Bishop Charles Chaput: We make the future, not the other way around

“How bad are expert predictions? Almost predictably bad.  In 2005, Philip Tetlock, a professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, published the results of a magisterial 20-year analysis of 27,450 judgments about the future from 284 experts.  He discovered that the experts, in aggregate, did little better, and sometimes considerably worse, than ‘a dart-throwing chimpanzee’.”

 —Trevor Butterworth
 The Wall Street Journal

If Dan Gardner’s new book, “Future Babble” (Dutton) is half as good as Trevor Butterworth says it is, buy it and read it right now.  I will.

Butterworth’s review of “Future Babble” in the April 30 Wall Street Journal is a gem in its own right: funny, insightful and unsettling all at the same time.  As author Gardner and reviewer Butterworth both point out, human beings are “addicts for certainty.” This makes us easy victims of plausible-sounding nonsense. 

We live more and more in a cocoon of knowledge-class opinion and prediction which is often wildly wrong.  As Butterworth notes, “the high priest of erroneous prediction is, of course, Paul Ehrlich,” whose books “The Population Bomb” and “The End of Affluence” have been tossed in history’s dustbin by actual events. 

But Ehrlich is just one in a very long list of impeccably credentialed experts who got things drastically wrong—who warned of 21st century race war in America; the collapse of Britain; the irrelevance of China; Japanese global dominance; extreme and chronic inflation; and the Soviet Union (when there was still such a thing) surpassing the West in economic production.

Given the track record, why do people still listen so gullibly to “experts”? As Butterworth notes, the key to an expert’s “success in the face of repeated failure (is) never admit mistakes, never sound doubtful … the more you sound like you know what you are talking about, the more people will believe you.” 

In practice, gullibility has very little to do with education.  “Future Babble” recounts the story of one “renowned” Dr. Myron Fox, an expert in “mathematical game theory as applied to physician education” who wowed three different audiences of academics and graduate students with his confidence and clarity. 

Alas, Fox was an actor in an experiment by University of Southern California psychologists.  And his presentations were nothing more than rational-sounding mumbo-jumbo.

How does any of this relate to our lives as Christians?

It’s worth remembering that “experts” saw Jesus as a delusional wilderness prophet.  Experts dismissed the idea of the resurrection.  Experts laughed at Paul in the Areopagus.  Experts put their money on the Sultan’s fleet at Lepanto.  Experts predicted the death of Christianity during the Enlightenment. The list goes on and on. 

Most tellingly, most of Europe’s political and economic experts 80 years ago shrugged off Islam as a stagnant, fossilized thing of the past. It was the Catholic writer Hilaire Belloc who saw the flaws in our own civilization and the coming resurgence of Islam more clearly than any of his secular contemporaries.

The tools of social science that undergird so much of modern expert opinion have great descriptive value.  But the key word in that sentence is descriptive, not “predictive.” 

History is made by people, not things or trends or the opinion of our knowledge classes, because history consists of individual decisions and actions that flow from human free will, not statistics. 

As Scripture cautions us again and again:  We cannot be sure of our lives even tomorrow.  And to the degree God grants us the gift of tomorrow, its content depends on our choices and actions today.

The lesson of the Easter season is that we are redeemed by the love of God—a love unearned but passionate and real—and made free to co-create with him a future of mercy and justice for the people whom our lives touch.  We make the future, not the other way around.  It’s a principle worth recalling the next time we listen to experts.

The Lord is risen!  Alleluia!  Once again, happy Easter!

Most Rev. Charles J. Chaput, O.F.M., Cap. is the archbishop of Denver. To read more from Archbishop Chaput, click here.

We make the future, not the other way around by Archbishop Charles J. Chaput

Denver Catholic Register:

“How bad are expert predictions? Almost predictably bad. In 2005, Philip Tetlock, a professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, published the results of a magisterial 20-year analysis of 27,450 judgments about the future from 284 experts. He discovered that the experts, in aggregate, did little better, and sometimes considerably worse, than ‘a dart-throwing chimpanzee’.”

 —Trevor Butterworth, The Wall Street Journal

If Dan Gardner’s new book, “Future Babble” (Dutton) is half as good as Trevor Butterworth says it is, buy it and read it right now. I will.

