The consumer products industry is very skilled at selling things to you. Sometimes they sell so well, they don't even have to try. They create an environment where, sometimes, you carry water for them. You do the work for them by convincing yourself to spend more.
They can even do this while making you think you're smart, enlightened and above average.
One easy way this can be done is by creating an entire domain of ersatz knowledge and expertise that consumers want to learn, so they can become more "sophisticated" and have a greatly deepened appreciation of a given product.
Let's consider a textbook example of such a product: cigars.
How can we get legions of otherwise intelligent consumers to spend lots of money on cigars? It's quite easy actually.
First, create an entire body of knowledge out of the domain and make it so the customer has to work to learn all the nuances and details of cigar making... where the really good cigars come from, how they're made (by hand, painstakingly, of course), which are the best and why, and so on. Have them learn various memorable narratives about certain cigars: "This one, a newly legal Cuban, was made at the factory owned by Fidel Castro's personal cigar-maker," let's say. Or: "This one, from a remote village in Nicaragua, is made from tobacco grown from transplanted seeds of the finest Cuban tobacco breeds."
Be sure to have your customers memorize a long list of jargon, terminology and idiosyncratic phrases. Have them learn what it means to "toast the foot." Have them learn how to "retrohale." They are becoming knowledgeable about a very high-end, very elite topic. Let them signal their intelligence and sophistication by holding forth knowledgeably about it!
Then, sell them accessories, high-end ones of course. After all, it's pathetic to use a match when you can use your double torch lighter ($42.99). Using your teeth seems so undignified, so neanderthal-like, when you can use your personalized silver cigar cutter with its own carrying case ($59.99). Another advantage: accessories serve as mini ersatz knowledge domains too, by which a consumer can easily signal still more of his or her sophistication and good taste.
Now, let me ask readers a few questions: Once this cigar-buying consumer has learned all these things, once he's attained a meaningful level of sophistication, will he spend less money on cigars, or will he spend more? Or will he spend much, much, much more?
Which leads to another obvious question. Is it really in the interests of the consumer to obtain this knowledge?
Is it even "knowledge" at all?
Notes/For Further Reading
1) The Diderot Effect
2) Constructed Preferences
Tuesday, August 29, 2017
Tuesday, August 22, 2017
When Things Don’t Make Sense
There are some really strange and kooky things in our modern food system. Like, for example, the fact that there are 20-30 different kinds of jams and jellies in your local grocery store.
An easy career move any aspiring food pundit or food blogger can make is to write an article pointing out something weird or senseless like this (it's ridiculous for there to even *exist* 30 kinds of jam!), and then use that seemingly weird, senseless fact as self-congratulatory proof that "our food system is broken."
There was even a book about the "jam problem," at least in part: The Paradox of Choice,
in which author Barry Schwartz[1] discusses many instances where the modern consumer environment offers what he sees as an inappropriately dizzying array of choices.
One way we can react to seemingly senseless or dumb things, like 30 kinds of jam, is to shake our fists and wonder why things are so stupid. Even better: if you wonder out loud to the people around you about how weird and dumb these things are, you can score bonus virtue-signalling points too![2]
Except that situations like the jam/jelly problem, as weird and dumb as they may seem, are cognitively tricky, trickier than they at first appear. And the first thing we need to do in cognitively tricky situations like this (uh, right after shaking our fist and pointing out how weird and dumb things are), is to consider one of our minds' worst habits: They like to form quick explanations for things. And worse still: our minds love quick explanations that neatly fit into our existing world view.
Well, it really is kind of ridiculous to have 30 kinds of jams and jellies. I can't see any other reason for it other than pure corporate greed.
Can you believe all of these jams and jellies? The store should use this space to sell healthy quinoa, or... or lentils! The food industry is trying to make us all fat.
First, let's start with a heuristic: Any relatively simple explanation that fits your worldview should be spontaneously rejected as unlikely. We'll see why shortly.
Second, just because something doesn't make sense to you doesn't mean it doesn't make sense. We are limited beings. We may not see the whole picture, or whatever system or set of phenomena we happen to observe might simply be opaque to us.
