Exploring the World of Bias – Episode 4: Insignificance

The Bias of Insignificance

I have always had an interest in astronomy since the first time I looked up at the stars at night. They fascinated me. I almost thought I could ‘feel’ the depth of the Universe when looking up and imagined small we were in comparison. So, today I want to explore the Bias of Insignificance. I’ll try to keep this short, but the implications could be huge.

The bias of insignificance is the belief that everything around us, events, people, places, and actions are of little to no importance. For some people, this realization could lead to depression as they feel that no matter what they do, the result is insignificant in the grand scheme of things. What do I mean by that?

At one time in history, humanity believed that they were the center of the universe and all the planets, the moon, the sun, and even the stars revolved around us. Then some astronomers like Copernicus came up with a different idea, one that placed the sun at the center of the universe that we revolved around. Actually, that is not quite fair because a Greek astronomer Aristarchus of Samos in the third century BC proposed that the Earth revolved around the sun. Even he was only responding to an earlier philosopher named Philolaus of Croton. The problem is that whoever came up with the concept, it did not end there.

We know for certain that we are on the third planet around a non-descript G-type star which has a total of 8 planets that revolve around it (after demoting Pluto), 9 recognized dwarf planets, more than 650 natural satellites and still counting, and probably over a million asteroids, comets, and debris left over from the creation of this solar system. I won’t even go into the current estimates of man-made satellites we have placed in orbit (Elon Musk keeps adding to that number), rocket casings, dead satellites, and debris circling the Earth right now and posing a hazard to manned space flight and the International Space Station. Yes, humans tend to leave their garbage everywhere they go. Perhaps the best way to find life in the Universe is to look for big garbage dumps.

Our solar system is just one of about 300 million (the number varies from 100 to 400 million) star systems in our spiral arm galaxy known as the Milky Way. But we are nowhere near the center of that either. In fact, we are about 25,000 light years from the center which is about halfway from the center to the rim. We are not even in one of the spiral arms currently. We are in a little side spur called the Orion Spur between the Sagittarius and Perseus arms. Perhaps that is why some people believe we are isolated on a prison planet, or at the very least it explains why aliens do not go out of their way to contact us.

So, we are nowhere near the center of our galaxy. There are other nearby galaxies like Andromeda (M31) which is at least twice the diameter of the Milky Way and is estimated to

have about one billion stars. It is a mere 2.5 million light-years away, and in 4.5 billion years, astronomers estimate that we will collide with it. Why would we collide with it? Well, together with Andromeda and Triangulum (M33) and about 80 other smaller galaxies mutual gravity has formed what we call the local group.

Then about ten years ago, astronomers determined that our local group of galaxies was part of a larger supercluster of about 100,000 galaxies which they named Laniakea which spans an area of a little more than 500 million light-years in diameter. Are you feeling insignificant yet?

Well, astronomers are still not done. They now believe that Laniakea is just a filament in an even larger structure. Altogether, the Universe as currently envisioned by astronomers may have over 200 billion galaxies. Each has an average of 100 million stars. If only one in a hundred stars had an Earth-sized planet in the habitable zone and only one in a hundred of these had life and if only one in a hundred of these had intelligent life and if only one in a hundred of these were alive at this moment, that would still leave over 200 billion planets in the Universe with intelligent life.

Are you feeling insignificant now? Maybe even a little humbled?

While we may be insignificant on the scale of the Universe, maybe that causes you to reconsider just how inconsequential our political and national quarrels are or even how little difference various religious beliefs make in the grand view of the Universe. Yet how often do they seem to be the only thing that matters? Because for most of us, they do. Maybe that is the real test of our existence and intelligence to see how we handle the bias of being insignificant while we continue to make a difference right here, right now.

Exploring the World of Bias – Episode 3: Normalcy

Normalcy Bias

Just what is normalcy bias? Normalcy bias is also referred to as cognitive bias. Perhaps that does not help you understand what it is. Well, in simple terms, it is when most people resist change, especially change that appears adverse or threatening. For most people, normalcy bias is, well, normal.

For example, many people invest in the stock market because they see specific stocks (or the entire market) going up for so long that because of FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out), they decide to invest. They want to be part of that upward trend which they see as the normal path of stocks at that moment. So, they buy right before a major correction or a stock sell-off. Then they fear that the stock of that company is doomed and will never recover (negative normalcy?) and sell their holdings at a loss. They may even exit the stock market never to go back, giving in to their normal tendency to avoid uncertainty, and put their money back in banks at 1% interest where they feel it is safe. Another example might be the employee who thinks that their company will never lay people off because they never have in the past. But the company is now facing hard economic times. What do they do? Or how about those who resist an evacuation order due to a pending hurricane because they always were able to ride out the storms in the past? Or how about the thought that climate change cannot be real because it always feels hotter in the summer after a cold winter (or vice versa)? That is only normal right? The denial of any change in the face of facts (at least as perceived by others) is a normalcy bias.

