Your Future Self Will Thank You
with Bina Venkataraman

Episode description
How do we bridge the gap between the present and the future? In this episode, our host, Annie Duke, speaks with Bina Venkataraman, journalist, author, and science and technology policy expert, about the psychological, social, and institutional barriers to making long-term decisions. Drawing from Bina’s experiences in science communication, climate policy, and journalism, they discuss the difficulty of imagining the future and yourself within it, and how creative tools such as virtual reality and role-playing games can help us master the tug-of-war between now and later.
Key takeaways include innovative ways to promote future savings, the challenges of communicating complex science in uncertain times, and how culture, social norms, and scarcity affect people’s ability to delay gratification and plan for the future.
Bina Venkataraman is a journalist, author, and science and technology policy expert. She is currently a columnist and Editor-at-Large for Strategy and Innovation at The Washington Post. From 2019 to 2022, she was the Editorial Page Editor of The Boston Globe, overseeing its editorial board and opinion coverage and shepherding two Pulitzer finalist editorial series. She is also the author of The Optimist’s Telescope: Thinking Ahead in a Reckless Age, named a top business book by The Financial Times and a best book of the year by National Public Radio.
Bina formerly served as senior adviser for climate change innovation in the Obama White House, and directed global policy initiatives at the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT. Since 2011, she has taught in the program on science, technology, and society at MIT.
Bina is an alumna of Brown University and the Harvard Kennedy School and the recipient of a New America national fellowship, a Fulbright scholarship, a Princeton in Asia fellowship, a Metcalf fellowship, and a James Reston fellowship at The New York Times.
Books
- The Optimist’s Telescope: Thinking Ahead in a Reckless Age – Bina Venkataraman (2020)
- The Baby Decision: How to Make the Most Important Decision of Your Life – Merle Bombardieri (2016)
- Off the Edge: Flat Earthers, Conspiracy Culture, and Why People Will Believe Anything – Kelly Weill (2022)
Articles
- Attention in Delay of Gratification – Walter Mischel; Ebbe B. Ebbesen (1970)
- Waiting for the Second Treat: Developing Culture-Specific Modes of Self-Regulation – Bettina Lamm; Heidi Keller; Johanna Teiser; Helene Gudi; Relindis D Yovsi; Claudia Freitag; Sonja Polocze; Ina Fassbender; Janina Suhrke; Manuel Teubert; Isabel Vöhringer; Monika Knopf; Gudrun Schwarzer; and Arnold Lohaus (2017)
- Increasing Saving Behavior Through Age-Progressed Renderings of the Future Self – Hal E. Hershfield; Daniel G. Goldstein; William F. Sharpe; Jesse Fox; Leo Yeykelis; Laura L. Carstensen; and Jeremy N. Bailenson (2011)
Resources
- Using a Weight-and-Rate Tool – Alliance for Decision Education
- Perspective Taking – Knowledge at Wharton
Website
Producer’s Note: This transcript was created using AI. Please excuse any errors.
Annie: I am so excited to welcome my guest today, Bina Venkataraman. Bina is a journalist, author, and science and technology policy expert. She is currently a columnist and editor-at-large for strategy and innovation at The Washington Post. From 2019 to 2022, she was the editorial page editor of The Boston Globe, overseeing its editorial board and opinion coverage, and shepherding two Pulitzer finalist editorial series.
She is also the author of The Optimist’s Telescope: Thinking Ahead in a Reckless Age, named a top business book by the Financial Times and a best book of the year in 2019 by National Public Radio. Bina formally served as senior advisor for climate change innovation in the Obama White House and directed global policy initiatives at the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT. Since 2011, she has taught in the program on science, technology, and society at MIT. Bina is an alumna of Brown University and the Harvard Kennedy School, and the recipient of a New America National Fellowship, a Fulbright Scholarship, a Princeton in Asia Fellowship, a Metcalf Fellowship, and a James Reston Fellowship at the New York Times.
Bina, I am so excited to have you on the podcast. Thank you so much for coming and chatting with us. I’m always so fascinated by people whose lives look like they’ve taken all of these kinds of, you know, left turns and zigs and zags. Right. And that’s probably just on my part because that’s sort of what my life did. So I, I tend to relate to that type of journey, but I would love for you to just kind of give an overview of kind of where you started, where you are now and, and all of the in between.
Bina: It’s funny you say zigzagging and left turns, because I always say to people that I took interesting exits off the highway. And sometimes those interesting exits kind of led me down a new road for a while. And so that metaphor really works for me in terms of what I do and have done.
