Your Daily Tao

It is virtually impossible to convince any Western reader that in the current national and global context, the continuation of strong CCP rule under Xi Jinping could be good for China and for the world. In the Western mind, any undemocratic political system that deprives citizens the ability to choose or remove a leader is by definition evil. This is why no major Western pundit or political figure could have challenged the political avalanche of criticism that descended upon Xi when he removed the term limits on his presidency. Yet, if contemporary Western thinkers had sought advice or guidance from previous generations of Western thinkers, they would have found good advice they could have used. One such piece of advice was provided by Max Weber. In one of his famous essays, he wrote that “it is not true that good can only follow from good and evil only from evil, but that often the opposite is true. Anyone who says this is, indeed, a political infant.”* It can be argued that strong central control of China by the Chinese Communist Party under Xi Jinping is producing at least three “global public goods” that the world is indeed benefiting from. And if Max Weber were alive today, he would be astonished to see the absence of strong Western voices observing and documenting how the West (and the rest of the world) is benefiting from the stable and rational rule of China by the CCP. The first global public good that the CCP is delivering is to rein in a strong nationalist dragon that is clearly alive and well within the Chinese body politic. There are many reasons for nationalism in China. Most Chinese are aware that China was badly trampled upon and humiliated during the century of humiliation after the Opium War. China’s recovery today has buoyed their national pride. Many in the West were shocked when in 2001 the Taliban destroyed the precious antique Buddhist statues in Bamiyan, which had survived fourteen centuries. Yet, those shocked Westerners, outraged by the Taliban’s behavior in 2001, failed to remember or mention that barely a hundred and fifty years earlier British and French troops had behaved just like the Taliban in Beijing in 1860. Here is one account of what happened in that episode. As the primary residence of five Qing emperors, Yuanmingyuan contained hundreds of palaces, temples, libraries, theaters, pavilions, chapels, gazebos and galleries filled with priceless artworks, antiquities and personal possessions. To ensure an equitable distribution of this imperial property, the commanders agreed to appoint “prize agents” to divvy it up. There followed an orgy of indiscriminate plunder in which anything that could not be carted off was destroyed. Then, on Oct. 18, British forces were ordered by Lord Elgin—son of the Lord Elgin who removed the marble friezes from Greece’s Parthenon—to inflict a final blow, with fire, as revenge for the deaths of British and Indian prisoners in Chinese captivity. Because Yuanmingyuan was so vast—roughly five times the size of Beijing’s Forbidden City and eight times that of Vatican City—it took an entire infantry division of nearly 4,500 men, including four British regiments and the 15th Punjabis, to set it aflame. Gilded beams crashed, porcelain roofs buckled, ash filled the lakes and embers snowed down on Beijing, where clouds of dense smoke eclipsed the sun. Upon hearing the news, the ailing 30-year-old Xianfeng emperor vomited blood; less than a year later he was dead.* If China were to make a sudden transformation into a democracy, the political voices that would dominate the political landscape would not be the calm and soothing voices of democratic leaders like John F. Kennedy or Barack Obama but the angry nationalist voices, like those of Donald Trump or Teddy Roosevelt. In terms of its emergence as a great world power, China in 2020 is probably where America was as it emerged as a great world power at the end of the nineteenth century, when Teddy Roosevelt served as the secretary of the US Navy. This is why Graham Allison of Harvard has wisely warned his fellow Americans against wishing that the Chinese “would be like us.”

The message seems to be “Be careful what you wish for”. While many in the west, and probably here, might decry the current political climate in China as too restrictive, there are also benefits that come with that stability. Just thought that this was an interesting and nuanced perspective from this excerpt.

