Cancer and the Collingridge Dilemma: A Personal Guide To Living Through Change
I remember exactly where I was when my dad told me he had cancer. It was lunchtime on a Wednesday earlier this spring and I was stretching on my front porch. He FaceTimed me and asked me if I had a minute. He told me they found a mass in his colon. It took me a moment before I realized what he was saying. That’s the peculiar thing about the early stages of a cancer diagnosis. It is always surprising, and nobody wants to say it directly. Our initial reaction to abrupt change is to euphemize the truth.
The world is an uncertain place at the moment. From COVID-19 to economic upheaval to political division, it’s difficult to know what to expect these days.
Living with uncertainty isn’t easy. Stress, anxiety, addiction, and depression can all result from it. To make matters worse, uncertainty tends to arrive unannounced as the result of a change we weren’t prepared for. Why? For a few reasons.
- Limited time and energy make it difficult to quantify future risks. There are only so many hours in the day and many of us don’t spend them considering how things may change. Even if we do, we tend to consider (i.e., worry about) a very narrow set of possibilities.
- We tend to discount personal risk. Even in situations where we can quantify risk, such as the likelihood the average person will be in a car accident in their lifetime, we tend to ascribe bad outcomes to others and assign good ones to ourselves — in this case, assuming someone else will be in a car accident but we will not (for what it’s worth, the average person files a car insurance claim about every 17 years, meaning it isn’t a matter of if you will be in a car accident in your lifetime, but rather, how many you will be in).¹
- Some events are extremely difficult to predict. So-called black swan events are extremely rare, have massive consequences, and are often rationalized in hindsight as being obvious. 9/11 is one example. No amount of existing data would help us predict these events because black swans are not based on past experience; they are incongruous with the past. They are needle-in-the-haystack events, and adding more data would only add more hay to the haystack.
- Any sufficiently large change will have unintended consequences. Interaction in complex systems quickly creates knock-on effects that far outstrip our foresight. Even planned changes will result in uncertainty when implemented at scale.
This final point is the subject of the Collingridge Dilemma, which states we cannot know the full impact of a technology before it is adopted, at which point it is very difficult to regulate. Consider social media. It took one and a half tumultuous presidential elections, a Capitol Riot, and a global pandemic exacerbated by misinformation for the United States government to begin asking Jack Dorsey tough questions about Twitter, at which point changing how people use the app is always a matter of catch-up, and fundamentally changing user behavior is next to impossible. Perhaps if regulators had perfect foresight they would have intervened in the activities of social media companies from their infancy.
The Collingridge Dilemma extends beyond technology — in reality, it is one substantiation of a broader concept: The explore/exploit dilemma. In computer science, the explore/exploit dilemma describes the tradeoff between the time one should spend training an algorithm on a data set (e.g., exploring) versus the time one should spend reaping the benefits of an algorithm in a real-world context (e.g., exploiting). As people, we face the same dilemma every day when we decide whether to try something new — such as a restaurant — or stick with an old favorite. As we age, we explore more things and therefore have a better idea of what to exploit, but less time to reap the rewards of our exploring. I call this the Paradox of Wisdom, and it’s the more general case of the Coolingridge Dilemma.
The Paradox of Wisdom begs the question: Given the tradeoff between foresight and action, what is the best way to live through change? Conventional perspective states the answer to this lies in building mental, physical and financial resilience, having a robust community of support, and healthy coping mechanisms. These things will all help mitigate change fatigue and lessen the chance of change-related failure. This is true. But there is another important element of coping with change that we accept as a given in situations of business, war, and other high-stakes activities, but that we tend to discount in our personal lives.
That is response speed. Often, in situations of personal change, we do our best to continue living, buffering our actions and expectations to keep ourselves within a narrow band of contentedness. Our default is the status quo until something pushes us to actively address the change. Typically, this necessitates engaging our avenues of last resort. But that’s the wrong way to think about it. Time is precious. When you act makes a difference. Think instead about your instruments of first resort, the critical things you must prioritize in any uncertain situation.
In the graphic above, there is an intersection point, which sits somewhat arbitrarily at the midpoint of both curves. It doesn’t have to be that way. There are steps you can take to shift the curve.
1. Frontload wisdom. The first critical component of your instruments of first resort should be the ability to learn as much as you can from trusted sources as soon as possible. In the event of moving to a new city, it could mean polling local friends vigorously early on and following up on their suggestions. For life in general, it could mean spending more time learning from the elderly.
2. Prolong exploitation. The second critical component of your instruments of first resort should be the ability to prolong exploitation. In some regards, achieving this requires more planning than the first component. But it is possible. In the event of moving to a new city, it could mean buying a train ticket for one day after the expiration of your lease. That might not sound like much, but having an extra free day with no obligations like packing will allow you to exploit your knowledge of the city and visit all your favorite spots. For life in general, it could mean saving more for retirement, or — more conceptually — changing how we think about getting older. We tend to think about the elderly as being mired in repetition (as evidenced by the Early Bird Special at certain restaurants). But when you consider that getting older means getting to know your preferences better, then our view of the elderly shifts from people unwilling to try anything superior to individuals who know exactly what they want and are enjoying the heck out of it.
I’m with my dad now; out in the midwest underneath a big sky. There are sweeping fields and red-wing blackbirds that parry in the dry grass. Recently, while running on a narrow trail, I came to an impasse with someone on horseback. She apologized to me for the largess of her beautiful beast.
It is nice to be somewhere with so much space and time. It’s allowed me to think, and to write, and you are reading the result of that.
I’ve thought about cancer, and getting older, and how in failing to protect our bodies we use words to protect our minds.
I’ve thought about the reasons why we are caught off-guard by change, and our imperfect tendency to stonewall the truth; how that is a reactive form of preparation.
I’ve thought about life as a process of one-way transitions; where each experience informs how we want to live the rest of our lives. This is where our instruments of first resort come in. We cannot reverse the direction of time, but we can control how we spend it.
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