The Paradox of Indoor Ornithology
Are all Ravens black? Excepting all albinos and other genetically abnormal specimens, are all Ravens black? Should we expect a given Raven that we encounter to be black? In the common parlance, can we short-hand ‘All Ravens are black’ for the more-true-but-clunkier ‘Almost all Ravens are black’?
What should we accept as evidence for the proposition that All Ravens Are Black? If we were to attempt to prove such a thing, what form must a compelling argument take?
An intuitive approach is to study examples of Ravens, cataloging their color, and see if we can find counter-examples to the hypothesis that All Ravens are Black. This is called Science.
There is, however, another possibility. Suppose that we looked at an object that was Not a Raven, say a Green Apple, and saw that the Green Apple was Not Black. Is that evidence for the proposition that All Ravens are Black?
Of course not. The color of Apples does not determine the color of Ravens. That is absurd on its face. And yet: What if we could look at every object in the universe that was Not Black and see that none of those objects were Ravens? This would prove beyond any doubt that All Ravens are Black, since only Black Objects would remain, in a set that also contained Every Raven.
This being so, then merely by observing a Green Apple, we are reducing by some infinitesimal fraction the set of Not Black But Possibly Raven objects in the universe, and taking a step towards this final condition of having observed every Not Black Object and found the set Raven-Free.
In other words, merely observing a Green Apple does, strange though it may seem, provide evidence for the proposition that All Ravens are Black.
*****
Sarah physically sat in her apartment, at her desk chair, wearing the Neural Augmentors—called “N-A-Specs” in the promotional material—that she’d received for Christmas just a few days before. They were basically VR-goggles, but they had a laser array at the temple that communicated with her forebrain to enhance and smooth the experience by, for example, removing the feeling of weight and pressure that the N-A-Specs would otherwise create, so that inside the simulation she could forget she was wearing them.
Sarah’s consciousness was at a quiet bar, sitting next to her best friend, Nick, who was physically in his own bedroom wearing a set of VR-goggles. Neither of their avatars was wearing the goggles though; they were digitally removed in real-time.
On the bar top between Nick and Sarah was a virtual screen displaying the Make-Your-Profile page of the Alchemy app, which Nick had been pestering Sarah to try for most of the last week, after he’d gone out on a successful date he’d found through the app.
“Do you consent to share your social feeds with the algorithm? This will not allow potential matches to look at your profile, it just allows the matching algorithm itself to scrape your data.” Nick was reading her the disclaimers, and Sarah was waving her virtual hands, impatient.
“Yes, whatever,” she replied. He clicked a button, then opened his mouth to read the next disclaimer, but she cut him off. “Yes to all. Just yes me and let’s get on with it, if I don’t have a boyfriend by the time I finish this drink I’m giving up on men completely, so hurry up.”
Nick clicked several other buttons. His fingers were long and graceful, and she for the thousandth time wished he could be her boyfriend, but they’d long ago had this talk and he was completely, one hundred percent gay, like please-don’t-be-offended-but-the-thought-of-having-sex-with-you-makes-me-gag gay. You had to respect that. Sarah wasn’t sure *she* even liked men that much.
“Okay,” Nick was excited now, and his eyes lit up like they always did when he was excited. “Here we go.”
He hit one final button and the boring menus were replaced by men. Their photographs were translated into moving avatars automatically by the A.I., so the men all smiled and waved and winked at her without embarrassment.
“This new version is great,” said Nick. “The old one, they all kinda moved exactly the same because the algorithm didn’t know how to vary them up, it was kinda creepy. This is much better. So these guys are all into some of the same bands you are, they’re all at least five-ten, and they all have tattoos, just like you wanted. Who do you like the look of?”
Sarah let her eyes sort of glaze over as she sipped her drink and perused the roster. This part always made her feel anxious. There were just so many options, and especially now with Nick looking at her and watching her choose, it made her self-conscious.
Nick was staring at her too, hardly even blinking. He had this weird intensity that sometimes was the best thing in the world but at times like this was really off-putting and—
“Him.” She pointed to one basically at random, a dark-eyed pasty white guy with a shock of curly brown hair that fell in his face. Nick gave her a judge-y look like ‘really, him?’ But didn’t say anything, instead just tapping the virtual screen and bringing up the guy’s profile.
“Okay, here’s the coolest part. You know how it sucks reading people’s profiles and they never say anything actually interesting? You don’t have to do that anymore! Check this out.”
He tapped a few buttons on the screen, and a decision menu flashed up that read:
Purchase Date Sim Pack?
