Loserthink, p.9
Loserthink, page 9
We all want to live in a world in which facts and reason, along with empathy and ethics, of course, influence our decisions, and nothing else gets in the way. But we don’t live in that world. We do live in a world in which we can often know which direction we want things to move, but rarely can we know with any precision what we should do to get there, and how it will all turn out.
If you find yourself obsessing over the accuracy of facts versus the direction those facts will lead you, you might be in a mental prison.
CONFUSING HYPERBOLE WITH LEGITIMATE OPINION
One of the most useful tools for any leader is something called hyperbole, better known as exaggeration. In the interest of persuasion, leaders typically exaggerate their strong points and understate their flaws. So if you want to understand what a leader really means, it helps to be able to sort the hyperbole from the facts.
In November 2018, House representative Eric Swalwell got into a Twitter exchange in which he noted that the government could enforce a ban on semiautomatic rifles—if such a law passed—because the government has lots of firepower compared to citizens. The conversation happened on Twitter, where creative exaggeration is normal, and Swalwell used some hyperbole to make his point. It did not go over well with proponents of the Second Amendment.
When I noticed the strong reaction on Twitter, I thought I could help clarify the situation by telling people that Swalwell’s nuke reference was not the sort of thing one should take seriously, as it was clearly meant as hyperbole. I got two types of irrational responses to that opinion.
Irrational Response 1: This group said they understood the nuke reference to be hyperbole, but to them it signaled that Swalwell was suggesting the government could confiscate guns by threat of violence. That is accurate, but lacks the important context that the government enforces all major laws by threat of violence. That’s how laws work. If you disobey any major law in this country, armed people paid by the government can find you and punish you. And if you use a weapon to resist that punishment, you can reasonably expect the government to use weapons to neutralize you.
If you try to build bombs or chemical weapons in your home, and the government finds out, they will send people with guns to fix that situation. Likewise, if the government passes legislation outlawing a certain type of gun, and let’s say the Supreme Court agrees the law is constitutional, you can expect the government to use weapons to enforce that law too. So the idea that Swalwell was introducing a new draconian policy involving the government turning its weapons on citizens is completely off base. Swalwell was recommending a new law, and the government always uses guns to enforce major laws, either directly or indirectly. You can hate the law itself, but it’s nonsense to debate the very nature of laws.
The legitimate question here is whether Swalwell’s call to ban certain types of semiautomatic rifles is constitutional and desirable. I won’t weigh in on that topic because it is outside the scope of this book. Instead, I will leave you with two lessons on loserthink. First:
It is loserthink to take political hyperbole literally.
Irrational Response 2: This group said they knew all along that Swalwell was joking about the nukes, but they chose to act as if he meant it so they could “nail him,” to get even for all the times Swalwell’s team (Democrats) twisted the meaning of words on their team (Republicans). That isn’t a productive plan.
It is loserthink to attack an opponent by acting as dumb as they act. It might feel good, but it isn’t a winning strategy.
SYSTEM VERSUS GOALS
Thomas Edison had a goal of inventing a practical light bulb. But his goal would have been useless without a system to achieve it. His system involved continuously testing different approaches until one of them worked. Had Edison been too specific about his goals, insisting on using one type of filament or developing one type of bulb, he would have failed. His system was permissive, in the sense that he didn’t know what exact solution would be the best. He discovered the best solution by using his system.
Leaders understand that a good system involves doing something on a regular basis to improve your odds of good outcomes, even if you don’t know exactly what the outcome will be.
For example, going to college and continuously learning new skills prepares you for lots of different opportunities, but you can’t always predict where that will lead. If you develop good systems for improving your diet and fitness, that can help you in your health, personal life, and even career, but not in ways you can exactly predict.
One of my systems involves blogging and livestreaming on a variety of topics, then monitoring audience reaction to see where I should focus my energy. That system, which I have used for years, caused me to evolve from a cartoonist into a political pundit with a special focus on persuasion. There was no way I could have predicted that outcome. I simply continued adding skills to my skill stack while testing different messages and topics until something I was doing excited the audience. This was where it ended up.
As part of that journey, I built a large following on Twitter, and as a result got to see more examples of loserthink than I ever imagined possible. When I combined my new understanding of the most common forms of faulty thinking on social media with my writing skills and my general media skills, it brought you and me together over this book. None of this was predictable, except in the general sense that having good systems kicks up opportunities you wouldn’t otherwise know existed.
When it comes to your personal life, business life, and political opinions, it makes sense to favor systems over goals whenever that is practical. A goal gives you one way to win, whereas a system can surface lots of winning paths, some of which you never could have imagined.
The loserthink trap here is that you often see people comparing political objectives and preferring one specific path to another. That sounds reasonable on the surface. But the smarter play would be to favor systems that give you lots of ways to win and a low chance of losing.
