Brian Klaas

I mean, the asteroid that hit the dinosaurs and made them extinct.

If that had been delayed by a second, the dinosaurs likely would not have gone extinct, mammals would not have risen, and it's unlikely humans would exist, right?

And the best scientific evidence suggests that that asteroid was caused by a brief oscillation in a place called the Oort Cloud in the distant reaches of space.

It's an idea called contingency, where if this one thing had been different, everything would be different.

I think when you look back at the history of how humans emerged, for example, or how our lives are built, it's just contingency upon contingency upon contingency.

Now, our brains have evolved to see reasons behind everything, and that's because it helps us survive.

When you were in the hunter-gatherer society or the long stretch of humanity,

if you see or hear a rustling of the grass, it makes sense for you to infer that there might be a saber tooth tiger there.

And if you are wrong and there's nothing there, that doesn't kill you.

But if you ignore the rustling in the grass and think, oh, that's unrelated to anything else, and the saber tooth tiger is there, it will eat you.

So we've evolved through survivorship of basically people who find patterns.

And when you find patterns, it helps you survive.

So our brains are fine-tuned

to see explanations for everything.

We're allergic to explanations of randomness or small changes having big effects.

And this is where, again, I think the cognitive bias we have is important to recognize because we can counteract it.

We can understand that actually sometimes there are random things that happen.

Sometimes small changes do have big effects.

Yeah, I mean I think – I describe myself as a disillusioned social scientist because I am a social scientist.

I do study this stuff.