One key goal of this book is to blow away the thick fog of misunderstanding that has enveloped the Sino-American relationship, to enable both sides to better understand—even if they cannot approve of—each other’s core interests. Better understanding will not necessarily lead to peace and harmony. On purely ideological grounds, any American administration must appear sympathetic to the demonstrators in Hong Kong clamoring for more rights. American public opinion demands that the United States support the demonstrations. However, any shrewd American administration should also balance public opinion with a sound understanding of the core interests of Chinese leaders. A Chinese leader who appears to be soft on territories that were once seized from China at China’s greatest moment of weakness in the nineteenth century will be condemned by his own people and quickly removed from office. It is my hope, therefore, that, on completion, a reader of this book will develop a better understanding of the deeper dynamics driving both sides. This book also makes room for a possibly optimistic conclusion. If we believe that we live in an age of reason, where public policies are driven by hardheaded, rational calculations and a geopolitical understanding of each other’s core interests, it is possible for both sides to work out long-term policies that will prevent them from moving inexorably toward a painful and unnecessary clash. There is one important statistic that both American and Chinese leaders should be consistently aware of: 330 million people live in America and 1.4 billion in China. These are big numbers, but the combined population of America and China (1.7 billion) still makes up less than 25 percent of the world’s population. Many of the remaining 75 percent of the population have now come to understand and accept that humanity lives in a small, connected, and imperiled planet that we all depend on. Hence, there will be little tolerance from the rest of the world of extreme or irrational measures adopted by either America or China.

Sharing the objective of this new book. Just thought that it will be interesting to share the local perspective of the USA and China relationship. The author, Kishore Mahbubani, has a nuanced and balanced view of this and I think it will be worth exploring on as we carry on from the previous book.

Today’s excerpt shows the complex dynamics and structures that will never allow any Chinese leader to take a soft stance on Hong Kong or Taiwan. Regardless of your view on this issue, the circumstances of the situation simply do not allow for China to publicly concede on this issue. In the upcoming passages, more will also be shared on the interesting dynamics between these 2 giants.

I was curious as to how Myanmar leaders saw China’s long-term strategy. Did they, like so many in the West, view China as a capitalist wannabe, intent on a peaceful rise in the community of nations? Mitchell said that Myanmar intellectuals were reading the views of Lee Kuan Yew, the eighty-nine-year-old former prime minister of Singapore and one of Asia’s most revered leaders. Lee, hailed as the father of the Singaporean miracle, has won widespread praise in the West; Richard Nixon once compared him to Churchill, Disraeli, and Gladstone, and Bill Clinton and George H. W. Bush were among many hailing him as a visionary leader. Yet curiously many in the West have chosen to ignore his views on China. A Myanmar official pointed me to a new book on Lee’s views that was for sale at Rangoon’s five-star Strand Hotel, a Victorian-style structure built during the British imperial era and that now stands as a relic of a declining Western empire. “The rise of China [is] the issue about which Lee undoubtedly knows more than any other outside observer or analyst,” wrote the book’s editors, the Harvard professors Graham Allison and Robert Blackwill. I scanned the book myself and found that Lee has clearly understood China’s long-term strategy, a country he has observed closely for decades, long before most of us in the West. “It is China’s intention to be the greatest power in the world,” Lee says bluntly, “and to be accepted as China, not as an honorary member of the West.… At the core of their mind-set is their world before colonization and the exploitation and humiliation that brought.” Beijing, Lee continues, has masterfully harnessed the aspirations of the Chinese people—a far cry from their position after Tiananmen in 1989. “If you believe that there is going to be a revolution of some sort in China for democracy,” he states, “you are wrong.… The Chinese people want a revived China.” Asked by the book’s interviewers how China would become number one, Lee replies, “Their great advantage is not in military influence but in their economic influence.… Their influence can only grow and grow beyond the capabilities of America.” Lee seems to confirm essential elements of the Marathon strategy, though he believes that the period of Chinese dominance is still decades away. “The Chinese have figured out if they stay with [claims of a] ‘peaceful rise’ and just contest for first position economically and technologically, they cannot lose,” he observes. “To [directly] challenge a stronger and technologically superior power like the United States will abort their peaceful rise. China is following an approach consistent with the Chinese television series The Rise of the Great Powers, produced by the Party.… I believe the Chinese leadership has learnt that if you compete with America in armaments, you will lose. You will bankrupt yourself. So, avoid it, keep your head down, and smile for forty or fifty years.” I could not have put it better myself. At least I have one ally. Despite the bipartisan, even global, acclaim Lee Kuan Yew has received, his sobering forecast about China has been met with resistance by China policy experts in the West. One reason for this pushback has been his critics’ wishful thinking and false assumptions that China will somehow either collapse or become a Western-style democracy. A second reason has been China’s vigorous efforts to act humble and downplay its growth prospects. A third reason is that there are too many false alarms about a near-term China threat. Like Lee Kuan Yew, I address how strong China will be in 2049. My focus on the longer term means that there is plenty of time to pursue the twelve steps I have laid out. All too often, talk about China takes the form of sensationalized warnings about China’s imminent global takeover and military dominance—neither of which are near-term possibilities. The Harvard political scientist Joseph Nye correctly warns, “The greatest danger we have is overestimating China and China overestimating itself. China is nowhere near close to the United States. So this magnification of China which creates fear in the U.S. and hubris in China is the biggest danger we face.”

