Do the Patterns of Your Life Predict Your Future?

On the radio this morning I heard an interesting story that relates to our discussion about free will and determinism last week.

https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2018/03/30/597974076/invisibilia-do-the-patterns-in-your-past-predict-your-future

The story discussed the research of sociologists (particularly, Matthew Salganik from Princeton University) trying to use computer models to predict the path of people's lives.  As computer algorithms have gotten to be more powerful, they've become better and better at understanding patterns and predicting the future.  Pandora can guess which songs you might like; Netflix recommends movies and shows for you personally, based on your previous history.  So can we predict what path a person's life might take, using the patterns from their past?

The story describes the project: 

"So Salganik set to work. He got a massive trove of data on 5,000 kids who had been followed from the day they were born, then made that information available to data geeks and researchers across the globe. Four hundred teams were given incredibly detailed information about the kids from birth until age nine, then told to predict their grades — and a handful of other outcomes — at age 15."

What did Salganik find?  In fact, the predictions were all very inaccurate.  No one was able to create a model that could reliably predict where the person would end up based on the data they had been given.

Duncan Watts, a sociology researcher who works at Microsoft Research, explains:

"We find exactly the same pattern everywhere we look... when you're talking about individual outcomes, there's a lot of randomness," Watts says.

"And the other half of this conversation is that people don't like that answer, and so they keep wanting a different answer. They say nature abhors a vacuum. Humans abhor randomness. We like deterministic stories," Duncan says. 

We like the idea that patterns can tell us what will happen in life because that idea makes us feel more secure, he says.

"If you think you can predict things— even if you're wrong — it means that you get up in the morning and you feel confident," Watts says. "And so you can invest your time and energy today in things that won't pay off until tomorrow."

We want to be able to predict what will happen, to feel like we have some kind of control over our lives or over our children’s lives.  But maybe there just is a lot of randomness in life and how things turn out, and we have to come to terms with that.

What should we think about this research?  What does it tell us about human life and the problem of free will?

One possibility is that the lack of deterministic patterns is evidence that humans have free will.  Of course human behavior looks random--that's because each person is a free agent and makes her own choice.

But maybe that's not it.  Maybe where we end up going is random because the situations that people face are so random.  The bank robber in the story because a law professor because of random things that happened to him, not because of something he clearly chose.

Another possibility is that human behavior really is determined by external factors and patterns, but we just haven't learned what they are yet.  Presumably there are things that determine, say, the weather, but they are so complex and hard to measure that we haven't yet been able to model and predict weather perfectly... yet!  But that's no reason to think we never will be able to predict weather, or predict human behavior, if we have more data and better models.