Third, any explanation (for anything) that comes to mind comes from our minds. As circular and definitional as that statement may sound, it hides an insight: when things come out of our minds, they're almost always dripping with solipsism, with our own narrow way of looking at the world.
We can see now that our brains, in just a couple of rapid-fire thoughts, have reached three distinct layers of cognitively suspect conclusions:
a) Our initial opinion, that it's ridiculous that there even exist 30 kinds of jam, is likely wrong.
b) Our explanation for why there are 30 kinds of jams and jellies is likely wrong too. Our brain leaped to it too quickly, and it too neatly fits our existing world view.
c) Finally, most of our ideas and explanations will suffer from some (possibly calamitous) degree of solipsism.
Sadly, we now have SCIENCE!!! piling on too, explaining to us why things are the way they are, and how they should be instead. Now, one would hope that credentialed experts will take their time to form explanations, using careful study design and even more careful testing methods. Their conclusions will be rigorous, correct, and not pre-fit to some pre-existing world view.
Hmmmm. Let's see if this is true about jams and jellies.
Well, as a matter of fact, one of the best known studies in the genre of choice paradox was the famous "jam study," where, conclusively, it was found that when customers were given far fewer choices, they buy more jam. A lot more: some ten times as many customers purchased jam when faced with six choices compared to customers faced with 24 choices.
So the idea that it was ridiculous and dumb to have 30 kinds of jam in the grocery store now had the blessing of evidence-based, credentialed SCIENCE!!! Intelligent consumers everywhere were given a clean, simple explanation, and that explanation had the added bonus fitting our world view: It really is stupid to have so many kinds of jams and jellies! Nobody needs all that.
Now let's step back a moment. The so-called "jam study" dates from the mid 1990s. That's more than twenty years ago. If it were actually that much more profitable to sell far fewer types of jam, don't you think grocery stores all over the world would have done so? If greed supposedly explains everything they do, you'd think they'd leap at the chance to put these credentialed scientific conclusions to work ...and make even more money.
Whenever we find ourselves at war with reality, we're given an opportunity to consider that we're wrong.
And it turns out the jam study (and Barry Schwartz for that matter) studied the wrong thing: Neither considered the fact that almost all jam-buying consumers have already long ago settled on a brand and type. They already know what they want, and if they don't find "their" jam, they don't buy at all.[3]
Thus the grocery store isn't actually subjecting consumers to a dizzying array of choice by carrying dozens of types of jams and jellies. The idea that there were "too many choices" was an error of solipsism--an error committed by Schwartz, by the designers of the fatally flawed study, and us!
When a store carries what seems like a "ridiculous" number of types of the same product, all these brands and types are not there for you or me. We buy the specific type we want, and so do all other customers. Collectively, these products, as long as they remain profitable for the store to sell, make up the what the store carries. The grocery store simply offers the brands and types that consumers have already settled on, and as a result, there are exactly the right number of types of jams and jellies.
In reality, what the "jam and jelly aisle" really represents--to Schwartz, to the jam study people, and to many consumers who consider themselves smarter than the marketplace in which they participate--is essentially a problem of aesthetics. We're all intelligent people, and it just doesn't make sense to have so many more jams and jellies than any of us as intelligent individuals would think was necessary.
To us, there are more varieties than there needs to be, it doesn't make sense, and somebody should do something about it. See how that works?
Footnotes:
[1] Note that I do not intend the specific criticisms of this post in any way to take away from the many valuable insights in Schwartz's book. For me, one of the most profound insights I learned from The Paradox of Choice was the concept of "satisficing."
[2] The virtue-signalling here is nuanced and often difficult to see (all virtue-signalling must be non-obvious, by definition, in order to be truly effective). The mechanism here: by pointing out something dumb, one appears smart by (unstated) comparison. Look around carefully, and you will see all kinds of examples of this type of behavior. One common current example occurs when people point out how stupid (or inarticulate, or hotheaded, or treasonous, or gesticulatory, or racist, or orange, etc.) our President is. This particular example also shows how easy it is to virtue-signal without us realizing we're actually doing it.