I’ve looked for ways to make a difference. I think public service has been a common theme, and creativity has been a common theme of the work I’ve done. And sort of wanting people to know, right? Like wanting people to have the truth, wanting people to have information that they could use in their lives and wanting that to be, like, accessible to lots and lots of people and not just an elite, whether that’s a scientific elite or journalistic elite or political elite. But really wanting people to have the tools and knowledge of science to make decisions, for people to know what’s really happening in the annals of government. But yeah, so my career, as a result, it hasn’t been linear.
I try to help people imagine futures that can be different. I write about technology. I write about the environment. I write about public health. And I’m also sort of working on larger questions now of how a newspaper should reimagine and reinvent itself for the future.
Annie: I want to dive into, kind of, two separate issues. So we can set aside—I mean, obviously you spent a lot of your career as a science translator, a science communicator, right? Really taking uh science that might not be accessible to most people and translating in a way where you don’t lose the core meaning of it. But you’re allowing them to sort of access what the science is telling you—that’s an amazing mission to have in life. It a little bit assumes, you know, and I struggle with this myself, that, having communicated the science, that then you will get the action that you desire because the science is now known, right? And, and we know that that is not actually connected in that way.
So I want to start off kind of diving into your years in the White House because I’m really interested in, kind of, your take on what is it like to solve a problem that has two component parts that make things difficult? One is that you have different constituencies, right, that have different values. So, for example, someone who has to be reelected to Congress every two years is going to have different values than, say, what President Obama in his second term having to face no election is going to be facing, or even a senator who has a six-year term or judges who might have lifetime appointments, for example.
But, so we have these kind of different time horizons. They’re playing to different constituencies. And then, separate from that, in terms of just the public in general, on this time horizon issue. It’s not just, oh, a senator doesn’t have to worry about getting reelected for six years, but that I, as just a constituent of those people, may not be able to foresee or even imagine 20 years from now or 50 years from now or, you know, what things are going to look like in the future. Number one and number two, I may just care about short-term things more even if I could. So it feels like this creates a very complex kind of like tangled decision problem in the space that you were working in, which is climate change, where obviously, while there are short-term consequences of climate change, the real serious consequences are pretty well into the future particularly back when you were working in the second Obama White House, they were actually quite far into the future at that time.
So I’m just curious as to how you kind of approach that problem, how you thought about those different constituencies, how you thought about the time horizon problem. Maybe you have some specific examples that can illustrate the way that you sort of tried to untangle those problems and to actually affect real change.
Bina: Yeah, I mean, you’re really hitting it on the head here, Annie, because part of the challenge is the science of climate change has been known for a very long time, but the consequences and the disasters that manifest from climate change—really only in the last several years has there been more of a public awareness and consciousness of the increased frequency of these disasters. And the reality is, yes, we are seeing more of climate change in the present now than we were a decade ago, or two decades ago, or three decades ago. And so, that aspect of, can people imagine this future problem and the future opportunities if we solved some of this problem versus just think about the immediate consequences or immediate tradeoffs of focusing on a future problem.
And this is true, by the way, with other problems, but climate change is a sort of really hard, it’s been a really, really hard complex problem because of this issue of time horizons. It’s also true that if you want to prepare for future pandemics, you ought to be doing research now.
Annie: Right.
Bina: You ought to be stockpiling certain kinds of equipment. You ought to be thinking about the system, public health systems that can make you resilient. But with climate change, for a long, long time, the science of it was known, the sort of impacts, the fact that there would be increased wildfires, more severe floods when there are hurricanes, droughts, heatwaves, all of these things we’ve started to see happen more frequently. The science of that has been known for a long time. And so part of my job was trying to share that science with communities and companies and see if we could, in that process of sharing that information, help them make better decisions. But there’s a big gap as you’ve implied between knowing the science of something and being able to make a decision on behalf of the future about that particular thing.
You know, people, I think there’s a cynical view of human nature that I, in my research about long-term and short-term thinking, was able to sort of complicate or at least dispel to some degree. And the cynical view is that people only care about immediate gratification. They only care about the here and now. We’re no better than the hunter-gatherers on the plane or even our primordial ancestors who just sought instant gratification, and why do we even try to think about future problems? But if you look at all the world’s major religions and even sort of moral systems, the idea that future generations matter and that the future matters and that we want a better future has been a part of human nature as well. It’s just not as prominent in our decision-making as our seeking of short-term results.
And there are reasons for that. And one of the reasons is that what’s in the future, we have to imagine what’s here and now, we take in with our senses, we can feel it viscerally, we can actually smell the donut on the counter, we can feel the hit to our pocketbook if the gas prices go up. So you can create fear around actions around climate change by telling people it’s going to have an immediate impact on them, or that it’s going to cost something in the immediate term, and you’re asking them to do that on behalf of some of us future avoided threat, future avoided danger, or future opportunity. And that’s an imaginative leap you’re asking them to have in addition to the fact that people sort of do discount to some degree rationally what happens in the future over what they get today.
