Loserthink, page 7
Making matters worse, historians and philosophers have passed down to us some sticky sayings about patterns that we are raised to believe are wise. The worst offender is this one:
“HISTORY REPEATS”
American philosopher George Santayana allegedly said some version of “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” That often gets shortened to “History repeats.”
I suppose the idea of history repeating would be useful for someone such as a scholar to add context to history. But one thing you’ve probably noticed about most of the people with whom you interact is that they are not, in all likelihood, scholars.
I would trust a scholar to know that “history repeats” has no more predictive power than observing that people were selfish, brutal, and violent in the past, so you can reasonably expect more of that in the future. The assumption that people haven’t changed much since the start of recorded history feels accurate and useful. But once you extend that observation about people to an observation about a situation, you’re on shaky ground.
Let me give you an example. When my first book, The Dilbert Principle, became a number-one bestseller, my publisher asked for a second one to capitalize on the momentum. If “history repeats,” how should I have expected my second book to perform? Just as well as the first?
Lots of authors have had bestselling books and then followed up with a second book. You might expect my experience to be similar to that of other authors in my situation. You can probably think of authors who had a huge bestseller and then rode that popularity to create a string of even larger bestsellers. Stephen King, J. K. Rowling, James Patterson, and John Grisham come to mind.
My first bestseller got me scads of attention and lots of happy readers who gave me stellar reviews. I assumed they were spring-loaded to buy my next book too, and I assumed new readers would discover me as well. In other words, I was hoping history would repeat.
I published my follow-up book, Dogbert’s Top Secret Management Handbook, and it did well enough to top the nonfiction bestseller list. But overall, it sold about half as many books as the first.
Why the heck did history decide to stop repeating just when I needed it???
One day my publisher explained to me that nonfiction books tend to follow the same pattern that mine had. The authors who consistently wrote one bestseller after another were fiction authors. Consumers of fiction want more of the kind of writing they like, only next time with different characters and stories.
Consumers of nonfiction books apparently think some version of “I already know what that author has to say.” Especially when the topic seems to be in the same domain as the previous book. The defense against that pattern, for nonfiction writers, is to write books on entirely new topics if the audience lets you get away with it, the way Malcolm Gladwell and Michael Lewis do. I use the same strategy now.
One would need to have a lot of publishing experience to know which historical patterns would be the predictive ones in my situation. I thought I knew all I needed to know about how one bestseller leads to more. But I didn’t. We humans are not good at knowing which history is the one that will repeat. Life is messy and complicated, and the situations we encounter often remind us of multiple histories. But which of those histories is the one that is predictive?
Consider a person who has been married and divorced twice. If that person gets married again, does history suggest a divorce is likely? Or does history suggest that third marriages are more likely to last than first or second marriages? On top of that, what makes this particular couple typical enough to compare to the average? For example, if one of them is a sex addict, isn’t that a more predictive variable than the third-marriage pattern? Beats me. The point is that we generally have more than one historical pattern in play. And we usually don’t know which ones will be the most predictive.
Consider the stock market. That is a bundle of competing histories. You might be looking at the track records of top management. You might be looking at the history of price competition in this market. You might be looking at the history of unexpected innovations. Every company is a collection of patterns. Which ones matter?
The smartest people in the investment world will tell you the quality of management is the most predictive variable. They will also advise you to buy index funds instead of individual stocks because no one can consistently predict how managers will perform. Maybe the managers of some public companies got lucky with success a few times in the past. Maybe their skills were perfectly suited for the last situation but not this one.
Think of the trillions of dollars swirling around investment markets across the globe. With so much on the line, you can expect to attract the smartest, most capable people in the world. And indeed, top investment advisors come from the best schools and have deep experience. If “history repeats” was a meaningful concept, those experts could easily pick the companies that will perform the best.
They can’t.
As I just mentioned, unmanaged index funds almost always beat the individual stock-pickers. As it turns out, the history of broad index funds performing well does repeat. Or at least it has so far. By the time you read this book, someone might invent an algorithm that predicts the fate of individual companies in a statistically valid way. Because history repeats until it doesn’t. And you never know when the “doesn’t” phase starts.
History also has the quality of influencing the future to be different. And by that I mean we learn from mistakes. For example, the United States tried to negotiate with North Korea several times over the decades and found the North Koreans would make promises and later break them. Did that history help predict what would happen when President Trump met with Kim Jong-un? That’s like the third-marriage pattern. People learn (eventually) what didn’t work last time and so they modify their approach. And if the new approach fails too, they try something else next time. Technologists and marketers call this A/B testing, in which you are heading steadily toward a good outcome while appearing to observers as if you are failing most of the way, at least until something works. A pattern of consistent failure looks a lot like A/B testing that isn’t yet complete. One is bad news and the other is good news about to happen. They look the same.
