Loserthink, page 13
“The world potential market for copying machines is 5,000 at most.”
—IBM, to the eventual founders of Xerox, saying the photocopier had no market large enough to justify production, 19593
“There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home.”
—Ken Olsen, president, chairman, and founder of Digital Equipment Corp., 19774
“Stocks have reached what looks like a permanently high plateau.”
—Irving Fisher, professor of economics, Yale University, 19295
“We don’t like their sound, and guitar music is on the way out.”
—Decca Records, rejecting the Beatles, 19626
A terrible way to predict the future is to assume things will keep going the way they have been going. The terrible way is also the most common way. And that makes sense because the alternative is predicting “surprises” along the way, and that would be absurd. If we could predict surprises, they wouldn’t be surprises.
But predict we must, because that’s how we decide how to act. For example, I just made a forty-year projection of my finances to see how much I can spend now and still retire comfortably. And in that forty-year prediction, I didn’t account for any social or technological change of consequence. I didn’t take into account this book becoming an enormous bestseller. I didn’t account for robots, health changes, medical breakthroughs, wars, depressions, alien encounters, climate change, the fate of my startup, the third Adams presidency, or any of a thousand variables that will make my future completely unpredictable.
And those are the big potential changes, or at least a sample of them. My financial future is also entirely different if I tweak my expected investment return by one half of 1 percent. The difference is so large when compounded over forty years that I would act differently today based on using the lower number versus the higher one.
Straight-line predictions told us the population would increase faster than the food supply. The opposite happened. Straight-line predictions told us we would run out of fossil fuels, but we keep finding new sources. We humans are not good at predicting. And any notion that we have developed that superpower, in light of all observations to the contrary, is pure loserthink.
Straight-line predictions are generally wrong, and dangerous if you act on them. Still, they are not useless. Sometimes a straight-line prediction can encourage people to make the changes necessary to avoid a bad outcome. And sometimes you can rule out some possible outcomes, which can be helpful. But don’t confuse helpful with accurate.
When trying to predict the future, I often look to what I call the Adams Law of Slow-Moving Disasters. The idea is that whenever we humans see a huge problem coming at us in slow motion, the odds are excellent that we will figure out a solution. That’s why we haven’t run out of food or fossil fuels, and why the Y2K bug was solved somewhat easily. So long as we have lots of warning, humans are astonishingly clever at solving problems, even enormous ones. So figure that into your predictions.
I also like to look at how much entrepreneurial energy is going into a topic. For example, in the dawn of the personal computer age, it was hard to know which companies would come to dominate the industry, but it wasn’t hard at all to know that personal computers were here to stay. Similarly, we observe there is a lot of energy going into blockchain technologies, which doesn’t tell you much about the future of any particular product or company, but we can safely predict that blockchain will be around for a while. In general, when you see a lot of energy in a particular area, spread across multiple companies, the technology or industry is likely to stay around even if the players change. That is helpful to understand when predicting a future that doesn’t travel in straight lines.
Over the long term, straight-line predictions are loserthink, because history rarely travels in a straight line.
CHAPTER 11
Things Pundits Say That You Should Not Copy
One of the ways we accidentally build mental prisons for ourselves is by mimicking the irrational arguments we hear from pundits. Pundits are almost always advocates, as opposed to objective observers. If you imitate their arguments, you are leaving the field of reason in favor of trying to persuade. If you are intentionally copying pundits for the purpose of persuasion, that might make sense. But if you are imitating pundits while imagining their opinions are unbiased and rational, you are creating a little mental prison for yourself.
In this chapter, I will show you how to avoid copying the most ridiculous pundit “reasoning,” as well as how to avoid falling into their word traps.
MORAL EQUIVALENCY
If you have no children, but you do have a cat, I recommend that you resist the urge to speak as though kids and cats were similar in importance, even if you believe that to be the case. Don’t do something like this:
FRIEND: “My kids are driving me crazy with their picky eating.”
YOU: “I know what you mean. My cat only eats wet cat food.”
That comes off sounding as if you think your cat and your friend’s kids are equivalent in some meaningful way. And they are. But you can’t say that without making your friend feel bad. So don’t do it. Here is another example to avoid.
FRIEND: “I’m having a quadruple bypass tomorrow. The doctor urged me to update my will.”
YOU: “I know the feeling. I had a Botox shot to get rid of some wrinkles in my forehead and it was super scary.”
As a matter of good manners, try to resist comparing someone’s cancer with your pimple, or comparing a death in someone else’s family to an expired carton of milk in your fridge. It isn’t a crime against humanity; it just isn’t good manners. And it is rarely persuasive.