[3] See this interesting article on a re-analysis of 99 studies of choice paradox, which uncovered explanations why you actually might want dozens of kinds of jam after all.
An easy career move any aspiring food pundit or food blogger can make is to write an article pointing out something weird or senseless like this (it's ridiculous for there to even *exist* 30 kinds of jam!), and then use that seemingly weird, senseless fact as self-congratulatory proof that "our food system is broken."
There was even a book about the "jam problem," at least in part: The Paradox of Choice,
in which author Barry Schwartz[1] discusses many instances where the modern consumer environment offers what he sees as an inappropriately dizzying array of choices. One way we can react to seemingly senseless or dumb things, like 30 kinds of jam, is to shake our fists and wonder why things are so stupid. Even better: if you wonder out loud to the people around you about how weird and dumb these things are, you can score bonus virtue-signalling points too![2]
Except that situations like the jam/jelly problem, as weird and dumb as they may seem, are cognitively tricky, trickier than they at first appear. And the first thing we need to do in cognitively tricky situations like this (uh, right after shaking our fist and pointing out how weird and dumb things are), is to consider one of our minds' worst habits: They like to form quick explanations for things. And worse still: our minds love quick explanations that neatly fit into our existing world view.
Well, it really is kind of ridiculous to have 30 kinds of jams and jellies. I can't see any other reason for it other than pure corporate greed.
Can you believe all of these jams and jellies? The store should use this space to sell healthy quinoa, or... or lentils! The food industry is trying to make us all fat.
First, let's start with a heuristic: Any relatively simple explanation that fits your worldview should be spontaneously rejected as unlikely. We'll see why shortly.
Second, just because something doesn't make sense to you doesn't mean it doesn't make sense. We are limited beings. We may not see the whole picture, or whatever system or set of phenomena we happen to observe might simply be opaque to us.
Third, any explanation (for anything) that comes to mind comes from our minds. As circular and definitional as that statement may sound, it hides an insight: when things come out of our minds, they're almost always dripping with solipsism, with our own narrow way of looking at the world.
We can see now that our brains, in just a couple of rapid-fire thoughts, have reached three distinct layers of cognitively suspect conclusions:
a) Our initial opinion, that it's ridiculous that there even exist 30 kinds of jam, is likely wrong.
b) Our explanation for why there are 30 kinds of jams and jellies is likely wrong too. Our brain leaped to it too quickly, and it too neatly fits our existing world view.
c) Finally, most of our ideas and explanations will suffer from some (possibly calamitous) degree of solipsism.
Sadly, we now have SCIENCE!!! piling on too, explaining to us why things are the way they are, and how they should be instead. Now, one would hope that credentialed experts will take their time to form explanations, using careful study design and even more careful testing methods. Their conclusions will be rigorous, correct, and not pre-fit to some pre-existing world view.
Hmmmm. Let's see if this is true about jams and jellies.
Well, as a matter of fact, one of the best known studies in the genre of choice paradox was the famous "jam study," where, conclusively, it was found that when customers were given far fewer choices, they buy more jam. A lot more: some ten times as many customers purchased jam when faced with six choices compared to customers faced with 24 choices.
So the idea that it was ridiculous and dumb to have 30 kinds of jam in the grocery store now had the blessing of evidence-based, credentialed SCIENCE!!! Intelligent consumers everywhere were given a clean, simple explanation, and that explanation had the added bonus fitting our world view: It really is stupid to have so many kinds of jams and jellies! Nobody needs all that.
Now let's step back a moment. The so-called "jam study" dates from the mid 1990s. That's more than twenty years ago. If it were actually that much more profitable to sell far fewer types of jam, don't you think grocery stores all over the world would have done so? If greed supposedly explains everything they do, you'd think they'd leap at the chance to put these credentialed scientific conclusions to work ...and make even more money.
Whenever we find ourselves at war with reality, we're given an opportunity to consider that we're wrong.