So yes, all of this was coming into the decision-making. And to be honest, I went in a bit naively in the early years of my time working on this, as you implied, both as a journalist, but also as a policy advisor. I was thinking, okay, we just need to unleash all this data. We need to get these climate data and information in front of people and in a more useful way, right? Like we need, we need you to be able to look at a map and see how in 15 years the flood zone is going to change and your home is going to now be in the flood zone. We need to be able to show people that. And so we worked on tools like that. We helped the private sector. We helped nonprofits build tools like that using government data that we released during the Obama years.
And that was one piece of it, but the reality was that people were impaired in making these kinds of decisions, whether it was because of political imperatives, like you say, to your election cycle or financial and investment-oriented incentives. You have a board of directors, you have investors, they’re interested in your short-term market return. They’re interested in your quarterly earnings report if you’re a corporation publicly traded. And they’re not necessarily interested in what you’re doing to help secure your supply chain 20 years in the future or what you’re doing to make sure your communities are safe 15, 20, 25, 50 years in the future.
And so we do have this misalignment as a matter of how we’ve designed these systems in our society to reward and reinforce our pursuit of instant gratification. And that is misaligned with dealing with problems like climate change, which have profound effects, which can be totally catastrophic, which can have much bigger costs than the small amount of cost it might take in the short term to manage them. Whether that’s investing in renewable energy or just investing in more resilient infrastructure. There are things you can do like elevating your home if you live in a flood zone, that would be very low cost compared to rebuilding your home if it gets completely flooded, right. Or to rehabilitating your home in some way. And that’s true sort of on every level from the individual homeowner all the way up to the corporation to the government and society.
And so getting my head around that and trying to be strategic and have an impact in that regard required me to really get into the science of how people make decisions and why people make myopic decisions when they do, but more importantly, I was very interested in the question of what helps people make better long-term decisions. How do people engage with the future in a way that can actually be productive? How do we bring the future to light? So we know that it happens sometimes, right? Human beings sow the seeds of the agricultural revolution, the literal seeds that planted seeds for later harvest, humans put a person on the moon, humans save for retirement, at least sometimes. And so there are conditions, and there are environmental circumstances, and there are ways in which people can engage with the future better to make better decisions.
Annie: So much to unpack there. I mean, there’s so much depth to what you just said. So I’m just thinking about a couple of things. Obviously the fMRI data that shows that when people are imagining a future version of themselves, that the part of the brain that’s being engaged is essentially the part of the brain that would be true if I were imagining another person that wasn’t me.
So, you know, I mean, I think that we have this general problem in terms of, you know, how do we actually plan ahead, right? And take care of future versions of myself. I’m not even talking about people who don’t exist yet, right? I’m talking about me in the future, that I fundamentally don’t view me as me, right? I sort of think about myself in the future as someone else. And I think we’ve all felt that when we’ve committed to something because it’s very far off in the future and when it comes around, we’re like, wait, why did I commit myself to that? That was—
Bina: Absolutely.
Annie: I shouldn’t have done that. So I think that we just, you know, I think separate and apart from this idea of, kind of, instant gratification, we just have this kind of, you could call it imagination, but I think it’s kind of a neurological hurdle, right? Which is what’s happening in your brain when you’re actually engaging the future and then separate from that, what you brought up, it’s this idea of competing values, right? If I can smell the donut on the counter I have a value of health and longevity, right? But I also value like tastiness and pleasure and satisfaction. And I would take that somewhat out of this idea of instant gratification to how am I weighting those competing values, right? And what might be rational for me in the long run, I may just weight those in a way where if you knew what my weightings were, eating the donut now would actually be rational given what my weights are. You could disagree with how I’m waiting those different values, but it’s hard to actually know that.
And then the third thing, and I kind of want to be interested in your thoughts on this, cause I’m sure this is something that came up for you a lot is that we know. But when you look at something like the marshmallow test, so for, for listeners who don’t know it’s, you have these kids at Stanford and they’ve got a marshmallow in front of them and an experimenter tells the participants, the little kids, Hey, there’s a marshmallow in front of you. If you could not eat it for 15 minutes, right? Just let it sit in front of you. When I come back in, if the marshmallow is still there, I’ll give you a second look. So there was a whole bunch of like to-do about the marshmallow test that had to do with, you know, the kids who actually were better at, at not eating the marshmallow, delaying gratification, ended up having all these better outcomes in their lives. And so we should try to teach kids to delay gratification. We’ll do all sorts of good things for them. Separate and apart from things like sample size and whatnot, it turns out that there was just a huge confounding factor, which was socioeconomic status. And to your point about sort of rationality. Around some of these things about not delaying gratifications. We know that people are, when they’re living in scarcity, that I’m wondering how that relates to this idea of you’re asking someone to do something that costs money to their house, right?
