Original link: https://shyrz.me/news-16-once-in-a-lifetime/
22·06·12 Issue 16
Everyone, happy Dragon Boat Festival (albeit a bit late)!
The Dragon Boat Festival just passed, did you have a good time? May you all be in a good mood. At the same time, I would also like to thank the friends who rewarded me in the last issue. Your encouragement surprised me very much!
In this selection of articles, “Once in a Lifetime” explains why so many so-called “once in a century” events occur from a statistical point of view, and “How to Change Your Habits” points us to an alternative to willpower. An effective method, “Time Travel is Possible, But Only If Multiple Histories Exist”, explains the possibility of time travel from the perspective of quantum mechanics and the solutions to the various time travel paradoxes currently proposed. Hope that inspires.
Once in a lifetime
Collaborative Fund June 7, 2022 article by Morgan Housel explains why there are so many “once in a century” and even “once in a thousand years” events.
I want to try and explain why the world looks so crazy these days.
Evelyn Marie Adams won $3.9 million in the 1986 New Jersey Lottery. Four months later, she won again, claiming another $1.4 million. “I’m going to give up the game,” she told The New York Times. I’m going to give other people a chance.
That was big news at the time, because statisticians put her odds of winning twice at a staggering 1 in 17 trillion.
Three years later, two mathematicians, Persi Diaconis and Frederick Mosteller, poured cold water on the excitement.
If a person plays the lottery, the odds of picking two winning numbers are indeed 1 in 17 trillion. But if 100 million people play the lottery over and over again—as is the case in the U.S.—the odds that someone will win twice are actually pretty good. Diaconis and Mostler think it’s 1/30. The number didn’t make many headlines.
“With a large enough sample, anything outrageous can easily happen,” Mosteller said.
That’s part of why the world seems so crazy, and why once-in-a-lifetime events seem to happen so often.
There are about 8 billion people on this planet. So if an event has a one in a million chance of happening every day, it should happen to 8,000 people every day, or 2.9 million times a year, and maybe 2.5 billion times in your lifetime. Even a one-in-a-billion event can be the fate of hundreds of thousands of people in your lifetime. And given that the media wants to promote shocking headlines, you hear their names and see their faces.
Physicist Freeman Dyson once explained that what is often attributed to paranormal phenomena, magic or miracles is really just basic math.
Over the course of any normal person’s life, miracles happen about once a month.
The proof of this rule is simple. During the time we are awake and actively engaged in life, about 8 hours a day, the things we see and hear happen at a rate of one per second. So the total number of events that happen to us is about 30,000 per day, or about 1 million per month.
With few exceptions, these events are not miracles because they are trivial. The chance of a miracle happening is about 1 in every million events.
Therefore, we should expect an average of one miracle per month.
The idea that unbelievable things happen because of boring statistics is important because it does the same for terrible things.
Consider the once-in-a-century event. The once-in-a-century floods, hurricanes, earthquakes, financial crises, frauds, global epidemics, political collapses, economic recessions, etc., are endless. Many terrible things can be called “once in a century”.
A once-in-a-century event doesn’t mean it happens every 100 years. It means there is a 1% chance of it happening in any given year. This seems low. But when there are hundreds of different independent 100-year events, what are the odds that one of them will occur in a given year? quite high.
If there is a 1% chance of a new global outbreak next year, a 1% chance of an economic depression, a 1% chance of a flood, a 1% chance of a political collapse, etc., then next year — or any year — bad things will happen The odds are… not low.
It’s always been like this. Even the good times we remember are full of traces of chaos. The glorious 1950s was actually a litany of grief—adjusted for population growth, more Americans lost their jobs during the 1958 recession than in any month during the 2008 Great Recession. The same was true in the 1990s. It was a quiet decade in our memory, but the global financial system nearly collapsed in 1998, at the time of the greatest boom we have ever encountered.
What’s different now is the size of the global economy, which increases the sample size of potentially crazy events that could happen. When 8 billion people interact, the odds that liars, geniuses, terrorists, idiots, pundits, assholes, and visionaries will move the needle in a significant way on any given day are all but guaranteed. Social media then amplifies it, giving the impression that it is more prevalent than it actually is. The world crashes on average every ten years. Every one to three years may be more common for your country, state, town or business.
Sometimes it feels like bad luck. But more often, it’s just raw math at work. There are an infinite number of different things that can go wrong, so at any given moment, at least one of them could be wreaking havoc.
How to change your habits
Big Think May 27, 2022 Article by Elizabeth Gilbert interviews USC behavioral scientist Wendy Wood.
SasinParaksa / Adobe Stock
Habits shape people’s daily lives, but often go unnoticed. At the same time, people often hope to change bad habits through willpower, but it does not work. Dr. Wendy Wood wants to tell readers that it’s easy to blame a lack of willpower when recognizing a bad habit, but it’s not easy to use willpower to make a change.
Habits shape everyday life
The habits we develop ultimately shape our daily lives, but we often don’t notice them.
