In class on Thursday, we discussed the Asimov short story’s that we had to read along with the investigative piece on our criminal justice system. The discussion of probability arose amongst the class. Probability is the designated value between 0 and 1 for the likelihood that an event will occur or not. In my Management 102 class that I took this past fall, a huge portion of our class involved solving probabilities of different events, and then reporting them to a company to help their decision-making processes. Many of the times, if I computed an even to have a .1 probability of happening, we would convert that to a 10% chance (easier for humans to understand). Converting to this percentage chance allowed us to quickly advice decisions based on my interpretation of this number. In this case, anytime I see a low number like 10% I interpret it as: the event will not occur.
To put this into perspective, say the event of it raining today has a 10% chance of happening. We all will assume that it will not rain, and will most likely choose to not bring a raincoat. If it ends up raining, most people would be shocked because they interpreted the 10% in their mind that it wont rain instead of interpreting it as a number that is not 0 meaning rain is always possible. This wrong interpretation of percentages happens all the time in the world around us. Recently, it was stated that before Election Day, Hillary Clinton had a 65% chance of winning the presidential race. Because of this high percentage, and our human impulsive to further simplify numbers, people assumed Hillary had it in the bag. However when the election came to a close, Trump “surprised” voters and ended up winning the race. The real point of this situation is how the voters were surprised that Trump won. Hillary’s 65% made people automatically and faithfully assume a clear and easy win. They should not have been as shocked as they were because it never said that Trumps chance of winning was 0; meaning it was still possible for him to win. Contrary to popular belief and speculation, the original reporting of the likelihood of Hillary winning was not wrong. What was wrong was people’s interpretation of what that percent actually meant.
People’s need to interpret everything is our strength and our flaw. Interpretation helps people get a better read on social situations, and shortens the decision making process. However, it is also our flaw because people are too quick to jump to conclusions before understanding the information at hand. This human flaw was exemplified in All The Troubles In The World by Isaac Asimov. The people working for Multivac were so accustomed to the accuracy and precision of the machine that they made a fundamental error. When Multivac told the government that Mr. Manners was planning on trying to destroy Multivac, they automatically assumed it was Joseph Manners because they interpreted this act to be so radical, only an adult would be capable. The people did not even check to see if there was a child still being reported under the name of Mr. Manners (a fundamental procedure of the system). Multivac chose this family on purpose because it knew that our flaw of interpretation would allow this plan to follow through. I think a point that Asimov was trying to make is that people are lazy and arrogant. After time, they do not do extra work to ensure they are right because they assume they will be right. I think this arrogance is also shown in how the government was running Multivac. They intelligently created a robot and a system to almost completely eradicate crime. While this was a huge feat, they did not consider the possibility that after time, Multivac could be filled with so much information that its intelligence capability would far surpass that of humans. This phenomenon is known as singularity. If this ever were to happen, it would not make sense for a human to run such an advanced system because they would have no idea what is going on. Human’s did not catch on to Multivac’s plan until it was almost too late. And even then, humans only caught on by a flaw of Multivac.