Ask A Genius 1121: Indeterminacy and People

Author(s): Rick Rosner and Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2024/09/28

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: You wanted to talk about indeterminacy?

Rick Rosner: Yes, so what started me thinking about it was Shohei Ohtani. He’s with the Dodgers and has been setting records. He’s in what they used to call the 40-40 club, which means hitting 40 home runs and stealing 40 bases in one season. Only six people, including him, have done that in baseball history. But now, he’s in the 54 club—he’s hit 54 home runs and stolen 57 bases this season. I get excited when people set records because there are numbers involved, and, you know, it’s all about the stats.

He still has two more games left in the regular season. He could hit another homer or two and get to 55. But while this was happening, there was a gambling scandal involving his assistant at the beginning of the season. Gambling scandals are always bad for professional athletes because if they’re involved, it can lead to a lifetime ban. Sports maintain their integrity by avoiding any involvement in betting on games. Luckily, Ohtani wasn’t involved in the scandal. His assistant stole $16 million from him and gambled it away.

But thankfully, Ohtani has a massive contract with the Dodgers—something like $700 million over multiple years. So, while it’s a lot of money to lose, he’ll be fine. But it got me thinking about gambling and how hard it is to win consistently. Outcomes in sports, and most things you can gamble on, are indeterminate—you can’t predict them.

Bookies do their best to set the odds, but they’re still making educated guesses. Bookies take about 10% of the action, and for pari mutuel horse racing, where you place bets at the track or an off-track betting site, they take 20%. That’s a massive built-in advantage. Casino games have anywhere from a 1% to 5% or even 8% house edge, depending on the game. Slot machines, especially the crappy ones, can have even higher house advantages. Trying to beat odds like 10% or 20% is almost impossible. That’s what keeps bookies and casinos from going broke.

Plus, it’s their job to predict the outcomes and set the betting lines so they can balance the action on both sides. They want equal action on each side, or at least close to it, so they don’t take a huge hit no matter which side wins. If the bookies take too much action on one side and something unexpected happens, they risk a significant loss. That’s why they have the 10% or 20% “vig,” or house edge, to protect them from the unpredictability of events. But even bookies, whose job is to predict outcomes, need protection against the inherent unpredictability of things.

Some people have even developed technology to make certain games, like roulette, semi-predictable. Some devices, like mini-computers, can predict where the ball will land within a certain range of slots. But there’s nothing like that for dice games, though some people, after lots of practice, claim they can control how the dice land by throwing them in a specific orientation. Still, good luck consistently pulling that off in a casino.

With games like 21 (blackjack), casinos have made card counting much harder. In the early days, before card counting was popularized in the 1960s, casinos would deal from a single deck. Now, they deal out of a shoe with multiple decks—sometimes eight or even twelve—to make it harder for players to predict which cards are left.

So, for the most part, even casino games are unpredictable for the average person. But sports games, with all their variables, are even more unpredictable. Of course, the outcome would be predictable if a professional sports team played a junior high team. However, when two professional teams—formed through the same processes of drafting and training—go head-to-head, the outcome is far more uncertain.

That unpredictability is part of what drives sports betting and gambling. I wonder what percentage of people’s urge to gamble comes from thinking they can predict outcomes. Still, it must be significant, especially in sports. People often say that gambling makes watching a game more exciting because they have money riding on it.

I wonder how much of that attitude comes from an earlier time in history—like in the 19th century and earlier—when people thought the world was entirely deterministic. Before quantum mechanics, most people and scientists believed in a clockwork universe. They thought that if you knew the exact positions and velocities of every particle, you could predict everything that would happen in the future, down to the smallest detail. The universe was seen as entirely predetermined.

Then quantum mechanics came along in the 1920s and shook that view. It weirded out scientists at the time, including Einstein, who famously said, “God does not play dice with the universe.” He spent a lot of his career trying to find hidden variables that could explain quantum indeterminacy, hoping that, if discovered, they could make the universe predictable again. But here we are, 100 years later, and quantum mechanics is much less weird to us now.

We also have information theory, which Claude Shannon pioneered with his equations. Information theory gave us new tools to understand uncertainty and randomness in ways we hadn’t before.

There were probably people doing relevant theorizing about information before, but Claude Shannon was the first to call it “information theory” in 1948. Now, we deal with information all the time. However, I’d argue that we’re still unclear about information’s exact role in the universe. We’re so connected to our devices and used to thinking in terms of information, which means we’re accustomed to dealing with incomplete information.

Jacobsen: We’ve all experienced slow internet or limited bandwidth, where we get less information than we’d like or not as quickly as we’d prefer. Information, by its nature, is recursive and often incomplete. So, any information system, by definition, will always be incomplete. Yet, it forms the most basic structure of what we call “information.”

Rosner: Right. We’re much more at home with uncertainty than in the 19th century. For example, I’m not particularly weirded out by quantum mechanics. Maybe it’s because I don’t fully understand it, but I don’t think that’s the case—I think I understand it well enough. I believe certainty was such a bedrock concept for people more than 100 years ago that it took a while for society to let go of that idea.