Bina: Yeah, yeah. So scarcity can happen to take that last one first. Scarcity can be a matter of attention. So when you see doctors, overprescribing antibiotics, for example, it’s often a bandwidth issue. And so it’s easier to just write the prescription for the patient, right? And that long-run problem is more abstracted from that interaction with the patient right there, right? The long-run problem being superbugs or antibiotic resistance and the immediate issue being how do I get this patient something that will help them or get them out of my office so I can, you know, move on to the next one.
So that’s a scarcity issue, but it obviously also relates to why people take, you know, sacred family items and take them to the pawn shop when that is not maybe in their longterm interest or value set, to your point, but it’s something that they need at the moment.
But what’s interesting about the marshmallow test is it’s not just socioeconomic status. And in fact, there were, there have been versions of the test comparing Cameroonian toddlers from nomadic families who are relatively poor with German and American toddlers and finding that the Cameroonian toddlers wait for the second local treat at a much higher rate than the German and American toddlers. So it’s also about culture and sometimes culture can trump scarcity or trump socioeconomic factors.
And I say that because there are ways that we can toggle, right, like the dials on some of the things that we’re asking people to consider when we consider longterm decisions. The other aspect of that test that was really important were social norms. So if you did that marshmallow test with kids that were all wearing red shirts and blue shirts, and you told kids wearing the red shirts that every kid with the red shirt is waiting for the second test, they would pass the test at a higher rate because they wanted to be like their teammates. So they wanted to adhere to the norm.
In addition, it was about reliability. So if you created conditions where the kids felt they could rely on the adult giving them the second treat, they would wait more on average than kids who didn’t feel that the adult was trustworthy because the adult had promised them something, like art supplies, and then not shown up with them. So they’ve done different versions of that experiment over time that show us a lot about the external factors, the factors that don’t have to do with innate human nature, or who you are, or where you were born, but have to do with culture, have to do with conditions, and to me, suggest a hopeful picture for helping human beings make decisions around the future. If we can help them deal with things like scarcity and reliability. We can’t always, you know, create certainty around future outcomes, but If we can help people kind of grapple with the feeling that the donut is immediate and for sure, and my future health is uncertain, and I don’t even know if I’m going to live that long, then we might be able to help them make better decisions.
And to your point, I think that you’re absolutely right that our future selves are strangers to us, let alone future generations, leaving aside the future generations for the time being. And so I do think of that as an imaginative gap, and one of the reasons is, you know, as I was doing research on this question for my book, The Optimist’s Telescope, I interviewed, for example, Hal Hirschfeld, who is an economist who, yes, who has studied college students and saving and how to get college students to save more for their future retirement. And one of the things he did was he created virtual reality avatars of the students themselves in old age and found that when college students interacted in an experimental setting with virtual reality avatars of themselves when they were older, they were then showed a willingness to save more for the future. So that’s just one study. There are many studies on perspective taking in the future. So what happens when you write a letter to your future self empathizing with your future self or a family member—that can change your ability to make decisions on behalf of the future or do things for the future.
So this idea of creating a sort of imaginative empathy tool that allows you to then think and take some of that estrangement away and take more seriously that future version of yourself or that future person in your family when you’re making decisions today. Some of those, at least in an experimental setting and to some degree in practice, we see such imaginative tools helping people to make better future decisions.
So I do think that whether you call it estrangement or a failure of imagination, the reality is we can relate much more to everything we face today. It’s the world as we have it today. And it’s one of the reasons we struggle so much with technological change, because it’s changing the world around us. It’s changing our relationship to ourselves and to others. And so we have to use these tools, helping people imagine the future, helping people come into a scenario where they actually have to engage with versions of the future they either might not like or might not believe are likely. Those are some of the tools we can use to help people make different decisions.
