Loserthink, page 3
The best way to get the sort of attention that drives viewership and profits today is with provocative fake news, which in my way of thinking includes not only factual inaccuracies but also biased coverage and emotion-based presentations. Bias usually reveals itself with something I call opinion stacking. That involves news programming that involves panels of pundits who hold the same biased opinions, joined by only one relatively unpersuasive pundit for the other side.
The technological change that broke the news business was our ability to measure audience reaction to every headline and every variation of every story. Once you can reliably measure the income potential of different approaches to the news, the people who manage the news have to do what works best for profitability or else they are abandoning their responsibilities to shareholders. On top of that, executive compensation is determined by profit performance. From the moment technology allowed us to know which kinds of content influenced viewership the most, the old business model of the news industry was dead media walking. From that point through today, the business model of the press changed from presenting information to manipulating brains.
I want to stress that no one in this story is evil. Everyone is acting according to the well-accepted rules of capitalism, trying to maximize the outcomes for shareholders and their own careers. The main thing that changed was our ability to measure what kinds of content worked best. And when you can measure what works, and you are managing a public business, you are highly incentivized to follow profits, so long as doing so is legal, and in this case it is. Ethics is a separate and important issue, but it isn’t predictive in the context of capitalism. If something is legal and profitable, it will happen, a lot.
The inevitable outcome of the press having a business model that rewards brain manipulation versus accuracy is what I call political warming. As the press becomes increasingly skilled at stimulating the emotion centers in our brains, one should expect the public to be in a continuous state of fight-or-flight anxiety. We’re more scared and angry than I imagine we ever have been, at least since World War II. And that means bigger storms ahead in the form of protests and divisiveness.
As I write this book, the news is full of appeals for more civility in politics. Nearly everyone recognizes that the country is becoming more divided and we are turning on each other in a way we have never seen before. The loserthink way of looking at the situation is that we need to try harder to be nice to each other. But that prescription misdiagnoses the problem. People did not suddenly become different in a fundamental way. The business model of the press manipulated our brains until our emotions overwhelmed whatever traces of rationality we started with. You can’t fix that by trying harder to be nice. The influence of the press is too strong, and all because they learned to measure the impact of their actions with extraordinary precision.
In such a world, where truth routinely loses to emotion-based, click-bait versions of reality, how can you know what is true and what is not? And more importantly, how can you act for the greater good—or even your own good—when you can’t reliably sort the truth from the lies?
If you buy into the full-scary narratives promoted by either the political left or the political right, you’re probably experiencing loserthink. A more useful way to think of the political news is that nearly every major story is exaggerated to the point of falsehood, with the intention of scaring the public. If you think the frightened feeling you are getting from the news is legitimate and appropriate, you probably don’t understand how the business model of the news has changed. Twenty years ago, if the media said something dangerous and scary was heading our way, you had to treat that seriously. Today, the news provides one fright after another, but an understanding of why they do it helps you avoid loserthink.
All the doom-and-gloom in the press, and on social media, could give you the impression the world is in big trouble. The reality is almost directly the opposite: things have never been better for humanity, and the future looks incredible too. I’ll say more about that in a later chapter.
As you read this book, you are likely to see thoughts with which you agree, and other thoughts you will be certain are wrongheaded. Now that you are warned, I recommend keeping in mind the most important thing you will ever understand about the human experience: Being absolutely right and being spectacularly wrong feel exactly the same. That’s the right frame of mind for this book.
Let’s look at some practical examples in which people who are experienced in different disciplines have advantages in thinking about their world, and therefore also navigating it successfully.
CHAPTER 3
Thinking Like a Psychologist
If you have a background in psychology, you are probably better equipped than the average person in seeing past the common illusions that influence our perceptions. For the purposes of this book, I’ll focus on the illusions that I see most commonly displayed on social media and in the news.
THE MIND READING ILLUSION
If your complaint about other people involves your belief that you can deduce their inner thoughts, you might be in a mental prison. We humans think we are good judges of what others are thinking. We are not. In fact, we are dreadful at it. But people being people, we generally believe we are good at it while also believing other people are not.
I’ve been a public figure for decades, and I’ve been the subject of intense public criticism—for one thing or another—for most of that time. I’m not complaining, because criticism comes with the job, and I knew what I was getting into. The interesting thing is that perhaps 90 percent of the criticism I receive involves strangers incorrectly assuming what I must be thinking. A quick check of my Twitter feed shows . . .