Mark Twain once observed that people can’t tell the difference between good news and bad news. That feels right to me. We usually can’t tell which patterns are most predictive, which means we literally don’t know if we are looking at good news or bad coming our way. But we imagine we can.
By now you might be thinking I have overreached in my criticism of the idea that history repeats. Perhaps you can think of situations in which you are absolutely sure history did repeat. But I submit to you that history is very busy, and it does a lot of stuff. You wouldn’t notice all the occasions in which history doesn’t repeat. In fact, if you were sure you noticed history repeating a thousand times, it wouldn’t tell you anything unless you knew how many times it did not repeat when it might have. If that number is a million, your observation of a thousand history-repeating situations is no indication that history repeats. In that scenario, it would be more accurate to say sometimes events remind you of history and sometimes they don’t. It would not be rational to say there is some sort of predictive relationship between unrelated historical anecdotes and whatever you are doing today.
And when you do see history apparently repeating, ask yourself if you needed to know history to make your prediction. For example, if every time someone challenges a professional MMA fighter to a bar fight, the trained fighter either wins or refuses to fight, that might seem to us like a predictive history. But you could predict the same two probable outcomes with no knowledge of history. The better fighter should be expected to win a fight. And a professional fighter would know that the legal system would treat him harshly for fighting a drunk with no special fighting skills.
Whenever humans have an opportunity to do something illegal that would have a huge payoff should it work, and no risk of getting caught, the odds of someone doing that illegal thing approach 100 percent. Not everyone will take the bait, but if enough people are in that situation, you can be sure at least one will take a run at the free money with no risk, even if it means breaking a law. You might say that’s a case of history repeating, because whenever that situation occurs, sooner or later someone will try to take advantage. But here again we need no special knowledge of history to make our predictions. You simply have to understand the dark side of human nature.
For the nitpickers reading this chapter, I acknowledge that we only understand human nature because we observe how people have acted throughout history. History gives us useful insight on how humans act. But that insight is useful only in simple cases.
Will people who are hungry seek food? Yes.
Will people exploit loopholes for personal gain? Yes.
Will people lie if they think it helps a lot and they can get away with it? Yes.
When we talk about the idea of history repeating, we’re usually not talking about the simple and predictable impulses of human beings. Usually we’re comparing, for example, one complicated set of negotiations with hundreds of moving parts to some past situation in which the variables were substantially different but we are still reminded of it.
As I was writing this chapter, I took a break and checked Twitter. I happened upon a debate on the value of so-called trickle-down economics, which refers to cutting taxes and hoping that doing so gooses the economy enough to make up the difference in how much the government collects in taxes. The debate went like this:
CRITIC OF TRICKLE-DOWN ECONOMICS: It has never worked in the past.
PROPONENT OF TRICKLE-DOWN ECONOMICS: It has totally worked in the past.
If history repeats, which history will be doing the repeating? I take it as a given that one of those views is right. But how would the average citizen know which was true?
History doesn’t repeat, at least not in any way you can use to accurately predict the future. (The exceptions are simple situations.)
THE SLIPPERY SLOPE
The slippery slope argument bothers me more than most forms of loserthink. It is generally presented as an argument that things will continue going in the same direction until they go too far and some form of harm is done.
For example, gun rights folks will argue that any form of gun control is a slippery slope to full confiscation. Some support that argument with appeals to “history repeats” based on the experiences of countries that are quite different from the United States.
My objection to the slippery slope argument is that everything is a slippery slope until it isn’t. In physics, a body in motion will stay in motion until it meets an equal and opposing force. Our experience of life is a lot like that. Literally everything would be a slippery slope if not for counterforces. So look for counterforces to predict how far a thing will slide. If there are no offsetting forces, then yes, things will keep going in one direction forever. But that’s rare. Usually a counterforce pops up as a reaction, or it is already in place.
In the case of gun control in the United States, the counterforce is the gun owners themselves and their commitment to the Second Amendment. They generally favor commonsense rules about gun safety, but if you start knocking on doors to take away guns, that is unlikely to end well. The slippery slope simply doesn’t apply. Gun owners might end up with more restrictive rules of ownership than they prefer, but so long as most of the public prefers the new rules, you can’t blame the slippery slope. That’s just voters getting what they want.
There’s also no objective way to know when a slippery slope is more progress than problem. It depends which side you are on. Your slippery slope might be my progress. I like progress, and I don’t want you to stop my progress by labeling it a slippery slope.
The slippery slope isn’t a concept worthy of using for persuasion, or for any other purpose. It isn’t predictive because there is generally a counterforce ahead. And if the counterforce is not evident, or it seems too weak, there’s a good chance a stronger counterforce will materialize specifically to stop the slippery slope.
