Conviction

The Data Never “Says”

March 1, 2021 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

The Data Never

Data doesn’t say anything. Indeed, data can’t say anything for itself about an issue any more than a saw can form furniture, or a sauce can simmer a stew.

Data is inert and inanimate. Data doesn’t know why it was created. Data doesn’t have a mind of its own, and, therefore, it can’t infer anything.

Data is a necessary ingredient in judgment. It’s people who select and interpret data. People can turn it into insight or torture it to bring their agenda to bear. Data is therefore only as useful as its quality and the skills of the people wielding it.

Far more than we admit, subjectivity and intuition play a significant role in deciding how we collect, choose, process, explain, interpret, and apply the data. As entrepreneur Margaret Heffernan warns in Willful Blindness: Why We Ignore the Obvious at Our Peril (2012,) “We mostly admit the information that makes us feel great about ourselves, while conveniently filtering whatever unsettles our fragile egos and most vital beliefs.”

In the hands of careless users, data can end up having the opposite effect its creators intended. All data is good or bad depending on how it’s employed in a compelling story and what end it’s serving—neither of which the data itself can control.

Don’t let data drive your conclusions. Let data inform your conclusions.
Don’t declare, “The data says,” (as in, “the stock market thinks.”) Data by itself cannot have a particular interpretation.
When you find data that seems to support the case you wish to make, don’t swoop on it without caution and suspicion. Data can be very deceptive when used carelessly.
Be familiar with the limitations of your data. Investigate if your data informs any other equally valid hypothesis that could propose an alternative conclusion.

Idea for Impact: Beware of the risk of invoking data in ways that end up undermining your message.

Tribalism Needs to Self-Destruct

January 20, 2021 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Big Tech’s recent rush to repress provocative content has expanded the debate on free speech and the social-media algorithms’ raw power to preside over how people see the world.

Democracy and free markets aren’t supposed to function this way. Overall, capitalism works because it typically rewards players for being right and penalizes players for being wrong. If you’re an investor and you’re wide of the mark about something, the market will penalize you.

That used to be valid with journalism too. Traditionally, if a mainstream news outlet got something wrong, it’d face disapproval, retractions, and embarrassment. If the outlet was wrong often enough, its circulation would shrink, and advertisers would drop.

Sadly, this feedback loop has gone. Our media consumption has become so segmented and tribal. For instance, Fox News could assert whatever it wants its audience to believe, and the market won’t punish it. Indeed, Fox News could even be rewarded with more significant viewership.

Tribal media consumption is especially manifest with social media because the platforms’ business model is driven by tribe-segmentation, engagement, and clicks. Social media reward fanaticism, emotionalism, and hyperbole. There’s no natural self-regulating market apparatus any longer.

All told, tribalism and hyperpolarized filter bubbles have taken their toll. They’re contributing to society’s intellectual decay.

Idea for Impact: This isn’t as much a freedom-of-speech issue as it is a distribution issue. Yes, everyone should be free to express themselves without the interference of editors or other filters. But what does—and doesn’t—surface for consumption needs to be moderated. Gate-keeping must be done in a way that doesn’t devalue truth and ignore the counterevidence. Technology needs to pivot to help society break through the mental barriers of tribes.

Saying is Believing: Why People Are Reluctant to Change an Expressed Opinion

November 30, 2020 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Politicians shift their views shamelessly with the winds of opportunism. To their defense, they must choose to stand up for what they believe or risk political capital.

Most politicians believe in one thing—winning elections and latching on to power. Seems they’ll say anything that can get them in the office and stay there. Like when, during the 2004 presidential elections, Democratic nominee John Kerry famously proclaimed, “I actually did vote for the $87 billion before I voted against” funding to rebuild Iraq.

Politicians Will Often Flip-flop to Maximize Their Popularity

Well, that’s the nature of the beast. Politicians enter politics for ideological reasons but must readily sell their souls to prolong their political careers. Politicians never seem to be willing to say, “I was wrong” or “Upon mature reflection, I’ve changed my mind on such and such.”

But what about the rest of us? It seems that, unlike the politicians, we’re shamed relatively easily when we change our mind and adjust our approach. Admitting we’ve made a mistake is too threatening to our sense of self. We end up over-compensating by denying fault and refusing ownership of our own mistakes, thereby protecting our self-image.

