ASM042 Tiny Humans, Depression, and Predicting the Stock Market

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tiny humans depression and predicting the stock market all that and more on this week's episode of ask sciencemic

[Music]

welcome to ask science mike the weekly podcast where i answer your questions about science faith and life it's so good to be back from concussion land and have a fully functioning brain and want to thank all of you who sent me cards and emails and thoughts and prayers it meant a lot but i'm feeling better i'm back in action and this week we're gonna do a podcast let's get it started hey mike how's it going this is matt carter from the bad christian podcast and break it down and i hope you're doing good after that motorcycle crash but i have a question for you today and that is why can't we figure out the stock market why can't we make economic predictions very well using science is it just because humans are are too complicated is it just is psychology really even a science can we can we not predict what people are going to do because i know like maybe math is the simplest science and then physics and chemistry and up through biology but is social science and psychology and like studying people is that even science can we make predictions why can't we make better predictions about what people are gonna do for any of you who don't know my friend matt he's uh the host of two podcasts that i listened to and i've actually been a guest on one of them so if you'd like to hear matt and i rambling about you can check out break it down with matt carter podcast where i was a guest and uh matt's that's a big thinker uh it's fun to have him put a question on the show because i'm trying to do these five-minute answers and he just asked a 55-minute question which is what matt does he's he's a big thinking guy uh so why can't we predict the stock market with any accuracy it seems like we're constantly going through these boom and bubble cycles and nobody knows when to put their money in and when to take their money out and that basically comes down to the limits on human knowledge so we're not going to chase the epistemology rabbit hole because there's just not enough time and instead i'll kind of explain why there's a gap in human knowledge to begin with and it's pretty simple you see our models of reality are of lower fidelity than the universe itself i'll say that again our models of reality are lower fidelity than the universe itself what i mean is there's more information in the universe than we can put into a model and this is never more apparent than when you try to model like emergent phenomenon things like weather or the stock market or even human behavior which is driven by consciousness itself a poorly understood emergent phenomenon uh so even if we assume that determinism is ultimately true and determinism is basically cause and effect everything happens for predictable physical reasons even if we make that assumption we never have enough data to model everything and this makes a lot of sense because imagine a supercomputer the biggest computer in the world with the most memory and now double it in size you know it's a skyscraper computer think about how much memory would be in that computer well you couldn't even accurately model the physics of just that computer using the computer because you can't have a complete model of something within itself so all of the memory cells in that computer would be made of particles quantum particles if you try to count them all you'd run out of memory very quickly because there'd be more particles than the emergent phenomena of the actual computer memory and because of that because you can't model a system within itself we can't create an accurate model of the universe within the universe the universe is already the only accurate model of itself the only way to model the entire universe would be to have something that could contain more information than the universe itself is anybody dizzy out there that's why our knowledge is limited we as far as we can understand we can't know the absolute total information of anything anything of significant complexity because there's just too many components that make up this system if you think about how many cells are in a human body how many atoms are in a cell and then how many quantum particles compose an atom and then the fact that we don't even understand exactly what undergirds those quantum phenomena you understand our ability even in classical determinism to make predictions is limited so what we do instead is build predictive models that work in certain circumstances so a lot of our laws in science work by placing constraints on their predictions newton's laws are only true under certain scenarios and certain assumptions and we even understand that as useful as they are for building bridges and you know looking at the motion of a bouncing ball they aren't particularly useful at the quantum level or at the levels in which relativity affects gravity they are limited so when we look at more complicated systems more complex systems more dynamic systems where there's more interactions we tend to use special branches of mathematics a really popular one would be the chaos math that people became familiar with because of the movie jurassic park and the character ian malcolm and as you start to use larger and more complex and more dynamic mathematical models you can get better at making predictions of complex systems i have an app on my phone called dark sky and very often it pings me right before it's about to rain it can make these 60 minute localized forecasts using the specialized parallel graphics hardware in a phone to download weather data and then do a short range hyper local weather forecast and that's just a really good mathematical model it's the kind of rain prediction that we saw in back to the future part two and it's real it's very accurate it works well and in the same way supercomputers have pretty much taken