Selection bias and pessimism

Why are young people more doomer than me?

One of the striking things I’ve noticed lately is that folks in their 20’s are much more pessimistic and “doomer” than folks my age. I was in a conversation with some folks this age recently, and I made the prediction that our big problem with atmospheric carbon in 100 years is going to be that we are mining too much of it, because it’s so useful. They were shocked! No one had heard of anything like precision fermentation, “air to fuel” or other new ideas that make use of new engineering and ideas. Which is just weird - it’s usually the other way around, where I don’t know what’s new, and they do.

If you’ve been in tech for 35+ years like I have, this era is just incredible: there are so many new technologies emerging, new solutions to old problems, and new capacities, that it’s almost hard to know where to put your attention. So why the inversion in energy and optimism? There are many possible reasons for this, but I think a big one is that the younger generation has been badly “tuned” by the internet to think that rare events are common.

We all know the internet “flattens” the world. One of the things we are all constantly doing as humans is building a model of what we expect the world to look like. If we see a certain event often, we build the expectation that it is common, and that, in some cases, we should be able to achieve it or have a similar experience. If something is rare, we might guard against it (like being eaten by a predator) but we don’t expect it to happen all the time.

The internet likes sensation, and we all know the filters are running amok. So we are all being fed a steady diet of “six sigma” rare events, but because we see so many of them, we think they’re common. I won’t bore you with the math, but it’s easy to imagine if there are billions of events in the world each day, and you get shown the 100 most interesting and rare ones, and that’s 100% of what you see in the day, you will have a very distorted view of what’s “normal”. The world is big, the filters are powerful, but we can only see so many things in a day - we can easily be misled.

So why is this generational? I think it might be because the older generations have been “trained” on a more normal distribution. My friends growing up were the kids in the neighborhood. I didn’t see any “influencers” online. Some of us were smart, some weren’t. I was a skinny kid, others were stronger and there was one very serious athlete in my school, but only one. There was a spread of characteristics, but rare things were rare. It was “normal” in the statistical sense.

This selection bias (at least in reporting) happens with startups too. We all “know” that most startups fail, but those never get written about. So mostly what people see are the unreasonable successes. I lived through enough of my own and other’s failures to have a robust sense of how hard it is to create, and how stubborn you have to be to work through tough engineering problems. If you’ve only been fed a diet of success stories though, you probably won’t have that model in mind. If you think you have to have it all worked out before you start (you don’t!), you won’t ever do anything. I think this is the impression we are giving the younger generation, and it’s really fatal.

I could list all kinds of new things that are happening or seem promising, or even just FUN to play with: new science like AI and synth bio, and new abilities like cheap intermittent power that can lead to new engineering solutions, all kinds of AI things, new material science, AlphaFold is like alien tech from the future (we can haz nanotech now?). Even “mundane” capabilities like desktop CNC - now I can make a sub-millimeter precise copy of the best mandolin in the world from 120 years ago, in my garage, in a few hours! All of these ideas make me excited - none are easy and there are ALWAYS problems to be solved, but there is so much opportunity right now.

We need the next generation to be optimistic, creative, and disruptive. That’s always the role of the younger generation. It’s striking, and disturbing, that I am more optimistic and disruptive in conversation than folks in that cohort (I’m an old poop!) Fight that programming! You can do great things, and there are so many opportunities right now. I wish I were 20 again - even though the last 35 years have been crazy and disruptive and fun, I think the next 35 are going to be more so.

Don’t expect it to be perfect, or easy. Don’t model yourself on what you see in a feed, anywhere. Just make things, with friends. When you find a problem, which you will, don’t give up, push! It’s your turn. You can invent much more than you think.