“Research shows that people act according to their habits far more than they realize,” said Dr. Wendy Wood.
→ Further reading: The Hidden Habits That Control Your Life | Wendy Wood
Of course, humans have developed brains capable of creating, problem-solving, and planning. But our daily habits—the little everyday actions we don’t think about—are the main reason we spend our time and energy.
Dr. Wood’s research found that approximately 40% of our daily actions are habits. That’s why it’s worth taking a closer look at what habits are and whether they have a negative or positive impact on our lives.
What is a habit?
Habits are automatic behaviors . They do not require intent, but rather responses to environmental cues, such as time of day or place. Essentially, your brain forms an association between a specific environment and a specific behavior. Then you perform the behavior in the situation – the habit, without even thinking.
Habits can be things like checking email as soon as you go to work in the morning, walking a certain route home every night, chewing your fingernails when you’re nervous, or swiping Twitter when you go to bed at night.
Habits are formed when you get a reward for a certain behavior. Like Pavlov’s dog, you may not even realize you’re learning something new.
How are habits formed?
When exposed to something pleasant, the brain releases a neurotransmitter called dopamine . This “dopamine rush” makes you feel good, so you are motivated to repeat the behavior in order to get the dopamine reward again. Over time, associations between context, behavior, and reward are stored in areas of your brain, such as the basal ganglia and dorsolateral striatum , which are involved in emotion and implicit learning.
For example, checking your news feed at night can be enjoyable, at least sometimes. So, before you know it, hope for another dopamine rush brings you back to bedtime to check it out. Before long, the habit will be stored in your brain and it will be difficult to change.
Even after the reward ends, the habit remains
Over time, some habits can become so ingrained that they persist even after the reward is over.
In a classic study of habit change , researchers tried to get people to change a simple workplace behavior: taking the stairs instead of the elevator. The researchers tried to educate people about the benefits of using stairs, such as reducing electricity usage and exercising quickly. It’s no different.
So the researchers slowed the elevator doors to close by 16 seconds—just enough inconvenience to prompt about a third of people to take the stairs.
But a more striking finding was that people continued to take the stairs even after elevator speeds returned to normal. They stick to their habit.
Habits can rarely be changed with knowledge, planning or willpower alone
Remember that habits are stored in some areas of the brain, such as the basal ganglia and the dorsolateral striatum. These areas are involved in basic life functions, including procedural memory (for example, how to ride a bike or do other movements) and emotion. They are considered somewhat primitive, even primitive, in the early stages of evolution to ensure that animals fulfill the “four Fs”: eat, fight, flee and reproduce.
On the other hand, willpower, explicit knowledge (such as the ability to state facts), and planning are mostly done by the prefrontal cortex. The prefrontal cortex is the most developed part of the brain. But Dr. Wood argues that since it’s separate from where the habit is stored, it can’t directly change the habit by itself.
“Habits are stored in a memory system that we can’t access, don’t make a fuss, it’s a way to protect the most important information.”
For example, just as educating people about the benefits of taking the stairs did not reduce elevator use, educating people on how to eat healthier is unlikely to change their eating habits. Even offering financial rewards generally does not lead to lasting habit changes after the reward ends.
How to change the habit?
Form a new habit. In short, the best way to change a habit is to replace it with a new one . That means you have to perform a new behavior in a specific context, get a reward, and repeat.
Of course, this is easier said than done. Forming new habits is challenging because of what psychologists call “friction” — obstacles such as distance, time, and effort that prevent completing a behavior .
Create a helpful environment. One of the best ways to overcome friction is to create an environment that makes new behaviors easier and rewarding. A new environment ideally reduces old incentives to bad habits and increases new incentives to beneficial new habits.
“The whole point about behavior change is that you have to change with what’s around you, and we need an environment to make it easier to get there.” That’s where your planning and thinking come into play. If going to the gym is a hassle, find a favorite way to exercise at home and keep your workout clothes and equipment in a convenient and visible place; if you want to read before bed instead of playing on your phone, consider keeping it out of your bedside The place to charge your phone overnight and then find a book you can’t put it down.
Take advantage of habits
While habits are badly said, using them wisely can greatly improve your life.
In addition to helping you achieve your goals, habits can provide your life with a sense of structure, control, and even meaning. For example, many professional athletes gain a sense of confidence and control when performing certain rituals before or during competition. While others may have family traditions or conventions that provide meaning.
But even mediocre habits can help. Because habits take so little brain power, they can also free up your mind for other things, like thinking about your important life goals or calling your mom on the drive home.
“When we practice something enough that we don’t think about it, then we can do other things to get meaning out of our lives.”
Time travel is possible, but only if multiple histories also exist
The Conversation April 24, 2022 Article by Barak Shoshany, Assistant Professor of Physics at Brock University.
Have you ever made a mistake that you hoped to undo? Correcting the wrongs of the past is one of the reasons we find the concept of time travel so fascinating. As often described in science fiction, with a time machine, nothing lasts forever – you can always go back in time and change it. But is time travel really possible in our universe, or is it just science fiction?