And one of them, by the way, is sort of role playing games or war games. You know, I interviewed people at the Pentagon who have designed war games that help people kind of enter into future scenarios. And one of the great things about a game is that when you tell people to imagine a future scenario and they’re just sort of like, that’ll never happen, so I don’t need to plan for that future. I’m not going to deal with a heat wave in my town. I live in Maine or I live, you know, wherever. When you give them a game, the whole idea of a game, right? Like when I say, let’s play Monopoly, Annie, you’re like, okay, let’s play Monopoly. And we get into it and we say, like, you know, neither of us, I don’t think own a railroad, but we get into that. We get into the scene, right? And we suspend our disbelief. So games occupy this place between fiction and reality, but we still feel emotional stakes. So if you go and you occupy, you know, the boardwalk and all those properties, I’m going to be like, Oh, man, I’m really going to feel something right when we’re playing this game together.
And so using that, the imaginative qualities of that, the empathic qualities of game playing and the way that it helps us deal with scenarios of the future without just simply dismissing them, can be another tool for doing better by the future and by our future selves.
Annie: You know, I’ve heard you, and obviously you talk about this in your book as well, talk about kind of a have your cake and eat it too type of strategy. So we’ve got the, like, let’s actually have a conversation with our future self—games, it sounds like, are a great way to do that because they help us to sort of change the rules of engagement where the whole thing is about imagination. So let’s be better at imagining what that future is going to look like and then planning for it. The have your cake and eat it too strategy I would say it’s like, let’s figure out ways to design systems where people get a short-term benefit for actually creating the long-term benefit to say society as a whole or the individual. Can you talk about that as a strategy a little bit?
Bina: One of my favorite strategies like that has to do with helping people save for the future by using lotteries. So one of the things we know about lotteries is that they are a regressive tax, that they tend to be played more by poor people. And, you know, that might seem counterintuitive or irrational, like, why do poor people play the lottery so much? They don’t have, you know, disposable income. And if you think about some of the cognitive biases that affect and prevent us from thinking about the future, including the fact that what is most here and present to us, our current experience is often what’s most imaginable or the stories we’ve heard or the things we’ve seen others experience are more imaginable to us than sort of abstract ideas of the future. That bias, right, makes it so it’s easier sometimes to imagine something very specific happening to you, even if it’s unlikely, like winning the lottery, because you’ve seen people on TV that have won the lottery. You know that someone somewhere wins the lottery. Whereas maybe you don’t have the experience of knowing someone in your family who’s really saved effectively for the future. Or maybe you just, you know, it seems like you would have to save so much for so long in order to make up for the hole that you have because you’re in debt. Whereas the idea of winning the lottery is a very visceral, specific, imaginable way of solving your problems.
And so there have been groups, governments and nonprofits and other efforts. There was a credit union in Michigan that worked with people to encourage them to save by saying, if you save a certain amount, we’re going to pool some of your savings. We’ll give you probably less of an interest rate, less of a return rate on the savings and take some amount of that money and put it into a common pool and hold million dollar, $10 million lotteries. So that people have a chance to win a lottery as they’re saving small amounts for their future, and it was very effective in Michigan, and there have been other examples of like this actually was used in post-World War II Britain to try to help people save by giving them some lure, not even the guarantee, frankly, of something in the short run, but really just some very specific, imaginable way of winning or of getting ahead that’s more than, you know, what it feels like to put $25 a month or $100 a month into a savings account. Sometimes that can feel like it will take forever.
Annie: So I think that we’re sort of guessing in some ways about what in the future is going to make us happy. Like what is the balance between doughnuts and exercise or doughnuts and wheat germ, right?
Bina: Absolutely. And I think, you know, if we overthought every single thing we ate and every little decision we made from the point of view of what’s my future self going to think about it, we would drive ourselves crazy and I don’t necessarily think it would be, right? Like not every decision matters that much in the long run. Some of them matter a lot.
And so I also think the other thing that’s underlying your question, Annie, is this notion that when you get to a later point in your life, there’s going to be regret and which thing are you going to regret and which thing are you going to regret more? And we can’t always anticipate those kinds of things and you know I really believe and it was a very liberating moment for me when I realized that you cannot live a life without regret. Like just forget it. Just stop trying to live without regret because that is a sort of crazy-making way to approach your life because if you think, okay, How do I avoid regret? You’ll make decisions, you know, you might not take risks or you might, you know, you might do things that don’t make a lot of sense.
And at the end of the day, I think I know from this juncture anyway, in my 40s, that you, I do regret certain things. I regret certain things and I wouldn’t have made, been living if I didn’t regret them, certain things. And so I think it’s okay to have regrets and the question then becomes when it comes to the really big things, can you anticipate what will lead you to less regret or what will lead you to more happiness if you want to or more meaning or whatever your barometer is for a life well lived.
