggers it. So if there's a war, if there's an assassination, if there is a major shift in society of any sort, or indeed if our lives are upended, that there must be some big explanation.
And so we've basically got brains that are evolved to gravitate towards large explanations for large events. And it's really unsatisfying to think the opposite, right? So one of the ways that this manifests is in conspiracy thinking. And if you think about Princess Diana's death, this is one of my favorite studies that goes to the cognitive psychology of this.
A lot of people in Britain looked at what they saw as an extremely momentous world event of Princess Diana dying. And the idea that a car accident, something so banal and so arbitrary as a car accident could be behind this was so unsatisfying that a lot of people, when they were being studied for their beliefs on what had actually happened,
will happily take large explanations, even if they're mutually contradictory. So people who are conspiratorial thinkers will sometimes say that, yes, we think that she's still alive, and also we think that she was killed by the government. And both of those can't be true, but they're totally unsatisfied with the notion of an arbitrary or an accidental explanation.
Yeah, but if you go back further, all of this is this intersection of tiny events. I mean, sometimes I'll say things like, have you ever heard of Albert Einstein's grandmother? It's like, no. Well, she was really important because if she didn't exist, Albert Einstein doesn't exist.
So you sort of, the more that you end up looking for explanations, you end up in what's called an infinite regress, which is where there's another explanation. And then that has another explanation behind it. And that has another explanation behind it.
And what you ultimately end up with when you're making truthful assessments of what happened is that there's an infinite number of causes, many of them tiny, but all of them essential because if you take them away, you probably wouldn't end up with the same outcome.
This is one of my favorite sections of my research is that I'm looking at all these crazy aspects of human evolution where, but for this one thing, we wouldn't exist. My favorite is the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs because the best science we have today suggests that an oscillation in this part of space called the Oort cloud fluctuates
flung a space rock towards Earth and it hit in the worst possible place from the perspective of the dinosaurs and the best possible place from the perspective of humans, just off the Yucatan Peninsula in what is this rock that is very rich with gypsum. And so the impact creates obviously some devastation, but what really wiped out the dinosaurs was this toxic gas along with the heat.
And so if it had hit anywhere else on the planet or if it had been delayed by a few seconds, it probably would have missed the Earth. Humans almost certainly would not exist. Mammals would not have risen as the sort of dominant player after the extinction of the dinosaurs. This is constantly happening.
My other favorite story of this type from evolutionary biology is the origin story of live births and the sort of emergence of placenta. That is, according to the best genomics research we have today, derived from a single chance event where one shrew-like creature got infected with a retrovirus about 100 million years ago. And this is why mammals don't lay eggs, right?
And you sort of think, I mean, such a profound evolutionary change. Maybe we wouldn't exist.
if not for this one shrew-like creature 100 million years ago, it's a very humbling thing to look into these backgrounds because the fragility, not just of your individual existence through the maddening random chance that leads to you being born rather than somebody else from your parents, but also just humanity's existence is incredibly, incredibly fragile.
So Edward Lorenz is a fascinating character because he accidentally ended up in meteorology during World War II, you know, when Uncle Sam was sort of drafting everyone into the military effort. Lorenz was a really bright guy and he had an interest in the weather.
So he joined up and ended up, believe it or not, working on forecasting weather during American bombing rains in the late stages of World War II in Japan. Now, after the war ends, he's sort of aware that there's some really limited computing power involved in forecasting. And we really don't know how we can predict the future of weather. It's really arbitrary and really poor quality.
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