For the last decade, Dr. Jean Wilson, a brilliant biologist, has been working on a new theory showing how a particular species of oceanic algae could be cultivated in huge quantities to clean excess carbon and pollutants in the Earth’s atmosphere.
Dr. Wilson put everything on the line for her theory – her reputation, she called in all of her favors, and tapped all of her financiers. She even sacrificed a relationship and any prospects for raising a family. She was convinced this was the solution to air pollution. In fact, her passion was infectious – many people believed she was onto something just by listening to her speak on the subject. She was so charismatic and so successful in bringing her idea to fruition that hundreds of millions of dollars were spent to construct the first experimental oceanic algae farms.
She was ready.
As the farms were nearing completion, Jordan Harrison, one of the University graduate students Dr. Wilson was mentoring, began playing with the raw data again from their initial trials. He created a spreadsheet to mathematically extrapolate the chemical impacts to the local environment from having so much algae so densely packed together. He knew this had already been done by safety regulators and others, but he wanted to see it for himself. After Jordan completed his analysis, it turned out there weren’t any negative impacts. If anything, this algae would cause a massive surge in local life. He sat back in his chair, relieved to see the evidence right in front of him that everything was okay.
After getting some coffee, Jordan came back to look at the results one more time before deleting the simulation. But this time, he noticed something odd: There were some unclassified proteins he hadn’t noticed before. Strangely, they only showed up at the end of his simulations and were not included in the main results, marked and dismissed as “expected outliers.”
“What in the world is that?,” he thought.
After running another simulation and getting the same result, Jordan decided to go find Dr. Wilson. When she arrived, she took a look at the data and checked the simulation. Briefly, she experienced a flash of anxiety, then relief washed over her once she remembered what this was. She laughs and explains to Jordan that she had seen this before too. This was an inert protein byproduct of the algae’s metabolizing of certain pollutants in the atmosphere, nothing to worry about.
Jordan was a little confused by her reaction and asked how she knew it was inert? Dr. Wilson explained how she didn’t know which pollutant in particular caused the protein byproduct, but there was only a tiny amount of it in the atmosphere. Because of the tiny quantity, even if this protein was harmful there’s simply not enough of it to do any real damage.
Jordan was a little skeptical, but didn’t want to alienate his famous professor. So he remained silent about it and tried to hide his concern. However, Dr. Wilson noticed his hesitation and said “Look Jordan, there will always be outliers in the real world, but the pros far outweigh any cons here. This was always going to be a calculated risk. But at some point, we’ve got to act. No more delays, no more politics. Think about what we’re doing – we’re saving the world! Do you think this is worth stopping all this momentum we’ve achieved?” Jordan decided she had a point, smiled, and said he supposed not and they left to grab lunch together.
Years go by and the algae farms are a huge success, especially after an agricultural corporation designed a growth stimulant that was specific only to that particular algae strain. The algae was indeed converting carbon and pollutants to inert compounds that simply sank to the bottom of the ocean. The atmosphere was measurably improved near the algae farms. Many nations took notice and the project spread into a worldwide endeavor.
After billions of dollars are spent and construction of many farms spanning thousands of kilometers are completed, air pollution begins to detectably decrease across the globe and climates begin to normalize. News organizations everywhere report this as “the scientific achievement of the century.” Dr. Wilson is celebrated as one of the greatest achievers of her generation.
However, a few months after the celebrations dwindle, vast tracts of algae begin to sicken and die for no apparent reason. After a few weeks, entire algae farms are wiped out. And before anyone could react appropriately, it went completely extinct.
The world reeled at this news and frantic efforts by scientists everywhere were underway to figure out what happened. As the world panicked, the biomass of untold countless tons of floating algae blooms began to rot, releasing absurd amounts of carbon dioxide back into the atmosphere and strangling ocean life everywhere. Due to it’s massively cultivated size, the death spiral of this species alone released enough carbon dioxide to put the planet in a state far worse than it was before any of this happened. It became unclear whether this would cause an extinction-level event of life on Earth and many nations were in a state of panic.
Authorities quickly discovered that the little protein ignored by Dr. Wilson was actually deadly to the algae if produced in large-enough quantities. The smaller farms and trials were not affected initially because the amount of the deadly protein was so low it didn’t cause any harm. But when scaled planet-wide, it gained enough density to cause a cascading effect where the algae would strangely react to the poisonous protein by producing more of it. Ocean currents moved it everywhere and it destroyed the entire species.
It was surmised that this protein was an evolved defense mechanism for algae populations outgrowing their own environments. From an evolutionary standpoint, if the algae grew too widespread, it would naturally kill itself off back to sustainable numbers to preserve the species, not unlike the natural balance between the number of predators in any ecosystem being tied to the abundance of prey.
The world was stunned. There were serious questions about whether our civilization would survive this catastrophe. Every resource from every nation was diverted to cleaning up the damage, but it’s difficult to know if this is all too little and too late…
So what happened here?
Dr. Wilson experienced something called “confirmation bias.”
confirmation bias: the tendency to interpret or seek out new evidence as confirmation of one’s existing beliefs or theories.
When Dr. Wilson originally saw the anomalous protein in the simulation, she ignored this new evidence because it didn’t fit her conviction, her belief, that she was saving the world. So she dismissed it as a normal outlier. That’s exactly what confirmation bias is – not confirming or accepting evidence that is at odds with our biases. It’s cherry picking.
Confirmation bias can be extremely subtle and that’s what makes it so dangerous. If a brilliant scientist with a decade of experience can be fooled, then so can the rest of us.
How did confirmation bias evolve?
If you think about it, confirmation bias is a great way to doggedly pursue a new idea: In ancient times, tribes were nomadic and constantly searching for prey to hunt. If a young hunter in the tribe thought of a better way to hunt, he would do everything in his power to prove his discovery to others in his tribe. If his idea was indeed a better way to hunt, the tribe gains a survival advantage and he would be rewarded. If it wasn’t, the tribe lost nothing.
Now apply that thought to every idea every human has ever imagined and it should be obvious how confirmation bias has massively motivated the expansion of human knowledge – in a significant way, it prevents us from giving up on an idea too soon.
Yet, as the reach and power of our efforts expand, so too does the damage caused by our errors, which is why an awareness of confirmation bias is increasingly important.