Critical Thinking

The Unthinking Habits of Your Mind // Book Summary of David McRaney’s ‘You Are Not So Smart’

April 1, 2021 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Psychologists have argued that many cognitive biases are rooted in mental shortcuts. They are heuristics—rules of thumb, stereotypes, instincts—that help you make sense of the world. They aren’t intrinsically flawed, but, they’re often quirky and error-prone. Your mental models can affect you in ways that you don’t suspect.

David McRaney’s You Are Not So Smart (2011) suggests a brief—if hurried—tour of 48 cognitive biases that can deceive you. Based on the author’s popular blog, the book is a satisfying assessment of understanding people’s—and your own—behavior a little bit better.

There is a growing body of work coming out of psychology and cognitive science that says you have no clue why you act the way you do, choose the things you choose, or think the thoughts you think. … From the greatest scientist to the most humble artisan, every brain within every body is infested with preconceived notions and patterns of thought that lead it astray without the brain knowing it. So you are in good company.

Each chapter starts with a brief statement of a misconception followed by the fact. Then a synopsis of a related behavioral study shows how our brains produce the counterpart deception and the truth. Some of the less-known preconceptions discussed are,

Confabulation. You tend to create unreliable narratives to explain away your choices post hoc. These reassuring perceptions can make you think you’re more rational than you actually are.
Groupthink. People tend to fall in with the rest of the group to minimize conflict and foster group cohesiveness and social acceptance. No one wants to be the one person with a dissenting opinion.
Social Loafing. That others in a team will pick up your slack may induce you to put in less effort if you think you’ll get away with it. This can curb your own performance, even if you’re a conscientious, hardworking type. If you don’t feel your participation will be noticed, why bother putting in the effort?
Availability Heuristic. You’re likely to estimate the likelihood of an event based on your ability to recall immediate and easily accessed examples.
Fundamental Attribution Error. You tend to assign external reasons for your own behavior but internal motives to other people. For instance, if you’re late for a meeting, you’ll blame it on public transport. If someone else is running late for a meeting with you, you’ll blame it on her poor time-keeping.

Recommendation: Read David McRaney’s You Are Not So Smart. It’s an engaging, easy-to-read primer to how the mind works. Read it as a lead up to Daniel Kahneman’s bestselling dissertation Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011; summary forthcoming.)

Idea for Impact: Once you learn to spot the cognitive biases we all grapple with, they’re easier to overcome.

Five Ways … You Could Avoid Being Wrong

March 20, 2021 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Beware exaggeration of a kernel of truth. For instance: indeed, many of us don’t realize our full intellectual potential; but that doesn’t give credence to the notion that most people use only 10% of their brainpower. Besides, beware of overstatements of small differences. Sure, men and women tend to differ somewhat in their communication styles, but declaring that “men are from Mars” and “women are from Venus” is taking a kernel of reality to an extreme, not to mention coercing psychology into stereotypes.
Don’t infer causation from correlation. Don’t be tempted to conclude that if two things co-occur statistically, they must be causally related to each other. (Rabbi Harold Kushner once asserted that circumcision seems to increase men’s chances of winning a Nobel Prize.) Seek contending explanation.
Beware biased sampling and extrapolation. Inferences from a biased sample are not as trustworthy as conclusions from a truly random sample—e.g., don’t ask people coming out of Sunday Mass if they have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ and infer that Americans are turning to God. Don’t ascribe to the whole any attribute of the part.
Don’t let stress impair your problem-solving capabilities. As many airline disasters confirm (example, example, example,) speed can narrow your cognitive map—small errors can quickly become linked up and amplified into disastrous outcomes. When you feel rushed, you’re likely to miss details. You’re not present enough in the moment to notice what’s important and make the most beneficial choices.
Beware argumentum ad nauseam. Don’t confuse a statement’s familiarity (such as urban legends) with its accuracy. The fact that you’ve heard a claim repeated over and over again (think of President Trump’s allegations of widespread voter fraud,) sometimes with rearranged phrasing and substitute terms, doesn’t make it correct.

Bonus: Be suspicious of any claim that doesn’t come with counterarguments or disconfirming evidence.

The Data Never “Says”

March 1, 2021 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

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.

Leadership is Being Visible at Times of Crises

February 25, 2021 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

It’s terrible optics for an elected official to leave his constituency while it’s in the midst of a crisis.

In a grave slip-up for an ambitious politician, Texas Senator Ted Cruz’s giving a lame excuse initially for his Cancún joint made him look insensitive. He was expected to stay and endure alongside his constituents, who were suffering from Texas’s recent freezing temperatures and blackouts.