Given how LKY has been in the news for his accurate foresight on Afghanistan recently, thought this excerpt would be even more interesting. Read through his insights and thoughts, and it gives more credence to the author’s claim on “The Hundred Year Marathon” and China’s plan to be the number 1 superpower.

This might seem more obvious to us in recent times, but this book was written back in 2015 and it seems like there are still people whom naturally assume that China will eventually collapse without the adoption of democracy. That is something that remains to be seen.

In July 1971, Kissinger made his historic secret visit to China, the first tangible realization of Mao’s long-held plans. The Chinese were coy about the Soviet threat that had driven them to reach out to the Americans. Foreign Minister Zhou Enlai referred only obliquely to “our northern neighbor” and “the other superpower.” Nor did the Chinese side initiate any further discussion on the issue of the Soviet threat. Were they really so terrified of an attack? During Kissinger’s subsequent trip to Beijing, in October, Zhou placed the Soviet Union on a list of six key issues on the substantive agenda, although he listed it last. After the Chinese declared that they were not opposed to improvements in American-Soviet relations, Kissinger concluded that they were displaying bravado and concealing their fear of the Soviet threat. Kissinger warned Zhou of Moscow’s “desire to free itself in Europe so it can concentrate on other areas.” “Other areas” meant the People’s Republic of China. But there were glimpses even then that the Chinese saw the United States not as an ally but as an obstacle. Referring to the United States, Zhou offered a hint of how the Chinese really felt about their new prospective friend. “America is the ba,” Zhou told Kissinger’s interpreter, Ambassador Ji Zhaozhu of China’s Foreign Ministry, repeating a term that would be frequently used by Chairman Mao and his successor, Deng Xiaoping. U.S. government officials who understand Mandarin—a small but growing group—have long known that many Chinese and English terms cannot be fully translated between the two languages. Choices must often be made by the interpreters about what each side really means. Kissinger’s translator told Kissinger that Zhou’s statement meant, “America is the leader.” This seemed to be an innocuous remark, and when taken in the context of the Cold War even a compliment. But that is not what the word ba means in Mandarin—at least that is not its full context. Ba has a specific historical meaning from China’s Warring States period, where the ba provided military order to the known world and used force to wipe out its rivals, until the ba itself was brought down by force. The ba is more accurately translated as “tyrant.” In the Warring States period, there were at least five different ba. They rose and fell, as each new national challenger outfoxed the old ba in a contest of wits lasting decades or even a hundred years. One wonders how U.S. policy toward China might have shifted had Kissinger been told that day that the Chinese saw Americans not as leaders, but as wrongdoers and tyrants. To this day we still have to sort out and live with the consequences of that key mistranslation. Some years later, I had the privilege of talking to Ambassador Ji Chaozhu. He omitted any discussion of how he translated the concept of ba to Kissinger in his otherwise chatty memoir The Man on Mao’s Right, which provides a rare insider’s account of how China’s Foreign Ministry viewed the opening to the United States. I asked if the word “leader” he used in English had originally been the Chinese word ba. “Did you tell Dr. Kissinger what a ba was?” I asked. “No,” he replied. “Why?” “It would have upset him.” If Kissinger had realized what Zhou meant by ba—if he had realized how China really viewed the United States—the Nixon administration might not have been so generous with China. Instead, the administration soon made numerous offers of covert military assistance to China—all based on the false assumption that it was building a permanent, cooperative relationship with China, rather than being united for only a few years by the flux of shi.

Interesting how things can be lost in translation and the impact it can have on global affairs in the decades to come. Obviously, this story is likely embellished to fit the specific narrative of the author. Nevertheless, I just thought it was a really good anecdote on how important context comes into play when translating for different parties and the words we use.

