by Bill Nye
To overcome your own confirmation bias, you can draw on the ways that researchers deal with it. We go about our work in the opposite way of what many people imagine. Instead of designing experiments to prove a hypothesis right, we work hard to develop schemes or techniques that would show our hypothesis to be wrong. We actively work to set our brains free of their biases. When humans codified the process of scientific inquiry, it was a major leap forward in thought.
The way I see it, all life exists on a gradation. We are on the high end of intelligence (smarter than most dogs, at least, though maybe not smarter than your dog), and I submit we are on the high end of intuition and the ability to reason. The scientific method—the nerd way of thinking, I might say if I’m feeling a little self-congratulatory—is our attempt as a species to stretch beyond our stubborn evolutionary limits. It is our most meaningful appropriation of free will, or at least as much free will as our brains allow.
We seek theories that can make predictions about the cosmos, our planet, and ourselves. We want to know the laws of nature. Is our curiosity itself part of our evolutionary programming? I think it has to be. Our ancestors who were not curious about the world around them got outcompeted by the other nearly naked gals and guys who sought answers to life’s problems. Where do I sleep tonight? What will I eat next season? You could think of this as an early impulse to rebel against the idea of destiny and take the future into our own hands. If we know what’s coming, we can prepare and change the outcome (for example, not starve to death next winter). By extension, maybe our desire to choose freely is programmed by evolution, too. You can go crazy thinking about these things, albeit while having fun. All the evidence tells me that humans, more than any other species, have transcended their evolutionary impulses and get to choose how they want to behave toward each other and toward planet Earth.
I believe we each have a gradation of choice-making ability within ourselves. I bought a car for reasons I couldn’t specify and probably didn’t consciously know. I spent several months trying to decide whether to quit my day job as an engineer to focus on writing and performing for a living. I took at least as long to come around to the idea that I, with virtually no management experience, could manage a multimillion-dollar nonprofit organization, The Planetary Society. The bigger the decision, the more I activated the nerd side of my brain, and the more I recognized the need to grab information in everything-all-at-once style and then filter it like crazy. When I finally reached the moment of “Well, let’s go!” I believe the process that brought me there was, in a very significant way, free will.
What I am absolutely certain about is that we will never attempt great deeds and never—dare I say it?—change the world if we do not embrace our human freedom. On the most basic level, that means getting past the easy cynicism of grumbling about a rigged system or feeling like no one person can make a difference. We have to learn to see the problems around us clearly, without the fog of confirmation bias. We need to make nerd honesty a way of daily living, not a specialized tool for scientific investigation.
Then we can really begin to figure out what’s going on and which solutions will do the most to fix our problems. The deliberate method of rational investigation—approaching, addressing, and solving those problems—is a transcendent act of free will, and we have to choose to exercise it. An even greater expression of freedom, though, is taking the next step and putting the scientific method to work. Letting it guide your life so that, at every moment, you see the greater possibilities around you. Realizing your personal potential. Recognizing your responsibilities. Turning back global warming. Reducing poverty. Expanding access to information. We are never more human than when we reject the idea of an imposed destiny and use science to change the world in big, bold, and very free ways.
CHAPTER 19
Time for Measured Urgency
It’s currently fashionable for people to brag about their extraordinary skills at multitasking. As you know, I’ve never (okay, seldom) been a follower of fashion, so let me honestly and unfashionably say that I consider multitasking to be a modern hoax. The title of this book might mislead you into thinking that I recommend starting countless jobs at the same time. Well, that’s not what I mean—not at all. It’s why I put so much emphasis on filtering. I want us all to use good judgment not just about what needs to be done but also about when to do it. In other words, if you want to be an effective agent of change, you also need to filter your sense of urgency.
I’ll start with a few huge examples. We have to address the needs of people in extreme poverty, and we need to prepare for the rapid changes in our seacoasts and agriculture brought on by rising global temperatures. These challenges are urgent, but they are going to require our attention for decades. We also need to search for life in the solar system and beyond. That’s not nearly as urgent, but to me it is very important; it, too, is a decades-long undertaking. To address these projects, we need to take in everything all at once, sorting through all the best information and designing well-considered plans. Being attentive to priorities is a critical part of that process, and recognizing the fallacy of multitasking is an important first step.
Inattention is a chronic problem these days. Where I live in Los Angeles, I’ve seen countless car wrecks that could have happened only if someone was simply not watching the road. Should you ever be driving behind me in slow traffic, you might notice the custom license plate frame I got in response. It proudly reads, “TRY MONO-TASKING.” So far as I know, “monotasking” is not in a dictionary—not yet. But it may be soon, because no one really multitasks; no one does two things (or ten things) simultaneously. Even the circus performers who juggle while riding a unicycle are doing just one thing: performing, with their subconscious running the show. They’re not thinking about two tasks at once. If one of those performers were genuinely multitasking—using the reasoning part, or conscious part, of her or his brain to control each individual component of the act—there’s no way she or he would get anything done at all. She’d be inattentive to the real goal, probably ending up flat on her face or back on her tailbone.