over stock trading because they build models that are faster and more reactive to the market than human behavior but these models fail even with dark sky sometimes i can still get rained on at a picnic and even with supercomputers doing high-speed trading you still have days where the market crashes either because of human behavior or bugs in the algorithms that allow the computers to trade both of those are limitations of models of reality now this all makes a lot of sense if you think about it just one brain has over 86 billion neurons with many more glial support cells and countless dendrites and synaptic connections our brains are immensely complicated and because of that we can't model even a single human brain with accuracy much less the complex interactions of millions of brains reading the stock market and responding to it while at the same time worrying about their kids or their spouses or just having an off day because of say an undiagnosed blood sugar problem there are just too many factors at play for any of our best models to be useful at precise predictions in temporal space now that doesn't mean we can't look at trends with with pretty good accuracy it doesn't mean that there aren't advantages with more data it just means you're playing a statistics game now here's what's funny we are getting better at predicting human behavior as we learn more about the brain i've read some studies where scientists have basically come up with limited mind reading powers using real-time brain scanners for example without seeing what someone's looking at they can decode simple geometric images out of the visual cortex or they can know what decision a person is going to make if given a or b or yes or no moments before the person's consciousness is aware of that decision this is pretty cutting edge stuff but you can imagine as we get better at imaging brains and as we get better at learning what parts of the brain drive what behaviors we may get better at predicting individual human behaviors and who knows eventually that may latter up into better predictions i think about nate silvers 538 and unbelievable success they had with the last general election those are the result of continuously refined mathematical models that do a better job of dealing with the uncertainty we find with tremendous complexity [Music] our next question comes in from the email inbox and i've got to be honest it's one of my favorites in the history of the program it reads hey science mike my question is somewhat twofold first what do you suppose is the science behind people caring what celebrities think about god and spirituality second and this question is full of hypocrisy what would you say is the science behind people asking science questions to a man while incredibly intelligent and well-read and by his own admission google's slightly better than the people asking the question i hope that doesn't sound rude when you read it i couldn't think of a better way to phrase the question love the show thank you for your time oh that's beautiful that is that is a fantastic question and no i don't think it's rude i think it's completely appropriate and uh i was i've been waiting for that question honestly waiting so i'd have an excuse to talk about it so here we go your first question about celebrities if you go listen to the liturgist podcast on christian celebrity we talk about that a lot it comes down to something called parasocial relationships effectively when we have experiences with people in modern media that aren't present our brains tend to treat them like real relationships over time and because celebrities are attractive and intelligent wealthy and powerful and they tend to have signals that indicate social dominance or high social rank their opinions matter to us because evolution has trained our brains to spend inordinate amounts of energy modeling social dynamics because we're a social species that can't survive on its own so we want the liking and the approval of the powerful and successful members of our tribe because those who were in with the in crowd had a better chance of survival that's it the second question is tough because i don't know what the science is behind people listening to this show it mystifies me it really does i'm not a scientist and i i do work really hard to make this show entertaining and informative uh try to make very complex topics approachable and maybe help people understand something they've never been able to understand before but to be honest i wrestle with my own authority all the time in fact i've spent the last couple of weeks back and forth with my publisher and with my agent talking about my book and their biggest critique of me is how hesitant i am to be an authority so your question comes at a perfect time because i've been trying to figure this out in my own life why should anyone care what a college dropout speaking into his spare bedroom with a microphone why should anyone care what i have to say so i'll tell you what i figured out and the the thing is i'm the science version of an nfl fan you've got friends who can name every quarterback of every nfl team and who the quarterbacks were before that and know lots and lots about football and even though they don't play football and they're not professional football players they're not even coaches they love the game and they've spent a lot of time studying it and so if you have a football question they're a pretty good resource i'm the science version of that i love science and i've spent my entire life studying what scientists write about the world and struggling to integrate science into my world view and i just i think i've just spent more time than most people have and i have more passion about it and that's why i tend to have good science answers and believe it or not i don't google most of the answers on the program i read or listen to the question and then i jot out five or six bullet points on a note card or in evernote and then i google the facts and figures