Butterworth’s review of “Future Babble” in the April 30 "Wall Street Journal" is a gem in its own right: funny, insightful and unsettling all at the same time. As author Gardner and reviewer Butterworth both point out, human beings are “addicts for certainty.” This makes us easy victims of plausible-sounding nonsense.

We live more and more in a cocoon of knowledge-class opinion and prediction which is often wildly wrong. As Butterworth notes, “the high priest of erroneous prediction is, of course, Paul Ehrlich,” whose books “The Population Bomb” and “The End of Affluence” have been tossed in history’s dustbin by actual events.

But Ehrlich is just one in a very long list of impeccably credentialed experts who got things drastically wrong — who warned of 21st century race war in America; the collapse of Britain; the irrelevance of China; Japanese global dominance; extreme and chronic inflation; and the Soviet Union (when there was still such a thing) surpassing the West in economic production.

Given the track record, why do people still listen so gullibly to “experts”? As Butterworth notes, the key to an expert’s “success in the face of repeated failure (is) never admit mistakes, never sound doubtful … the more you sound like you know what you are talking about, the more people will believe you.”

In practice, gullibility has very little to do with education. “Future Babble” recounts the story of one “renowned” Dr. Myron Fox, an expert in “mathematical game theory as applied to physician education” who wowed three different audiences of academics and graduate students with his confidence and clarity.

Alas, Fox was an actor in an experiment by University of Southern California psychologists. And his presentations were nothing more than rational-sounding mumbo-jumbo.

How does any of this relate to our lives as Christians?

It’s worth remembering that “experts” saw Jesus as a delusional wilderness prophet. Experts dismissed the idea of the resurrection.  Experts laughed at Paul in the Areopagus. Experts put their money on the Sultan’s fleet at Lepanto. Experts predicted the death of Christianity during the Enlightenment. The list goes on and on.

Most tellingly, most of Europe’s political and economic experts 80 years ago shrugged off Islam as a stagnant, fossilized thing of the past. It was the Catholic writer Hilaire Belloc who saw the flaws in our own civilization and the coming resurgence of Islam more clearly than any of his secular contemporaries.

The tools of social science that undergird so much of modern expert opinion have great descriptive value. But the key word in that sentence is descriptive, not “predictive.”

History is made by people, not things or trends or the opinion of our knowledge classes, because history consists of individual decisions and actions that flow from human free will, not statistics.

As Scripture cautions us again and again: We cannot be sure of our lives even tomorrow. And to the degree God grants us the gift of tomorrow, its content depends on our choices and actions today.

The lesson of the Easter season is that we are redeemed by the love of God — a love unearned but passionate and real — and made free to co-create with him a future of mercy and justice for the people whom our lives touch. We make the future, not the other way around. It’s a principle worth recalling the next time we listen to experts.

The Lord is risen! Alleluia! Once again, happy Easter! 

* Charles J. Chaput is the archbishop of Denver.

Divine Opportunity

From The Catholic News Agency by Deacon Patrick Moynihan

George Santayana’s famous warning, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it,” popped into my mind the other day. I have to admit that, at first, I remembered the quote as “those who cannot remember history” or “those who do not know history” are condemned to repeat it. I also thought Winston Churchill may have had said it. Google quickly set me straight on both accounts.

I also learned in the course of my search for the proper wording to Mr. Santayana’s quote that his full name is Jorge Agustín Nicolás Ruiz de Santayana y Borrás. While he studied and did much of his writing and teaching in the US, ergo his Anglicized name, he was born in Spain and returned to Europe for the second half of his life. He was always a Spanish citizen.

I mention this because Spain, which has been very important historically to the formation of Western culture, just doesn’t get much notice these days — unless the World Cup is going. I also mention Mr. Santayana’s nationality as a small apology for having thought momentarily that his well-known quote belonged to a British curmudgeon like Churchill — something as a Spaniard he may have found hard to take.

It was a wry comment by my oldest son that brought the quote to mind. In the middle of watching together the film “Frost Nixon,” a docudrama on the planning of Nixon’s most candid post-resignation interview, my son blurted out, “What’s the big deal?”

I suddenly felt very old as I realized that while my own life had only been tangentially touched by Watergate and Vietnam, I still grew up in the culture those events created — a culture dominated by disillusioned people who knew the history of Nixon and the failed war all too well. I responded, “It’s a very big deal.”

