Hypothetically Speaking...

“Today will be partly sunny, overcast later in the day with a chance of showers…”

“I think Smith’s injury is going to have a huge impact on how well these guys can move the ball…”

“A new study by medical experts shows that oxygen might cause cancer, despite previous theories to the contrary…”

“If the Democrats fail to make an impact on this issue, the Republicans are going to take the majority again this year and most likely get another Republican in the White House in ’08…”

“Statistics show that about one in every five people is likely to suffer a stroke by the age of 65…”

“Approximately fifty percent of this country disagrees with what the president is doing…”

“I don’t want to speculate before the press conference, but it looks pretty certain that what we are seeing is a complete mental breakdown. I’ve called on other experts to offer their opinions…”

We live in a world disgustingly saturated with hypothetical bias. Everything from a four-hour-long-pre-game show, to an interview with political analysts, to a weather forecast—they are all constructed by material that does not exist. Companies are paid exuberant amounts of money by the government and other private companies to simulate everything from relational interactions to warfare scenarios and storm paths, and the accuracy rate for such simulations is under 40%.

I’ve heard guys laugh at “nerds” who argue over whether or not a Super Star Destroyer could take on seventeen regular Star Destroyers. They laugh because Star Wars is a fantasy and there is no point about arguing over something that’s not real. But the same guys who find Star Wars debates so ridiculous are absolutely glued to the set when ESPN’s best and brightest argue over what is going to take place two days in the future during Sunday’s big games. O hypocrites!

The only difference between Star Wars and a football game is that the football game will happen in our reality and there will be a subsequent effect on some people’s lives. But for 99% of the fans who haven’t bet on the game, their lives will go on just as if the game was a fantasy. They won’t see another dime on their paychecks, their spouses won’t love them any more or less, gas prices will not drop or skyrocket, they’ll still have to go to work, they’ll still have all the problems they had before the game started.

Those guys on ESPN are essentially indulging in the same fantastical debates as the Star Wars fans. Nothing the guys say or do will change reality, and they are both operating out of a realm of the non-existent. Star Wars fans take specs and information provided by George Lucas and draw conclusions based on them. ESPN guys take injuries, history, and stats to form conclusions as to how the match up will go.

The bonus for Star Wars fans is that they can never be proven wrong, while the ESPN guys are embarrassed time and time again when reality grinds their hypothetical, non-existent game into dust. An injury they thought would take the running game out of an offense, thereby shifting the entire balance of the game, ends up being a non-factor when the second-string running back has a fantastic performance despite his prior string of poor performances. A team they discussed for hours on end as being Super Bowl contenders just inexplicably fails to show up and gets demolished by a 14-point underdog.

Weathermen. What good are they? If Mr. Vane the weatherman tells me there’s only a three percent chance of rain, and I plan a huge outdoor picnic, and it rains, what the heck do I care what the percentages were? The fact was it did rain. I don’t care if the odds were less than a percentage point or if it was a sure fire bet. I’m wet and my picnic is ruined regardless. And where exactly did Mr. Vane pull that percentage from? What exactly in the radar gives anything in the way of a mathematical estimate of how likely a certain weather pattern is to emerge? Seems like there’s going to be some human guesstimation happening, and since both the world and the weather are in a constant state of change, it doesn’t seem like a guesstimation has very good chance of being accurate.

And it doesn’t!

A news story breaks at 9am based on some hypothetically sound information, and analysts and experts debate for ten hours until the press conference reveals that it was all a misunderstanding and the situation never really happened.

That’s the key. Technically, for all those people who create hypothetical scenarios, when what they say doesn’t happen, they have just indulged in debating a fantasy just like Star Wars. For anyone having a difficult time drawing the connection, I’ll bridge the gap between Star Wars and ESPN with this: Bruce Lee versus Mike Tyson. I have heard this hypothetical fight debated many times. It involves two people that existed in the real world at the same time, who technically could have actually fought each other. But the fight never did happen and it never will. So just because a football game involves people that actually exist, like Mike and Bruce, it doesn’t mean that the debate about the victor or the strategies used will be any more pertinent to real life than something that is pure fiction.

The same is especially true in politics. Expert One says there’s no way a female could take the White House, and Expert Two disagrees. The two do verbal battle for four long years, bringing in other experts and citing polling data that agrees with them. They elaborate and debate and conjure support for their perspectives, only to find that there is no woman on the ballot. Every word those two experts spoke was a waste. It was a debate about something that didn’t happen, therefore it was pure fantasy, and therefore it had no effect whatsoever on society.

That’s another thing. Who are these experts? What does an expert do when he/she isn’t giving their opinions? Who bestows upon them the title of “expert”? Who gave that person the authority to be an expert on experts? It’s not a title. You can be a doctor of something, but there is no working “expert” title. And how much is that title worth when you have two “experts” who disagree with each other? They both can’t be right. If one of them says that the new durinum alloy on the spaceship will burn up on reentry and the other one says it won’t, one of them will be wrong. But they are both experts! We are listening to their opinions, giving them airtime and attention because they are supposed to know more than us, but one of them will be just as wrong as we would be! Who cares why? And does that erroneous “expert” get demoted? No. He goes right on being an expert, waiting in his magic “expert lair” until the media decides to question him again.