There’s evidence that suggests that saying is believing. Making a known pronouncement strengthens our commitment to that point of view. By committing ourselves openly to our present opinions, we may be hardening ourselves to future information that would otherwise change our minds.

The ‘Saying-Is-Believing’ Effect

According to Robert Cialdini’s Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion (2006,) social psychologists have shown that openly committing to an opinion makes you less willing to change your mind.

Cialdini cites an experiment by social psychologists in which three sets of students were shown a group of lines. One set of students was asked to write down estimates of the lines’ length and turn their estimates to the experimenter. The second set was asked to write down their estimates on a Magic Pad and then wipe out their estimates before anyone else could see them. The third set of students didn’t write down their estimates at all. After the students were shown new evidence that suggested that their initial estimates were wrong,

The students who had never written down their first choices were least loyal to those choices. … By far, it was the students who had publicly recorded their initial positions who most resolutely refused to shift from those positions later. Public commitment had hardened them into the most stubborn of all.

Publicly committing to an answer makes people less receptive to information suggesting they were wrong

Yup, the act of publicly documenting your opinion enforces the feeling of others knowing what your opinion was. This produces fear of being judged.

The hard part about admitting you’re wrong is, well, admitting you’re wrong. This may induce you to refuse to accept new ideas.

The American economist Paul Krugman has remarked on the “epidemic of infallibility,”

Just to be clear, everyone makes mistakes. Nobody is perfect. When you’re committed to a fundamentally false narrative, facing up to facts becomes an act of political disloyalty. What’s going on with Mr. Trump and his inner circle seems to have less to do with ideology than with fragile egos. To admit having been wrong about anything, they seem to imagine, would brand them as losers and make them look small. In reality, of course, the inability to engage in reflection and self-criticism is the mark of a tiny, shriveled soul.

Idea for Impact: Changing Your Mind is Actually a Good Thing

Changing your mind based on new information isn’t bad. It’s something to be encouraged. As the Transcendentalist essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.”

In our vigilant, hypercritical, and judgmental society, the problem isn’t with people voicing and documenting their opinions (particularly on social media) but with people not being OK with someone changing theirs.

A professed commitment shouldn’t cause reluctance to change your opinion.

No One Has a Monopoly on Truth

September 15, 2020 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

The notion of god means different things to different people. Religions vary in identity and function. Almost all religions require their adherents to believe their specific religious doctrines with absolute certainty. These deep-seated beliefs and attitudes then become inflexible and are held with great zeal.

Closed Minds and Closed Hearts: Absolutism is Evil

Beware the Danger of Religious Certainty The self-righteous voices of fanaticism, the cruel voices of indifference and intolerance, and the uninformed voices of hate are revolting. Religious extremists are accountable for a lot of pain and suffering in the world. Crusades, inquisitions, faith-based discrimination and persecution, religious wars, and other forms of sheer hatred of other human beings are attributable to attitudes of hate and narrow-mindedness. Nothing deceives you as much as extreme passion.

The Scottish Anglican cleric Richard Holloway reflects on these concerns in Leaving Alexandria: A Memoir of Faith and Doubt (2014,)

Religions may begin as vehicles of longing for mysteries beyond description, but they end up claiming exclusive descriptive rights to them. They segue the ardor and uncertainty of seeking to the confidence and complacence of possession. They shift from poetry to packaging. Which is what people want. They don’t want to spend years wandering in the wilderness of doubt. They want the promised land of certainty, and religious realists are quick to provide it for them. The erection of infallible systems of belief is a well-understood device to still humanity’s fear of being lost in life’s dark wood without a compass. “Supreme conviction is a self-cure for the infestation of doubts.” That is why David Hume noted that, while errors in philosophy were only ridiculous, errors in religion were dangerous. They were dangerous because when supreme conviction is threatened it turns nasty.

COEXIST: Bumper Sticker Designed by Jerry Jaspar

Idea for Impact: Beware the Danger of Religious Certainty

We, humans, tend to have a profound need for certainty. It’s easy to embrace prepackaged convictions unquestionably and deny doubt. Most people draw their faith as children from their parents and never question their beliefs for the rest of their lives.

Religious certainty can provoke limitedness in the human condition. We always have to concede that we may be mistaken and learn to tolerate others’ attitudes that may actually bother us.