For example, in the United States we have lots of ideas for improving healthcare. And people talk about these various plans as if we should pick the best one and implement it. That is an example of bad thinking. The smarter approach is to admit we don’t know which plans are the best and then find ways to test them small. Maybe one city or one small state wants to try it first. Ideally, different places would try different solutions so we someday are in a position to compare. Testing small and tracking results is a system. And it is one you are unlikely to criticize because it sounds so sensible.
Goals are for loserthinkers. Systems are for winners.
CHAPTER 8
Thinking Like a Scientist
COINCIDENCES
If you think your opinion on a topic is correct because of coincidences that can’t be explained any other way, it might help you to know that confirmation bias looks exactly like that. We humans are terrible at knowing which coincidences are meaningful and which are just, well, coincidences. Luckily for us, scientists are trained to be skeptical of any kind of coincidence, and you would do well to follow their example.
The day I wrote this paragraph, I bought a package of Sharpies (marking pens), which I love using for a variety of reasons. While unpacking my shopping bag at home, my television was on, and I heard Greg Gutfeld proclaiming his love of Sharpies on the Fox News show The Five. That happened while I was holding my new Sharpies in my hand thinking how great they were. The world is bristling with meaningless coincidences.
Want some more?
A few days ago, I arranged my collection of flashlights on a display wall in my man cave that you might call my garage. I checked each flashlight and made sure the batteries were fresh. I love flashlights even more than I love Sharpies. The very next day, an SUV crashed into a power pole in my neighborhood and plunged my home into darkness for most of the evening hours. I believe this was the first time in ten years that my power had been out for so long at night. And it happened one day after I’d created a flashlight shrine so I would be prepared for this exact scenario.
Earlier that same day, I had a plumber fixing my shower. That evening, I watched a rerun of Parks and Recreation that included a scene in which a guy was fixing a shower. How often do I get my shower fixed? This was the first time I can remember in my entire life. And how often do you see someone on TV doing repairs on a shower? I can’t recall one other time, but of course I would have no reason to remember it if I did.
In that same episode of Parks and Recreation, a subplot involved a guy living in a camping tent across the street from his ex so he could stalk her. I was watching the show with my girlfriend, Kristina, and by coincidence, one of her exes had actually stalked her by camping in a tent he’d pitched across the street. How weird is that?
Getting back to the plumber who fixed my shower, it was a big deal for me because I hadn’t been able to use my own shower for a week. I couldn’t wait to get back in that thing and experience its warm, wet embrace. I complained nonstop for a week to Kristina about not having my own shower. And when it was fixed, I could not have been happier. But before I could enjoy the awesomeness of my beloved shower, that SUV rammed the power pole and took out the power. Sometimes a power outage will damage electronic equipment. My house is bristling with electronics, and exactly one of them was damaged: the electronics for my water heater. I had exactly one major ambition for the week, which was to use my own shower, and by some extraordinary coincidence an SUV driver snatched away my chance at the worst possible time. What were the odds that the only two times my shower had ever had problems were back-to-back in the same week? And coincidentally, my water heater is a type my plumbers never work on, so they didn’t have a way to get the part within days. So I ordered it from a supplier who promised to overnight it for early morning delivery. I was still waiting five days later.
Luckily, I had planned a writing trip that weekend, so I was in a hotel out of town. Which hotel, you ask? I didn’t make the travel plans, but by coincidence I ended up in the same hotel I wrote about earlier in the book. But at least the table had no awkward tablecloth on it this time.
Today, on Twitter, someone sent around a viral video clip from a movie made in 1958 that involved a con man named Trump trying to sell a protective wall to unsuspecting villagers in a western town. At the same time I saw the video clip, President Trump was visiting the border to talk about his plans for a “wall.” Politics aside, this was quite a coincidence.
Yesterday, I was taking calls on an app that my startup created called Interface by WhenHub. The app allows experts (at anything) to take video calls from people who are willing to pay for their time via the app. I set my price artificially low because I was promoting the app and wanted to guarantee I got calls. One of my callers was a young man who said he had read many of my books and was especially interested in the topic of affirmations, which I have written about a number of times. After reading my work, he decided he would try an affirmation aimed at finding a way to talk to me personally, so he could ask some follow-up questions about affirmations. When he saw my announcement on Twitter that I was live on the app, he quickly downloaded the app and connected with me. What were the odds that a motivated reader of my books would get to have a personal conversation with me while I sat on my couch at home? By coincidence, I cofounded a company that solved his exact problem of wanting to talk to me even though he had no access to my personal contact information.
Today, I opened on my computer the draft file of the book you are reading. I hadn’t written a word for a few days and I needed to figure out where I’d left off last in my continuous rewrites. Luckily, the document was still open on my laptop to the place I’d left off. It was this section, titled “Coincidences.” And my note to myself in the chapter was that I needed to add some examples of coincidences. Entirely by coincidence, a number of recent coincidences were fresh in my mind, and you have just read them. This was an easy section to complete.
