The maybe in your mind, the maybe of JSON, the maybe of history

How sifting signal from noise could be a theme of our times

Your job no longer fits you, but it’s not so bad you should be running away. You doubt the prospects of your relationship, but love your partner in so many ways. There is a debate and both sides make good points, but many horrible points as well. It’s unclear, it’s uncertain, it’s important.

This is what I call the “maybe point”. I have been noticing these maybes everywhere and I want to show you. Let me first introduce the maybe in our minds, then point out the maybes all around us, and, finally, speculate on the global maybe of our times.

The maybe in my head

The conventional is to smash the maybe. There must be no doubt. Pick a career and stick to it. Or leave your job and pursue your dreams. Fuck yes or not at all. Leave your partner and be done with it. Or stay till death do you part. Pick a side and wave the flag. Or pick no sides.

All extremes and all promise certainty. Interesting things happen if you don’t shatter the maybe. If you accept the fear that comes with it. You will discover it has many facets to it. A prism allows to peek inside the light spectrum. The maybe is a prism for the mind. The maybe, freed from extremes, allows to peek inside reasoning.

There is not much reasoning when things are definite. Which is why we remember the uncertainties and the decision points, but not the times of conviction. In the decision points the brain was active and that’s what it considered important to remember to help you make better decisions in the future. When things are definite your mind is effectively off. Maybe you are barely even human, barely perceiving reality.

The maybe is the only point at which will is exercised. At that point, possible futures are compared. At that point, the system two, explicit probabilistic reasoning, and all the other cool stuff is on. At that maybe point you are alive and actually awake. Questioned by the world.

It's a shitty point too. You don't get fun in the maybe. Maybe is suffering. If the choice was simple there wouldn't be a maybe. Your conscious mind is like the president. When the president gets called it’s definitely a crisis. The whole apparatus couldn’t solve something and now the crisis is his. A hard decision. Torment.

The wider maybe, as illustrated by JSON

Let me illustrate, by one example, the maybe outside our minds.

A short primer. The world is practically running on JSON blobs: bits of structured machine-readable text. This is how software systems often pass information between each other. Bank transactions, button clicks, store inventories, social media feeds, you name it. It gets more abstract: JSON blobs describing other JSON blobs. Like how many JSON blobs a database contains. Or the relationships between two JSON blobs, which could also be JSON blobs describing relationships between JSON blobs. The abstraction just grows and grows infinitely until you can not tell what the initial blobs were even about.

Many people, me included, spend a lot of time moving JSON blobs. In fact, most of software engineering is just that and it’s a famous meme by now. The level of abstraction is so high you don’t even count the levels anymore. Imagine a B2B Software As A Service that provides a unified adapter API to a hundred APIs for effectively managing Docker containers. Sounds like gibberish? This is life for a lot of people. Cryptic JSON blobs in, JSON blobs out. It can get soul-crushing. This gave birth to another meme: programmers ditching their cushy JSON-moving jobs and becoming woodworkers.

It’s tempting to make a trite point: the work is detached from real life and entirely meaningless to boot. It seems certainly hopeless, but, in fact, it’s the opposite: constant maybe.

If the work was really meaningless the decision would be easy. It would be certain. Useless soul-crushing job? Ditch it. The people moving JSONs around are usually not without choice. They could just do that. But for some reason, they are not leaving. Many even claim to enjoy it. The alienation of labor does not explain what is going on.

What’s missing is the maybe. The culprit: JSON blobs are not entirely useless. They might be ninety-nine percent detached from reality and useless, but not one hundred. It might even be that each JSON is a little bit useful. It’s a lot of soul-crushing useless. It’s a lot of noise. But there is signal.

This is the uncertainty, the maybe, of this work. One might feel like they are moving useless JSONs around, so maybe they should do something else. And yet, it feeds their family and brings a sense of accomplishment. You could even make the world a better place with a clever movement of some JSON blobs as all the hip tech companies try. Maybe stick to it? Maybe not? Constant little torment.

