The Gradual and Fundamental Effect of Affective Probability

Knowledge is found everywhere. What you do with it determines wisdom.

The second half of my undergraduate career was spent in a warehouse. Sure I went to class most mornings. But the real knowledge I collected during those two-and-a-half years was much more worldly than the theories of water imagery in T.S. Elliot's poetry that worked so hard at prolonging my hangovers.

During those years I majored in vulgarity, profanity, and obscenity, with special emphasis in "what I did with your mother last night." I may never have enjoyed a job more.

Of course my second, and less legitimate major at the university, which seemed to distract me from good times, was English. And I struggled with it. I spent the first half of my undergraduate career in Salinas, as a Behavioral Sciences major. And I excelled in those courses, transferring to "the big school" in Sacramento with a lofty GPA.

But I had a lot of responsibility at the time. I indulged my pride in my ability to support myself, pay child support, and keep a full-time job. I didn't think I would ever realistically be able to do the field work involved in becoming a real anthropologist or sociologist. I didn't have the same kinds of freedoms as other people my age.

And to make things worse, a friend of mine, on whom I had a major crush at the time, made the mistake one night in San Francisco, of referring to me as an "intellectual." I don't think I really knew what it meant at the time. But I liked the sound of it. And my ego soared at the notion that I could be one. I decided then and there to change my major to English, because I wanted more girls to think of me as "intellectual." I was sure that a wide and varied knowledge of classic literature would do it for me.

I had also decided that I wanted to be a teacher. And English seemed like the best subject to teach. As far as I knew, English teachers were the coolest old hippies ever. And I wanted to be one of them.

When I arrived in Sacramento to start this new chapter in life, I had no job, and I didn't know a soul in the city, aside from my roommate, who had tagged along with me from Salinas. He was a childhood friend whose parents had died, and I had sort of been taking care of him for a while. We had been best friends for many years. He didn't really have anything else going on, so Sacramento seemed like a good idea for him also.

Enlisting my killer work ethic, which had gotten me as far as I had at nineteen, I found a great job in less than a week. I was to stock shelves at an auto parts distribution warehouse for $7.50 per hour. This would be plenty of money to pay my rent ($230), pay child support, eat, put gas in my car, and buy beer. I would work the swing shift, leaving my mornings open for classes. After several years of working many odd jobs to try and make ends meet, this would be the only job I would have for the rest of my undergraduate career.

Probability is something I have always been fascinated with. Even during my short stint as a high school student, probability was something that always got me thinking. As I avoided math classes during my undergraduate years, discussions of probability were something to which I always paid attention. It always seemed like a fairly simple concept, but somehow incredibly far-reaching. I remember realizing, talking with one of my instructors in Salinas one day, that when it comes to buying lottery tickets, I could choose the numbers 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6. And as absurd as it seemed to me at the time, and to most people, I would have exactly the same chances of winning the jackpot as anyone else with any other set of numbers. Probability defied intuition. And yet, it so clearly explained so many truths that I thought otherwise went unnoticed. I started to wonder if an understanding of probability might not help me achieve a level of enlightenment I might otherwise miss. I realized that probability is always at work in the universe, and yet, in our culture, we rarely consider it. Slowly, probability began to become a larger and more important part of my world-view.

I employed my rudimentary knowledge of probability in my new job. Because I was determined to one-day graduate from college, and because I was worried that I might not actually do it, I determined that my greatest chance of succeeding in life was to diversify my abilities and experience.

English proved to be a much more difficult major for me. I had also met a girl, who would, during this time, become my wife, so I was plenty distracted from my studies by the real world. This is when I began to embrace the real world.

I learned, and worked at, every job I could in that warehouse. I started stocking shelves, then moved to checking and verifying special orders, pulling parts, shipping special packages, processing damaged returns, driving forklifts, loading trucks, and toward the end even moved into the front office for data entry and purchasing work, and to show the managers how to use Excel, which was just catching on in this world. Some nights, after my regular shift, I would even go out on the overnight delivery routes with the truck drivers into Nevada, for an extra $50 and the knowledge of what it takes to be an overnight truck driver. I even began working on a commercial truck-driving license, because you never know. Probability had convinced me that the more practical knowledge and experience I had, the more likely I was to be able to maintain some level of success in life, and continue to meet my growing obligations, regardless of what happened with my actual college education.

But my major was doing its work on me. I did learn to love John Donne and the metaphysical poets. I got a little recognition for my own poems of war and heartache. I was all over Shakespeare. I particularly loved American fiction. And I even saw the voice of a generation in "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock." I knew indeed that in the rooms the women come and go, talking of Michelangelo.

Another important thing I learned was a little bit of grammar and usage. And this knowledge fell hard on me one day, literally.

When I spent time processing damaged returns at the warehouse, which is just a fancy term for a job literally breaking stuff, I had to stamp certain types of invoices with a rubber stamp, which had been carefully procured on my behalf. It was one of those self-inking kinds, with bold red ink and block letters that read "Does not Effect Stock."

Now, let's imagine for a moment, that the capitalization scheme used on this stamp made any sense at all. I was willing to look past that. But as time went on, I became more and more offended, that my employer would ask me to support such flagrant disregard for the English language as this use of "Effect." After all, I was now a man of words. I had respect for the language. I felt deeply that in order to communicate as clearly as possible one's meaning, certain rules needed to be followed. After a few months, I couldn't stand it anymore. I walked into the office of Sandy, the warehouse manager, with the offending tool in my hand.

Sandy was not a reasonable person in any way. She had been born and raised in warehouses such as these, and had endured a hard life. She also had a superiority complex, and no tolerance for a smart mouth. She also didn't like me very much.