—Someone claiming I am an advocate for lying
—Someone claiming I approve of neo-Nazis
—Someone claiming I am lying about a fact in order to “sell a book”
—Someone claiming I will defend the president’s actions no matter what those actions are
That’s just a typical morning for me. None of those claims are true, by the way. And all of them depend on strangers believing they can look beyond my actual words to divine my secret thoughts. That gives me an unusually clear window into how often humans act as if they can read minds. If you someday become famous, you’ll see what I’m talking about. Your critics will also misunderstand your inner thoughts while being sure they are doing no such thing.
Even the people who know me best can’t accurately deduce what I am thinking more often than chance would suggest. Apparently I look and act exactly the same when I’m either angry or concentrating on writing a funny tweet. And there’s not much difference between my bored look and my hungry look. Your experience might be similar.
The impact of all this faulty mind reading is that you and I are often penalized for what other people think we are thinking. I don’t want to be punished for other people’s faulty thoughts. I’ll bet you don’t want to be punished for other people’s thoughts either.
If your opinion depends on knowing the inner thoughts of a stranger, or even someone close to you, then you might be in a mental prison. You can only know what people say and do, and even that knowledge is likely to be incomplete or out of context. And you definitely can’t tell what others are thinking as often as you believe you can. It just feels as if you have that ability. It is an illusion.
If you spend any time on social media, or you follow the news, you know an alarming percentage of political differences are based on mind reading. It looks like this:
PERSON 1: I want healthcare insurance for all citizens.
PERSON 2: Your real goal is total socialism.
PERSON 1: No, I like capitalism, but with social safety nets in some areas.
PERSON 2: Nice try, Karl Marx. I know what you really want. You’re not fooling anyone!
The mind reading isn’t limited to one side of the political spectrum. Here’s another example.
PERSON 1: I favor merit-based immigration policies.
PERSON 2: In other words, you want fewer brown people, you racist.
PERSON 1: No, I want people from all over the world who will be good citizens and contribute. Most of them will be nonwhite because the world is mostly nonwhite.
PERSON 2: Nice try, Hitler.
To be fair, no one in these examples believes they are doing mind reading. They think their interpretation of events is so obvious that any simpleton could see what they see.
As I write this chapter, critics are accusing politician Ron DeSantis of racism for calling his Florida gubernatorial opponent, an African-American man, “articulate.” On top of that, DeSantis also said on a different occasion that he didn’t want anything to “monkey this up,” a reference to the political gains he claimed had already been made. Critics say DeSantis was sending a “secret racist dog whistle” to his base. The assumption his critics make is that because they understand the words articulate and monkey to be racially offensive in the context that each was used, DeSantis must have known it too. And if he knew he was using offensive racial terms, he must be doing it intentionally to signal to racists. Therefore, he must be a racist.
A quick check on Twitter confirms that plenty of educated people were unaware that articulate has historically been considered an offensive backhanded compliment when directed at a black man or woman. Was DeSantis one of the people who knew that word was offensive in the context he used it, or was he one of the many people who did not know it? We can’t read his mind, so we don’t know. We can know what he says and what he does, but we can’t reliably know what he is thinking.
People who know the word articulate is offensive to African-Americans probably assumed DeSantis knew it too. People who had never heard of that word being an insult to African-Americans probably assumed DeSantis didn’t know it either. In effect, both groups acted as if they could read DeSantis’s inner thoughts based on the assumption DeSantis’s mind is similar to theirs.
The same point applies to DeSantis’s “monkey it up” gaffe. Reasonable observers know that any monkey reference would be offensive in the context of discussing a black candidate. But other people who are just as reasonable see it as nothing but an interesting choice of words, probably conflating the more common terms monkey around and mess it up into “monkey it up.” And because both sides of the political divide believe DeSantis thinks the same way they do, the two sides came to inhabit separate realities constructed from their illusions that they can read the mind of a stranger.
If we are being objective about DeSantis, all we can say for sure is that he made two political/verbal mistakes that many people would have known to avoid, while many other people would not have known to avoid them. We can observe that using those words caused DeSantis unnecessary political problems, but we can’t know his inner thoughts. If you are certain you know the inner thoughts of a stranger, that’s a sign you might have too much confidence in your opinion.
My take on the DeSantis situation is that it is hard to imagine a person who is smart enough to be a major-party candidate for governor (and since this writing has become governor) but also so dumb that he thinks acting like a gigantic racist before the election would work in his favor in the modern world. I can’t imagine any reality in which one person can be that smart and that dumb at the same time, at least on a conscious level. In my view, the best explanation for DeSantis’s mistakes is that he didn’t know his words were offensive.1
How likely is that?
Politicians are routinely ignorant on particular topics. Ask your senator what a gallon of milk costs. And if your senator knows the answer, please tell me, because I have no idea what milk costs. Educated and well-informed people always have huge gaps in their knowledge of the world.