to make sure i didn't miss anything it's a rare question that i actually start from scratch and research now because i know so much about science i am a little better at googling science things than most people but here's the weird thing it works i get emails from actual scientists all the time thanking me for portraying science so well and with such clarity including non-religious scientists i've had more than one email from a scientist who said listen heard about your program and i listened in in order to discredit you and walked away thinking you do a great job educating people about science so whatever i'm doing part of it's working i work hard at science accuracy and science clarity but there's more than that i i really can't say why people listen to the show but i can tell you why i do the show and that seems to be the magic in terms of what gets people to listen number one for most of my life i've struggled to reconcile science and faith and more recently in my life i made the assumption that other people had the same struggle and so i decided to start talking about this struggle publicly and the download numbers for this program make me think that my hunch was good that lots of people are trying to work out what they believe about god in the context of how powerful modern science is so that's the first thing the second thing is i really want to teach people the value of information discernment and the skills required to do critical thinking and independent research a skill set sometimes known as skepticism i honestly believe our world is a better place when people have other sources for opinions than their social identity because group think tends to lead to dangerous behaviors and an independent skeptical outlook can act as a break among some of our most dangerous behaviors that are guided by good intentions and finally and honestly probably most importantly is that people tend to live with lots of shame especially christian people so i try to live out a lot of my struggles in public so that other people feel less alone and they feel less of a need to hide because somehow when we hide our feelings and we hide our questions we hide our doubts it's unhealthy and so a lot of what i do is solidarity i just say me too i feel that way all the time so i spend a lot of time on a program that's question and answer telling people i don't know things because it's okay to admit it when we don't know things and i spend a lot of time avoiding the kind of posturing against social norms that people always worry about i don't mind saying something that's outside of popular opinion but doing so and saying it's no big deal that i disagree i i am through my own actions demonstrating how we can subvert the kind of social pressures that encourage us to conform to a degree that causes us not to flourish anymore and that's that's the most important thing about this program to me bringing questions bringing thoughts out of the shadows and into community and into health so i have a christian show where i talk about science i talk about sex i talk about the limits of our understanding and i talk about even how some of the ideas most important to me in my life like a loving god or a savior that rose from the grave stand on very shaky ground and i'm not ashamed i'm just living a life that fulfills me and in trying to help others i as best i can in the process so your question is well placed i shouldn't be taken as authority that's the reason i include show notes with every episode to let people do their own research and start their own journey but ultimately why do people listen to the show i think it comes down to solidarity this podcast is a voice out there that says me too i am just as confused by all this as you are and here's another email question it's pretty fun it says hey science mike if we shrunk someone down until they were only a few inches tall would their voice get higher like it does in some movies is there any science that would suggest our voice would get higher if we became tiny i love this question uh honey i shrunk the kids was one of my favorite movies growing up i don't know why i just thought it'd be really awesome to be able to shrink down and explore the world from another perspective i find it far more fascinating to be shrunk down to a tiny scale than blowing up to a really giant scale that didn't interest me very much now as shaky as the science is behind most uh shrunken person movies be that honey i shrunk the kids or ant-man or or what it whatever any movie where people shrink most of the science is pretty shaky but the tiny high-pitched voice that's on good ground scientifically because if you look at nothing but the size reduction of the voice box vocal cords lungs mouths lips other parts that create speech absolutely voices would be higher pitched and it's for the same reason that a violin is higher pitched than an upright bass if you look at the construction of a violin and an upright bass they're remarkably similar one's just a lot larger and that larger resonance chamber and an upright base and the larger thicker strings combine to make a lower pitch the strings when plucked move back and forth more slowly and the larger resonance chamber more easily resonates with lower frequency sound waves it's that simple so if you shrunk human vocal cords absolutely they would be high pitched as a straightforward science but you still can't shrink humans the most important part of the movie the mechanics of how you shrink a human being break all the laws of physics there's two ways you could shrink a person one you could throw out a bunch of atoms which would be terrible even if you could arrange the atoms in some fractal similar proportional arrangement as the original material you would lose a lot of information cells don't work when they're that small neural connections wouldn't fire anymore you'd kill the person you'd have this like tiny organic replica it just wouldn't work i mean just the dna loss alone would be phenomenal and