And you know, I had an interesting decision point in my life around having a kid. I was trying to adopt a kid for years with my former partner from India and we ran into so much trouble. There was actually a crackdown on foreign adoptions at just the time we were trying to adopt because there had been some, some issues with people who had adopted children from India abroad and it was, it had become a big political issue in the country. And so between that and an error made by our adoption agency, we were going to have to start the process all over again after a couple of years of trying to go through this process.
And so, it was sort of the decision point, like, do we keep doing this, or do we just, like, say, okay. That’s enough of that. And I really wanted to make the decision not based, because of all this work on long-term thinking and thinking about, you know, the long run of life, I didn’t want to make it based on utter frustration and exhaustion in the moment, but based on a larger look at my life.
And I was lucky enough to meet a clinical social worker who’s written a book called The Baby Decision, named Merle Bombardieri, who has an exercise that is much like these imaginative exercises we’ve been talking about, where she says, imagine yourself in a rocking chair when you’re 75. She says this to single people and couples alike, who are grappling with the question of whether they want to have children or not. And imagine you’ve done one. You’ve had children. Or imagine you’ve done the other, you’ve remained child free, which she’s a, you know, a champion of that, that choice as well. And then play it out for yourself. Which one are you feeling less regret around? Because there is regret around both of those decisions. I think if you talk to anyone who’s chosen either, right, there are certain things that they regret.
And I did that and where it led me was to decide, okay, I think I’m comfortable not being a parent. I have so many kids in my life. I have nieces and nephews. I have seven godchildren. I’m going to have the young people in my life. I’m going to get to care for people. I’m going to get to do all these things. But there are a lot of other things that, you know, if I keep going on this road, I might give up. And so that was a hard decision and it’s, is it going to be perfect or there never going to be any regrets? Am I going to be exactly the person I envisioned in that rocking chair when I’m 75? Probably not. But at least I know that I engaged with that person. At least I know I thought about that future self and I tried to reduce the distance between us. I tried to become less of a stranger to that person and her less a stranger to me and making that decision.
And so I think that’s kind of the best we can do when it comes to these personal decisions is try to close that empathy gap and imagination gap we have with our future selves. And maybe even in the process document some of that so that our future selves can understand our past selves as well.
Annie: So now let’s talk about the omniscience problem. Obviously our decisions can only be as good as the information that we input into those decisions. And there’s all sorts of ways in which that information is imperfect and incomplete, right? So the first thing is that we don’t know everything there is to know. There’s just, you know, the stuff we know, like fits on the head of a pin and the stuff we don’t know is like the size of the universe. Some of the stuff we don’t know, we know we don’t know, you know, to borrow from Rumsfeld. Some of the stuff we don’t know, we don’t even know we don’t know.
And then we also have this really huge problem, which I think people don’t think about enough, which is that there’s all sorts of things that we believe, that we think we know, that is inaccurate. And this is a problem for everybody, right? I mean, I know that lots of people think it’s a problem, for example, for the other side, meaning the other political party, but this is a problem for every single person. All sorts of things that we believe that are inaccurate, and would only partially, or maybe not at all, survive any kind of fact check.
Given how sticky we know that a lot of these false beliefs are, like, how do you think as a journalist, you know, in your work with The Washington Post or just in terms of your work and, you know, in other areas, how do you think about how, how do we actually approach this type of problem to help people to better navigate the information ecosystem that we’re now living in?
Bina: One of the dangers of the world we live in is that we collect a lot of data on all kinds of things to your point. And that’s scientific data, it’s numeric data, it’s information, right? Like, we just have exposure to all these pieces of information, but without the ability to use that to make good decisions, without the ability to contextualize that information, the information alone can’t serve us to make better decisions about the future.
And so I do think about this a lot and it’s one of the things, you know, predictive power is only increasing with both the power of analytics and algorithmic sophistication, supercomputing, parallel computing, we are just getting so much better at crunching these data to analyze trends, to understand trends, and then we’re collecting so much more of it. We have, like, ubiquitous sensors now as well.
And so I’m a real proponent of science and even of technology as a tool, and I like to see the advancement of that, and there’s so many ways in which we need more innovation and advancement, but we also need to pair it with the capacity to have judgment about what these predictions mean, what the data show us or don’t show us.
And one of the examples I have written about is the TEPCO, the Tokyo Electric Power Company, doing its risk modeling for Fukushima Daiichi, which was the power plant that had the meltdown in 2011 with the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami in Japan. They had a very robust data-driven model of risk for that nuclear power plant. It just didn’t go back far enough to capture the one-in-a-thousand-year event of an earthquake that triggered a tsunami of that size.
