Why everyone is wrong
Last week I wrote about the issues of cognitive bias and ego preventing us from seeing the truth.
You’ll be pleased to know I’m carrying on the subject of ego and making us more aware of our ill-equipped nature.
Agendas
We all have our own agendas and beliefs about the world.
Inside we are looking to find things that validate our current opinion. We want to live in blissful acceptance that our hunches all along were correct.
The rise of fake news has been so prevalent because we love to share articles with headlines we agree with (Even if the actual article happens to be full of poo). We share it without reading it because it resonates with what we want everyone else to know.
Learning through Memes
This Twitter thread below was a really enjoyable example of virality based on a meme leveraging people’s pre-existing beliefs.
On the surface, it looks like data. Our ability to enjoy data is in full force when the data says what we want.
This data tells a story we find entertaining and fitting snugly into what we already think implicitly.
The original tweet
This was the subsequent text of his tweetstorm explaining his opinions
Strong correlation with The Northern Germanic cultures and it has to do with various adaptations and reactions to the specific honor /shame economy of the Norse “Empire” (what is commonly referred to as Viking culture. ).
In Norse culture, hospitality (providing food, drink, lodging) was a duty of higher status individuals towards people of lower status, but the act of receiving hospitality created an obligation or debt on the part of the recipient.
So, hospitality not only brought honor to the giver, it had the potential to bring shame to the recipient. Norse culture, and as it progressed through the Middle Ages, was incredibly personally violent. People fought duels, violently extracted debts and squeezed renters
Church, inequality, industrialization, turnover in land ownership, and interpersonal conflict.
Follow up explanations
The comment thread was full of users chiming in with different explanations that fit their worldview and education as to why this effect happens.
(Only after 100 comments did anyone even ask where this data came from or if it was true…)
Opposing view 1 - Islamic code
Opposing view 2 - Drinking habits
They also added this convenient graph.
The Relationship between the cost of alcohol vs The shame associated with being drunk
I guess Russia is an anomaly here but let’s move on.
Opposing view 3 - Temperature and food availability
My favorite (and most accurate)
There were many more opinions but let me attempt to draw some insights.
Which is correct?
I loved this thread because of the array of explanations and beliefs going on that could all be good arguments alone.
Personally, I’ve been all over Europe and had meals shared with me. They are all generous nations to their guests. Italy stands out as a nation built on the culture of food creation and sharing (Note - as a foreigner never cook pasta for an Italian, it’s sacrilege…)
This leads me to question how correct the first statement is, let alone any explanation.
There may be threads of truth in every single opinion. But no single opinion is a complete truth. So everyone in this thread is wrong (even if they are also a little right).
We all have our own history and knowledge. We also all have our own agendas and views we subscribe to. Like the authors in this thread, most of our beliefs have some foundations of truth, but alone they are incomplete and ultimately incorrect.
Is ANYTHING correct?
Last week I challenged your ability to see the reality of new ideas and information.
Unconscious bias controls every single interpretation you make, of everything.
Here I’m trying to give you a better understanding of the diversity of options there are to explain something that on the surface seems pretty simple.
If you can deeply take this on board, you’ll see that pretty much everything you know is mostly incorrect.
Let me introduce a quick mental model that doesn’t come naturally to us.
It can be very hard or impossible to confirm some truths.
A doctor can test you for cancer and find no trace cancer. Yet she can never confirm 100% that you don’t have cancer.
Doctors can’t test every single cell in your body so they will never know that cancer is not lurking somewhere.
However, they only need to find one cancer cell to confirm that you do have cancer.
So it can never be stated that “you don’t have cancer”.
It only be confirmed that the statement “You don’t have cancer” is false.
Our thoughts on what is correct are a bit like cancer. They are weird elusive things.
We can never fully confirm our theory is correct in every situation. We just haven’t found evidence that we are wrong yet. It might be lurking somewhere we can’t see it.
It only takes one situation to confirm that we are incorrect.
Nothing is correct
As covered last week, our problems really stack up when we don’t listen to the data telling us we are incorrect.
Everything in science is just a theory that currently hasn’t had anything to disprove it yet. Understanding the world around us should be considered a science.
So in the interests of sanity and learning:
Assume you are wrong.
Assume that you don’t know why you’re wrong.
Be excited to find out.
It makes life much more interesting.