Everything Is Obvious_ _Once You Know the Answer - Duncan J. Watts [58]
IT’S NOT OVER TILL IT’S OVER
In the classic movie Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Butch, Sundance, and Etta decide to escape their troubles in the United States by fleeing to Bolivia, where, according to Butch, the gold is practically digging itself out of the ground. But when they finally arrive, after a long and glamorous journey aboard a steamer from New York, they are greeted by a dusty yard filled with pigs and chickens and a couple of run-down stone huts. The Sundance Kid is furious and even Etta looks depressed. “You get much more for your money in Bolivia,” claims Butch optimistically. “What could they possibly have that you could possibly want to buy?” replies the Kid in disgust. Of course we know that things will soon be looking up for our pair of charming bank robbers. And sure enough, after some amusing misadventures with the language, they are. But we also know that it is eventually going to end in tears, with Butch and Sundance frozen in that timeless sepia image, bursting out of their hiding place, pistols drawn, into a barrage of gunfire.
So was the decision to go to Bolivia a good decision or a bad one? Intuitively, it seems like the latter because it led inexorably to Butch and the Kid’s ultimate demise. But now we know that that way of thinking suffers from creeping determinism—the assumption that because we know things ended badly, they had to have ended badly. To avoid this error, therefore, we need to imagine “running” history many times, and comparing the different potential outcomes that Butch and the Kid might have experienced had they made different decisions. But at what point in these various histories should we make our comparison? At first, leaving the United States seemed like a great idea—they were escaping what seemed like certain death at the hands of the lawman Joe Lefors and his posse, and the journey was all fun and games. Later in the story, the decision seemed like a terrible idea—of all the many places they might have escaped to, why this godforsaken wasteland? Then it seemed like a good decision again—they were making loads of easy money robbing small-town banks. And then, finally, it seemed like a bad idea again as their exploits caught up to them. Even if you granted them the benefit of foresight, in other words—something we already know is impossible—they may still have reached very different conclusions about their choice, depending on which point in the future they chose to evaluate it. Which one is right?
Within the narrow confines of a movie narrative, it seems obvious that the right time to evaluate everything should be at the end. But in real life, the situation is far more ambiguous. Just as the characters in a story don’t know when the ending is, we can’t know when the movie of our own life will reach its final scene. And even if we did, we could hardly go around evaluating all choices, however trivial, in light of our final state on our deathbed. In fact, even then we couldn’t be sure of the meaning of what we had accomplished. At least when Achilles decided to go to Troy, he knew what the bargain was: his life, in return for everlasting fame. But for the rest of us, the choices we make are far less certain. Today’s embarrassment may become tomorrow’s valuable lesson. Or yesterday’s “mission accomplished” may become today’s painful irony. Perhaps that painting we picked up at the market will turn out to be an old master. Perhaps our leadership of the family firm will be sullied by the unearthing of some ethical scandal, about which we may not have known. Perhaps our children will go on to achieve great things and attribute their success to the many small lessons we taught them. Or perhaps we will have unwittingly pushed them into the wrong career and undermined their chances of real happiness.