At the time, the Chinese economy was languishing at about 10 percent of America’s GNP. It seemed unrealistic that the Chinese would dare to dream about truly surpassing the United States. All official Washington heard was that China wanted a new dance partner. President Nixon would have to decide whether to cut in. Thus began a relationship with consequences far more profound than any of us at the time dared to consider. The Chinese planned to use the Americans as they had used the Soviets—as tools for their own advancement, all the while pledging cooperation against a third rival power. This was how the Marathon was conducted throughout most of the Cold War—China using the Soviet Union’s rivalry with America to extract Soviet aid and then, when that faltered, shifting to the Americans by offering to help against the Soviets. In doing so, the Chinese were reflecting another ancient stratagem—“kill with a borrowed sword”—or, in other words, attack using the strength of another. Four decades later, shortly after Xi Jinping assumed office as general secretary of the Communist Party of China (a precursor to his becoming president), he provided a greater glimpse of China’s underlying intentions. In his maiden speech in his new role, Xi used a phrase that no Chinese leader had ever used in a public speech, qiang zhongguo meng, or “strong nation dream.” The comment was remarkable. China’s leaders are extremely careful with their language, especially in public, far more so than Western politicians. They avoid words such as “dream” or “hopes” in their public remarks. Such emotion-laden sentiments are considered a flaky, Western eccentricity. However, Xi has since made repeated references to the “China dream” in his speeches. According to a front-page story in the Wall Street Journal, Xi referred to 2049 as the date the dream will be realized—one hundred years after Mao Zedong’s ascension in China and the formation of the Communist state. Xi’s reference was neither casual nor inadvertent. A veteran of the People’s Liberation Army and a former secretary to the defense minister, Xi is closely connected to the nationalist “super hawks” in the Chinese military. As I discovered from my own conversations with some native Chinese speakers in Xi’s audience, those educated in the country’s universities and members of the military understood Xi’s reference to the “strong nation dream” immediately. By invoking the “strong nation dream,” President Xi was referring to a once-obscure book—obscure, that is, in the West—published in China in 2009 called The China Dream. The book was written by a colonel in the People’s Liberation Army named Liu Mingfu, then working as a leading scholar at China’s National Defense University, which trains future generals of the People’s Liberation Army. It was there that I first spotted a specific written reference to “the Hundred-Year Marathon.” The China Dream became a nationwide best seller. The book, only parts of which have been translated into English, outlined how China will become the world’s leading power, surpassing and then replacing the United States. It analyzed how the Soviet Union had failed to supplant the United States, and an entire chapter was devoted to the eight ways China’s effort would be different. The phrase Liu adopted as his own—“the Hundred-Year Marathon”—held resonance across China, though the word marathon itself is borrowed from English. The concept is more readily referred to in Mandarin as China’s “rejuvenation” within a “just” world order or, in keeping with the book’s title, “the China Dream.” The word for rejuvenation or restoration (fuxing) seems to be synonymous with Marathon, assuming it takes a century counting from 1949. China is both secretive and sensitive about the end state of the Marathon. It has never spelled out exactly what the final fuxing will be like, except to declare it will be a good thing. Liu’s book called for a world-class military to project China’s global leadership. “China’s grand goal in the 21st century is to become the world’s No. 1 power,” Liu declared. “The competition between China and the United States,” he predicted, “will not be like a ‘shooting duel’ or a ‘boxing match’ but more like a ‘track and field’ competition. It will be like a protracted ‘Marathon.’” At the end of the Marathon, Liu contended, the ruler finally will be the most virtuous power on the planet—the Chinese. When asked in 2010 by an ABC News reporter about his provocative work, Liu held firm on the book’s central positions, but stressed that China’s competition and ultimate victory over the West would be peaceful. But for those of us able to read his book in the original Mandarin, that is not the tone he adopts there. The colonel alludes to the importance of studying American weaknesses, and preparing to hit the Americans once the West becomes wise to China’s true game plan. Liu also hints at the existence of an official Marathon strategy among the Chinese leadership, praising Mao Zedong because “he dared to craft a grand plan to surpass America, stating that beating the United States would be China’s greatest contribution to humanity.” As the Wall Street Journal revealed in 2013, The China Dream is featured in the “recommended reading” section of all state-controlled bookstores.

