Probability in TV and Economics

In TV, nothing proves how clever you are than spouting off probabilities. "I estimate a 75.2% chance of destruction!" cries Mr Spock when encountering some new alien, or perhaps "There's a 30% chance he's guilty" from a university boffin on a show like Numb3rs. There's just one problem with this: it's complete and utter bollocks.

The problem is that in real world complex situations, there is basically no way of accurately estimating probabilities. In situations where the rules are simple and known, probabilities can often be calculated, but when you move to a situation where a lot of information is hidden, estimated probabilities are more or less meaningless.

If we go back to Mr. Spock and his attempts to estimate how likely James T is to get everyone killed, the following might be major stumbling blocks:

1. Often, the knowledge of the enemy is very limited. If your overall probabilities involve decisions by living beings, then you need to be able to assign probabilities to the different decisions they might make.

2. The number of variables quickly becomes impossibly large - not only do you have to worry about the probability of the enemy captain making decisions, but also the competence of the guy actually firing the guns. For example, if the gunner falls asleep on the job 50% of the time, then this has a major impact on the probability of the Enterprise getting blown up.

And so on. Of course, Mr. Spock can try to make assumptions, but if you make big assumptions you cannot rely on the result. For example, Mr. Spock might assume that the enemy captain has a very low probability of making suicidal decisions, but if the enemy happens to believe that a flock of beautiful virgins are waiting for him in the next life he might actually not be bothered by an "everybody dies" result. You could say that Mr. Spock's original probability estimate was reasonable given his knowledge, but it was also useless precisely because of his lack of knowledge.

This same issue plays out in economics. Economists assume that:

1. everyone is rational
2. people make decisions that maximise something ("utility") over time

How does (2) work in an unpredictable world? Economists say that people maximise "expected utility", e.g. the average result of their actions. The problem with this is that, in order to know the average or expected result, people would need to know the probability of all the different possible outcomes of their choices. Is this really possible?

Most economists basically assume it is. Keynes said it wasn't, because the future is unknowable - not only can you not know what will happen, you can't even know with any accuracy the probability of any particular thing happening. The reason is that the world is so extremely complex that building any kind of model of it without a vast number of basically untestable and unjustifiable assumptions is impossible. People are too limited in perception, knowledge, and processing power to accurately calculate the probability of far future events.

Of course, people can try to estimate probabilities anyway, and big financial institutions do use statistical models, but if those probabilities are based on a larger number of assumptions, any of which could be invalidated at any time by events, it means that people's probability estimates are extremely volatile and their decisions might suddenly swing strong from one direction to another. In this situation, using a model is not really any better than just using your gut.

Thus, what people do is use heuristics and make a guess. This is reasonable because doing better is impossible, for the reasons just discussed. It does however make planning less of a pure scientific exercise, with one correct answer, and turn it into a subjective area where it is impossible to prove which plan is the best. And because people tend to make the same (incorrect) assumptions, it also means that crowds tend to show volatile and herd-like behaviour, which then causes "irrational" booms and crashes which the models don't predict.

And that's why Mr. Spock is spouting nonsense to look clever, and how economists oversimplify the world in their models.

Babylon 5

I recently started re-watching season 2 of Babylon 5, and it made me remember why I liked the series so much when I first watched it about a decade ago. Season 2 was, I think, by far the best season of Babylon 5, as it contained the least of the bad and the most of the good.

The bad of Babylon 5 for me are as follows:

1. Michael O'Hare

This is the guy who played Commander Jeffrey Sinclair in season 1 before being relegated to a bit part in later seasons. The quality of the acting on B5 was always a bit mixed, because SF shows generally don't have massive budgets to throw at talent, but he was by far the most wooden actor. His departure alone made season 2 better than season 1.

2. Cheese

B5 always had a certain amount of cheese, but it was worst in the beginning and the end, and less bad in the middle.

3. Descent into militarism for conflict resolution

Later on, the removal of the dictatorship on Earth and then the resolution of various disputes within the Interstellar Alliance show a gradual slide towards militarism as the solution to conflicts. Earlier in the series there was more of an emphasis on diplomacy and negotiation, whereas later in the series the primary mechanism for resolving conflict is Sheridan turning up with high-tech ships and threatening people (and basically always winning). I think this was a disappointing simplification into the typical action movie 2D world-view from something a bit more interesting.

4. Season 5

This season was truly terrible, mostly because they thought the show was going to get cancelled after season 4 so they prematurely resolved all the open plot lines. After they unexpectedly got renewed for a final season, they had to cobble together a selection of mostly bad ideas to fill up the season.

Having got that out of the way, the things that made earlier B5 good were:

1. Mystery

Earlier on, there was a lot to learn about what was actually going on, especially who the Shadows were and the motivations of the Vorlons. Obviously, those mysteries had to be dissolved during the course of the series, but I think they were a very appealing part of the series while they lasted.

2. An attempt at complex intra- and inter-species relationships

A lot of SF has somewhat simplistic politics. Star Trek, for example, favoured Cold or Hot War style relationships between the Federation and most other major races / polities for most of its run. Other states were either subsumed into the Federation, at which point they lost much of their distinctiveness, or there were tense highly militarised relations between them and the Federation. The Romulan and Klingon empires are both good examples of this.

This wasn't the case with Babylon 5. Yes, there was war, but the series attempted to make the relationships between the races more complex than just war versus perfect unity. Babylon 5, the focus of the show, was at least partly a diplomatic hub, and was presented as being a much bigger and more diverse place than a star ship or the space station Deep Space 9.

3. A comparative lack of techno-babble handwaving

Star Trek is justifiably famous for inventing random rubbish to achieve resolution to their plots, but B5 for the most part tried to avoid this. Advancements in technology were rare, and typically occurred via transfer from an alien race that had a well-established history of using the technology in question.