And it turns out the jam study (and Barry Schwartz for that matter) studied the wrong thing: Neither considered the fact that almost all jam-buying consumers have already long ago settled on a brand and type. They already know what they want, and if they don't find "their" jam, they don't buy at all.[3]
Thus the grocery store isn't actually subjecting consumers to a dizzying array of choice by carrying dozens of types of jams and jellies. The idea that there were "too many choices" was an error of solipsism--an error committed by Schwartz, by the designers of the fatally flawed study, and us!
When a store carries what seems like a "ridiculous" number of types of the same product, all these brands and types are not there for you or me. We buy the specific type we want, and so do all other customers. Collectively, these products, as long as they remain profitable for the store to sell, make up the what the store carries. The grocery store simply offers the brands and types that consumers have already settled on, and as a result, there are exactly the right number of types of jams and jellies.
In reality, what the "jam and jelly aisle" really represents--to Schwartz, to the jam study people, and to many consumers who consider themselves smarter than the marketplace in which they participate--is essentially a problem of aesthetics. We're all intelligent people, and it just doesn't make sense to have so many more jams and jellies than any of us as intelligent individuals would think was necessary.
To us, there are more varieties than there needs to be, it doesn't make sense, and somebody should do something about it. See how that works?
Footnotes:
[1] Note that I do not intend the specific criticisms of this post in any way to take away from the many valuable insights in Schwartz's book. For me, one of the most profound insights I learned from The Paradox of Choice was the concept of "satisficing."
[2] The virtue-signalling here is nuanced and often difficult to see (all virtue-signalling must be non-obvious, by definition, in order to be truly effective). The mechanism here: by pointing out something dumb, one appears smart by (unstated) comparison. Look around carefully, and you will see all kinds of examples of this type of behavior. One common current example occurs when people point out how stupid (or inarticulate, or hotheaded, or treasonous, or gesticulatory, or racist, or orange, etc.) our President is. This particular example also shows how easy it is to virtue-signal without us realizing we're actually doing it.
[3] See this interesting article on a re-analysis of 99 studies of choice paradox, which uncovered explanations why you actually might want dozens of kinds of jam after all.
Tuesday, August 15, 2017
Dunbar’s Law and Your Stuff
I was reading through Everett Bogue's old e-book The Art of Being Minimalist and stumbled into an interesting idea.
Dunbar's Law says that the maximum number of people you can genuinely, sincerely relate to in the real world is about 150 people. You can't really have 1,000 "friends" on Facebook unless you use the post-post-modern definition of the word "friend," which of course isn't a friend at all.
But what if you applied this concept to your stuff? To the amount of things you owned?
Thinking back to how we must have lived millennia ago, almost no one had the resources to own hundreds of books, dozens of pieces of furniture, hundreds of shirts, shoes, even (as much as I'd rather not admit it) pairs of underwear.
And as Bogue says, "Once you get past 150 things, you start to lose your glasses. You don't remember what is in that box anymore, unless it's labeled and you look at it. ...Imagine how many objects a hunter/gatherer in the bush has to deal with? A lot less. This leaves valuable brain power for getting the work done."
Dunbar's Law says that the maximum number of people you can genuinely, sincerely relate to in the real world is about 150 people. You can't really have 1,000 "friends" on Facebook unless you use the post-post-modern definition of the word "friend," which of course isn't a friend at all.
But what if you applied this concept to your stuff? To the amount of things you owned?
Thinking back to how we must have lived millennia ago, almost no one had the resources to own hundreds of books, dozens of pieces of furniture, hundreds of shirts, shoes, even (as much as I'd rather not admit it) pairs of underwear.
And as Bogue says, "Once you get past 150 things, you start to lose your glasses. You don't remember what is in that box anymore, unless it's labeled and you look at it. ...Imagine how many objects a hunter/gatherer in the bush has to deal with? A lot less. This leaves valuable brain power for getting the work done."
Tuesday, August 8, 2017
Running Towards Humps
Much of human behavior essentially amounts to comfort seeking. When we're hot, we seek air conditioning. When we're hungry, we eat without delay. When we want something, we buy it, even if we don't really have the money.