What do all these coincidences mean? Absolutely nothing. Coincidences happen all the time. But we humans are wired to put meaning on coincidences, and when we do, we are often engaged in loserthink.
To be fair, sometimes coincidences do mean something. If the police are investigating a domestic murder, and the surviving spouse booked a flight out of the country right before it happened, that might not be a coincidence at all. But the far more typical situation is when we think a coincidence means something and it doesn’t. We are surrounded by coincidences. Most mean nothing at all.
The most common situations in which coincidences can be misleading involve your career and your personal life. When the topic has an emotional element, and you are already primed to believe something to be true, expect the environment to serve up lots of false signals.
For example, if you suspect a romantic partner of lying, suddenly you see signs of it everywhere, even if those signals are false. And if you think a particular plan in your workplace is a bad one, you will see all kinds of signals you are right, even when you are not. The more you care about a topic, the more susceptible you are to assigning meaning to coincidences. And if the situation is rich with variables, you will have plenty from which to choose.
Sometimes coincidences tell you something useful. But 90 percent of the time they mislead you. Never be too confident about an opinion that depends solely on interpreting a coincidence.
ANECDOTAL EVIDENCE
One of the most common forms of loserthink involves treating individual situations as though they represent an overall pattern or trend. When this sort of observational “evidence” is in play, the term for it is anecdotal, meaning it comes from your unstructured observations as opposed to scientific or other credible data. And therefore it should not be deemed persuasive.
If someone wearing a green hat punches you in the stomach, you might irrationally draw the conclusion that green-hat-wearing people are dangerous. If you are smart, you’ll realize this is nothing but anecdotal evidence and not representative of all wearers of green hats. In our everyday life, most people understand the difference between anecdotal evidence and scientific evidence. But . . .
The problem occurs when the media slants its coverage of stories so you see what you believe to be a pattern. If every story on your preferred news source focuses on green-hatted violence, you will quickly come to believe it is a big problem. I just described every news outlet. They all focus on the stories and images that support their political leanings. And that focus on stories, usually involving death or danger, gives the consumer a slanted impression. This is especially true for news coverage of anything involving violence. If all we see are news articles about punchy green-hatted people, we will soon come to believe they are the biggest menace to society.
If you are reaching a general conclusion about a big topic by looking at anecdotal evidence, you are engaging in loserthink.
ASK YOURSELF: “WHAT IF THE OPPOSITE IS TRUE?”
German mathematician Carl Gustav Jacob Jacobi—whose parents were not good at naming babies—was known for his maxim that it is often easier to solve a problem if you express it as its opposite.1 Famous investor Charlie Munger, best known as Warren Buffett’s business partner, uses a version of this method to look at investments; instead of asking how they might succeed, he first tries to understand what failing would look like in this situation, and how to avoid it.2
As a cartoonist, one of my writing techniques involves considering common situations and asking myself what it would look like if my assumptions were exactly backward. For example, we assume our doctors want to heal us and they try hard to do so. But for comic purposes, it is funnier to imagine the opposite, that the doctor is a serial killer who found a legal way to pursue his hobby. Now all he does is dispense bad medical advice. I do this mental exercise of reversing reality often as part of my work, and so I reflexively do it with topics I see in the news, my personal life, and everywhere else. Usually, things are not the opposite of how they look, but it helps to be on the lookout for times when that is the case.
Have you ever suspected a loved one was trying to do something bad to you and later discovered they were trying to do you a favor? If you lock yourself into the first theory before discovering you are wrong, much damage can be done before you learn the truth. But if your first reflex is to ask yourself what if the opposite of the first impression is true, you’re on safer ground. Often it helps to hold both your suspicion and the opposite of your suspicion as equally possible until you know for sure.
The way human minds are wired, if we take a firm position on a topic, we are unlikely to change our minds even when facts emerge that debunk our initial belief. That’s why it is smarter to not commit to a firm opinion when facts are still coming into focus. My mantra in these situations is: But I could be totally wrong. That gives me the mental freedom to later adjust my opinion if needed.
Always ask yourself if the opposite of your theory could be true. Doing so keeps you humble and less susceptible to bias until you get to the truth of the situation.
JUDGING A GROUP BY ITS WORST MEMBERS
Scientists are trained to understand that stories and observations can be persuasive at the same time they are misleading, which is a dangerous situation. We nonscientists are easily influenced by individual stories, especially when they include bad behavior from members of any group.
As I write this book, Democrats are accusing Republicans of being racists because some of them are. Meanwhile, Republicans are accusing Democrats of being socialists, criminals, and anarchists because some of them are.