The maybe around

Let’s zoom out and inspect other things through the maybe lens.

Tinder is a soulless scroll of superficial illusions of connection. Turning the dating market into a literal market. The most inhumane way to rank people. And yet, there is your future partner and soulmate there, somewhere.

Instagram is pure vanity. Cesspool of virtue signaling. The place where you scream into a void that you are cool and not quite like the others, please accept me and deem me worthy. At the same time, it's the place where you check up on friends and see what's going on in their lives.

Take any social media feed. It’s a mash of informational garbage, echo-chamber preaching, and sneering. All for the sake of imaginary internet numbers. It has ruined your and mine ability to concentrate, plunged thousands into depression, and gave a platform to literal maniacs. But among it, somewhere, is a little spark of happiness. The particularly cute cat picture. A funny meme that is just right, in that spot where most people wouldn't understand it, but not complete gibberish too.

Video games are mostly consumerist factory belt-produced copycats aimed to fry your brain on digital cocaine. But some are masterpieces that make you marvel, and you never regret letting them hijack your brain.

Netflix is an endless movie reel of mediocrity and mild propaganda. And yet, this is what you watch in the evenings with your partner, usually the calm highlight of the day.

It's uncertain, but there is signal. This is the essence of the maybe. Can’t just ditch Tinder and everything else, but can’t stop wondering if you should. A lot of noise, but you can not stop searching for the signal.

The maybe in society

Let’s zoom out even more. To the level of society.

The news is a Niagara waterfall of rage, lies, and propaganda. Blood, scandals, monster of the week, Florida man does a backflip, more blood, and so on and on to infinity. And yet, there is truth somewhere. Shattered, concealed, ridiculed, disfigured, strawmanned, but still truth. Your only way to know.

Politics is just an endless culture war. A fistfight in a dumpster fire. The people involved need therapy. Most issues on the table are dillusioned paranoid hypomania nonsense. Nobody ever cares about policy and whatever the hell is truth anyway. The parties want you to become a soldier for their cause. You resist because it's all bullshit. And yet, among this mess something could change millions if not billions of lives. Something that puts our future on the line. It can be wages, roads, and interest rates, or it can be existential like AI.

Careers. Soul-crushing zoom meetings where you wish you had your camera off and you could actually do that, but it would hurt your career trajectory, so you pretend to be involved. Running social media marketing campaigns to zombify desperate people into buying a mindfulness course subscription. Making pretty dashboards for people who are wholly inequipped to multiply two numbers without creating a JIRA ticket. Making an API to things that should have been built properly in the first place. Whatever you do, you have no idea how any of this translates into potatoes harvested or whatever is happening in the physical world. And yet, among this, somewhere, is rewarding work. Stupid things can be averted and great things can be achieved. Good can be done, money earned, creative marvel of doing stuff at the edge of your competence experienced.

Science is supposed to be an island of signal. It’s better than most if you can get past the nonsense like "studies show a glass of wine per day makes you healthier than not drinking at all". It’s easier when you understand that science is not the answer machine, but the question machine. One level deeper, however, it’s pretty bad. Bickering. Publish-or-perish and I-will-backstab-my-coauthor. Pseudoscience. P-hacking. Underpowered studies. Suspicious sponsored studies. Never replicated studies. Just changing numbers in Excel until you get publishable results. Artificially generated papers. Incremental improvements no one cares about. Conferences that publish trash, but don't care, because the point is to have a trip to Madeira, and everyone knows this. The sheer volume of things published. Meta-analyses on meta-analyses because some asshole made a meta-analysis that proves homeopathy works. Finally, the fact that even good studies show marginal effects and no definite conclusions. And yet, the truth is there. Something that could cure cancer, send us to Mars, and philosophy to tell us how to get the hell out of the mental stationary point where we might be get stuck forever.