While it may not be reasonable to cling to unchanging normalcy, it is reasonable to question change. In that company stock’s case, did the stock go down (or up) because of something inherent in what the company is doing or is it part of a seasonal sales cycle or perhaps a change in the Fed’s interest rate policy? Factors outside of the company must be evaluated differently than internal factors. Is the company laying off people because the business they were in has changed (no one is buying horseshoes for their horses anymore) and they have not changed to meet the new challenges? Is that summer heat wave or winter cold spell a one-off weather event, or can you plot historically a change in the client that spans many years?

Normalcy is relative to one’s perception of the underlying factors that influence the thing being observed. Is the call of workers back into the office normal because that is the way work has always been done in that industry. But is it the only way or is there a bias against remote work because it is just something that management does not understand or trust. So, they want things to return to normal. There was a time when people who wanted to communicate with each other had to do it face-to-face. That was normal. Then the telephone was invented so you could talk remotely to others without needing to go to see them. Some people did not consider that normal and resisted it. However, it did not take long before they placed a telephone on every desk in an office, so you no longer needed to get up from your desk and walk ten feet down to a co-worker’s office to talk with them. Just pick up the phone. That became the new normal. More recently, people have switched to texting on cell phones. You now can see people out to lunch with each other sitting around a table texting with each other rather than simply talking to the person on the other side of the table. If in the future, you could add telepresence to show holographic images of the people sitting around a table having lunch or a meeting to discuss the latest project, would you still require people to be in the same room? The same building? The same city? The same country? So, what is normal? Does every change face some degree of normalcy bias until a majority of people accept it?

Today we live in a world in which there are not just one or two conflicts between nations, political campaigns, religious groups, or other groups going at each other at the same time. Have we become so accustomed to these conflicts that when another arises, it feels like it is just one more group fighting one other group. The thought being that they are not like me and therefore they are not normal. Is that the dark side of normalcy bias?

What are the phases of normalcy bias? Typically, normalcy bias begins with denial. That new virus is probably just like the flu and nothing to worry about. Then comes deliberation as different groups argue whether the virus was naturally occurring or whether it was manufactured by an enemy and if we all just stay at home, it will simply go away. Then the time comes when decisive action is needed. Vaccines are developed and made available to combat the virus. Or to take another look at the previous stock market example when the stock of a company begins to plummet. First, you cannot believe that the stock price has dropped by 25% in one day. There must be a mistake. Then you hear different analysts report their reasons why that stock price change was due to poor management decisions, market conditions, temporary pullbacks of that over inflated market segment, or outside political or economic factors. The stock had been going up for a year. Should you sell just because of one bad day, granted a very bad day. Will the stock price return to ‘normal’ if you just hold it? You must decide whether to hold onto the stock and ride out the downturn, to aggressively buy the dip in the hope of making a profit on the rebound, or to dump the stock and look toward other companies that are faring better.

The point I want to make here is that while Normalcy bias begins with the denial of a change in the status quo, It is important to quickly analyze the reasons why the normal has changed and then to take decisive action to meet those changes. Otherwise, normalcy bias can get you stuck in the past thinking that things will just go back to the way they used to be. While sometimes they will, often they do not. Many people believe today that when we beat inflation, prices will go back to the levels we had two years ago because that was normal. My personal opinion is that it is probably not going to happen. Prices may stop rising as quickly as they did, but other than a few commondities, prices overall they will never go back down again. You can forget about that $0.15 hamburger.

Or is that just another Normalcy Bias?

Exploring The World of Bias – Episode 1

Since my retirement a few years ago, I have focused on two primary topics of interest. One is to make more people aware of ADA concerns ranging from website issues to local government road signs with poor color contrast. The second is to look into the many ways that bias exists in everything. I have given talks on both of these topics at SQL Saturday and Code Camp events many times over this period. However, I feel the need to reach out to more people. Although I have written about bias in the past, this begins the start of a new blog series on bias in today’s world.

Bias in the Astrophysics World

First, some background. On January 8, 2014, a meteorite CNEOS 20140108 (CNEOS stands for Center for Near-Earth Object Studies) struck the Earth near the northeast coast of Papua, New Guinea. It was confirmed to be the first known interstellar meteorite to strike the Earth. However, some believe that it could have been of extraterrestrial origin.

While the meteorite broke up in the atmosphere, pieces were suspected to have rained down into the ocean. In 2022, the Department of Defense (DOD) confirmed that the meteorite was most likely of interstellar origin. How did the DOD get involved you ask? Most likely, it was the new Space Force Command which is tasked with tracking anything entering the Earth’s atmosphere that might pose a threat such as a missile, a falling satellite, or yes, a meteorite. An initial path was plotted to indicate where the debris of the meteorite may have fallen.

