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
So he starts to invent a weather computer and tries his best to improve forecasting of how he might be able to predict the weather. So he has this really rudimentary computer that can only handle a few variables. I think it was about 12 variables of the weather. So maybe you've got temperature and wind speed and so on.
And he plugs them into this computer, this sort of early computer, and runs a simulation. And one day, he decides to rerun the simulation starting from halfway through. But he sort of groans and doesn't really want to start all the way at the beginning. It will take too long. So he figures, I'll just start halfway.
I'll look at the computer printout for the data for all of the variables in the model. I'll type them in exactly, and I'll rerun the simulation starting from halfway through. And what he sees, we can only imagine he's got this sort of befuddled look as he looks at the screen because the data is completely different.
The weather patterns have changed radically from simulation one to simulation two, even though they're using the same data. And what he finds after a lot of sort of chin scratching is that the numbers that were printed out ended after three decimal places. So imagine that you've got a number like 1.234. It would be printed as 1.234, but the actual number might be 1.23456789.
And so in losing those little tiny numbers after the third decimal place, what Lorenz realized was that that was where the weather was diverging. And this is the origin story of a realm of science called chaos theory, where you realize that these tiny changes over time can have profound consequences.
And it's, by the way, the reason why today, even with the best supercomputers, we cannot forecast the weather reliably beyond seven to 10 days. And that's because we can't measure everything absolutely perfectly. There's always going to be these little variations. And that's the difference between a forecast being correct two weeks down the road and being wildly off.
So imagine that you are a sort of pre-modern hunter-gatherer, and you see this little rustling in the grass, or you hear this rustling in the grass. Now, your brain could either decide it's probably nothing and just carry on with your day, or your brain could say, okay, hold on, this might be a saber-toothed tiger, this might be a predator.
Now, if you happen to make a mistake and you think it is a saber tooth tiger when it's not, you will survive and maybe waste a little bit of energy by running away. But if you make the other kind of mistake, if you think it's nothing and it turns out to be a saber tooth tiger, you will die. So our brains have evolved to overemphasize patterns.
And this helps us survive because you're more attuned to what might be a threat. But it also means that we see patterns where they don't necessarily exist. And this creates a mismatch with modern life where we make mistakes because we believe things to be true that simply are uncorrelated clusters of data that we sort of connect the dots between.
Yeah, so I find this both from sort of an observational point of view and also from participating in this world of forecasting and punditry. On the observational side, I think when you look at something like the stock market, 8 billion interacting humans producing a global economy, and then some analysts will say, well, stocks are reacting today to this one piece of news. And you're like, really?
Out of 8 billion people? This one thing is what's causing the market to move in this exact way. And of course, if it had moved the other way, you would have just come up with an explanation that also fits that.
But when I end up going on television to talk about politics or social change, I've been really aware that one thing I can't really say, and I'm never told this, but it's sort of the implicit norm of this world, is you can't say, I don't know. And I don't know a lot of the time. Because The world is really complicated. It's really complex.
So it reinforces the bias because it's what we crave the most from the people who seemingly are the smartest among us, when in actual fact, the smartest people are the ones who are most prone to saying, I don't know.
So sliding doors tells us something really important, which is that the moments that we believe to be consequential, those sort of what if moments, those are the tip of the iceberg, right? They're the ones where we're aware that our lives have diverted. And the point that I'm making is that that is happening literally 100% of the time.
When I talk to people about the ideas that I'm grappling with, I often will say, you know, all of you sort of have these moments where you know that something could have been different, where you could have turned left rather than right when you got into a car accident, or you could have gone to the bar or not gone to the bar. And that's when you met your spouse.
The problem is that those are not the sliding doors moments. The sliding doors moments are the ones that we don't know that our life has diverged. That every moment you have, every little quip you make in conversation diverts the conversation.
Every little decision you make, whether to leave the house now or in five minutes, changes the kinds of people you'll meet that day, the conversations you'll have. And those ripple effects emanate throughout our lives. And so one of the biggest mistakes I think we make is that only big things matter and only things we're aware of matter. And those are both completely wrong.
So all of the time, every single moment of our lives is reshaping our futures. And we intuitively understand this whenever we encounter science fiction that involves time travel. Because if you're going to go back in time, everyone gives you the same warning, right? Don't touch anything. Don't squish a bug a million years ago because you'll delete humans from the future.
Or don't talk to your parents because you'll never get born. So they understand in that logic that every little detail matters. Cause and effect happens the same whether it's in the past, the present, or the future. So if squishing a bug a million years ago can reshape the world, squishing a bug today can reshape the world.
If talking to someone 50 years ago can reshape who's born, talking to someone today can reshape who's born in 50 years. And that is a bewildering thought, but in my view, it is scientifically accurate and completely true as well.
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