A few years ago, when I fortuitously stumbled onto William Irvine's brilliant book on Stoicism,
I started embracing various types of "voluntary discomfort" as part of my halting efforts both to learn about Stoic philosophy and to try to learn how to appreciate life a little bit more. And as a quick reminder: Stoics don't "do" voluntary discomfort because they get off on suffering, that's just a snarky and condescending misreading of the practice. Rather, they do it to appreciate the comforts they already have, and to avoid taking them for granted.
At this point I'd also read Julien Smith's short and intriguing book The Flinch,
which talked about how our "flinch" reaction often covertly produces avoidance behaviors that divert us from valuable life experiences. This book taught me to invert the flinch reaction and seek out experiences I'd normally flinch from. Finally, it was around this time that I'd begun exploring compound weightlifting in an effort to combat aging and get back some of my lost athletic footspeed and endurance.
Now, I'm awfully slow--window-lickingly slow--at learning things, but I'm finding surprising synergies, big ones, across almost all "domains of discomfort" in my life. Let me describe three examples:
1) Cold Showers
A crucial metaphor from The Flinch is the cold shower. And holy cow, the idea of taking a cold shower is something I definitely flinch from. It seems like such an incredibly awful experience that some days (uh, like today, the very day I'm working on a first draft of this post) I simply can't do it. I turn the water to a nice hot temperature and I wait like a wuss for the water to warm up.
But on the days I can do it, the actual experience of a cold shower isn't really all that bad.
Hahaha ...hahahahahaha... yes it IS that bad! That first shock of the cold water is hellish. I hate it.
Except... three minutes into that shower, the water oddly doesn't feel cold any more. More importantly, I always feel great after a cold shower. I feel refreshed, calm, replenished. Moreover, there's compelling evidence of both positive physiological and psychological effects of cold showers. For example, after difficult athletic training sessions, cold showers help your body recover. I've also found I get cognitive benefits from cold showers too: I feel sharper, mentally fresher afterwards.
The point here is that you've just got to get over the hump. And in the case of a cold shower, that hump is just three minutes long. That's it. And all these benefits are yours, in return for a minor exercise of voluntary discomfort and discipline.
2) Deadlifts
There's a lot to talk about in the domain of compound lifting, and most of this domain is still outside of my circle of competence. But I can speak to my experiences learning to do deadlifts, and one thing I can say confidently is that my road--the road between nervously picking up a deadlift bar with exactly zero pounds on it, and now doing a somewhat respectable 3x10 reps at one and a half times my body weight--was paved with humps. Lots of them.
In contrast to nautilus-type machines that work one or two muscles at a time under more limited conditions, compound lifting trains your entire body: your muscles, bones and connective tissue are all forced to work in concert. And this includes lots of minor muscles overlooked in most standard workout routines.
So, as I worked toward making my body deadlift-compliant, I tweaked parts of it I didn't even know about, and pulled muscles in places I didn't know I had muscles. In my first few months of deadlifting, I experienced intercostal muscle pulls throughout my rib cage. I experienced strains in all kinds of random places in my abs and upper hips (the so-called "abdominal cuff" area is fertile soil for injuries for beginning deadlifters since most people are shockingly fragile there). I tweaked my elbows, wrists, collarbone, even my fingers.
It was kind of like a cold shower... except that it took me about a year to come out the other side. But once I got over the hump, I had a more robust and far less fragile body.
In how many other domains do we see a "hump" of discomfort between us and serious insights and opportunity? And where else do we lose out on longer-term gains because we flinch from (or fear) the upfront discomfort?
3) Learning to Cook
With my typical slowness, I've come to discover that cooking is yet another discipline of voluntary discomfort, with enormous benefits once you get over "humps" of various types.
The discomfort here is a bit more metaphorical, of course. In the very short run, learning to cook is way more of a pain in the ass than grabbing takeout or going out to dinner. So the voluntary discomfort at first involves deferring an easier solution in order to develop some basic cooking and shopping skills.
And then there are the dinners and recipes you screw up as you learn. You'll make mistakes, and ruin a few meals. More humps and discomfort, in other words. It's a necessary part of the road towards competence, and later, skill.