→ Further reading: Can humans travel in time?
Our modern understanding of time and causality comes from general relativity. Theoretical physicist Albert Einstein’s theory combines space and time into a single entity – “space-time” – and provides a very sophisticated explanation of how it works, to a level that no other established theory is capable of. comparable. This theory has been around for more than 100 years and has been experimentally verified with such high precision that physicists are fairly certain it provides an accurate description of the causal structure of our universe.
For decades, physicists have tried to use general relativity to figure out whether time travel is possible. It turns out that you can write down equations that describe time travel and be completely compatible and consistent with relativity. However, physics is not mathematics, and equations are meaningless if they don’t correspond to anything in reality.
Arguments Against Time Travel
There are two main issues that make us think that these equations may be unrealistic. The first problem is a practical one: Building a time machine seems to require exotic matter , that is, matter with negative energies. All matter that we see in our daily life has positive energy – matter with negative energy is not something you can just casually find. From quantum mechanics, we know that this kind of matter could theoretically be created, but in too few quantities and for too little time .
However, there is no evidence that it is impossible to create sufficient quantities of exotic matter. Additionally, other equations may be discovered that allow time travel without the need for exotic matter. So the problem may just be a limitation of our current technology or understanding of quantum mechanics.
Time travel seems to contradict logic / Shutterstock
The other major problem is less practical, but more important: it is the observation that time travel seems to contradict logic, in the form of the time travel paradox . There are several types of this paradox, but the most problematic is the consistency paradox .
The consistency paradox is a popular trope in science fiction that occurs whenever an event caused a change in the past, but the change itself prevented that event from happening in the first place.
For example, consider a scenario where I go into my time machine, use it to go back five minutes, and destroy the machine as soon as I get there. Now that I’ve destroyed the time machine, I can’t use it in five minutes.
But if I can’t use the time machine, then I can’t go back in time and destroy it. So it’s not destroyed so I can go back in time and destroy it. In other words, the time machine is destroyed if and only if it is not destroyed. Since it cannot be destroyed and not destroyed at the same time, this situation is inconsistent and paradoxical.
remove the paradox
In science fiction, there is a common misconception that paradoxes can be “created”. Time travelers are often warned against making drastic changes to the past and avoiding meeting their past selves, for this very reason. Examples of this can be found in many time travel films, such as the Back to the Future trilogy.
But in physics, a paradox is not an event that can actually happen – it’s a purely theoretical concept that points to an inconsistency in the theory itself. In other words, the consistency paradoxes don’t just mean that time travel is a dangerous job, they also mean that it simply cannot happen.
This is one of the motivations for theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking to propose his time-series preservation conjecture , which states that time travel should be impossible. However, this conjecture has so far remained unproven. Furthermore, if we didn’t eliminate time travel because of the paradox, but just the paradox itself, the universe would be a much more interesting place.
One attempt to solve the time travel paradox is theoretical physicist Igor Dmitrievich Novikov’s self-consistency conjecture , which basically states that you can travel into the past, but you can’t change it.
According to Novikov, if I had tried to destroy my time machine five minutes ago, I would have found it impossible. The laws of physics somehow conspire to stay consistent.
→ Scene from the first time travel in the 1985 film Back to the Future
Introducing Multiple History
But what’s the point of going back in time if you can’t change the past? My recent work with my students Jacob Hauser and Jared Wogan showed that there is a time travel paradox that Novikov’s conjecture cannot resolve. This brings us back to the first party, because even one paradox cannot be eliminated, and time travel is still logically impossible.
So, is this the final nail in the coffin of time travel? it’s not true. We show that allowing multiple histories (or in more familiar terms, parallel timelines) can solve paradoxical problems that Novikov’s conjecture cannot. In fact, it resolves any paradox you throw at it.
The idea is very simple. When leaving the time machine, I exit to a different timeline. On that timeline, I can do whatever I want, including destroying the time machine, without changing anything on my original timeline. Since I cannot destroy the time machine in the original timeline, the one I actually use to go back in time, there is no paradox.
After studying the time travel paradox over the past three years , I’ve become more and more convinced that time travel is possible, but only if our universe allows multiple histories to coexist. So, can it?
Quantum mechanics certainly seems to imply this, at least if you agree with Everett’s “many worlds” interpretation, where one history can be “split” into multiple histories, one for each possible measurement – For example, is Schrödinger’s cat alive or dead, or whether I arrive in the past.
But these are just guesses. My students and I are currently trying to find a concrete theory of time travel with multiple histories that is fully compatible with general relativity. Of course, even if we manage to find such a theory, it’s not enough to prove that time travel is possible, but it at least means that time travel isn’t ruled out by the consistency paradox.
In science fiction, time travel and parallel timelines almost always go hand in hand, but now we have evidence that they must also go hand in hand in real science. General relativity and quantum mechanics tell us that time travel is possible, but if it does, then multiple histories must also be possible.
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