Be a voice for peace. Be a voice for humanity, for open-mindedness, for wisdom, for justice.

How to Embrace Uncertainty and Leave Room for Doubt

September 7, 2020 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

The value of sound decision-making is to be mainly sought from embracing uncertainty.

As the Presocratic philosopher Xenophanes proclaimed, “All we have is but a woven web of guesses.”

Physicist Richard Feynman on how doubt informs critical thinking and learning The physicist Richard P. Feynman often talked about how doubt informs critical thinking and learning. In a 1964 lecture on “What Is and What Should Be the Role of Scientific Culture in Modern Society,” published in The Pleasure of Finding Things Out (1999,) Feynman warned,

A scientist is never certain. We all know that. We know that all our statements are approximate statements with different degrees of certainty; that when a statement is made, the question is not whether it is true or false but rather how likely it is to be true or false. … Scientific knowledge is a body of statements of varying degrees of certainty — some most unsure, some nearly sure, none absolutely certain.

Science produces ignorance, and ignorance produces more science, reminded Feynman in a 1963 lecture on “The Uncertainty of Science” published in The Meaning of It All (1999,)

To solve any problem that has never been solved before, you have to leave the door to the unknown ajar. You have to permit the possibility that you do not have it exactly right. Otherwise, if you have made up your mind already, you might not solve it.

When the scientist tells you he does not know the answer, he is an ignorant man. When he tells you he has a hunch about how it is going to work, he is uncertain about it. When he is pretty sure of how it is going to work, and he tells you, “This is the way it’s going to work, I’ll bet,” he still is in some doubt. And it is of paramount importance, in order to make progress, that we recognize this ignorance and this doubt. Because we have the doubt, we then propose looking in new directions for new ideas. The rate of the development of science is not the rate at which you make observations alone but, much more important, the rate at which you create new things to test.

The Czechoslovakia-born Israeli American scientist Itzhak Bentov formulated the so-called “Bentov’s Law,” reiterating that science produces ignorance both deliberately and unintentionally. In Stalking the Wild Pendulum: On the Mechanics of Consciousness (1977,) Bentov wrote,

One’s level of ignorance increases exponentially with accumulated knowledge. When one acquires a bit of new information, there are many new questions that are generated by it, and each new piece of information breeds five-ten new questions. These questions pile up at a much faster rate than does accumulated knowledge. Therefore, the more one knows, the greater his level of ignorance.

How to Embrace Uncertainty and Leave Room for Doubt

Idea for Impact: If you can’t tolerate uncertainty and ambiguity, you may as well embrace a fanatical ideology.

Learning the boundaries of your knowledge—the shortcomings, caveats, hedges, and the standard deviations toward everything you think you know—hones decision-making.

In other words, to get to the right answers, you first have to ask the right questions. So the first thing is to ponder about is what questions to ask and how to ask them. What are the things you don’t know, and how can you reach out into these areas that may be new to you to uncover somethings about the world and yourself?

Once you discover the answers, you’ll realize that approximate statements and varying degrees of certainty will require you to think probabilistically. Your inquiry shouldn’t be, “Will I be right, or will I be wrong?” but rather “What is the probability of this scenario versus that, and how does this judgment impact my choices?”

Leave room for doubt, even in your highest conviction ideas. If not, you’ll risk becoming smug and self-satisfied.

Don’t Live in a World Ruled by Falsehoods

July 17, 2020 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

“Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away,” defined the American author Philip K. Dick.

Lying is second nature to us, and under the influence of improbable thinking, even idealism, we’ll hang ourselves if given enough rope. Rebekah Campbell of the New York Times observed,

A study by the University of Massachusetts found that 60 percent of adults could not have a 10-minute conversation without lying at least once. The same study found that 40 percent of people lie on their resumes and a whopping 90 percent of those looking for a date online lie on their profiles.

Most people lie about little things to make them look good. People lie to stave off the consequences of making a mistake, to buy more time or to spare someone’s feelings. Their hearts may be in the right place, but they are still telling lies.

Telling lies is the No. 1 reason entrepreneurs fail. Not because telling lies makes you a bad person but because the act of lying plucks you from the present, preventing you from facing what is really going on in your world. Every time you overreport a metric, underreport a cost, are less than honest with a client or a member of your team, you create a false reality and you start living in it.