If you are defending your side of an issue by claiming your critics are making a “moral equivalence,” you are likely engaging in empty-calorie loserthink. We don’t know how people are ranking things unless they tell us explicitly, and then we still suspect they might be lying.
I have yet to see anyone accused of making a “moral equivalence” confirm that they are intending to do so. And that means the typical accusation of “making a moral equivalence” is based on some sort of assumption about what a stranger is thinking. We humans are not good at reading minds, but we often think we have that magical power.
I most often see the accusation of moral equivalence when people can’t defend their side but need to say something smart-sounding. For example, if you insult someone at a bar, and a drunk kills you over it, those two acts are not morally equivalent. Murder is generally considered worse than insults. But it is nonetheless true that both parties acted poorly—one more poorly than the other. In a scientific sense, you can blame both participants for their parts in it. But in a political or social media sense, any statement saying both parties are to blame opens you to the loserthink criticism that you are “making a moral equivalence,” which is probably not what you are doing.
As a general rule, when people intend to make a moral equivalence, they are happy to confirm they are doing so if you ask for clarification. But if the only people talking about moral equivalence are the pundits, and the target of those pundits is not thinking in those terms at all, the pundits might be lost in loserthink. Don’t be like them.
If you are accusing someone of making inappropriate moral equivalences, you are probably experiencing loserthink of the mind reader variety.
WORD-THINKING
When you criticize something that has gone wrong, as all of us sometimes do, you might have a perfectly valid point, especially if you are using facts and logic.
But if you find yourself reengineering the meaning of common words to make your case, you might be engaging in what I call word-thinking, a common form of loserthink. Word-thinking involves trying to understand the world, or trying to win a debate, by concentrating on the definition of words.
EXAMPLE:
PRO-LIFER: Abortion is murder!
PRO-CHOICER: It’s only “murder” when it is illegal. And it isn’t illegal.
PRO-LIFER: Call it what you will, but killing an innocent human life is immoral!
PRO-CHOICER: A fetus isn’t “life” until it can live on its own.
PRO-LIFER: Life begins at conception!
And so on.
You can see in this example that no real debate is happening at all. It is little more than a debate about the definition of words. The real debate involves finding a political balance between one side’s preferred sense of morality and the other side’s preference for allowing women the freedom to choose their best personal health, lifestyle, and economic outcomes. If you make an honest argument either for or against abortion, you end up looking like a monster, albeit a different kind of monster depending on which side you take. So most people quite reasonably retreat to the safest space on the topic, which is to insist their personal definition of words should determine national laws.
Rarely, if ever, does anyone use word-thinking when the facts and the logic are on their side and they feel safe to discuss them. We generally like to lead with our strongest arguments, and that means you leave the word-thinking as your last resort. In fact, that’s one of the ways I know I have won a debate on Twitter. When the word-thinking comes out, I declare victory and walk away.
Let’s look at some examples of word-thinking.
“Normalizing”
In political discussions you often hear people saying it would be bad to “normalize” one sort of behavior or another. The implication is that the behavior in question is both abnormal and undesirable. But “normalize” is a vague and subjective standard. What is the difference between normalizing something and simply doing something you think makes sense? How long does a new thing have to last before we call it normalized?
We will never agree on what normalizing means, or even if it’s a bad thing or a good thing in any particular situation. For example, you wouldn’t want to “normalize” a sitting president criticizing the legitimacy of the press, because press freedom is a core value. But that’s making you think past the sale. The first question that must be answered is whether or not the press has crossed a line from legitimate reporting to what some would call fake news that is pushing political agendas on both the left and the right. If that line has been crossed, it seems to me entirely legitimate, as well as productive, for leaders to point it out. On the other hand, if the line has not been crossed, we wouldn’t want to make it a habit to act as if it had. The word normalize in this context influences you to uncritically accept that the press is beyond criticism. That is an example of word-thinking, in which the word normalize is used as a substitute for reasons. Words are not reasons by themselves. But they can feel like it.
When people have good arguments, they will more often than not gleefully show their work to anyone who will listen. But when people have no compelling arguments for their points of view, they sometimes prefer to jump ahead to the “Don’t normalize that behavior” stage and act like the argument makes itself.
If your only complaint about another person’s behavior is that it might normalize something, you might not have any reasons to back your opinion.
“Problematic”
If you don’t like someone’s plan, but you don’t have specific objections, you might be tempted to label the plan problematic. That generic label excuses you from having to provide facts and reasons to back up your opinion. Best of all, the word problematic sounds smart, which gives you unearned credibility.
If you tried to describe what you meant by problematic, you might sound like this: “I don’t see any specific problems with your plan, but I feel as if there must be some.” You would be ignored or mocked for having such an empty opinion. But if you say the plan is problematic, you have suggested there is some sort of commonsense reason to expect problems, and geniuses such as yourself can recognize those problems.