The China Dream. I was just reading about it and it seems there are many interpretations about what it really means as it is a rather broad concept. From the author, one key aspect of the China Dream is about outlining China’s rise to being the leading power of the world.

Earlier and also later in the book, Pillsbury spoke about how many American leaders assumed that China would take on liberal values as its economy developed. There are many ways to view this. One may take it as “arrogance” that America might assume the world would naturally adopt its values with economic development. Another way might simply be American leaders being unable to internalise or truly understand certain aspects of Chinese values due to cultural differences. I’ll be sharing some further passages in this book to shed more light on this.

FALSE ASSUMPTION #4: CHINA WANTS TO BE—AND IS—JUST LIKE US In our hubris, Americans love to believe that the aspiration of every other country is to be just like the United States. In recent years, this has governed our approach to Iraq and Afghanistan. We cling to the same mentality with China. In the 1940s, an effort was funded by the U.S. government to understand the Chinese mind-set. This culminated in several studies, including one in which 150 Chinese emigrants in New York’s Chinatown were shown Rorschach inkblot cards. The researchers, who included the scholars Nathan Leites, Ruth Benedict, and Margaret Mead, also analyzed the themes of popular Chinese books and films. One conclusion that emerged was that the Chinese did not view strategy the same way Americans did. Whereas Americans tended to favor direct action, those of Chinese ethnic origin were found to favor the indirect over the direct, ambiguity and deception over clarity and transparency. Another conclusion was that Chinese literature and writings on strategy prized deception. Two decades later, Nathan Leites, who was renowned for his psychoanalytical cultural studies, observed: Chinese literature on strategy from Sun Tzu through Mao Tse-tung has emphasized deception more than many military doctrines. Chinese deception is oriented mainly toward inducing the enemy to act inexpediently and less toward protecting the integrity of one’s own plans. In other cultures, particularly Western, deception is used primarily with the intention of ensuring that one’s own forces can realize their maximum striking potential … the prevalent payoff of deception for the Chinese is that one does not have to use one’s own forces.… Chinese tend to shroud their means in secrecy and not publicize the day-to-day activities of those in power; for surprise and deception are assumed to be vital. Chinese literature often highlights the role of deception, and the need for the “sage”—that is, the wise statesman—to penetrate the deception around him to find the hidden signals in reality. There is an emphasis in many classic Chinese stories of heroes using cunning to manipulate others. The heroes of many popular novels, films, and television programs are those who prove adept at concealing their motives, misleading enemies, and veiling their true intentions until the end. Those artists considered the most skilled convey deceptive signs that require a reader’s effort and intelligence to decipher and understand before the plot reaches a conclusion. The results of the original 1940s study—the idea that an ethno-national group viewed the world differently—proved controversial and politically incorrect, and they were never published. The sole existing copy rests quietly in the Library of Congress. It would not be until 2000 that I learned from Chinese generals that the study’s conclusions were essentially correct. The Chinese value highly the importance of deception stratagems. They are proud of their cultural uniqueness. Two hawkish generals formed a “Chinese Strategic Culture Promotion Society” to broadcast this view. Their national media influence has risen since I first met them twenty years ago. My colleagues mistakenly ignored them until some of their recommendations recently became Chinese policy.

This book is by Michael Pilsbury, one of Trump’s policy advisers on China and one still has an influential voice in their policy making. I picked up this book quite a few years back, and decided to read it to get the American perspective on China.

In this next series of posts, I’ll be sharing a few excerpts from this book, then be sharing another neutral perspective on China from a local author.

One thing I found interesting was how strategy can be potentially viewed differently across both cultures. Being “Cunning” is a trait that is promoted and emphasised in many classical Chinese stories, as opposed to that in western stories where things like “honour” and “loyalty” might be played up more significantly. This serves as the fundamental perspective that shapes the rest of the book and excerpts and I’ll be covering them in the next few posts.