“I don’t want to buy anything,” she blurted. She could barely afford to eat, though of course as an aspiring actress that was probably for the best.
“Don’t worry, it’s on me. It’s not expensive anyway,” Nick was booking commercial parts regularly now, while Sarah was still slogging her way through awful auditions that were more like cattle calls. He’d become generous with her, which she accepted with a dose of resentment that she’d tried to cover until she realized he enjoyed it as a validation of his success.
“If you want to be my pimp that bad…” she rolled her eyes. “What’s a sim pack for anyway?”
“Watch.” Nick grinned at her and pressed the ‘Buy’ button.
The screen started flashing with scenes of Sarah and Nick on dates, rapidly clicking through hundreds of times and locations. They walked through a park in spring time, talking, unsure how much to look at each other. They sat in a cookie bar sharing a snicker doodle. They parked outside a restaurant, walked into a bar, and sat at the counter of a coffee shop. They ran through the rain and basked in the sunshine. Each of these lasted only an instant but they piled onto each other, dozens and then hundreds and perhaps thousands of dates between her and the young man with the shock of curls whose name she hadn’t bothered to look at.
Then the flashes stopped. A series of labeled bar graphs replaced the scenes, but before she could look at them, Nick turned the screen away from her and prepared to read it out. She fought to turn the screen back towards her, but Nick batted her virtual hand away.
“No! I paid for it and I told you about Alchemy in the first place, AND if you didn’t know me you’d probably still be a freaking virgin, so just let me read it to you!” When he got bitchy like that there was no arguing, so she just rolled her eyes again and took a sip of her drink.
“A-hem,” he cleared his throat theatrically. “Okay, first date vibes… B plus.”
“What does that mean?”
“B plus is good, nothing wrong with that.”
“I want an ‘A’, honestly what the frick?”
“It’s just one score! Relax. This is why you never go on dates, what do you hate fun? Just drink your drink and let me do this. Okay, so, First date vibe… B plus. Physical chemistry… A! Oh, that’s good, you should let this guy—“
“Don’t need the commentary, thanks. What else?”
“Chance of second date… eighty-six percent. That’s high! You’ve got a good one here. Chance of a relationship that lasts at least three months… fifty-one percent. Oh, Girl, stop it, I’ve never gotten a chance that high and I’ve done this like a hundred times! Of course in gay world three months is like five years for straight people, but still!”
“What the hell, Nick? Is this thing for real? Does it say we’re gonna get married?”
“One reason I believe it is they admit their model isn’t so good after three months. The future is hard to predict. But they claim a really high accuracy rate for good first dates, and it’s getting really fricking good reviews and blowing up and stuff, I think it’s good.”
He turned the screen back to her. She stared at the predictions.
“How do they do it?” Awe crept into her voice.
“Well you know all that permission stuff you ignored at the beginning? It looks at everything about you, all your social, your web site, search history, tons of stuff, and it builds a super-detailed profile of you. It does the same for him, and then it just… runs the numbers. I don’t know, however it does that kind of thing, I’m not like a computer programmer or something.”
She was hooked. She stared back and forth between the screen and Nick for a few more seconds, and then asked, without her usual sheepishness.
“Will you buy me a few more date sim packs?”
“Will you dish on your gross straight people dates after you go on them?”
“Have I ever not before?”
She smiled at Nick as she refocused herself on the virtual screen, and backed out of the data graph into the roster of eligible single men. This time her drink sat forgotten as she began to pore over them, row by row, looking for a face worthy of several thousand simulated dates.
*****
Imagine that you have a vase of infinite size, and an infinite supply of ping-pong balls. It is now 11:30 AM.
You begin by placing ten ping pong balls into the vase, and then removing one. When half the time between 11:30 and Noon has elapsed (meaning it is now 11:45 AM), you repeat this procedure, adding ten more balls and then removing a second one, leaving eighteen balls in the vase.
Suppose that when half the time between 11:45 and Noon has elapsed, you repeat the procedure again. You then repeat the procedure an infinite-but-countable number of times as Noon approaches. Each time that half the remaining time has elapsed, you add ten balls and then remove one.
When Noon arrives, how many balls are there in the vase?
The obvious answer is that there are infinite balls in the vase. You have performed an infinite number of steps, and a net of nine balls have been added at each step, therefore how could it be otherwise?
And yet, each ball that you put into the vase will be removed at a later step. Since the steps and the balls can correspond to real numbers, and since you are performing an infinite number of steps, there will always be a step n at which ball n is removed. Every possible ball that is inserted will be removed at some later step.
Therefore, when Noon arrives, there will be zero balls left in the vase. It will be empty.