They lived in a world of gears and machines back then. When we think of steampunk, it evokes images of iron and steel contraptions working deterministically. But nowadays, our machines—like smartphones—don’t have gears. Most people do not know what happens inside their phones or other devices. So, we’re more comfortable with uncertainty because we interact with technology we don’t fully understand.

Jacobsen: I think you’re right. It’s a marker of the modern mind not to be unsettled by a lack of absolutes. In a way, that’s closer to how humans felt in the wild before the modern era. This desire for certainty, this “magical thinking” about having definite answers for everything, is probably a relatively recent development in human history, maybe just an accident of progress or a consequence of certain types of development.

Rosner: That’s a good point. 

Jacobsen: The old world—the jungle, the savannah—was ever-changing, constantly growing and decaying. The landscape was in flux, so a process-oriented view of the environment was probably more natural for humans. You’re suggesting that with all our current information, we can still have a somewhat unified view of the world, even if we don’t fully understand everything, like how our phones work.

Jacobsen: We may not understand all our devices’ inner workings, but we see the world as a unified, comprehensible system. We operate under the assumption that everything connects in some way, even if we don’t always articulate it. There’s a sense that everything requires some degree of guesswork.

Rosner: Right.

Jacobsen: Back in the savannah, people had much specific knowledge—like what was safe to eat, how to catch fish, and how to make shelter and clothing—but they also relied heavily on intuition, which was honed through experience. That guesswork was uncertain, but it was necessary.

Rosner: You could argue that, in some ways, the worldview of savannah-dwellers might have been more fragmented than ours. If they lived in a pre-literate, pre-language era, they could only pass on knowledge by acting it out. 

Jacobsen: Their nutrition was probably worse, too, which impacted their cognition. So, we likely have much better brain development, given the quantity and quality of our food compared to people in the past. Back then, they had a more fragmented perspective of the world. They didn’t have as many facts or interconnected ideas as we do today. If you think about the amount of pseudoscience and bad beliefs we have now, can you imagine how much worse it was 20,000 years ago? They built frameworks to try and make sense of the world, and those frameworks often involved gods. It was their attempt at unifying their understanding of the universe. 

Rosner: A couple of nights ago, I was ranting about how MAGAs hold so many contradictory beliefs. For example, I’d argue that Trump is the least godly president ever.

Jacobsen: By “godly,” do you mean traditional morals and ethics?

Rosner: Trump is a terrible guy with a ton of evidence showing that he doesn’t care about morals, ethics, or even the Ten Commandments. When he says he’s Christian, he’s just full of it. He famously referred to 2 Corinthians as “Two Corinthians,” which caught religious people off guard.

Jacobsen: Yeah, he’s said much nonsense. But I don’t want to cherry-pick his worst moments.

Rosner: True, but there are trends. For example, today, I argued with a pastor on Twitter. I pointed out that Trump is no King David. In the Bible, David did some horrible things, like murdering to get a woman. Still, he eventually embraced God and sought redemption. Trump has had eight years, and we’ve seen no sign of redemption.

Jacobsen: How did the pastor respond?

Rosner: People wrote back with things like, “How do you know? You’re not God,” and, “You won’t ever see Saint Peter because you’re going straight to hell.” Some were making excuses for Trump. The pastor himself jumped in, making extreme pro-life arguments, saying that our side drills holes in babies’ skulls and sucks out their brains.

Jacobsen: That’s a hard argument to counter if someone is extremely pro-life.

Rosner: Right, but even if that’s your main issue, it’s still contradictory to excuse all of Trump’s evils just because he appointed judges who overturned Roe v. Wade. I argued a few days ago, and I’ll argue again that MAGAs seem able to embrace or live with many contradictions. There’s a gap between Christian morality and Trump’s immorality, yet they find ways to justify it. They have an entire structure of excuses that lets them support Trump despite all the contradictions.

I’d say that MAGAs have more broken connections in their worldview than other people. I don’t know how many connections are super important, however. We’ve talked before about how people believed much nonsense in the Middle Ages but still managed to live functional lives. Their beliefs didn’t necessarily interfere with what they needed to do daily.

It didn’t affect their daily tasks or lead them back to the rituals that helped perpetuate their culture.

A shoemaker in the Middle Ages might have believed in all sorts of things we’d consider nonsense today, but that didn’t affect his deep understanding of shoemaking or his daily life. Similarly, many MAGAs live fairly functional lives despite holding some strange or contradictory beliefs.

Some of those viral clips of MAGAs make them look extremely dysfunctional, but those are often cherry-picked by people who want to paint them in the worst light.

Most MAGAs hold down jobs, build families, and live effectively. The evangelicals, especially, have a social and moral framework that Trump might disrupt. Still, they likely maintain conceptual consistency within their close relationships—churches, congregations, and families.

They may still adhere to consistent values within their communities. It’s hard to say for sure.

Rick Rosner, American Comedy Writer, www.rickrosner.org

Scott Douglas Jacobsen, Independent Journalist, www.in-sightpublishing.com

License & Copyright

In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. ©Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use or duplication of material without express permission from Scott Douglas Jacobsen strictly prohibited, excerpts and links must use full credit to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with direction to the original content.