In 1997, Christopher, the eleven-week-old child of a young lawyer named Sally Clark, died in his sleep: an apparent case of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS, or crib death). Such events are terribly sad, but, even with the best of care, they happen. Only in this case, one year later, Sally’s second child, Harry, also died, aged just eight weeks. Sally was arrested, and accused of killing the children. She was convicted of murdering them, and in 1999 was given a life sentence. Now, this is not the place to go into the weakness of the case, the paucity of forensic evidence, or the disagreements about the causes of death. Rather, I want to show how a simple mistaken assumption led to incorrect probabilities. In this case the mistaken evidence came from Sir Roy Meadow, a pediatrician. Despite not being an expert statistician or probabilist, he felt able to make a statement about probabilities in his role as expert witness in Ms. Clark’s trial. He asserted that the probability of two SIDS deaths in a family like Sally Clark’s was 1 in 73 million. A probability as small as this suggests we might apply Borel’s law: we shouldn’t expect to see such an improbable event. If we don’t expect to see it, but we do anyway, then there must be some other explanation—such as, in the present case, that the mother had killed the children. Unfortunately, however, Meadow’s 1 in 73 million probability is based on a crucial assumption: that the deaths are independent; that one such death in a family does not make it more or less likely that there will be another. On average, the chance of a given child dying of SIDS is about 1 in 1,300. Meadow instead (correctly) used the much smaller figure of 1 in 8,543, arrived at by taking account of the fact that Sally Clark was nonsmoking, affluent, and young, all factors which reduce the probability of this kind of infant death. He failed to take account of the fact that both of the Clark children were male, a factor which increases the probability of a SIDS death. Then he made the critical assumption. He assumed that the probability of having a second such death in a family was independent of whether there had already been one. You’ll recall from chapter 3 that if two events are independent, you can find the probability that both of them will occur by multiplying their separate probabilities together. And that’s just what Meadow did. If you assume independence, then the probability of getting two such deaths in a family is 1/8,543 × 1/8,543; about 1 in 73 million, and this is the figure he presented to the court, describing it as the sort of event you would expect to see once every hundred years. Now, you’ll recall how slight changes to what we assume about the shape of a distribution can change probabilities by large amounts. In the present case, perhaps we shouldn’t assume that SIDS deaths within the same family are independent. And, in fact, that assumption does seem unjustified: data show that if one SIDS death has occurred, then a subsequent child is about ten times more likely to die of SIDS. Meadow’s estimated probability of two deaths was wrong. To arrive at a valid conclusion, we would have to compare the probability that the two children had been murdered with the probability that they had both died from SIDS. This would require us carrying out similar calculations for child homicide statistics. I won’t go through the details here, but Professor Ray Hill of the University of Salford in the UK calculated that “single [SIDS] deaths outweigh homicides by about 17 to 1, double [SIDS] deaths outweigh double homicides by about 9 to 1, and triple [SIDS] deaths outweigh triple homicides by about 2 to 1.”12 There is a factor-of-ten difference between Meadow’s estimate and the estimate based on recognizing that SIDS events in the same family are not independent, and that difference shifts the probability from favoring homicide to favoring SIDS deaths. Professor Hill added, “[O]ne wonders whether the Clark jury would have convicted if, instead of being given the ‘once in a hundred years figure,’ they had been told that second [SIDS] deaths occur around four or five times a year and indeed happen rather more frequently than second infant murders in the same family.” Later evidence also showed that at the time of his death, the second child, Harry, had a blood infection known to cause sudden infant death. Following widespread criticism of the misuse and indeed misunderstanding of statistical evidence, Sally Clark’s conviction was overturned, and she was released in 2003.

This is one of the more popular case studies that I have seen in multiple books. This is usually used to illustrate how an incorrect understanding of statistics can adversely impact the lives of others. In this case, Sally Clark was wrongfully imprisoned for a few years and never recovered from this ordeal, eventually developing psychiatric problems and dying of alcohol poisoning even though she was acquitted.

Just one of the interesting anecdotes, and something that I thought should be shared in every conversation about statistics!