*****
Meat space was so slow. Between work—she worked as an A.I. trainer to keep herself fed and housed—auditions, which were almost all virtual these days, and hanging out, Sarah spent at least seventy-five percent of her waking hours in Sim. But for some reason, she had this old-fashioned idea that dates should be in person. If pressed she’d have muttered something about ‘pheremones’, but she didn’t really know how those worked. It was just a feeling that this is how this was supposed to be done.
Thus she found herself crammed into this dirty little room, drinking an actual alcoholic beverage instead of a virtual one that corresponded with particular kinds of intra-cranial stimulation delivered by her N-A-Specs.
Dusty had a cowboy look on, flannel shirt with boots that looked properly worn in, although she couldn’t imagine where he worked in them among the concrete ocean of central L.A. He didn’t have a hat and she decided not to press him on it, because the lack of hat made it seem less self-consciously like a costume and because he had pretty eyes and she didn’t want to leave yet.
“Did you buy a Sim Pack with me?” Dusty had a high voice, a little scratchy, not like a cowboy’s should be. His profile said he wasn’t an actor, and a good thing with that voice.
“I did, yeah. Did you?”
He shook his head.
“I knew just looking at you I wanted to go on a date, I figure let fate decide, you know?”
“Do you want to know our percentages?” She smiled genuinely now, enjoying having this small power over him, and enjoying the compliment even if it was a little obvious.
“They must be good, otherwise I doubt you’d have come, you know?”
“But you don’t want to know specifically?”
“I don’t even know how accurate they are, you know? You can tell me if you want to, though. I doubt it changes anything.”
“What would it change?” She frowned, and he held up a hand, placating her.
“I just wonder,” he said in fits and starts, “like say it was a hundred percent accurate, but you know what the numbers are, would knowing them change them? I don’t remember what it’s called but it’s like how in science you can’t measure something without changing it.”
“Huh, I hadn’t really thought about that,” she said. “Maybe it takes that into account?”
“Maybe so,” he allowed. “It’s outside my box, that’s for sure.”
He glanced around the room and sipped his drink. She decided to change the subject.
“Those boots look broken in,” she said. “Did you do that yourself or buy them used?”
He looked back, surprised at the question but not upset.
“I’m from Texas. Got these in high school and been wearing them on ranches and stuff for a long time, you know? Now I— There’s a farm out in Pomona, they got twenty-five acres, I go out there and volunteer just for fun, be close to the animals.”
“What kind of animals do they have?”
“Chickens, horses, and goats,” he said. “Goats are my favorite. I could take you out there sometime.”
“I’d like that,” she lied. She’d already decided she wasn’t going to see Dusty again. He was great, but she already found herself wondering what the chances were that she’d found her best possible match on the first try, after only a few Sim Packs. Their numbers were high, but not ironclad, not *that* high, not so high that she could be sure.
Maybe it did change things.
*****
Most people believe that they have more friends than average. And yet, the more friends someone has, the more likely they are to be your friend in particular. Thus the reality is that on average, most people have fewer friends than their friends have.
Most people hate congress, but most people approve of their particular congressperson, else they could not get elected. Most people think schools are terrible, but approve of the particular school their child attends, and the teacher who teaches them.
Selecting the best decision-making method is itself a decision-making problem.
If Free Will exists, it should be literally impossible to choose between two outcomes of equal value. Given the sharp limitations on the precision with which humans can measure expected value, people should be routinely paralyzed over minor decisions they are unable to make.
The more similar two choices are, the more time a person typically spends choosing between them.
Even with the greatest goodwill, human intimacy cannot occur without significant mutual harm.
*****
Two weeks and four unsatisfying dates later, Sarah booked a national commercial. She called her family back home in Ohio and cried on the phone with her mother. Suddenly she had money. She resolved not to move to a better apartment or get fat eating out. Instead, she bought lots of Date Sim Packs, looking for the perfect man for her.
She bought so many Sim Packs that she went on fewer dates. She found a ninety-five percent chance for a second date, then a ninety-six, then a ninety-seven. She didn’t go on first dates with any of them. She promised herself that if she found a ninety-nine, she’d go out with him for sure.
Nick rolled his eyes and told her she was crazy, then later he didn’t roll his eyes and told her he was concerned. She assured him it was just for fun, that she was in work mode and auditioning a lot and didn’t have time for something new right now, not really anyway. And that was true, or at least it was true enough to placate them both for a while.
Things had just felt so awkward with Dusty, who messaged her after their date to ask for another, and to whom she hadn’t even responded because she felt foolish actually writing down the reality of why she wasn’t seeing him again. She didn’t want to invite more of that, at least not yet.
