Destabilized Saturday Edition #3

The turkey problem, shifting baselines syndrome, and Footloose

Feb 05, 2022

I often think about the problem of inductive knowledge, aka “the turkey problem.” I first encountered it reading The Black Swan by Nassim Taleb1 in the 2000s. It’s an old problem from philosophy that people like David Hume and Bertrand Russell wrestled with and wrote about. Taleb explains it like this:

Consider a turkey that is fed every day. Every single feeding will firm up the bird’s belief that it is the general rule of life to be fed every day by friendly members of the human race… On the afternoon of the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, something unexpected will happen to the turkey. It will incur a revision of belief.

Here’s a chart of that farm-raised turkey’s well-being over time, for us visual learners.

The problem of inductive knowledge asks how much we can know about what will happen next based on our observations of what has happened up to now. In other words, what can the past tell us about the future? Certainly something (i.e. more than nothing), but how much may depend on whether we’re looking for evidence in the right spans of the past.

The way I think about this is that the past is frequently an excellent guide to the future, but occasionally it isn’t. We hope we’ll be able to anticipate the exceptions, which can be hugely consequential, but in practice it’s very hard to do.

My Work

Climate change and housing bubbles

Meta-messages and the internet, Part 1 – “Consider a thought experiment: imagine you run one of the three TV stations in your area in 1985. Maximizing return on investment means earning the largest possible market share, and to do that you have to win the attention of 35-40% of everyone in your region – without upsetting your advertisers. How do you do it? In the context of a media market with a small number of competitors (TV or print), the way to maximize the size of your actual audience is to maximize the size of your potential audience. You do this by offering content that’s safe and unobjectionable because it appeals to values and preferences that are widely held. The other station heads and the publishers of the local papers have the same incentives, so every media outlet ends up offering a similar flavor of centrist, unity-inflected stories in the form of news, features, and TV shows.

“…Another feature of the pre-internet media was that everyone consumed it in the same window of time. In his classic book, Imagined Communities, Benedict Anderson called daily newspapers “one-day bestsellers”; the paper was only valuable for a day so that’s when people read it. Similarly, the six o’clock news and prime time TV were only on when they were on, so everyone watched them at the same time. Because there were just one or two local papers and three TV stations, as each person was reading or watching they knew their neighbors were, too. In a tangible sense, people consumed these stories together, and this element of community ritual reinforced the unity meta-message of the content.”

Interesting Reads

“Shifting baselines syndrome” means we could quickly get used to climate chaos

Life in authoritarian states is mostly boring and tolerable – I take this article with a grain of salt, but it’s an interesting perspective.

Ruth Ben-Ghiat is a history professor at NYU and an expert on authoritarianism. (Click the tweet to see images of the book burning incident in Tennessee.)