To be clear, you might be absolutely right about the risk of unspecified future problems. Some plans are so bad it would take all day to list all the ways they can go wrong. Those situations are indeed problematic. But in those cases, you can probably describe realistic scenarios for how things might go wrong. If the best you can do is label something problematic without offering some reasonable-sounding speculation on exactly how that might be the case, you are engaging in loserthink.
As I said, people who have logic and facts on their side tend to show their work. People who don’t have good arguments try to get away with labeling the situation as if the unstated argument were simply obvious.
Consider the topic of freedom of speech. No matter how much you like the right to free speech, you have to agree it can cause some problems. But you can easily list examples of potential problems. For example, you might say bad people will spread damaging ideas. You might say people will lie in public and ruin the reputation of honorable people. If you can point out some reasonable potential problems, it is fair to summarize all of that as problematic. But if you find yourself calling a plan problematic and you can’t give some reasonable-sounding examples to back it up, that is loserthink.
If you find yourself calling a plan problematic and you can’t give some reasonable-sounding examples to back up your opinion, you might be engaging in loserthink.
THE HYPOCRISY DEFENSE
If you defend your point of view by saying some version of “The other side does it too,” you are abandoning the adult frame and entering a child frame. Children say, “My sister did it too!!!” Adults say, “I made a mistake. This sort of mistake is too common. Here’s what I plan to do about it.”
Refusing to admit your errors, or your team’s errors, locks you into a team sport mentality. That’s a mental prison. It makes you appear small and it doesn’t advance anyone’s interests. You’re more focused on the fight than the fix.
To escape that mental prison, admit you are wrong, put it in context, and explain what you plan to do to fix it. Then you’re free. If your best response to a credible accusation against your team is that the other side does it too, you are locked in loserthink.
If you make a mistake and your best response is that other people do similar things, you are engaging in loserthink.
FAIRNESS
Humans apparently evolved to prefer fairness in situations where they don’t have the option of being on top. And that’s most situations. But as a practical matter, fairness is an impossible standard, because it is always a matter of opinion. The closest we can come to fairness involves applying the law equally to all citizens. Fairness beyond that is generally out of reach because what looks fair to me might not look so fair to you.
For example, let’s say you’re tall and I’m rich. Is that fair? And if it isn’t fair, should we try to fix it? Life is like this in the sense that you can rarely measure what is fair and what is not. And if you could measure it, people still wouldn’t agree on what they were seeing or what needed to be measured.
You often hear political leaders argue for fairness. Their job is to persuade, so that makes sense. Politicians are advocates for their constituents, not referees for fairness. If your job is to persuade, arguing for fairness can be an effective approach because humans are spring-loaded to prefer fairness. But in everyday life, fairness is an illusion, and complaining about the lack of fairness is rarely productive.
If fairness is an illusion, you might wonder how people can be leaders in a world in which there is no standard for how things should end up. As a practical matter, things usually end up wherever there is the least complaining. That’s as close as we can get to “fair.” And sometimes the only way to get to that stable state is through persuasion, as opposed to facts and reason.
Arguing for fairness is loserthink because no two people will agree on what it looks like. The exception is when you are trying to persuade, in which case rationality matters less.
If you find yourself in a debate with someone who is using fairness as an argument, try taking the high ground by saying some version of this: “Fairness is a child’s argument. It isn’t a useful standard because reasonable adults will disagree on what is fair. The best you can do is play by the same rules.”
FEELS-THE-SAME
A good use of an analogy would be, for example, Otto von Bismarck’s famous quote that laws and sausages are two things people shouldn’t see being made. That does a good job of conveying the point that making laws is an ugly business and the public would lose their faith in government if they could observe the lawmaking process. In this context, Bismarck is just explaining a new idea to us in a memorable way. That is a good use of analogy.
A bad use of an analogy involves saying your neighbor’s cat has markings on its snout that look like a Hitler mustache so maybe someone should put the cat to sleep before it tries to invade Poland. If that example sounds ridiculous, consider a meme I saw on Twitter while writing this chapter. Above a photo of President Trump, the meme asked, “Do you know who else discredited the media?” Below the photo came the answer: “Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini, Castro, Mao, Idi Amin, Pol Pot, Hussein, Assad, Putin, ISIS, Boko Haram.” That meme is based on situations that feel similar in at least one way, but that doesn’t mean anything else about those characters is similar. Plenty of politicians criticize the media, but few of them become dictators. And frankly, I think most of you would prefer your leaders to criticize the press whenever the press crosses the line from making simple mistakes to naked advocacy.