There are many more layers to the metaphor: you'll have to learn how to keep a stocked pantry, how to shop efficiently, how to avoid rookie errors like buying out of season fruits and veggies, and so on. These are all examples of humps to be overcome, but on the other side of those humps are enormous benefits.
Conclusion
I'd speculate that when it comes to cooking humps, most readers here at CK have long ago gotten over them, to the point where we can whip up several days' worth of laughably cheap food in less time than it takes to drive to the takeout place. Some humps used to be big, but as they recede into the rear-view mirror of life, it gets deceivingly easy to forget about all the work that went into getting over them. Don't forget to give yourself credit for this!
Once again, though, this is still more proof of the enormous value of what's on the other side of those humps. Which is why I'm trying to look at the various humps and sources of discomfort in my life in a different way. I am trying to think about what's on the other side of them--usually really good stuff--and I'm trying to train myself to run towards them rather than flinch from them.
A few years ago, when I fortuitously stumbled onto William Irvine's brilliant book on Stoicism,
I started embracing various types of "voluntary discomfort" as part of my halting efforts both to learn about Stoic philosophy and to try to learn how to appreciate life a little bit more. And as a quick reminder: Stoics don't "do" voluntary discomfort because they get off on suffering, that's just a snarky and condescending misreading of the practice. Rather, they do it to appreciate the comforts they already have, and to avoid taking them for granted.At this point I'd also read Julien Smith's short and intriguing book The Flinch,
which talked about how our "flinch" reaction often covertly produces avoidance behaviors that divert us from valuable life experiences. This book taught me to invert the flinch reaction and seek out experiences I'd normally flinch from. Finally, it was around this time that I'd begun exploring compound weightlifting in an effort to combat aging and get back some of my lost athletic footspeed and endurance. Now, I'm awfully slow--window-lickingly slow--at learning things, but I'm finding surprising synergies, big ones, across almost all "domains of discomfort" in my life. Let me describe three examples:
1) Cold Showers
A crucial metaphor from The Flinch is the cold shower. And holy cow, the idea of taking a cold shower is something I definitely flinch from. It seems like such an incredibly awful experience that some days (uh, like today, the very day I'm working on a first draft of this post) I simply can't do it. I turn the water to a nice hot temperature and I wait like a wuss for the water to warm up.
But on the days I can do it, the actual experience of a cold shower isn't really all that bad.
Hahaha ...hahahahahaha... yes it IS that bad! That first shock of the cold water is hellish. I hate it.
Except... three minutes into that shower, the water oddly doesn't feel cold any more. More importantly, I always feel great after a cold shower. I feel refreshed, calm, replenished. Moreover, there's compelling evidence of both positive physiological and psychological effects of cold showers. For example, after difficult athletic training sessions, cold showers help your body recover. I've also found I get cognitive benefits from cold showers too: I feel sharper, mentally fresher afterwards.
The point here is that you've just got to get over the hump. And in the case of a cold shower, that hump is just three minutes long. That's it. And all these benefits are yours, in return for a minor exercise of voluntary discomfort and discipline.
2) Deadlifts
There's a lot to talk about in the domain of compound lifting, and most of this domain is still outside of my circle of competence. But I can speak to my experiences learning to do deadlifts, and one thing I can say confidently is that my road--the road between nervously picking up a deadlift bar with exactly zero pounds on it, and now doing a somewhat respectable 3x10 reps at one and a half times my body weight--was paved with humps. Lots of them.
In contrast to nautilus-type machines that work one or two muscles at a time under more limited conditions, compound lifting trains your entire body: your muscles, bones and connective tissue are all forced to work in concert. And this includes lots of minor muscles overlooked in most standard workout routines.
So, as I worked toward making my body deadlift-compliant, I tweaked parts of it I didn't even know about, and pulled muscles in places I didn't know I had muscles. In my first few months of deadlifting, I experienced intercostal muscle pulls throughout my rib cage. I experienced strains in all kinds of random places in my abs and upper hips (the so-called "abdominal cuff" area is fertile soil for injuries for beginning deadlifters since most people are shockingly fragile there). I tweaked my elbows, wrists, collarbone, even my fingers.