And there was a different nuclear power plant closer to the epicenter of the earthquake in Onagawa, owned by a different power company. And that nuclear power plant was built at a higher elevation, further back from the sea with a higher seawall, so it didn’t have the problem that happened at Fukushima Daiichi that led to the meltdown, which was that the waves breached the seawall and flooded the backup generator. And then you had the meltdown. And the Onagawa plant benefited not from a data-driven model, but from an engineer who at the time of its construction had knowledge of an earthquake from, you know, a thousand years back that had flooded his hometown shrine. He remembered the plaque in his hometown shrine. And that this was a risk of something that could happen. And so that’s a kind of wisdom and knowledge. And I’m not trying to to suggest that use the old man’s instinct over, and use people’s memories over the data-driven model. I’m suggesting that data-driven models are only as good as the parameters and the data that we feed them.
And I think we’re seeing this a lot with AI and using different kinds of AI tools. It’s all about what you put in, right? And we have to be really aware of the assumptions. And the human tendency is to say this is science, or this is a data-based solution, or this is tech, and to say it must be the right answer. And that’s the sort of cycle that I think we need to break or the impulse that we need to break to always trust the technological tool to be accurate, to trust because it’s based on science or it’s empirical, it must be right.
I think often what is tested empirically is more robust and better to rely on. But if we don’t understand what’s going in and the underlying assumptions around that, whether it’s the time period for which the data is being evaluated, whether it’s how global the data are, whether it’s what the biases were of the people who collected those data and information and how they’re representing it, we won’t make good decisions based on that data.
Annie: Well, I think what I’m hearing you say also, I mean, if we think about the future self issue as well is that if you want people to act on data, if you, if you want them to act on it in a way that is actually going to create the change that you want to create, that data, just telling someone the data isn’t always enough, right? That you have to create some sort of connection as well, that’s sort of concrete and narrative driven and story driven that can like kind of go along with that. So if we’re thinking about someone where you’re trying to get them to put their house on stilts, you can give them all sorts of data about what, how the flood plain is going to move and so on and so forth, but we need to create something concrete for them. So one could just be like a tax credit. We could do that. We could give them savings on their insurance. But if they know someone who lives nearby whose house flooded, now we’ve brought that data to life, right? We’ve now ignited their imagination where they can actually really dig into, well, what would happen if I were in that situation? And they’re more likely to follow through.
And that’s kind of what you’re saying in this case, that I can show you all sorts of data. If I’ve captured the wrong time period, it’s not great, but if I can create all this data about what’s the probability of, you know, events where the ocean actually affects the ability of the reactor to operate. But the fact that this guy had a connection to the past that actually would bring those risks to life made it much more likely that you could act. Now, to be fair, his action could have been irrational. It could have been rational. It’s just that he actually acted on what he knew in the past. So that combination of sort of data informed also by story. And I think that where, where story can be really helpful, and I’ll be interested to see what you think about this, is that you do have problems with data that have to do with things like sample size, for example, right? Like there’s all sorts of data that looks like real science that journalists report on all the time, where when you actually go and look at the original work, the sample size is quite small. So you know that it’s going to be very volatile and those results might not actually replicate. For example, there was a lot of work around COVID that was like that, where you had these small sample sizes.
It could be not global enough. It could be that you’re looking at the wrong time period. You know, if I want to know something about a hurricane today, it would be really bad for me to look at hurricane data from the 1950s. The ocean temperature has changed. So there’s all sorts of things. And where I think the narrative could be really helpful is that if you’re connected to some way, in some way, with the risk that could accrue from any decision that you make around the data that you’re considering, it can actually get you to be more skeptical of the data. And that’s, sometimes your narrative will lead you astray, but the narrator can actually get you to ask the right questions of the data, I think.
Bina: The truth is that knowledge is always provisional, right? Like there is always a sense in which we should be investigating these questions with new assumptions and new environments, and then our assumptions can change and the knowledge can change. And it’s hard for people to wrap their heads around that because they want just an answer to the question, like, what can I eat? What’s safe for me to eat? What’s good for me to eat? What’s good for me to do? And so I think we also just need to get into a different mindset with respect to decision-making and knowledge, which is not just to be skeptical and to scrutinize the source of the data and the story being told about the data and to figure out if that story is accurate, but to also be able to understand that as things change, we need to change, and change is really hard for people.
I don’t say this, you know, glibly, I know that it’s hard for people to adapt to a world in which something is new, and I think we saw this a lot in the pandemic, and there was so much public health and medical research being done in real time. And then there were problems with the politicization of the science and the fact that, you know, we weren’t getting clear answers all the time. And so people were drawing their own conclusions, self medicating with ivermectin, doing things that were really outside of the realm of you know, wise practice in terms of their health. But I think part of the reason they were doing that is that there was a fundamental misunderstanding of how in an emerging health crisis, science actually is being done. And in the fact that the knowledge is provisional and yes, they’re telling you out of precaution right now to mask in schools, but that information might change as the data change and as we understand more about how it spreads.