Idea for Impact: Stop Living in a World of Illusions

Don't Live in a World Ruled by Falsehoods Live in the world of reality, not in the world of how you perceive reality.

Realistic thinking is grounded in an honest appraisal of all facts and data and conditions in different situations. Realistic thinking affords a clear-headed and conscious thought and behavior.

The great undertaking in life is to discover reality—to be truly honest and transparent with yourself about everything.

The meditation master Kalu Rinpoche wrote in The Dharma: That Illuminates All Beings Impartially Like the Light of the Sun and Moon (1986,)

You live in illusion, and the appearance of things.
There is a reality, but you do not know this.
When you understand this, you will see that you are nothing.
And being nothing, you are everything.
That is all.

Surrounded by Yes: Social Media and Elsewhere

June 18, 2020 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Social-Media Impose “Censorship” Through Recommendions and Filters

Google, Facebook, Amazon, and other media companies have built unbelievably powerful tools for collecting and organizing personal data. They’re developing and perfecting algorithms that track your activities and accumulate repositories of seemingly-trivial social media data.

They know whom you hang out with and what you like. And they can make extraordinarily good deductions about your demographics, social influences, political partisanship, social and economic preferences, and everything else. They’re influencing not just what content you see, but also which sites you visit in the first place.

These companies’ intentions are modest enough: to feed you the news you’re likely to want and to expose you to the kind of products and services you’re likely to respond to. The pages you’re shown are tailored for who you are, where you live, whom you interact with, and what you’ve previously clicked on.

The purveyors of the internet make money from advertising and paid subscriptions. Their goal is stickiness: they need traffic to thrive and prosper. Their success depends on their ability to draw you, keep you longer, and persuade you to return before you choose to leave.

Recommender systems have an enormous influence on the discourse you’re exposed to.

There’s a dangerous consequence here. What you should realize is that Google, Facebook, and Amazon have become gatekeepers of everything you see on the internet. Their content filtering and recommender systems are substituting editorial judgment. They’re not neutral and, given their economic objectives, often serve to amplify your biases.

The problem with filtering and recommender systems is that everybody likes them. The content you’re fed with is, in a sense, an endless stream of affirmations that you’re right—you’ll see more of what you’re interested in and associate with others who share your viewpoints. The consensus view is reinforced—the world seems to agree with you. Everything feels more normal!

On a broader scale, as people converge to likeminded people in virtual neighborhoods, you tend to operate in an intellectual bubble. Left to all these devices of today’s information-consumption patterns, much of your opinions and judgments are subjective, imprecise, incomplete, narrow-minded, or utterly unapprised.

All this has made it difficult for you to seek out contrasting views even if you feel so disposed. When you do venture out, all you’ll see are trolls who get offended by the slightest of disagreements—any attempt to challenge their beliefs is taken as a grievous insult. These trolls resort to bumper sticker-rhetoric, name-calling, demeaning attacks, and ill-informed declarations.

Idea for Impact: There’s Great Value in Listening Carefully and Charitably to Ideological Opponents.

Reach out. Consider alternative world-views that may cause you to philosophize differently. Find well-intentioned, respectful people who can challenge your viewpoints. Associate with ideological challengers who can help you improve your understanding of conflicting perspectives.

In On Being Certain: Believing You Are Right Even When You’re Not (2008,) neurologist and author Robert Burton argues that certainty is an emotion just like anger, passion, or sorrow. Once you develop a “that’s right” disposition about a subject matter, your brain subconsciously protects you from wasting its processing effort on problems for which it has already found a solution that you believe is good enough, and is continuously reinforced. In other words, your cerebral laziness could subconsciously lead you to “do less” by simply embracing a cast-iron certainty rather than re-examining your assumptions.

Don’t be lazy. Doggedly examine your biases and prejudices.

It’s Probably Not as Bad as You Think: The 20-40-60 Rule

May 5, 2020 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

The 20-40-60 Rule, believed to be written by humorist Will Rogers for his movie Life Begins at 40 (1935,) states,

When you are 20, you care about what everybody thinks of you.
When you are 40, you don’t care about what people think of you,
and when you are 60, you actually understand that people were too busy thinking about themselves.