Belief in slippery slopes is loserthink. It is more useful to look at forces and counterforces to see where things are likely to end up.
PRIVACY IS OVERRATED
Humans probably don’t have a biological need for much privacy. We are tribal creatures, meaning we evolved in environments in which the tribe knows everything about you, whether you like it or not. Privacy seems to be more of a modern invention. Most of us appreciate having privacy in a variety of situations. But it’s not likely that our preference for privacy is compatible with our nature. Consider that humans also enjoy drugs, cigarettes, and alcohol. Just because we prefer something, that doesn’t make it good for us. Privacy has real-world benefits, and I don’t recommend you give it up without a fight. But if your desire for some specific forms of privacy is fear based, you might be creating a mental prison for yourself that you don’t want.
I think most people would agree that the pivotal step in the advancement of gay rights involved brave activists “coming out” about their sexual orientation and making it safe, in time, for others to do so. You could say the LGBTQ community traded privacy for equality. They didn’t give up all of their privacy—only the part that kept them in a social prison. That’s the clearest historical example of privacy being more of a problem than a solution. Once the LGBTQ community embraced that truth—that privacy was their prison, not their protection—they had a path out. It wasn’t easy, and it might never be easy. But it’s a winning path.
Let me tell you about a time in which I intentionally traded privacy for freedom. I was born with a condition called paruresis, also known as shy bladder. It means you can’t urinate if anyone else is in the room or even in listening distance. Perhaps 5 percent of the public has this condition. The thing you need to know about paruresis is that there is no way for someone who has it to simply “relax harder” to get past it. The sensation is that your body and your mind become temporarily disconnected. Your body “locks up” even when your mind is totally at ease. The name shy bladder is misleading because shyness is not the problem. It happens to people who are not shy in general. And it seems to have a genetic component. At around age fifty, my brother Dave “came out” about his paruresis. At the time, I didn’t even know it had a name. And as hard as this is to imagine, I didn’t know my brother had it. Nor did he know I had it.
For half a century, my biggest problem in life was one that I believed was unique to me. I kept it private because I didn’t want to be seen as a freak. And I didn’t want to be judged or mocked for it. My knee-jerk preference for privacy made everything worse. It added the fear of detection to the base problem. And the base problem was bad. Imagine traveling and not being able to use a public restroom except in rare instances when they are empty. Oh, and just to make things interesting, I also have a small bladder. It was a continuous nightmare for fifty years. School was a nightmare. My corporate jobs were a nightmare. Dating was difficult. I was becoming rich and successful with the Dilbert comic and at the same time, to be frank, my quality of life was poor.
About 5 percent of the people reading this book are having an “Oh, shit” moment because I’m talking about them. They are in hiding about their shy bladders too. And their lives are nightmares for the same reasons. I’m about to release that group from their mental prisons.
When my brother started sharing his condition—and we soon found out my late father had it too—everything changed about the way I felt about it. I was no longer the lone freak. I was just one of the people with this condition, which I now had a name for. If you add up the ages of my father, my brother, and me, we went a collective 180 years without knowing anyone else on the planet was suffering from this life-destroying condition, and that added greatly to the psychological weight of it. You might say that pain and fear were our penalty for maintaining our privacy, but none of us knew it at the time.
My brother became an activist in the shy bladder cause. He has a website at paruretic.org, where he teaches fellow travelers how to work through their condition. Step one is admitting your situation to anyone who matters. That takes the pressure off and allows you to say and do what you need to say and do. For example, if I’m with a group of friends and excuse myself to use a public restroom, and one of the guys gets up to do the same, I loudly proclaim that the situation won’t work for me because I can’t use restrooms when others are in there. Not once has that been a problem or an embarrassment. Turns out most people either have the same problem, or some milder version of it, or know someone who does. More importantly, no one much cares about your problems, at least not your minor health issues, as they see it. We imagine people care about our situations more than they do.
The second part of the solution involves learning to wait at the urinal or in a restroom stall as long as it takes. You might need to wait for several people to come and go. Or you might use a stall with more privacy, if that works for you. You might even use the stall for people with disabilities, with good cause. Over time, you can learn to do what you need to do with no sense of embarrassment. But it takes practice.
Practice is the third part of the process. You practice by choosing increasingly difficult “challenges” that will train your mind and body to cooperate over time. For example, you might practice using a restroom when someone is in the next room. Eventually you can try using a urinal on one end of the restroom when another person is near the other end. At this point in my journey, I can use most public restrooms unless there is a person directly next to me at the urinal, the privacy barrier is low, or the other person got there at the same time. And when that happens, I just wait or use a stall. The net result of relinquishing my privacy on this specific topic is that it reduced the biggest problem in my life to an occasional annoyance. Better yet, for 5 percent of the people reading this book, I just put you on the path to your own recovery.