So I think we’re kind of in a fundamental crisis around whether people trust institutions and science and journalism as so-called arbiters of truth, the courts as arbiters of truth, are really challenged by a public that is skeptical of those institutions themselves. And I do think while there are errors that happen in science or there are questions where there’s too small, the sample size are not robust enough work being done, or there are errors in journalism. At their best, these institutions are self correcting. But the public, there’s a disconnect between the public’s ability to trust these institutions and the trustworthiness of the institutions. And I think part of that is a lack of communication about even how they work, a lack of a mutual understanding of how they work, and maybe a sense in which the public doesn’t feel that its questions actually get answered by these institutions.
So I think of it as a much, it’s even more fundamental than how we tell stories about data. It’s about who we trust to tell us those stories. It’s also true that the uncertainty that we all have about the world we live in and our uncertainty about the future is a big factor here. So when a preprint circulates about COVID at a time when people are really uncertain and really worried and anxious about the future, right, people are anxious about the future for all kinds of reasons.
There are fewer people who are hopeful, I think, about the future these days. And so that seeking for answers, that anxiety around what will happen, what could happen, leads to a kind of impulsive acceptance of people who have very pat and simple answers about the future.
Annie: Yep. And where they just take the nuance out and they offer you the certainty that we all crave.
Bina: Exactly. And I think it’s, you know, related to the impulse for authoritarian leadership and all of these different things that we are seeing crop up in our, in our era. But I guess what I want to say is like, we can use these tools, like imaginative empathy, we can use these ideas, we can use this time machine that we’re constructing to be more custom built to ourselves, to help us grapple with that uncertainty, to try to imagine positive futures, not just negative ones we dread, but to also imagine ones that could be not so great, so that we do things like put our houses on stilts and save for the future. We can do things in our own lives to make us less vulnerable to some sort of notion of the present or the future that is more manipulative and more simple, right? Like, and it involves being skeptical, but it also involves managing our relationship to ourselves and our decisions.
Annie: This has been really lovely. I’m going to, I’m going to finish up with a few closing sort of lightning round kind of questions.
Bina: Okay.
Annie: So the first one is what decision-making tool or idea or strategy would you want to pass down to the next generation of decision makers?
Bina: Oooh. Well, I mean, speaking of passing down, the one that I really think about is having shared heirlooms. So, thinking about spending some amount of your time in your life working on a shared heirloom, whether it’s a park or a library or something that can outlast you in your lifetime, but that is for not just your family, but a bigger swath of humanity.
Annie: That’s beautiful. That is also a very unique answer. We haven’t had that answer on the podcast before. Besides your own, which everybody should go read, what book would you recommend for listeners that are interested in improving their decision-making?
Bina: Ooh, there’s so many.
Annie: I know.
Bina: That’s a really hard one for me to just knock off because I’m like, I’m looking at my bookshelf and there’s so many. You know, well, my eye just caught Off the Edge, which is this book about the flat earthers, which is really interesting for the conversation we’ve been having about misinformation and our vulnerability to conspiracy theories. And it’s historical, but it’s also kind of about today. So that’s a book I recommend.
Annie: That is a book I don’t have. So I’m going to go ahead and order that. I don’t have that book. So I appreciate that recommendation just for myself. What do you think the impact on society will be when the Alliance for Decision Education succeeds in its mission to ensure that Decision Education is part of every K through 12 classroom?
Bina: I think having a society of people really grappling with their decisions in an informed way would just make it fun to talk to more people. So yeah, I think we could all be operating from a kind of, if not a common lexicon to your point of us all reading different things, we could be operating from a place of having real tools to make sort of wise, clear-eyed decisions.
Annie: Yeah. Love that. Okay. If listeners want to go online and learn more about your work, follow you on social media, where would you have them start?
Bina: I have a website. It’s writerbina.com. You can also find me on the pages of The Washington Post where I have a column. And yeah. See me there.
Annie: Well, we will make sure to link to all of that in the show notes. Bina, this has just been such a fascinating conversation for me. I’m coming out of this just feeling such gratitude for the enrichment that you have given me today and different ways to sort of think about the world and sort of solve some of these problems. So I really appreciate you. I appreciate so much the work that you’re doing and thank you so much for coming on the podcast.
Bina: It’s a pleasure, and thank you so much for asking such thoughtful questions. This has been a delight for me too, and a great way to spend a late afternoon.
Published February 5, 2025
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