It was kind of like a cold shower... except that it took me about a year to come out the other side. But once I got over the hump, I had a more robust and far less fragile body.
In how many other domains do we see a "hump" of discomfort between us and serious insights and opportunity? And where else do we lose out on longer-term gains because we flinch from (or fear) the upfront discomfort?
3) Learning to Cook
With my typical slowness, I've come to discover that cooking is yet another discipline of voluntary discomfort, with enormous benefits once you get over "humps" of various types.
The discomfort here is a bit more metaphorical, of course. In the very short run, learning to cook is way more of a pain in the ass than grabbing takeout or going out to dinner. So the voluntary discomfort at first involves deferring an easier solution in order to develop some basic cooking and shopping skills.
And then there are the dinners and recipes you screw up as you learn. You'll make mistakes, and ruin a few meals. More humps and discomfort, in other words. It's a necessary part of the road towards competence, and later, skill.
There are many more layers to the metaphor: you'll have to learn how to keep a stocked pantry, how to shop efficiently, how to avoid rookie errors like buying out of season fruits and veggies, and so on. These are all examples of humps to be overcome, but on the other side of those humps are enormous benefits.
Conclusion
I'd speculate that when it comes to cooking humps, most readers here at CK have long ago gotten over them, to the point where we can whip up several days' worth of laughably cheap food in less time than it takes to drive to the takeout place. Some humps used to be big, but as they recede into the rear-view mirror of life, it gets deceivingly easy to forget about all the work that went into getting over them. Don't forget to give yourself credit for this!
Once again, though, this is still more proof of the enormous value of what's on the other side of those humps. Which is why I'm trying to look at the various humps and sources of discomfort in my life in a different way. I am trying to think about what's on the other side of them--usually really good stuff--and I'm trying to train myself to run towards them rather than flinch from them.
Tuesday, August 1, 2017
Epistemic Humility
Today's post expands on some of the thoughts from last week's post. I'll start by offering a few more examples of those sneaky epistemically arrogant statements:
1) I can't run a marathon at my age.
2) Lose 50 pounds? Maybe I can do 20.
3) It's impossible for me at my age to deadlift twice my weight. No way.
4) You want to eat healthy? It's gonna cost you...
5) I think the stock market is rigged against the little guy.
Remember our conversational autist from last post, that imaginary person who tactlessly tells people what they're actually saying? Once again, let's imagine what she might say here in response to any (or all) of these statements:
Wait. What you're really saying is "I refuse to find a solution." You know that's pure ego protection, right? And it's kind of intellectually lazy too. Think about it: Is it really possible that you, limited you, just a tiny human being in the vast expanse of the universe, can "know" that there's no solution to something? Seriously, be honest: how can you *know* there's no solution?
Just to be extra-extra clear: do not say things like this out loud. Use your inside voice.
However, the oddly good thing about conversational autists is they tell you the truth when you don't want to hear it. Especially when you don't want to hear it.[1] And as we'll soon see, "I can't find a solution to X" and its even more disempowered cousin "There is no solution to X" are both statements of supreme epistemic arrogance. Both are false too.
Now, nobody likes to think of themselves as arrogant, certainly not epistemically so. Which is why, on the intellectual and abstract level, we're all fairly comfortable with the idea that we usually don't really know very much. Furthermore, we think we have an accurate assessment of the boundaries of our knowledge. "I know what I'm talking about when it comes to the stock market, but when it comes to neurosurgery, I'm definitely out of my depth. And by the way, Russia definitely interfered in our elections."
See how easy it is to leap blithely beyond our circle of knowledge? We simply do not know our boundaries: we overstate and understate[2] them, and we do so below the level of conscious awareness. Once again, the things we "know" just ain't so.
I realize I'm not going to go very far in life telling my readers that they're a bunch of epistemically arrogant fools who don't even know what they don't know. So, try not to remember that part. Instead, what I really want to convey in this post is the value of being humble about what you think you can't do.