then the other idea more popular in films is that you shrink the quantum phenomena in atoms and get rid of the quote empty space unquote it wouldn't work either it is true that atoms are mostly empty space that the nucleus in an atom is phenomenally tiny like golf ball in a football stadium tiny if i remember correctly but it doesn't matter because the forces of physics are as much as responsible for the atom as the mass itself and so if you start to compress atoms bad things happen really bad things at relatively mild levels of compression atoms nuclei fuse you get fusion so if you start compressing the empty space in an atom the first thing that would happen is you create nuclear fusion nuclear fusion is bad for humans you don't want your atoms to fuse that's a bad scene if you continue to fuse them you can get material like neutron stars with with high degrees of compression if you compress even further you're going to get a singularity you go small black hole now i haven't done the math to know exactly which one of those would happen from taking a person from normal size to inches tall i suspect it would just be fusion based on the fact that i know that you have to compress the earth to a remarkably small size in order to get a black hole uh but that alone listen i don't want my atoms to fuse i don't want an ex you know expulsed gamma rays or x-rays in the process i don't want the free neutrons that within damage surrounding dna even a very small amount of nuclear fusion in a human body is a terrible idea so i guess what i'm saying is the most likely outcome of shrinking a person is a high-pitched voice right until there's a nuclear explosion [Music] hey mike my question today is about anxiety and depression they run in my family and my parents siblings and i have all tried medications in therapy as an adult i find i'm able to manage my symptoms pretty well but i'm still riding the waves it's just less intense i feel really dissatisfied and frustrated with my church's perspective i would like to know what science says about preventing and treating these types of disorders my preschooler expresses a lot more anxiety than her peers or even her brother and i fear her genetic predisposition toward anxiety may outweigh her loving and supportive home environment and she will also be destined to a life of therapy and medication thanks mike thinking back to the earlier question about predicting the stock market this is a tough question depression is not well understood in science today and these are the kinds of questions i'm always the most afraid to answer on the show because you're talking about serious life issues in a realm where even the most trained scientists may misspeak or be proven wrong as research continues and so my instinct is to avoid questions like these which is why i answer them because tough questions are the first ones to get swept under the rug these are the questions that people automatically want to ignore or paint over with a platitude so i'm going to answer your question poorly as a way of honoring you as a person i hope that makes sense what i'm saying is i think it's vital that your question gets an answer even if i'm not satisfied with the quality of my answer to your question depression is incredibly complex and incredibly common i've had seasons of depression in my own life my wife struggles more with ongoing depression and when i look at anxiety my oldest daughter is very home to anxiety issues my youngest daughter i'm not sure that she knows what anxiety is it's just remarkable even in this small house of closely genetically related individuals how much variability there is in dealing with and experiencing depression and anxiety now when i look at what science has to say and this is one of those questions where i spent some time doing research to make sure i gave you the best answer i could genetics does seem to play a role and so do the relative sizes of brain structures and the changes in sizes of brain structures over time as well as the overall balance of neurotransmitters in the brain now this is not something as simple as too many of one chemical and not enough of another we're talking about millions of different chemical combinations and reactions to create a human's emotional and cognitive experience and because of that the chemical changes and relationships are subtle and complex and beyond the reach of modern science if depression is a is a dinosaur skeleton you know we have a few teeth and toes dug out from the dirt so far but among what we know it seems very likely that genetics and life events combine to create your propensity towards depression in that moment your genetic disposition as well as your historical and recent life events combined to create this propensity towards depression and the way depression affects you and for how long is influenced by your temperament which is largely genetic in your life outlook which is shaped by your experiences we're having this complex matrix of nature and nurture in the depression situation so let's look at a couple of scenarios you could take someone like me who has probably relatively small genetic propensity towards depression but has life circumstances sometimes that have led to depression but you know for someone like me my outlook and temperament have allowed me to work through issues with relative ease when i'm depressed i'm depressed for weeks or a couple months and then i'm out because i solve the problem and it would be easy for me and in fact in the past because i've been able to battle depression you know it's tempting to say other people can do the same but if another person has high genetic potential for depression as well as tough like circumstances they could become discouraged if someone like me said you know if you just have a positive outlook you'll get there you see how destructive that could be that person might even feel shame that they need medication to treat their depression because other people don't and what this tells me is