A study conducted by John Hopkins University suggested that the reported path of the meteorite and thus the location of its fall may have been wrong based on the fact that the seismic evidence recorded on Manus Island may have only been triggered by a truck on a nearby road. Seismic evidence from a meteorite that probably never hit the Earth, but exploded in the air you might ask?

It is feasible to assume that meteorites explode in the atmosphere with a force as great as the Hiroshima atomic bomb. While most meteorites that explode upon hitting the atmosphere go largely unnoticed because the Earth’s surface is mostly water, electronic detection is increasingly likely as our monitoring systems become more sensitive. Such an explosion of a meteorite would generate a large flash and create a line of debris in the direction in which the meteorite was moving. Not only can the explosion potentially be detected, but it is believed that we have the potential to hear larger objects as strike they the water. Gemini 5 in 1965 splashed down nearly 90 miles away from its intended site, but it was reportedly ‘heard’ by sensitive sonar stations designed to listen for enemy submarines. I would imagine that in the 50+ years since then, our sensors have become significantly better.

In the summer of 2023, Avi Loeb, a professor at Harvard specializing in astrophysics and cosmology led an expedition to try to find fragments of the meteorite off the ocean floor. Dr. Loeb is best known for the 2018 theory he proposed that an object called Oumuamua might be not only an interstellar object but may be an extraterrestrial object. Part of his theory was based on the fact that Oumauamua had increased in velocity as it left the solar system. Researching other meteorites that have hit Earth hoping to find a similar one, Dr Loeb felt that CNEOS 20140108 was most likely a similar object. If nothing else, it represented an object with a velocity of 60 km/s which is higher than the 42.1 km/s needed by an object at the distance from Earth from the Sun to place it in a hyperbolic path that would have allowed it to escape the solar system. It was also one of the arguments why the object could be interstellar.

Thus in 2023, Dr. Loeb led the Galileo Project to drag a magnetic sled across the ocean floor to try to recover debris from the 2014 meteorite. Of course, that would assume that the fragments were magnetic and not all metals are magnetic, nor are all meteorites metallic. In fact, only about 1 in 20 meteors recovered on Earth are iron meteorites which could be attracted by a magnetic sled. After several days of sweeping the ocean floor, they finally retrieved small spherules. These spherules had a composition of 84% iron, 8% silicon, 4% magnesium, 2% titanium along with a group of trace materials.

The discovery of iron was important to make the spherules magnetic. But what was really interesting was the ratios of Uranium 235 and 238 along with lead 206 and 207. These isotopes can be used to determine the age when the material formed. Uranium 238 decays to Lead 206 with a half-life of 4.47 billion years and Uranium 235 decays to Lead 207 with a half-life of 0.71 billion years. Once the rock is formed, the amounts of these isotopes are fixed. Any subsequent change in the ratios can be used to determine when the rock formed. In this case, the age seemed to indicate that the spherules were nearly 14 billion years old. Our solar system was formed only about 4.6 billion years ago. This was the second indication that the material came from outside of the solar system.

But was it of extraterrestrial manufacture or naturally occurring? Just because something is from outside of the solar system, does not imply it is extraterrestrial. This is the point where some objected to Avi’s theory that it could have been debris from an extraterrestrial vehicle. In a New York Times article of March 9, 2024, by Darren Orf, there was a statement by Steve Desch, an astrophysicist at Arizona State University who stated that “people are sick of hearing about Avi Loeb’s wild claims… It’s polluting good science conflating the good science we do with this ridiculous sensationalism and sucking all the oxygen out of the room.” Did you detect just a little bit of bias there? I sure did. The fact is that we do not know what the meteor was. Yes, it probably did come from outside our solar system. Yes, it could just be a rock formed early in the creation of the Universe. Yes, it could be debris from an alien spaceship or a probe (like our Voyagers). The fact is that we do not know. However, to shut down a respected scientist just because you don’t like his theory even though you have no real proof one way or the other is a bias that should never appear in science.

We have seen similar examples of bias by ‘professional’ scientists many times in the past. A good reference if you are interested, is the book, “Science Was Wrong” by the late Stanton T. Friedman who was a nuclear physicist by trade. But I have my own examples such as the belief when I was in elementary school that continents were fixed in position and did not move. My father grew up in a time when talk of men going to the moon was considered a fantasy. Yet, he lived to see Apollo astronauts walk on the moon. And we all know that continents float across the mantel of the Earth. Science is based on theories. They represent the best explanations we have at the moment for what we observe. There can be alternative theories, even conflicting theories. In no case should one’s personal bias give one the right to refer to another theory as “ridiculous sensationalism” much less that it might “suck the oxygen out of the room.”

Besides learning something about this very interesting investigation into interstellar material which could lead us to understand more about the formation of stars and galaxies, I hope you can see how bias often appears in so-called professional critiques. More importantly, I hope you can avoid such biased comments when evaluating your co-workers if you do not have the proof to back them up.