To see what I'm getting at, let's take another look at those five confidently-stated, epistemically arrogant statements above, and let's consider them from a perspective of deep humility. Let's state those statements with a total lack of confidence. Try it.
You'll see that things get weird in a hurry, because the less confidently you state "that's impossible" type statements and the more humble you are about them, the more possible they become.
If you know you most likely don't know--which is the definition of epistemic humility by the way--you might as well choose thoughts, ideas, and possibilities that produce the best outcomes. This might invert how most people think about "truth" and "falsehood." But the truth is, when it comes to questions about our own personal agency, we almost always have profoundly incomplete knowledge of what's true, what's false and what's possible.
So assume you can do it, that you can find a solution, that it is possible, and that the solution is out there waiting for you to find it. To do so is not only more epistemically humble, it's the more empowering choice.
Readers, share your thoughts!
[1] Readers might wonder how I know so much about conversational autists. Let's just say I'm still learning to use my inside voice.
[2] I'll leave it to readers to guess which is the more common error.
READ NEXT: On Writing for Casual Kitchen
1) I can't run a marathon at my age.
2) Lose 50 pounds? Maybe I can do 20.
3) It's impossible for me at my age to deadlift twice my weight. No way.
4) You want to eat healthy? It's gonna cost you...
5) I think the stock market is rigged against the little guy.
Remember our conversational autist from last post, that imaginary person who tactlessly tells people what they're actually saying? Once again, let's imagine what she might say here in response to any (or all) of these statements:
Wait. What you're really saying is "I refuse to find a solution." You know that's pure ego protection, right? And it's kind of intellectually lazy too. Think about it: Is it really possible that you, limited you, just a tiny human being in the vast expanse of the universe, can "know" that there's no solution to something? Seriously, be honest: how can you *know* there's no solution?
Just to be extra-extra clear: do not say things like this out loud. Use your inside voice.
However, the oddly good thing about conversational autists is they tell you the truth when you don't want to hear it. Especially when you don't want to hear it.[1] And as we'll soon see, "I can't find a solution to X" and its even more disempowered cousin "There is no solution to X" are both statements of supreme epistemic arrogance. Both are false too.
Now, nobody likes to think of themselves as arrogant, certainly not epistemically so. Which is why, on the intellectual and abstract level, we're all fairly comfortable with the idea that we usually don't really know very much. Furthermore, we think we have an accurate assessment of the boundaries of our knowledge. "I know what I'm talking about when it comes to the stock market, but when it comes to neurosurgery, I'm definitely out of my depth. And by the way, Russia definitely interfered in our elections."
See how easy it is to leap blithely beyond our circle of knowledge? We simply do not know our boundaries: we overstate and understate[2] them, and we do so below the level of conscious awareness. Once again, the things we "know" just ain't so.
I realize I'm not going to go very far in life telling my readers that they're a bunch of epistemically arrogant fools who don't even know what they don't know. So, try not to remember that part. Instead, what I really want to convey in this post is the value of being humble about what you think you can't do.
To see what I'm getting at, let's take another look at those five confidently-stated, epistemically arrogant statements above, and let's consider them from a perspective of deep humility. Let's state those statements with a total lack of confidence. Try it.
You'll see that things get weird in a hurry, because the less confidently you state "that's impossible" type statements and the more humble you are about them, the more possible they become.
If you know you most likely don't know--which is the definition of epistemic humility by the way--you might as well choose thoughts, ideas, and possibilities that produce the best outcomes. This might invert how most people think about "truth" and "falsehood." But the truth is, when it comes to questions about our own personal agency, we almost always have profoundly incomplete knowledge of what's true, what's false and what's possible.
So assume you can do it, that you can find a solution, that it is possible, and that the solution is out there waiting for you to find it. To do so is not only more epistemically humble, it's the more empowering choice.
Readers, share your thoughts!
[1] Readers might wonder how I know so much about conversational autists. Let's just say I'm still learning to use my inside voice.
[2] I'll leave it to readers to guess which is the more common error.
READ NEXT: On Writing for Casual Kitchen