I very sincerely and earnestly explained to her that "effect" is a noun, not a verb, and that what she was looking for, in this fragment, was in fact a verb, in which case "affect" would do nicely.

She stared at me blankly.

I made my case about the importance of clarity in communication, and how I understood that effect and affect were commonly mistaken for one another. I said I understood completely, but that I could no longer participate in this sort of activity. I would be requiring a new stamp. I knew she could get one ordered for me quickly.

She continued to stare at me.

I gently placed the stamp on her desk in front of her, turned my back and began to walk out of her office, to look for the deepest darkest hole in the warehouse in which to hide for a while.

I had barely made the door to her office when the stamp hit me squarely on the back of my head. I didn't even look back. I simply picked it up, and returned with it to my post. Sandy never said a word.

Lesson learned. And I should have known from my studies in probability that no one likes to be corrected. Probability suggests that if one is an arrogant ass in the face of others, those same people are likely to be asses in return.

This simple notion now forms the basis of my world-view. It is very similar to what some people refer to as Karma. I dig the notion, and buy it completely. I just approach it from a less spiritual point of view. Rather than assuming that there is some intangible force out there wreaking havoc on assholes and piling rewards on altruists, I think of it as simple theoretical probability. If you are an asshole, chances are, someone will be an asshole back at you. If you are a generally caring, helpful, and selfless individual, chances are, others will react to you accordingly. In fact I can very simply agree with any Buddhist that Karma exists, but another name for this force at work in the universe, is probability.

Seeing my world in terms of probability gives me a basis for making decisions that might otherwise be completely uninformed. This is how basic religious beliefs work for other people. Many Christians make decisions daily based on their understanding of the bible and belief in a set of morals, theoretically based on that scripture. The same is true for any other religion or world-view. My belief in probability allows me to experience "miracles" as well, for lack of a better term. And I have. Before my youngest son was born, when the doctors sat me down to tell me that I would lose either my son or my wife, they explained to me the situation in terms of probability, which I understood and greatly appreciated. I knew that the odds were stacked against survival for both of them. I also knew that if they could save one of them they would, and that the probability of survival would be higher for my son than for my wife. Because I understood the difference between theoretical and experimental probability, I knew that the combined chances of each of them surviving, or the probability that they would both survive, was very, very low. And I prepared myself for this. I did not find God. I left my faith in probability, and the hands of the surgeons and pediatricians.

When they both survived, and both came home, I experienced a miracle. Understand that there is no difference between my explanation of a miracle and the traditional "Christian" explanation of a miracle. Both occur when the probability of something happening is very, very small, and it happens anyway.

And I continue to find other connections between probability and larger sciences, which for me serve to confirm my simplistic notions.

I went on to study math, statistics, and probability in a much more in-depth fashion in later years. I learned that either our system of geometry is inadequate for really explaining the universe, or, the universe is internally infinite (Try constructing a right triangle, say out of wood, using the Pythagorean theorem to make your measurements, where the length of the hypotenuse becomes the square root of 2. Use any cutting device you want, but you will never, ever, cut any material to exactly the length of the square root of 2.), while I know from my later studies of physics that it is externally finite, as Dr. Hawking tells us, because the sky is dark at night.

The relationship between probability and Karma was reaffirmed for me not too long ago, when I was reading an article about more modern studies in anthropology, and scientists now believe that altruism is a very valuable trait to possess when it comes to natural selection. It seems that recent sociological and anthropological studies have shown that the people, or animals, in most groups who give the most, also receive the most, and are therefore more likely to survive. Altruism, or a sense of "conscience" may just have been an important trait, like opposable thumbs, in our own journey to the top of the food chain. It will certainly be important to keep us going. And it seems that probability is the driving force behind this notion. The more we give, the more we receive.

One of my favorite confirmations of my belief in probability as the driving force behind our universe, and one which I still do not completely understand, and consequently spend much time thinking about, is in the relatively new field of physics known as quantum mechanics.

One of my more recently acquired hobbies has been teaching myself to understand physics, and what humanity knows about the laws and forces at work in our universe. Any of you who are physicists will have to excuse my amateur and over-simplified explanation of this very complicated phenomenon. One of the most fascinating concentrations in physics is quantum mechanics, or quantum theory. Quantum theorists are physicists who spend their time looking for, and researching, the smallest building blocks of our universe. Currently, they deal in quarks. Because we have not yet found anything smaller, quarks are currently believed to be the smallest units of matter in existence in the universe. Everything is made of quarks. But quarks are interesting because no one knows exactly what to make of them. Physical science has a long tradition of predicting all activities in the universe with the use of a set of physical laws, believed to be constant and unchanging. However, Quarks don't exactly fit this mold. While we can predict the movements of planets and stars with a level of certainty that allows us to send probes out billions of miles and know where they will end up, we cannot predict the movements of quarks. Quarks react a little differently every time we do anything to them. There is no pattern. In fact, one of the ways quarks are classified is in terms of probability. The only way to predict the movement of a quark is in terms of probability. There is no rule, and no pattern to a quark's reaction to outside stimulus. Quarks can only be defined in terms of the probability that they might move a certain way, or react some other way to a given stimulus.

Einstein could not accept this idea. It is the source of his famous quote "God doesn't play dice." And yet, in all the years since Einstein's death, this odd characteristic of quarks has been confirmed over and over again.

The most fundamental building blocks of the universe can only be explained in terms of probability. I love that. And I have not fully considered the implications of this in my simple world-view.

I have very fond memories of the years I spent in that warehouse. And now that I am back in Sacramento, I drive by from time to time and always remember the lump on the back of my head. I only regret that I never had the chance to tell Sandy "That isn't how your mom reacted when I gave her my stamp last night."