I listen to one expert say such-and-such won’t be a deciding factor in the presidential elections, and I hear another expert say just the opposite. Great, now I have to believe who I want to believe and hope that guy is right. The cruel joke is that one expert can be wrong in one instance but be right in another, so there’s no way to ever discover who the true expert is; there isn’t one.

And across the board—weathermen, political experts, ESPN guys—none of them flat out admit when they are wrong. What they do is engage in damage control; that is they analyze what actually happened and work backwards to show how their theory had validity in an abstract way, or to remind us that even though they didn’t say it, of course there was a chance the exact opposite of what they predicted could happen.

Polls are another worthless piece of fodder. The only polls I care about are the ones at the top and bottom of our planet that keep us rotating properly. You can have the best sampling in the world and still be off. Considering how many variables factor into public opinion about anything, the odds of being able to get an accurate fix from any kind of sample are horrible. And if you tell me that polls are just to give me a rough idea, then why the heck do I care? Even if the poll is right, what does that say? I would venture to guess (though I’m no expert) that the vast majority of people polled about any given topic lack sufficient information to give a valid opinion.

Let’s ask a bunch of average Joe’s and Sue’s say what they think about our foreign policy. Forget that Joe and Sue don’t know a fifth of the laws and regulations that are in place to guide foreign policy, and that they have little more than a vague notion about who actually has what responsibility in our government. Add to that the score of information that is classified or confidential and you’ve got a relatively ignorant Joe and Sue making a very uneducated call. So remind me again why I or anyone else should care? “A bunch of people who don’t know anything about the subject offer their advice and opinions on this, our latest and greatest poll!” …Whoopee.

Sampling works in science because the factors and variables are known and/or controlled. While anything and everything can happen in an experiment, there generally aren’t the issues of human emotion, history, education, social standing, and ulterior motives, all of which can change in an instant. All a poll says is that those specific people, not even five percent of our nation, lean towards one particular opinion. Where’s the value in that?

Our lives are taken up with hypothetical information. Supposedly 75 percent of America will be obese in thirty years. So? Can we change that? Is there a call to action? If we change our lifestyles to avoid such a calamity, the statistic is worthless. Who could say it wouldn’t have dropped on its own? It’s not accurate therefore it is fantasy. And if we don’t change anything and three-quarters of us do become obese, what was the point in giving us the statistic thirty years in advance?

Hypothetical information cannot be proven until it is too late. By the time theories are put into a place where they can be authenticated or discarded, the point is moot. Some experts say vitamins might actually cause cancer. Other experts disagree. What good is their information to me? Even with my limited knowledge on vitamins, I know they can help me, hurt me, or do nothing. Those are my only options. Having people in the news remind me of those options is redundant.

Never mind the fact that there are so many exceptions to everything. My dad smoked cigarettes for 22 years and then cigars for the past 10. His lungs are clean as can be. My great grandfather smoked every day of his life starting in his teens and he lived until he was 95. My friend’s uncle smoked for three years, quit, and died of cancer at 45. You could tell my grandfather that smoking would increase his chances of dying early by 46.5% and what would it have changed? How many exceptions can there be to a rule before it is no longer considered a rule?

I think this hypothetical hype exists because, despite our many advances, we as humans still know very little about ourselves or the world we live in. Hypothetical musings are our way of pretending we understand our world, or more importantly that we can predict and even control it. After all, it isn’t until something actually happens that we can be proven wrong, and generally we have a 50% chance of being right when the time comes anyway. We take comfort in our statistics and odds, despite the fact that every day those odds are swept away and statistics are proven useless. If there is a shooting in a high school and the odds are that only two out of three hundred students are going to die, it seems very unlikely that you will be killed, right? Those are good, safe odds…unless you are one of the two to get shot. Then it doesn’t matter how statistically tiny your chances were—you got shot. You weren’t protected by the statistics…in fact, the false sense of security might have been your undoing!

The bottom line is that we need to stop clouding our time, energy, and thoughts with what-if’s. Nothing is certain, and no amount of expert opinion is going to change the countless uncertainties we face as humans every day. We take chances when we get up, when we drive our cars, when we eat a meal, and even when we lay down to sleep. We will all die sometime, whether it’s from a bee sting, shark bite, some form of cancer, drowning, murder, or old age. This world and this life were not meant to be figured out or confined to a formula. We live in a digital age where everything is a 0 or 1, but our lives are analogue.
Regardless of when or how we die, life is much too short for us to be spending countless hours lost in a world of fantasy that is insulated by hypothetical musings and statistics.

“Do you think these guys actually expected to win?”

“No, I don’t think so. I mean, 9 out of 10 teams who lost the first two games in
the series ended up losing, so I’m thinking they expected defeat.”

“See, I don’t know. Coach Schweitzer has always had a winner’s mentality that you can see in seventeen of his last twenty games.”

“Yes but remember he had a different squad of guys around him this year. If you
look at their mood during the interviews leading up to this game, it seemed like most of them had accepted defeat.”

“Well they didn’t expect for Santa Fe’s star defensive player to get injured in the first two minutes of play either.”

“That’s true too. We all thought he would play a big role in the game, but as we
know it doesn’t take much to change everything.”

“How do you think the team will do next year?”

“If their defense can get back on track and they make some key picks, I think we could see them here next year, no doubt.”

“But if they make bad picks and their defense stays the same they might not have such
a good chance.”

“That’s true too.”