Instead of multitasking, it looks to me that what the most successful people are doing is managing a great many things in parallel, paying full attention to each individual task as immediate priorities demand. This style of sequential monotasking reminds me of another guy at the circus, the one whose performance includes the wonderful spinning plates. Traditionally, Khachaturian’s “Sabre Dance” plays in the background while he works. He spins one plate on a flexible dowel. Then he spins a second, then a third. Before spinning a fourth plate on a fourth dowel, he dashes back to the first plate and revs it up a little to keep it going. Same with the second and third plates. Only then can he dash back to the fourth plate, and so on. Instead of multitasking, he’s just tasking, spinning one plate after another while paying close attention to which one needs another boost. I feel this is how we get something, or really anything, done. No matter how complex the action, no matter how fast or slow, we tackle the necessary steps in the necessary sequence. It’s pretty nerdy. When people forget to act sequentially, you get those freeway car crashes. Maybe someone tried to be equally attentive to the road and the radio at the same time, or decided that reading a text message was more urgent than assessing the distance to the car in front.
Multitasking is the formula for a car crash, whether literal or figurative. But what I’m talking about—whether you call it monotasking, or just tasking—allows you to get things done for real. But it still doesn’t tell you what tasks you need to focus on. It doesn’t tell you when it’s okay to look away from the road for a moment, or which plate needs another spin right now if you want the act to keep going.
This all reminds me of the days when I was writing comedy full-time on the Almost Live! show in Seattle. I came up with a sketch called “Measured Response—or Overreaction.” It starts with coworkers sitting around a lunch counter. One guy knocks a cup of hot coffee over, spilli
ng it into the next guy’s crotch. The victim calmly pours a glass of ice water into his lap; a large cloud of steam (from a fog machine) puffs up, showing us just how hot that coffee must have been. The announcer explains that we just saw a “measured response.” Next, a woman tells a man that she has to cancel their dinner date. In response, he smashes a bottle on his head and starts chewing a couch cushion. The announcer explains that it was an “overreaction.” Finally, a man driving a large car notices a parking space, but just as he is backing up to pull into the space, a much smaller car whips in and takes it. As the small-car driver gets out of his car, the first guy starts a fistfight, punching wildly. The announcer explains that the stolen parking space was an offense worthy of strong retribution and states in a deadpan voice, “measured response.”
The sketch is funny (or so it was intended) because, like all comedy, it is based on an essential truth about human nature. We are constantly evaluating which circumstances require just a little effort on our part and which ones demand that we go all-in. Measured response applies to every type of project, from making a sandwich to building a citywide water-sanitation system in the developing world. It applies to the choices between space exploration and antipoverty programs and to the multitude of individual actions they each encompass.
We each get a painfully limited amount of time on this planet, which we can fill with only so many tasks. It’s necessary to ignore a great deal of what goes on around us, but it is also necessary to pay close attention to the things that matter most. We nerds, who are especially attuned to the big picture and the big issues, have a special responsibility to address and resolve the troubles we see. So how do we reconcile these conflicting demands? We need to become measured-response experts. We just need to measure a little more carefully than that big-car driver in the sketch, the one who rolled past a perfectly good parking spot.
I often hear climate-change deniers (perhaps better called “climate-change whiners”) complain that there is no immediate solution to any problem inherent in the world’s warming. Any idea we came up with would just take too much time, they argue. From this they conclude that, even if the scientists’ warning is correct, there’s no point in taking drastic action because it’s too late to do much of anything about it anyway. My first thought is usually along the lines of “How do you know it will take too much time if you also think that global warming is not really happening?” But once I get over myself, I have to admit that there is an important question within their impotent whine. It’s another problem of measured response.
We do need to know the pace of change. This question of speed, and the associated one of how much urgency is called for, is the focus of intensive research by climate scientists. They track the melting of glaciers and the rising of sea levels, data which will tell us how quickly we need to prepare for coastal flooding (I’ll present much more information about that in Chapter 24). They monitor Earth for temperature changes, then test the observations against their detailed climate models. They research the record of climate change over the past hundreds of thousands of years. All these actions draw on an ancient principle: If we want to change the world, we need to understand the processes of the world and the rate at which they unfold.
Measured response is not a new concept. It is as old as the desire to be in control of nature. It goes back at least to the invention of the first calendars, many thousands of years ago. I maintain that the calendar may well have been the greatest invention in history, greater in many ways than the invention of the wheel. There were pre-Columbian cultures in Central and South America that had no wheeled carts or vehicles, but they had exquisite systems for reckoning time. The calendar was literally a matter of life and death. It was created to ensure the proper level of urgency at any time of year. For example, our ancestors used calendars to know when to plant crops, when to prepare for heavy seasonal rains and flooding, when to stockpile wood for winter fires. People had to keep their priorities straight throughout the year.
