Today's Thesis
Choosing Winners
Since it turns out most of the popular science psychology books have been written with fraudulent or misleading data, I'm going to present this thesis without evidence. After all, if you can't beat 'em you might as well join 'em.
Make your own mind up whether these ideas hold water.
As a species, the exchange of abstract information has turned up relatively late in the day. Books only arrived a few thousand years ago (six thousand year old ancient scrolls being perhaps the oldest we've found), but widespread printing has been a far more recent invention, barely having time to register against the long process of our evolution.
Before books we relied on the spoken word, which has evolved into the ancient and noble art of YouTube videos and Podcasts.
But before all of that, baked into our genes and evolutionary success, we relied on social information - not abstract facts, but the relationships and behaviour of the tribe around us. Recent inventions like democracy and the 5-2 Diet were proceeded by millennia during which we decided who was boss and which foods were healthy by looking to the groups we shared and doing what we were told.
Here's the radical consequence of this long evolutionary path: in our brain social information completely overwhelms abstract information when we try to evaluate ideas. Or to put it another way, we look to the tribe around us first and then add intellectual, abstract justification to our beliefs second. It's such a natural behaviour that we don't even notice it. We codify it into the internet - which ostensibly shares information democratically, but depends on social cues such as view counts to decide which information to surface.
In fact, social cues have been amplified by the internet. You are almost certainly reading this on a social network that only decided to show it to you because, distantly, we share the same tribe (and possibly, I've gained some social status by being liked or followed). So the first, and overwhelming, information you are getting is social not abstract. I've not given a single statistic or study to justify this idea - but you are reading it and perhaps nodding a little all the same. Unlike the cod psychology books, I'm not using some counter-intuitive mind trick to force you to believe me. I'm just acknowledging that is is social information that dominates our behaviour and thinking.
In turn, that leads to another radical consequence. We make bad decisions. Far from the wisdom of the crowd, we have the madness of the mob. Except this is a civilised, polite mob that writes articles, shares podcasts and produces YouTube videos to exchange information. We argue ourselves into beliefs not through the collection and distillation of abstract information but through research that is once again dominated by social structures and cues. We pick our information (or it is picked for us) first through who shared it, second through the appeal of the headline and then as a late third... perhaps... the actual justification for the idea or statement. That doesn't mean we're stupid, or acting stupidly, but that our first filter is social information, not abstract. In fact we can make great intellectual efforts to find evidence to justify the choices and beliefs we come to - but they still come from a lack of data.
Now I could make political points here or rail against perceived villains in the tech industry, but there is something less contentious that I wanted to address. We mistake social information for abstract information. Regularly, figures in technology and politics are described as "smart" not because they have made an intellectual leap or have a deeper understanding, but because they have dominated the social space. That in itself is a talent, but it doesn't mean they are right and should be followed or trusted. In extreme cases the "wisdom of the crowd" directed by a visionary, 'genius' leader has enabled massive, harmful fraud such as Theranos or FTX.
And when it comes to making personal or corporate decisions - which diet to follow, which car to buy, which technology to use for our multi-million dollar business critical system - we more than often follow misleading social information than rational analysis. During lockdown we talked ourselves into thinking an exercise bike company was worth a billion dollars, more recently that NFTs would make us all rich, then first blockchain and now AI would be the main drivers of our business.. and a hundred other lower profile decisions that have proven to be at best misguided and at worst hugely damaging.
So, next time you're reading a business article on an important new technology or listening to a podcast explaining the reasoning behind a political decision, it pays to double check how much of the piece is abstract information and how much is a post-hoc justification of social cues. When it comes to technology adoption are you following the crowd off a cliff, or waiting around unnecessarily for them to catch on?
And... the moment someone is described as a genius - run!
- Andy Toone
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