Sitting in Sim at that virtual bar, staring at the endless rows of good-looking men who descended on Los Angeles daily, looking for fame and love, felt like freedom. There was no messy reality, no cowboy boots to wonder about, no looming disappointment or overthinking, just endless compatibility, endless imaginings of what could be.
Two months passed. She shot her commercial and had a two-week break before she had to shoot more, and Nick brought up his concern again, and Sarah really finally admitted to herself that she should go on some dates or admit this was sort of pointless and uncomfortably close to an addiction. She hadn’t spent a worrying amount of money, but her time and youth were unrecoverable commodities and she wasn’t too dumb to see it.
She went to the bar one last time, once more, determined to find a perfect match or, failing that, to look over the best of her recent matches and start actually messaging a couple of them with an eye towards dating. But when she arrived there and called up the Alchemy app, it displayed a message that raised her eyebrows:
New Feature—Live-Simmed First Dates!
She clicked on the message and gasped at what she read:
Even we aren’t perfect! Our matching algorithms are the best in the world, but even we can make mistakes, and that can result in an awkward situation on your date. Yikes! But now, that’s no longer a problem, thanks to our patented First Date Sim technology. Our algorithm can now simulate an actual date with the partner of your choice, so you don’t have to let anybody down. If you like them, you can schedule a real date, and if you don’t, they’ll never even know you gave them a try!
She went on twenty dates in a week. It as the most glorious feeling in the world. She’d interacted with lots of complex Sim characters while gaming, but this was state-of-the-art. They didn’t just move differently, they talked differently, they laughed differently. They even looked at her differently and produced different feelings in her stomach. It was at least as good as the real thing.
If she didn’t get a good vibe in the first ten minutes, she could exit with the push of a button. A few times she walked into the virtual bar where the dates took place and pushed the button without even locating her date, just to make herself laugh.
Suddenly, the massive compatibility she’d procured by buying Date Sim Packs was right there, in front of her, but without responsibility. She realized that the effectiveness of the matching had actually put pressure on her that she hadn’t even known she was feeling. Each date felt like an opportunity for failure, which is what it surely was if she couldn’t get excited about a guy she had such scientific compatibility with.
After twenty Simmed dates, though, without going on a single actual, real date, she started to feel stupid. The Live-Sim Dates were significantly more expensive than the Sim-Date Packs, so even though she was richer than she had been, she felt the cost more. And besides, surely after twenty fake dates, most of them good, she had enough choices to pick one and try for real.
It turned out, she had too many choices. She had so much compatibility that she had no means to pick one. They all seemed like men she could end up marrying, she realized when she looked back over her list. She’d be proud to take any of them on the red carpet. So who to pick?
She ended up assigning them each a number and rolling dice to decide, even though she felt like a fool doing it. The lottery winner’s name was Hank, and he was a C-suite executive at a large real estate concern with lots of ambition and perfectly manicured eyebrows.
Sarah messaged him, and he invited her to dinner immediately. She went and they had a fabulous time. Meat space didn’t feel too strange or too slow, with him. He ordered wine expertly, pronounced the very French name of their appetizer as if he’d been born there, and asked her questions that consistently seemed like he’d been listening to her previous answer. Magnifique.
She didn’t normally go home with men on first dates, but she just about already had their children’s names picked out, so not only did she go home with him, she didn’t bother to explain that she didn’t normally do that sort of thing. She just knew that he’d know she didn’t, and either he did get it or he was just very willing to believe in his own charm.
But then they got back to his swanky condo on an upper floor of a downtown high-rise, and he started kissing her, and he nibbled on her neck in a way that tickled unpleasantly, and when she tried to redirect him he didn’t take the cue to the point that she literally had to push him away and tell him it tickled. He stopped then, and came back undeterred, but immediately started pinching and rubbing her nipples too hard, or at least too hard when she wasn’t already turned on, and she felt a pit in her stomach as she realized that this guy was just flat-out terrible in bed.
She let him finish. She faked an orgasm and let him put a condom on his unfortunately curved member and put it inside her, and she was so in her head with disappointment in their lack of chemistry, and already wondering to herself whether she could justify a second date that she hardly even noticed as he got on top of her and convinced himself he was rocking her world. He even had a great body, but it did nothing for her now. The expensive aftershave suddenly smelled spoiled, rotten, and made her want to brush her teeth the moment they were done.