For many centuries, horological nerds worked and worked to refine their reckoning of time. When we buy a calendar from a regular store, we presume that the days and months will be properly accounted for and arranged, but it took thousands of years to develop the most basic tool of measured urgency. There’s another intriguing, oft-overlooked aspect of this early history of the calendar: the role of religion and mythology. A calendar that was accurate to within a few days might have been sufficient for planting crops, but if your religious ceremonies required you to know exactly when to expect a lunar eclipse or an unusual conjunction of planets, you needed much greater precision. You had to recognize long-term patterns of celestial motions and anticipate how the various objects would move far into the future. In response, priests and shamans studied the sky in detail and learned to predict the exact motions of celestial objects. They invented astrology, the ancestor of today’s astronomy, and achieved a remarkably powerful tool for measured urgency. (Just to be clear, though, knowledge that was remarkable 4,000 years ago is now absurdly outdated. Nerds have, uh, made a little progress since then. Would you trust your life to ancient Sumerian medicine, for example? How about good old barber-pole bloodletting when you’re really sick? I hope you see what I mean.)
The challenge today is another form of information overload. We know so much about so many different problems, and have so many different measures of urgency, that it can become completely overwhelming. Even if you take my word—and you should, of course—that multitasking is a hoax, it’s easy to get paralyzed by competing priorities. You cannot attack every task with the same amount of effort everywhere, all the time; you would go crazy (in my case, crazier perhaps). If you treat every problem as an immediate number-one crisis, you can easily get sucked right back into the black hole of multitasking. That holds true not just for people but for our society as a whole. Perhaps our public officials routinely take too small a temporal perspective and completely lose focus. Or maybe they’re doing our bidding, and it’s us, the voters, who are to blame. And indeed, all of us rebound to our short-time point of view once in a while, and take too big of a temporal perspective. We think everything will pass into the past, so we take no action. Either way, the result is . . . inaction.
Failure at measured response has very real human consequences. Every year, hundreds of millions of people suffer from dysentery, malaria, and other controllable diseases because—wow, where would you even start? You surely know the feeling yourself. If you ever donate to a charitable cause, your mailbox and email box are soon clogged with solicitations for more donations. Twitter is a riot of outrage and calls to arms. Your Facebook feed is probably clogged with requests to join this group, march with that group, or give money to a hundred different worthy-looking causes. If you overreact to the first ones you see, you may end up misapplying your energies on a marginal project. If you underreact, you may end up missing out on something truly effective and meaningful. And forget about trying to engage with all of them; there aren’t enough hours in your life, let alone enough hours in the day. Meanwhile you (or maybe not you; you’re far smarter and more sensible, but someone like you) end up in an online shouting match about science or politics that sucks up all your energy. It’s an unproductive overreaction, like the jilted lover chewing madly on the sofa cushion.
What we need, then, is not just measured response but measured urgency. This is where nerds need to activate the second kind of filtering that I alluded to at the beginning of the chapter: temporal filtering. It is the way you figure out the correct measure for your measured response and the best order for your sequential tasks. Mastering the way our society regards time has to be at the core of the everything-all-at-once approach.
And how do you do that? Here I would like to bring you back to my beloved upside-down pyramid of design. The pyramid is more than a guide to how much things can cost during the design process. It is also a timeline that runs from its pointed base to the wide crown at the top. This timeline is a com
plex one that does not strictly move in a line. In the car business, for example, manufacturers have to start cultivating customers before they finish building vehicles or troubleshooting computer code, so the different levels of the pyramid can overlap in time. There’s a wonderful word in mathematics that describes the way time is mapped through the pyramid of design: “orthogonal,” meaning “at a right angle to.” The passage of time is orthogonal to the pyramid. Time affects every step in the ziggurat, but it is not bound to any one step.
Think of the pyramid as a visual depiction of what I mean by monotasking rather than multitasking. We use critical thinking to filter information, which shows us which problems need solving. Filtered information also guides us on how to solve them. The upside-down pyramid of design helps us filter out when to solve them. You can treat even a huge problem like climate change as a matter of design and break apart the different components: upgrading the electrical grid, regulating carbon dioxide emissions, building more wind turbines and installing more photovoltaics, building seawalls, expanding reservoirs, etc. We cannot shut down every fossil fuel–powered plant tomorrow afternoon, for example, because it would bring our economy to a standstill before we got the renewable electricity infrastructure built. Each of those components, in turn, can be broken down into its own pyramid with its own scientific and technological priorities—its own list of measured urgencies.