Of course, Cruz didn’t do anything that hurt anybody, apart from drawing police resources away to shepherd him through the airport. Cruz’s argument—sensible in its own way—was that all he could do was be in regular communication with state and local officials who’re spearheading the crisis response. After all, Cruz has no formal power in the state administration.

As a comparison, King George and the Queen Mother declined to leave London as bombs shattered their city during World War II. As an expression of concern, and commitment to the Allied cause, they even visited sites destroyed during The Blitz of 1940.

Idea for Impact: Leadership means serving as an anchor during crisis times and being available, connected, and accessible during a crisis. Leaders can’t do everything, and they need to delegate responsibilities. However, entrustment should not entail emotional detachment.

How to Avoid Magical Thinking

February 22, 2021 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Magical thinking remains a subtle impediment to making sound decisions. The more you examine yourself, the more you can reduce your tendency to indulge in it.

Discover the truth for yourself. Beware of the tendency to let others think for you. Don’t believe what your parents, teachers, counselors, mentors, priests, and authorities of all inclinations have taught you from an early age. (The best predictor of people’s spiritual beliefs is the religiosity of their parents.) Question others’ underlying premises and discover for yourself what’s reasonable. Force yourself to test for alternatives.

Don’t believe what you want to believe is true. Many people believe in UFOs and ghosts, even when there’s no credible verification for any visitation from outer space or dead souls haunting abandoned buildings. Often, misinformation is cunningly designed to evade careful analytical reasoning—it can easily slip under the radar of even the most well-informed people. Shun blind optimism.

Consciously identify your biases and adverse instincts. Psychologists have identified more than 100 cognitive biases that can get in the way of clear and rational thinking. Explore how those biases could come into play in your thinking. Try to determine their motive. Work to extricate yourself from them to the best of your ability.

Demand proof when the facts seem demonstrable. Remain intellectually agnostic toward what hasn’t been established scientifically or isn’t provable. If you can’t determine if something is true or it isn’t, suspend judgment. Beware of anecdotes—emotionally swaying stories in particular—they are the weakest form of evidence.

Don’t believe in something that isn’t true just because there’s a practical reason to. If you feel emotionally inclined to believe in something because it gives you hope, comfort, and the illusion of control, identify your belief as just that. Faith is often no more than an inclination that’s not withstood the tests of reason. The process of faith is an absence of doubt. There’ll always be people who reject evolution for reasons that have little to do with evolution. Don’t act with more confidence in unproven theories than is justifiable.

Idea for Impact: Be wary of the influences that can put you at risk for magical thinking.

Give critical thinking and systematic evidence the central role in how you understand the world. Improving the criteria you use to judge the truth of things is difficult—but it’s of the essence. Have an unvarying, well-balanced degree of skepticism about everything, especially your own postulations.

Never Accept an Anecdote at Face Value

February 19, 2021 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Human beings generally find anecdotes highly compelling. We’re not transformed as much by facts and statistics as we are by stories.

But anecdotes aren’t often objective. Anecdotes are uncontrolled individual observations—sometimes no more than one.

Reported experience is subjective. Our recollections are ever-changing, and they’re often amazingly imprecise. We often misrepresent events to agree with the audience—even embellish with made-up minutiae to render our stories more compelling.

And for that reason, anecdotes are usually the weakest form of evidence. Anecdotes are subject to a host of biases such as confirmation bias, generalization, and cherry-picking. Moreover, for every anecdote, an equal and contrary anecdote can be proffered.

Idea for Impact: Be deeply suspicious of anecdotes. Arguments that draw on anecdotal evidence to make broad generalizations are liable to be fallacious.

A Real Lesson from the Downfall of Theranos: Silo Mentality

February 4, 2021 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

The extraordinary rise and fall of Theranos, Silicon Valley’s biggest fraud, makes an excellent case study on what happens when teams don’t loop each other in.

Theranos’ blood-testing device never worked as glorified by its founder and CEO, Elizabeth Holmes. She created an illusion that became one of the greatest start-up stories. She kept her contraption’s malfunctions and her company’s problems shockingly well hidden—even from her distinguished board of directors.

At the core of Holmes’s sham was how she controlled the company’s flow of information

Holmes and her associate (and then-lover) Sunny Balwani operated a culture of fear and intimidation at Theranos. They went to such lengths as hiring superstar lawyers to intimidate and silence employees and anyone else who dared to challenge their methods or expose their devices’ deficiencies.

Holmes had the charade going for so long by keeping a tight rein on who talked to whom. She controlled the flow of information within the company. Not only that, she swiftly fired people who dared to question her approach. She also forcefully imposed non-disclosure agreements even for those exiting the company.