In essence, don’t agonize about what other people are thinking about you. They’re perhaps busy worrying over what you’re thinking about them.

The 20-40-60 Rule became popular when venture capitalist Heidi Roizen cited it (incorrectly attributing it to the actress Shirley MacLaine) at a 2014 lecture at Stanford. First Round Capital’s Review has noted,

People have enormous capacity to beat themselves up over the smallest foibles—saying the wrong thing in a meeting, introducing someone using the wrong name. Weeks can be lost, important relationships avoided, productivity wasted, all because we’re afraid others are judging us. “If you find this happening to you, remember, no one is thinking about you as hard as you are thinking about yourself. So don’t let it all worry you so much.”

Idea for Impact: Don’t Beat Yourself Up Over Your Mistakes

Chances are, people around you aren’t nearly as critical of you as you are of yourself. No one’s going to remember or care about your mistakes, and neither should you.

Could Limiting Social Media Reduce Your Anxiety About Work?

July 15, 2019 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

In a recent article on “Facebook envy,” I wrote about how looking at the carefully curated lives of others on social media can provoke insecurities about one’s own accomplishments—or lack thereof.

In response, a blog reader directed me to journalist Keith Breene’s writeup about a study on why millennials aren’t happy at work. Here’s a précis:

Much of the stress and anxiety reported by twenty-somethings is caused by ruthless comparison with peers. Emerson Csorba, director of the consultancy Gen Y, reported one millennial describing the challenge like this: “If we are not doing something exceptional or don’t feel important and fulfilled for what we are doing, we have a hard time.”

Where is the pressure coming from? With millennials more connected than any previous generation, opportunities to compare levels of success are ubiquitous, creating anxiety and insecurity. The accomplishments of peers, shown on social media, are a constant prompt to examine millennials’ own successes or failures. The problem is made much worse by the fact that only positive achievements are posted—you only ever see the good stuff.

Even though everyone knows that social media is a kind of PR feed of people’s lives, when you spend so much time online, these messages can easily become overpowering.

Idea for Impact: Resist the Envious Consequence of Social Media

Everyone’s lives are far from perfect, notwithstanding the dreamy pictures they’re posting on social media.

Protect yourself and your own internal goodness from self-sabotage. Rejoice in your real accomplishments without needing to show off to anyone else or seek external validation. Care less for what other people think.

Life isn’t a competition. There isn’t a race to the finish lines.

Furthermore, making others envious should never be a motivation for curating your social media posts. Nothing good comes from trying to be the envy of others.

Disproven Hypotheses Are Useful Too

June 21, 2018 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Hypotheses are conjectures—often merely proposals or intuitions—about what may constitute facts.

A specific hypothesis can be tested for its adequacy and proved correct or incorrect using the scientific method. Sometimes, a hypothesis is accepted for the time being, until further evidence suggests an amendment.

It does not matter if a certain hypothesis is proven incorrect because, in itself, the falsification of a hypothesis can offer precious insight about the “what is not” to enhance the “what is.”

Hypotheses are the bedrock of scholarship. Scientific understanding accrues when many interrelated and tested hypotheses are used to develop theories, and rethink and restructure our knowledge.

Conviction

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Politicians Will Often Flip-flop to Maximize Their Popularity

The ‘Saying-Is-Believing’ Effect

Publicly committing to an answer makes people less receptive to information suggesting they were wrong

Idea for Impact: Changing Your Mind is Actually a Good Thing

Wondering what to read next?

Closed Minds and Closed Hearts: Absolutism is Evil

Idea for Impact: Beware the Danger of Religious Certainty

Wondering what to read next?

The value of sound decision-making is to be mainly sought from embracing uncertainty.

Idea for Impact: If you can’t tolerate uncertainty and ambiguity, you may as well embrace a fanatical ideology.

Wondering what to read next?

Idea for Impact: Stop Living in a World of Illusions

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Social-Media Impose “Censorship” Through Recommendions and Filters

Recommender systems have an enormous influence on the discourse you’re exposed to.

Idea for Impact: There’s Great Value in Listening Carefully and Charitably to Ideological Opponents.

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Idea for Impact: Don’t Beat Yourself Up Over Your Mistakes

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Idea for Impact: Resist the Envious Consequence of Social Media

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