Efficiency Is Far More Important to Us Than Accuracy
Or, we hear something and we instantly believe it to be true
đ Hey there! My name is Abhishek. Welcome to a new edition of The Sunday Wisdom! This is the best way to learn new things with the least amount of effort.
Itâs a collection of weekly explorations and inquiries into many curiosities, such as business, human nature, society, and lifeâs big questions. My primary goal is to give you some new perspective to think about things.
In his book Sapiens, Yuval Noah Harari talks about how our language has evolved as a way of gossiping. Even today the vast majority of human communicationâwhether in the form of emails, phone calls, or newspaper columnsâis majorly gossip.
In the beginning, gossip gave us an advantage over apes, and thereby helped in the progress of Homo Sapiens. Later, gossip helped human beings form social groups and bands, and thereby helped in the progress of our civilisation. In practice, gossip is sometimes not very distinguishable from information, and most of the time hearsay becomes factâthatâs where lies the problem.
Letâs take an example. You are a cricket aficionado. Youâre a big fan of Sachin Tendulkar. You know all about himâhis centuries, his ducks, his nervous 90sâeverything. While discussing the 2011 World Cup with your friend, and singing praises about the Indian team, MS Dhoni, and Sachin, you gush, âAnd of course, Sachin was the lead run scorer for the tournament.â
Then your friend says, âWanna bet?â
Suddenly, youâre not so sure. That challenge puts you on your heels, causing you to back off your declaration and question the belief that you just declared with such assurance.
In her phenomenal book Thinking in Bets, poker star Annie Duke writes that when someone challenges us to bet on a belief, signalling their confidence that our belief maybe inaccurate in some way, it triggers us to vet the belief, making us look into the evidence that informed us.
Letâs take a step back, and try to understand how beliefs are formed. This is how you think you form beliefs:
You hear something.
You think about it and vet it, determining whether it is true or false.
Only after that, you form your belief.
But itâs not true. We usually donât engage in such level of scrutiny about everything we hear. It turns out we actually form abstract beliefs this way:
We hear something
We believe it to be true
Only sometimes, later, if we have the time or the inclination, we think about it and vet it, determining whether it is, in fact, true or false.
While the process of formation of beliefs isnât the most accurate, we all can appreciate the fact that it is surely very efficient.
You see, back in the day efficiency was important for us to go on with life â far more important than accuracy. Stopping to scrutinise every little thing we heard would have decremented our progress, especially in the early days of Homo Sapiens. If somebody shouted âTiger!â we didnât have the luxury to stop and ponder. If there was no tiger, all was well. But on those rare occasions when there was, those who stopped and pondered got eaten. We are the descendants of those who quickly formed beliefs and fled the scene.
While this process was every helpful back then, since there are no tigers roaming around, it can hurt us now, especially in high-stake situations.
âWanna bet?â triggers us to engage in the step that we only sometimes get toâvetting our preconceived notions and beliefs. Being asked if we are willing to bet on our beliefs makes us examine our information in a less biased way, be more honest with ourselves about how sure we are about our beliefs, and be more open to updating and calibrating our them upon finding counter-evidence. Thinking in Bets is a good way to avoid confirmation bias.
Of course, I am not suggesting that we put money on all sorts of claims. Iâm making a point that we often overstate our conclusions and beliefs without conscious examination. Offering a (hypothetical) wager brings the risk out in the open, making explicit what is implicit and frequently overlooked.
If you have a strong belief about something, anything, you can do a thought experiment and ask yourself, âWould I bet on it?â to test really how strong your opinions and beliefs are. This self-examination will weed our a lot of ill-defined notions and bring a lot of clarity of thought and judgement.
Also, after close inspection if you happen to conclude that you are still uncertain about your beliefs, itâs totally fine as well. Whether we realise it or not, we are very likely to be unsure about a lot of things. Now itâs completely upto us if we want to make our position stronger by doing some research, or let it go. While trivial facts (such as whether Sachin was the lead run scorer) can be easily looked up, abstract opinions and ideas (such as market positions and startup ideas) would require heavy duty work in order to vet them. Itâs advisable to do the work only if the upside is higher than the downside.
Charlie Munger said, âWe all are learning, modifying, or destroying ideas all the time. Rapid destruction of your ideas when the time is right is one of the most valuable qualities you can acquire.â Thinking in bets is a quick way to destroy false beliefs, and it also acts as a precursor to form strong opinions.
Thinking in Bets is very likely to make us realise that there is always a degree of uncertainty, that we are generally less sure than we think we were, and that practically nothing is black and white, 0% or 100%.
The more we recognise that we are betting on our beliefs, the more we are likely to temper our statements, getting closer to the truth as we acknowledge the risk inherent in what we believe. Thinking in bets makes us put our necks on the line i.e., gives us skin in the game.
An Idea For You
We need to accept the fact that we wonât always make the right decisions. We will royally screw up sometimes.
Understand that failure is not the opposite of success. Itâs a part of success.
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The Atheist Delusion â âAn atmosphere of moral panic surrounds religion. Viewed not so long ago as a relic of superstition whose role in society was steadily declining, it is now demonised as the cause of many of the world's worst evils. As a result, there has been a sudden explosion in the literature of proselytising atheism.â
How to Write Usefully â âWhat should an essay be? Many people would say persuasive. That's what a lot of us were taught essays should be. But I think we can aim for something more ambitious: that an essay should be useful.â
The past three editions of Sunday Wisdom: 27, 26, and 25.
Worth Thinking About
Creativity requires the courage to let go of certainties.
â Erich Fromm
Before You GoâŚ
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