Art is terrible. The old works are pleasant but not relevant. The beautiful clouds of Ayvazovsky get old soon and are considered totally meh by the people in the know. Modern art is a soup of bland political slogans disguised as profound thought. More freedom, more love, more equality. None of this yelling helps us in these times. The slogans are so out of date and didn’t age well. More freedom? At the cost of who's serfdom? Which freedom do you mean? Freedom of thought, expression, action, public demonstration, rambling on Twitter, swastika on your face, living in the woods and not paying taxes, shooting your neighbors’ dog with no consequences? We already know that the good guys and the bad guys all consider themselves freedom fighters. What do we do when everyone's idea of what is freedom is totally different? Instead, we get the old slogans, some disgusting but lazy performance for the latest political cause, made not to be impactful, but to get views on social media. And then there is the elitism. The post-Malevich world has so many layers of commentary and meta-commentary that modern art appears to be about what it means to be an artist. Plus the old slogans and the latest political issue. And all of that is just intended to sneer at people who don't understand. And yet, among all this there is a painting that makes you cry in the museum. There is something to enlighten us, change the frame of reference, and get us out of the mental fishtank.

It’s uncertain, but there is signal. Like cats chasing a red dot, we hunt for the signal, but rarely get the satisfaction. By the way, don’t do this to your cat, it’s painful for them. Back to the topic: it’s maybe all around. Maybe I should ditch social media, but how do I avoid being a freak? Maybe I should ditch following politics, but where is the world going to end up if everyone does? Maybe I should become a woodworker, but why would I bury my math brain?

The historic maybe

Let’s zoom out, turn speculation levels to the max, and inspect history.

This is the historic maybe point. The lost world of certainities is behind us. First, it was “let’s kill a mammoth or we starve”, then religious dogma, then it was communism versus nazis versus liberalism, then it was “liberal democracy won” a.k.a. “The End of History”. All of it was a delusion where things appeared certain. But not now. Now is a new world of fully connected graphs. Each of us is a vertex and information flows in all directions. More information than anyone can swallow, more noise, more choice.

It's a position for which the monkey brain is completely unfit. Now we understand that full conviction leads you down the alleys of genocide. And entire doubt, where you just assume there is no hope trying to find the truth, is a paralytic dead end.

We know all about the things that didn’t work, but can only guess about what could work. The world has changed dramatically, but we stayed the same. It's a point at which it's not clear if it's even possible to conceive another point that wouldn't be a repetition of a previous one.

That’s not to say it’s entirely uncertain and hopeless. Would be so easy if it was, but no. It’s uncertain, but there is signal.

We have become expert signal filters. Digging daily through mounds and mounds of informational trash, looking for the tiny signal. A happy moment, an insightful thought, a deep connection. While we are busy swimming in this swamp we are not busy creating. Sifting signal from trash is not an art, it’s a trade, a kind of manual labor.

In our age, Bayesian probability isn’t just a modeling technique. It encompassed and consumed reality. Everything is uncertain. Everything is uncertainty. Everything is an estimate. There is objective stuff, there is signal. But you have no hope of knowing it, only an estimate. Everything has a counterfactual. Infinite alternate futures paralyze us. The definite heuristics like "just go for communism" or “just love everyone and never fight” don't work anymore. Did they ever? We want to do better, make an informed decision, do a cost-benefit analysis. But it's fucking hard, the monkey brain is unfit, not sure if it’s working.

The maybe point is not just a decision point. It’s the true "what the fuck is going on" point, which might be a decision point or might be the last stop.

Now would be a good time to end with a positive. The best I have got is to go back to the nature of the maybe in our minds. The maybe point is a time for inspecting the lens of reasoning. It’s a time of forced awakening. The veil is lifted and you get to reflect. Maybe we get to reflect for the first time. That’s a glimmer of hope.

This is vague and not actionable at all. Yeah. Otherwise, there wouldn’t be a maybe.