we have to be careful that our own personal anecdotes and experiences apply universally to the species because they don't we're all different people and we all have different experiences and if science has so much difficulty teasing out these issues certainly our own personal experience can be informative but dangerous is over applied and that's kind of where i see the failings and how the church deals with depression and anxiety they tend to either call it sin or they tend to project their own experiences and oversimplify it and both ignore what science tells us that humans are remarkably diverse and complicated we're all different and we just can't assume our own experiences apply to everyone else now in terms of dealing with depression and anxiety physical exercise therapy medication diet all these things predictable answers tend to come out of science and they tend to work you know differently depending on how traumatic your life experiences are and how much genetic propensity you have towards depression i think community support and i think having a social context where you can be open about your feelings and and the people close to you won't judge you or dismiss you as a result is vital absolutely vital but obviously the most important thing for people who struggle with chronic depression chronic anxiety is to do what you've done to seek professional therapy professional mental health counseling to use medication where appropriate and develop coping skills over time understanding that there's not some expected outcome where you must be a person who is sanguine in disposition or that if you struggle with depression in some way you are less worthwhile than other people because i believe your experience your knowledge with depression and anxiety has value i believe that your different life experience has something to teach me and to teach others so maybe where i would end is by encouraging you to see yourself and see your experiences as valuable and even essential to the web of life on this planet and my hope for you is that you and your daughter would be surrounded by people who accept you exactly as you are [Music] well that does it for another episode of ask science mike this week i'll be in london for belong with the liturgists okay by the time you've heard this uh tickets may not even still be available if you're trying to get last minute i would hurry um i'm recording this obviously uh in advance so i don't know if any tickets are left at all anyway but i'll be at l in london this week if you're in london hey tweet me if we can hook up i'd love to see you somewhere i'll be there a few extra days after belong uh and then the rest of the events this year are not public events uh so there's no more chances to see me in 2015. i'd love to see you in your community in 2016 though i am available for bookings in 2016. it's starting to fill up pretty quickly winter and spring and even summer are starting to fill up and of course fall is going to be very busy with the book tour so if you'd like me to come to your church or your conference or your college in 2016 don't wait go to asksciencemike.com in the upper right hand corner click book mic and we'll we'll talk to you about how to do that i've been doing some ask science mike live events i'd love to do more of those so if you'd like me to come to your community we've got special deals if you just want to bring me for ask science mike live you can do that a little easier than you can to bring me into booking at least financially so if you want to reach out and say you're interested hosting a science mic you can use that same booking form and we'll hook you up there i'd love to see you in 2016 in person it's my favorite thing if you listen to the live podcast versus the pre-recorded i'm way more comfortable in the room with other people as an extrovert than sitting in this room alone like i am right now and talking so i feel like you get more of the true me in a live event than you do on the podcast this is me fighting extrovert loneliness uh we need your questions uh so many good questions we got a big backlog right now but we always need more so keep them coming you can go to ask sciencemike.com and submit a question got a form right there at the bottom you can even record a voice question that's how you hear the questions in the show you can also use hashtag sciencemike on twitter soundcloud or youtube more and more people are doing that it's been kind of wild and this show is listener supported so you can help have these hosts these open honest conversations about science and faith and every dollar helps if you want to send me a dollar a month two dollars a month that's great your donations do help me uh live my life that's where the money goes mortgage and health insurance groceries stuff like that um so i spend a lot of time on the program it's my job so if you enjoy it i'd love it if you could support me there's more information about that on the website asksciencemike.com our show is produced by greg nordeen i am so grateful for his help you know greg is not only great at this he's fast and he's responsive so if you're out there in podcast land and you're like oh wow i wish i had a podcast producer who was really professional and really talented and really fast you should talk to greg there's a link to him on the show notes you can go click his twitter you can hook up he's great same thing jeff botterford does a theme song he's immensely talented i know that several listeners have contacted jeb and hired him to write music and record music for things they've got going on he's fantastic greg and jeb are both on the show notes at sciencemike.com along with additional resources for almost every question that's ever been asked in the 42 episodes of this program it's a great resource go to ask sciencemike.com to learn more if you haven't noticed i'm doing the marketing thing where i say the url over and over at sciencemike.com uh thanks for listening guys and i will see you next week