We sure don’t pay enough attention to it. Talk about something that is everywhere that we look, think or study, and affects all of our decisions and understanding, yet we don’t want to think about it. We not only don’t want to think about it; we frequently don’t even want to acknowledge that it exists. That is strange. All statistical probability is gauged according to the bell shaped curve. There is a “95% or greater probability” that a finding exceeds the laws of chance, or there is a “5% or less probability” that a finding is valid. All research has to be gauged according to the bell shaped curve. In fact, everything we do takes into account what the chances of success will be with this or that certain tactic. We don’t really think about it most of the time, but our minds certainly do go through similar motions when we are trying to make decisions. Maybe it would be better if we brought that reality to the forefront more. Maybe we should be a little more mindful of the fact that all our lives depend on choices made according to the laws of chance.
Now, we all find that we can’t consider all things at all times. That becomes too complex. We find it necessary to reduce masses of data to simple terms. After reading an article on some subject or hearing a lecture, we all find ourselves asking: “Ok, what it the bottom line.” After hearing a bunch of nuances, possibilities, conjectures, investigations that went nowhere, all we want to know is that certain figure or level that means we have to do something about it. What does the WBC have to be before you worry about infection? What does the BUN have to be to indicate kidney failure? What does the BNP have to be in indicate cardiac failure? What does the ALT have to be before you change medicine to avoid hepatic failure? Life is so complex our heads get stuffed with all sorts of useless material unless we can reduce it to a certain figure or level that has meaning. It is like a switch in our heads: The BP is more than 140/90; well, we better give some medicine to get it back to normal.
It is important to do these things. We each need to make up our minds what the trigger level is that means we need to pay attention to any problem. We are remiss if we do not determine in most everything we do what the level is that carries statistical meaning. Those levels become a trigger or a switch to open that window or door and take action on that problem. Once that door has been opened, however, we certainly do need to look at the other data and surrounding for that finding. It is sort of like walking into a room. There is a reason that we opened that door. Once we have opened that door and stepped into that room, we need to, at least in a brief sweeping sense, be aware of everything else in that room. If we are not mindful of what else that room contains and how it relates to the item at hand, we will often make poor or incomplete decisions. The ramifications of our decisions have to be considered.
This is too general to have any concrete meaning for you. Let’s try to find some specific examples that will bring this point home to you, “ripped from the headlines.” There is this war in Iraq. If you take your emotions out of it, your preconceived perceptions of rights or destiny, your religious myths, and look at it in an analytical manner, you will see clearly that the odds are bad. The chances that we will alienate most Arabs against us for the rest of their lives are high. We are bombing their buildings, killing their civilians, and forcing our way of life down their throats. How would we like it if someone invaded our country and did that to us? The chances that this misadventure will turn out badly are immense. Sure, Saddam Hussein was a mass murderer and tyrant. Sure each of us is delighted that he is no longer the CEO of Iraq. Sure, we wish every people could have the advantages of democracy. But it just isn’t right. We are fighting the odds, and the odds will win. If we had instead taken all the money we are now pouring into the war effort in Iraq and spent it to develop agriculture and build schools in regions of the world where they are needed, we would be winners. Instead, we are now sure to be losers: we are losing our soldiers, our best genes, and our prestige around the world.
The other prime example that comes to mind at the moment is that the state of Ohio has passed a law outlawing homosexual unions or marriages. Setting emotions aside, that simply makes no sense. The statistics are that sexuality is a part of the bell shaped curve like everything else. There are those who are hypersexual, have to have it every day, there are most of us who really like it but can put other things as first priority, and there are some who just don’t care. There are those men and women who are hyper-heterosexual, there are most of us who form strong ties to other men or women, and there are those of us who are homosexual. That’s just the way it is. It has been this way since the beginning of humanity. We can’t force people to be something they are not. If our goal in society is to foster stable relationships, stable families, then we will allow those unions to exist in a legal setting. It just doesn’t make any sense any other way.
Just because someone is really tall or really short does not make them any less a human with the same rights of life that we all have. Just because someone is brown, black, white, yellow, round eye, slant eye, young, old, bent, straight, hyper-, hetero-, homo-, asexual or any other kind of sexual does not make them any less human. We are all in some way an outlier on a bell shaped curve. We need to accept all these outliers as normal. We are not all the same. We are all unique and different. We should relish the differences!
Every group of anything we know exists in a bell shaped curve. All of our life experiences and encounters show variability. All will show a median, a majority, and 5% outliers at the top and bottom of the curve. In everything we do, we need to keep in mind that we are playing the odds against the Laws of Chance. The bell shaped curve is simply an expression of God: It is all- powerful, all-pervasive and completely impersonal. We challenge God – we lose. We play along with God – and God is willing to give us a greater chance of long term survival. We recognize that we have great variability in human expression as a normal part of being us, and we are winners.
The bell shaped curve teaches us both ways. It teaches us that if something has a great chance of failure, we better take another course of action. It also teaches us that there is great variability in all of life, and that all of that variability should be reverently respected. We better learn what our teacher is saying; the God of Chance is watching with an unforgiving eye.