My son was not convinced. For him, these events are as old as Elvis and the Civil War. All the past is equally distant to the young. History is dead and dead is dead. The present has its own scandals and villains. Not surprisingly, at eighteen my son has no reference point for these events nor do his friends.

But, does this mean that these events will repeat? Can failing to appreciate history really cause its repeat? After all, how much history can a person know? Certainly, we cannot know all of it.

With all due respect to Mr. Santayana, I do not think that simply knowing the past will keep it from repeating. In fact, there are plenty of well-known, undesirable historical events which repeat. There are recurrent economic failures, for instance. Our knowledge of the Great Depression may have helped us limit our current crisis, but it did not keep us from adding a Great Recession to the recycled history pile. Clearly, knowing is not sufficient for avoiding recurrent negative events altogether.

Moral change is the real agent for stopping the repetition of past failures. In the end, the only negative events of history that we can be sure will not repeat are those that precipitate a societal conversion or moral advancement of sufficient magnitude and cultural significance to be passed on to subsequent generations. In other words, history changes for the better when we change for the better. Some things are about our character, not dates and events.

The abolishment of slavery provides a good example. Institutional, government sanctioned slavery did not end with a history lesson. No, slavery, which had been far too long a part of history, far too long obscured by the so-called complexities of history, required something much harder than a history lesson to bring it to an end. It required the admission of grievous wrongdoing. It required a moral shift of tectonic proportion. (Hopefully, soon, we will have the same global response to abortion.)

Fortunately, we humans, while we will never have a perfect history, still have the opportunity to make a more perfect future. This is the divine opportunity provided to us by a Creator constantly interested in supporting our pursuit of self-improvement. Moral change is difficult. It requires discipline and humility. But, it alone has the ability to keep the failures of the past from repeating. Maybe that is why Jorge Agustín Nicolás Ruiz de Santayana y Borrás decided to live his last years with the Blue Nuns instead of historians.

Dying to self...making room for small "victories" and everyday miracles

from Spirit Daily

Do you realize that God can go backwards in time and reverse the effects of anything we have done wrong, or that was wrongly done to us (if He so wills)? We have mentioned this before -- how the Lord not only can allow us to rectify past mistakes as if they didn't even exist (once we seek His forgiveness and expiate -- purify) but can even revisit certain points in our lives and eliminate the cause of a disease or psychological harm that set in during particular periods.

The Lord is omnipotent. He is also timeless. He can appear at any time in any situation. He speaks to our supernatural existence, which is the root of our dignity. There is not a single miracle that you do not have the potential to tap into. There is never reason not to persevere. We have seen accounts right unto death of how trust and perseverance pay off -- mountains moved, severe problems eradicated. Usually, they are smaller mountains -- bumps in our lives -- that we need help over.

Life on earth is a constant invisible transaction. Our victories often seem like "minor" victories, but they are no less miraculous. The money that came when you needed it? That lonely child of yours who suddenly has a buddy?

"Small" victories, but perhaps not really all that small.

We see such miracles every day and refer to them as answered prayers. It’s the way that the God of miracles coordinates our lives when we are in tune with Him and are selfless. I once received a Christmas card that listed the various ways of "dying to self." It was eye-opening. It described dying to self as:

-- When you are forgotten or neglected and you don't hurt with the insult, but your heart is happy -- that is dying to self

-- When your advice is disregarded, your opinions ridiculed, and you refuse to let anger rise in your heart, and take it all in patient, loving silence -- that is dying to self

-- When you lovingly and patiently bear disorder, irregularity, tardiness, and annoyance... and endure it as Jesus endured it -- that is dying to self

-- When you never care to refer to yourself in conversation or record your own good works, or itch for praise after an accomplishment, when you can truly love to be unknown... that is dying to self

-- When you can see your brother or sister prosper and can honestly rejoice with him, and feel no envy even though your needs are greater -- that is dying to self

-- When you are content with any food, any offering, any raiment, any climate, or any society -- that is dying to self

-- When you can take correction, when you can humbly submit inwardly as well as outwardly, with no rebellion or resentment rising up within your heart -- that is dying to self.”