I mentioned chaos and the butterfly effect earlier on in the book. We saw how uncertainty about the system’s initial conditions, or very slight changes to them, could mushroom to produce huge effects later on. The eminent physicist Michael Berry gave a beautiful example of this. He pointed out that all the objects in the universe are linked by gravity, so that, in principle, a perturbation of one will impact all the others, albeit in an absolutely tiny way for distant objects. Berry imagined removing just one electron at the edge of the universe (that is, about 1010 light-years away), and looked at the gravitational effect of this change on the angle at which two oxygen molecules on earth are deflected when they collide. He showed that after about 56 collisions between molecules, the angle of deflection could be completely different from what in fact occurred when the electron was present. Now imagine following the paths of oxygen molecules as they bounce around in the air, bumping off each other and off walls and other objects. If we follow one such molecule, then its path will be completely different, after less than 60 collisions, according to whether that one electron is or is not present at the edge of the universe. For air, each gas molecule goes from one collision to another in about two ten-billionths of a second on average, and each molecule is involved in about 5 billion collisions each second. This means that removing the electron at the edge of the universe would have completely changed the paths of oxygen molecules in the air you breathe after just a 100 millionth of a second. Michael Berry also showed that the mass of the two human players is enough to completely alter the angle of deflection of two balls on a pool table after just nine collisions. The movement of the players around the table leads to dramatic shifts in the probabilities that the balls will follow particular paths: the law of the probability lever.

A great example to illustrate the initial concept of chaos theory, where how seemingly minute changes in the initial conditions can cause super large changes in the later stages. Just a slight change of the mass of 2 human players can completely change the outcome of a game of pool.

That’s why it becomes so hard to make exact, accurate predictions of complex systems such as our financial markets. One small change in the initial conditions can have a massive impact in our models.

The regression-to-the-mean effect has also led to confusion in treating diseases whose severity fluctuates over time or from which people naturally recover in time. Doctors give treatments when symptoms are more severe, and if the severity fluctuates over time, then we should expect patients to improve without treatment, simply by waiting. Many quack treatments and pseudoscientific approaches capitalize on this. You wait until someone’s symptoms are bad and then give them the medicine. And, lo! The symptoms ease up, and the quack claims it’s all due to the medicine. This is why randomized controlled trials are so important. In such a trial, there are two equivalent groups of patients. One group receives the purported treatment and the other receives a placebo, or nothing at all, with neither patients nor researchers knowing which group received which. If the symptom alleviation is purely due to regression to the mean, and not to the treatment, then the two groups will recover at the same rate. An almost comic example of how regression to the mean can be misunderstood, and alternative explanations conjured up to explain something we should in fact expect to occur, is given by Arthur Koestler in his book The Roots of Coincidence. He wrote: “Even the most enthusiastic experimental subjects showed a marked decline in hits towards the end of each session, and after some weeks or months of intense experimenting most of them lost altogether their special gifts. Incidentally, this ‘decline effect’ (from the beginning to the end of a session) was considered as additional proof that there was some human factor at work influencing the scores, and not just chance.” The regression-to-the-mean effect is ubiquitous. Once you’ve been alerted to the phenomenon, you can see it everywhere. It occurs whenever the score, outcome, or response has a random component. Take performance, for example—in an examination, a test, a workplace, sports, or whatever. While performance clearly does depend partly on intrinsic ability, preparedness, and other factors, it also owes something to chance. Perhaps you were feeling particularly good on the day, or the questions on the exam just happened to be on the topics you’d anticipated, or the representatives from the prospective client turned out to be old high school friends. The chance aspect of your good performance is likely to fade away the next time, so that it looks as if you have deteriorated. Regression to the mean signals that caution must be exercised in taking the results at face value: an extreme score may well be so primarily because of chance. There’s also a flip side to this. If extremely good performance owes something to favorable chance, then particularly poor performance likewise owes something to unfavorable chance. All of this has obvious implications for just about any kind of ranking (of sports teams, surgeons, students, universities, you name it): if a high position owes much to chance, it’s likely to be followed by a lower position next time.

Regression to the mean. This probably is a concept that all you enlightened readers already know, but allow me to just expound on it anyways.

Truth is, most of the things we do in our careers are highly based on exogenous factors, or luck. At work, we’re reliant on finding the right mentors, having the right projects or being at the right place at the right time. Good performance in careers is not something as simple as say playing darts or bowling, where the number of variables are vastly lower and luck dosen’t play such a huge role.

Once luck is involved, then we have to expect regression to the mean. The top performer for 1 year might suddenly not able to perform when put in a different team or environment. The worst performer, would highly likely tend towards average performance. Adopting this into our mental models will help us double-check our initial judgements so we can be more accurate in our judgements, especially when you’re hiring or interviewing.