prophecies

reversing causality

also on mit admissions

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my favorite part of ancient greek literature is its treatment of self-fulfilling prophecies. oedipus’s parents learn that he will kill his father and marry his mother, so they abandon him, enabling a future where he doesn’t recognize his parents and therefore kills his father and marries his mother by accident. cronos learns one of his sons will overthrow him, so he eats his children, causing his son zeus to hate him and eventually overthrow him. these narratives are interesting from a storytelling perspective because they reveal their own endings early on and yet somehow the act of spoilage makes them more engaging, not less

there are no oracles in real life, but self-fulfilling prophecies certainly exist. the classical example is learned helplessness: in the original experiment, dogs in the control group were placed in an environment where they were shocked repeatedly and the shocking would only stop if they jumped over a hoop. in such a scenario, all the dogs quickly learned to jump over the hoop. meanwhile, dogs in the experimental group were shocked repeatedly regardless of what they did, and then they were placed in the same environment as the control group, at which point they did not attempt to jump over the hoop or do anything else to stop the shocks, presumably because they’d acquired an assumption that the shocks were inevitable

learned helplessness occurs all the time in humans as well. i’ve written about this idea before, in the context of friendships (we often assume we are powerless to help our friends resolve their issues so we choose not to help them and in doing so become powerless) and career decisions (we often assume we can’t make progress on difficult problems so we pick easier career paths and in doing so ensure that we don’t make progress on said problems). or, for a more concrete example, consider math education in the usa - one common anecdote educators report is of children getting lost during a math class, feeling that they “can’t do” math, and not trying as hard in subsequent classes as a result, ultimately resulting in them not being able to do math. (to be clear, i’m not trying to fault the students here; i think math curriculums need to be restructured to give students better avenues for recovering and catching up)

self-fulfilling prophecies have played an important role in how i experience attraction. i remember a few years ago one of my friends asked me “do you believe in true love?” and my response was something like i haven’t personally experienced true love and am not sure if i ever will, but i believe that some people experience it, and i believe that people who expect to experience true love are more likely to do so than people who don’t expect it, and that’s a response i would still stand by today. or, for another example, i spent the first twenty years of my life consuming media telling me that i was supposed to date conventionally attractive females and eventually have sex with them, and because that was my expectation for what relationships should look like i experienced physical attraction to conventionally attractive females and tried to date them. it wasn’t until two years ago that i realized i didn’t actually care that much about traditional beauty standards and was probably asexual, and once i made that realization i started experiencing significantly less physical attraction in general. it’s truly bizarre that expecting to feel things can cause you to feel them, and changing those expectations can make the feelings change

here are some of the prophecies on my mind these days: that it’s very hard to make friends after college (my friends who believe this tend to not put much effort into meeting new people, whereas other people i know tend to go to more events and search harder and find more people they like). that you stop learning once you have a job (my friends who agree with this tend to not bother learning much outside of what their jobs teach them, whereas my friends who still believe in learning tend to continue reading and experimenting and building projects in their free time). that life in general peaks during college and is less interesting afterwards (my friends who accept this tend to settle into relatively monotonous routines after starting work, whereas other people i know tend to continue trying new things and exploring more of the world)

these prophecies are all statements i’ve heard repeated over and over in my life, and yet, when i look at people i know who are older than me, only the ones who subscribe to these predictions seem to be affected by them. so i can’t help but wonder - what if none of these prophecies are actually destiny, and the reason they come to pass is because we believe in them? what if we could change the future simply by believing otherwise? of course faith alone does not accomplish anything - i don’t believe in “manifesting”, and i’m not a superstitious person - but faith is still valuable because it serves as the basis for all the work that must come afterwards

when i look into the future i see a minefield of self-fulfilling prophecies and self-reinforcing patterns, and i consider which ones i want to set off and which ones i want to avoid. this is why i think it is important to pick one’s beliefs carefully; this is why i choose to believe life in the future will be better than it is in the present; this is why i tell people optimism is the correct response to uncertainty and failure, no matter how counterintuitive it may seem

i don’t know how to accomplish the goals i want to accomplish or how to bring about the futures i want to live in, but i know that before anything else i must first believe these things are possible