Some people might argue that DeSantis’s choice of words reveals his subconscious bias, and that’s bad enough. But that is not a standard you would want society to adopt. Imagine a coworker reporting you to human resources because he believes your use of ordinary words identifies you as a bigot. That isn’t a world you would enjoy. Your coworkers are not good at deducing your private thoughts from the breadcrumbs of your vocabulary.
Verbal gaffes are fairly normal for people running for office. My bias is to prefer ordinary explanations for our observations as opposed to extraordinary ones, assuming the facts support both views.
For example, the famous Pizzagate conspiracy theory of 2016 claimed that a pizza joint in Washington D.C. was the front for a pedophile ring involving both Bill and Hillary Clinton.2 If that had been true, which it wasn’t, it would have been quite an extraordinary situation. Compare that to the more ordinary explanation, that people routinely spread ridiculous conspiracy theories on social media. On day one of the Pizzagate news, I chose the ordinary explanation—that it was fake. A twenty-eight-year-old man chose the extraordinary version and brought an assault weapon to the pizza place to see if he could save those children. He was arrested.
When the news reported in 2017 that a possible “sonic weapon” had been used on diplomatic staff at the U.S. embassy in Cuba, without any obvious motive, I chose the ordinary explanation—that it was a case of mass hysteria. If you are not a student of history and psychology, you might not be aware of how common mass hysteria is. I know how common it is, so I picked the most ordinary explanation of events. At this writing, some experts still believe a sonic weapon was involved, but no confirming evidence has been identified. Keep in mind that we live in an age in which nearly every crime can be solved if we apply enough resources. This one has not been solved, which supports my “ordinary” interpretation that no sonic weapon was involved. I do think some of the folks in the embassy had genuine health problems, but we might never know the causes.3
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I PREFER ORDINARY explanations to extraordinary ones, but that doesn’t always make me right. Sometimes the less ordinary explanation is the correct one. It just doesn’t happen often. If you are wondering if you are in a mental prison, it might help to keep these two rules in mind:
If your opinion depends on reliably knowing another person’s inner thoughts, you might be experiencing loserthink.
And . . .
If an ordinary explanation fits the facts, but you have chosen an extraordinary interpretation instead, you might have too much confidence in your opinion.
I assume most famous people have so often had the experience of strangers incorrectly reading their minds that they regard it as frustratingly normal. If you are not famous, you probably have less appreciation of how often the mind reading illusion is warping people’s views of just about everything.
Branding People Evil
If you spend more than five minutes on the Internet, you’ll notice people branding other people as apologists, racists, trolls, and other words that mean “evil.” That’s usually a form of loserthink.
Just to be clear, if you are talking about someone who keeps the remaining parts of his victims in a freezer in his basement, go ahead and call that person evil. I’d call it mental illness, but I don’t see much downside in labeling it evil at the same time. In this example, I’m assuming there is no doubt on the facts of the case.
The loserthink comes into play when we imagine we can read people’s minds (as opposed to observing their actions) and we totally-definitely see some evil in there. We humans did not evolve to be mind readers. We did evolve to jump to ridiculous conclusions while imagining we did not. So if you are playing the odds, your confidence that you can see some evil in another person’s soul is probably closer to being batshit crazy than to being the first known human with psychic powers.
We like to think we can judge people’s relative goodness and evilness by observing their actions, but that only works with the easy stuff, such as crime and bullying, and then only when we are sure of the facts. A more typical situation is that people have different ideas of how to reach a greater good in this world. You might think capitalism is the only way to a better world, while someone else thinks we should focus more on fairness and sharing, which you might call socialism. No one in my example has evil intentions, but one of those approaches is likely to be better than the other in achieving something like a greater good. Preferring one plan to another in the quest for a better world is not evil. It is loserthink to act as if it is.
If you think you can gaze into the soul of a stranger and see evil, you might be experiencing a loserthink hallucination.
Socialists and Racists
If you are dismissing your critics with labels they would not assign to themselves, you might be engaged in loserthink. If you call people who want everyone to have good healthcare a bunch of socialists, or you call people who want strong immigration control racists, you are not part of the rational debate. People who have good arguments use them. People who do not have good arguments try to win by labeling.
If your criticism depends on assigning labels instead of cause-and-effect reasoning, you are engaged in loserthink.
OCCAM’S RAZOR
Occam’s razor is the idea that the simplest explanation of events is usually the right one. The problem with that line of thinking is that it is complete nonsense, and people who have training in the field of psychology can see the problem right away. In a scientific setting, the simplest explanation that fits the facts is generally preferred. But in the messier nonscientific world, we all think our explanations of the world are the simplest ones.