He seemed shocked when she made an excuse to leave without staying the night or waiting for a second round. He texted her before she got home asking about another date, and she sighed at the darkness of her dingy apartment, realizing that putting Hank off was now going to be a long-term project she would have to manage with great care.
*****
Suppose you are standing before a table, and on the table are two boxes. Box A is clear, and Box B is opaque. In Box A, you can see that someone has put $1000 in cash. You cannot see what is in Box B.
Beside you is a genie that can predict how you will behave with great accuracy. The genie offers you a choice: You can have whatever is in Box B, or you can have the contents of both boxes.
The catch is that the genie predicted which you would choose. If its prediction was that you would only take Box B, then it put $1,000,000 in cash into Box B. If it predicted that you would choose to take both boxes, then it put nothing into Box B.
Which should you choose?
It seems obvious. If the genie predicts with great accuracy, then if you pick only Box B, it will have predicted that, and you will get $1,000,000. If you choose both, it will have predicted you would choose both, will have put nothing in Box B, and you will get only the $1,000 in Box A. You should choose Box B.
Of course it also seems obvious that the genie has already made the prediction when you make your choice, and thus has already either put $1,000,000 into Box B or not. Thus if you choose Box B, you will get either $1,000,000 or nothing. However, if you choose both boxes, you will get either $1,001,000 or $1,000. You will always get $1,000 more dollars by choosing both boxes than by choosing Box B, no matter what the genie did. You should take both boxes.
In the end, so much depends on what we believe about the genies who surround us and whisper offers into our ears.
*****
Sarah went to the bar in Sim one more time. She sat and sipped a virtual drink. A few people wandering by stopped and recognized her from her commercials, which she still found quite gratifying. She smiled as she thought of Nick, who had moved onto some other, better hookup app and had only rolled his eyes elaborately when she tried to bring up her troubles dating on Alchemy.
She hesitated to pull up the roster of men she’d bought Live-Sim Dates with. After the fiasco with Hank she wasn’t sure how to go about choosing a potential real date again, or even if she wanted to. The whole thing had put her off, and there was no good way to prevent it from happening again.
But this is what she’d come there to do, so in time she did raise her hand and call up the roster. But before all those handsome faces populated the screen, a message popped up:
New Feature—Your First Sexual Encounter!
She clicked on the message, her heart suddenly pounding. It read:
What’s a bigger bummer than not meeting a great guy? Meeting a great guy but finally getting to the bedroom and realizing there’s just no chemistry! You can feel a spark across a restaurant table, but when the clothes come off, maybe it just won’t be the same. The thought can be paralyzing! But our algorithm is here to help. Legally we can’t do Live-Simming like our very popular Live-Sim Date feature, but we can and will run thousands of simulations based on your blood chemistry to determine, with scientific accuracy, whether you’ll be burning up the sheets or looking for the exit. Let’s make bad sex a thing of the past!
It was impossible to choke on anything in Sim, but Sarah managed to choke on her drink anyway, and then she started laughing. She laughed as she put away the roster and closed the Alchemy app. The laughter turned halfway into tears as she left the Sim and woke up in her dingy little apartment in the center of Los Angeles.
She kept on half-laughing, half-crying, really even unable to tell herself which she was doing, as she walked out of her apartment and down the not-really-safe-for-her streets basically at random, not looking for anything in particular, just in need of momentum.
Then she saw it. She wasn’t far from her apartment, but somehow she’d never noticed it before. It had a kicking boot in lights on the side, and a sign that read “Cowboy Clothes!”. She went in. They had shelves full of big hats with dimples, flannel shirts with pearl buttons, and boots in every kind of hide there was on planet earth.
She saw a pair in her size and put them on. They felt stiff, too new, uncomfortable and in need of breaking in. They were perfect. She paid without haggling, cash from the commercial she’d booked, then walked home in them, scuffing them on the concrete as she sniffled and dried her tears with a sleeve. She hadn’t bought a flannel or jeans, just the boots.
The next morning she got on a bus headed to Pomona. She didn’t know the name of the farm, and she didn’t search it before departing. She’d just wander till she got where she was going. Dusty might be where she ended up, or he might not. If he wasn’t, she’d find a way to break in her boots anyway. Let fate decide.
END
Thanks for reading! If you enjoyed this story, as always, it really helps me out if you like, comment, or share this post with others. Have a great week, and I’ll be back next Sunday with something fun.
Story #54 - The Paradox of Indoor Ornithology
“please-don’t-be-offended-but-the-thought-of-having-sex-with-you-makes-me-gag gay” this line made me laugh.
Better to look for love in person rather than leaving it up to a computer to decide.
Love the philosophical math problems!