In other words, Holmes went to incredible lengths to create and maintain a silo mentality in her startup. Her intention was to wield much power, prevent employees from talking to each other, and perpetuate her deceit.

A recipe for disaster at Theranos: Silo mentality and intimidation approach

Wall Street Journal investigative reporter John Carreyrou’s book Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup (2018; my summary) is full of stories of how Holmes went out of her way to restrain employees from conferring about what they were working on. Even if they worked on the same project, Holmes made siloed functional teams report to her directly. She would edit progress reports before redirecting problems to other team heads.

Consider designer Ed Ku’s mechatronics team responsible for designing all the intricate mechanisms that control the measured flow of biochemical fluids. Some of his team’s widgets were overheating, impinging on one another and cross-contaminating the clinical fluids. Holmes wouldn’t allow Ku and his team to talk to the teams that improved the biochemical processes.

Silo mentality can become very problematic when communication channels become too constricted and organizational processes too bureaucratic. Creativity gets stifled, collaboration limited, mistakes—misdeeds in the case of Theranos—suppressed, and collective objectives misaligned.

Idea for Impact: Functional silos make organizations slow, bureaucratic, and complicated

Innovation hinges increasingly on interdisciplinary cooperation. Examine if your leadership attitude or culture is unintentionally contributing to insufficient accountability, inadequate information-sharing, and limited collaboration between departments—especially on enterprise-wide initiatives.

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.

How to Own Your Future

January 14, 2021 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Work seems to be shifting faster than ever. The New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman provides a particularly emblematic example of the profound changes in the way people work and the way organizations design jobs and work environments:

Work is being disconnected from jobs, and jobs and work are being disconnected from companies, which are increasingly becoming platforms. A great example of this is what’s ha ppening in the cab business. Traditional local cab companies own cars and have employees who have a job; they drive those cars. But, now they’re competing with Uber, which owns no cars, has no employees, and just provides a platform of work that brings together ride-needers and ride-providers.

Adaptivity via Self-Directed Learning

Dramatic economic, social, and technological changes necessitate professionals at all levels to be almost continuously trained and re-trained just to keep abreast of all facets of working life.

The career implication of this continuous transformation is the increasing need for ongoing learning. You’ll have to equip yourself to stay ahead of changes. In other words, you’ll need a growth mindset to learn, apply, reorient, and keep learning.

More Will Be Now on You

You’ll need to be self-directed. You’ll need to take the initiative and responsibility for the learning process. You’ll need to recognize training needs and choose how you’ll meet these needs rather than rely on your organization to tell you what to learn and how to do it. The smarter organizations out there are enabling and promoting individual choice and self-directed and self-determined learning.

What will set successful professionals apart in the future is that they take responsibility for their continuous learning. They proactively explore what they may be interested in and what the future will demand instead of indifferently waiting for options to present themselves.

Idea for Impact: Own Your Learning

Set your sights on a long career with multiple stages, each involving ongoing training and re-skilling. If you want to achieve career greatness, you will likely find your current skill sets obsolete in less than five years without self-directed learning.

Develop a growth mindset that’ll help you grow, expand, evolve, and change.

What the Duck!

December 28, 2020 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

There’s a popular technique among programmers called “rubber duck debugging:” put a rubber duck (or a cardboard cutout of a dog) next to your computer, and whenever you get stuck, you talk to the duck.

Yes, you talk your problem and walk your code with that inanimate object. And you perpetuate the stereotype that we geeks are a socially awkward bunch.

“Showing It to Someone Else” isn’t just a way of telling the other what you think; it’s a way of telling yourself what you think. Just the act of slowing down and explaining your problem and its context can bring about a moment of illumination.

Rubber duck debugging is related to what psychologists call “incubation.” The best solutions can strike suddenly and unexpectedly when you aren’t actively working on your problem. Think of Archimedes and his Eureka moment.

Idea for Impact: Talking is often a part of thought. After many failed attempts, switching your brain from problem-solving to problem-explaining—even to a cat, parent, sympathetic coworker, or somebody who may not know much about whatever it is that’s bothering you—can break you free from fixation and trigger creative breakthroughs.

Hat tip to reader Nick Ashcroft.

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Critical Thinking

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Idea for Impact: Be wary of the influences that can put you at risk for magical thinking.

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At the core of Holmes’s sham was how she controlled the company’s flow of information

A recipe for disaster at Theranos: Silo mentality and intimidation approach

Idea for Impact: Functional silos make organizations slow, bureaucratic, and complicated

Wondering what to read next?

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Adaptivity via Self-Directed Learning

More Will Be Now on You

Idea for Impact: Own Your Learning

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