Forming an Educated Opinion Takes Time and Effort That We Never Put
Or, as much as we’d like to believe, facts don’t change our minds
👋 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.
It’s a collection of weekly explorations and inquiries into many curiosities, such as business, human nature, society, and life’s big questions. My primary goal is to give you some new perspective to think about things.
I’m visiting my native place where I grew up. Some of my childhood friends are here and I’m spending a lot of time with them.
I’m also doing a lot of reading. For the first time ever I’m reading as many as 20 books on various topics at the same time. It’s a personal experiment. I’m trying to find an efficient way to read various subjects and find how they connect with each other.
I’m also dedicating a good chunk of time learning iOS Development. But similar to reading books I’m also learning frontend development in React on the side. Whenever I get fatigued with one, I switch to the other. This keeps things moving.
Now, it’s time to read and learn.
A request: If you like this essay, could you do me a favour and hit that 🤍 heart so that it becomes a ♥️ heart? This helps me understand what kind of topics I should write more about. This also signals Substack that more people should read this essay.
Q: How do we make sure that we aren’t fooling ourselves?
Ellie Arroway is a scientist searching for extraterrestrial life. She’s listening for radio signals from outer space in the New Mexico desert waiting for E.T. to phone from home.
A loud signal rises above the cosmic noise and jolts her awake. “Holy shit,” she blurts, and speeds wildly to her office. Once back at the office, she yells at her colleagues, “Make me a liar!” It’s an invitation to prove her wrong.
The fellow scientists come up with various alternative hypotheses about the source of the signal. It could be AWACS. But the status of AWACS is negative, so that’s ruled out. Other possible sources are also checked off. NORAD’s not tracking any snoops in this vector. The Space Shuttle Endeavor is in sleep mode. Arroway also checks FUDD to confirm that the signal came from space and not from Earth.
The point source of the signal is later determined. It’s a star called Vega. But instead of settling on the answer, the team immediately moves to prove this hypothesis wrong: Vega is too close, it’s too young to have developed intelligent life, and it has been scanned a bunch of times before with negative results.
But the unmistakable signal is a sequence of prime numbers—a clear sign of intelligence. But it could be a spoof, a glitch, a delusion—any number of things could have led her team astray. She knows that the discovery has to be independently confirmed.
She dials a colleague in Parks Observatory, which hosts a radio telescope in New South Wales, Australia. The Aussie colleague confirms the signal.
“Do you have a source location yet?” Arroway asks, without revealing her own findings.
“We put it right smack in the middle,” the Australian replies. After a brief pause he adds, “Vega.”
This is a scene from the movie Contact which is based on a novel authored by Carl Sagan. Ellie Arroway is the name of the character played by Jodie Foster.
Although fictional, this story presents an important process followed by scientists that all of us ought to emulate: how not to fool yourself.
The first thing to note is what Arroway does not do. Even when she hears a distinct signal that appears to be a sign of intelligent life, she refrains from immediately blurting out an opinion about what the signal might mean. But in reality, we do the opposite. We accept the first thing that confirms our beliefs as truth. We jump from “This sounds right to me” to “This is true” in no time.
As much as we would like to believe, facts don’t change our minds. The mind is stubborn, and no matter how strong the facts are, we undervalue evidence that contradicts our beliefs and overvalue evidence that confirms them. Ironically, the same brain that empowers rational thinking also skews our judgments.
In a study of over two hundred people, two-thirds of the participants refused the opportunity to win extra money by listening to the other side’s arguments on same-sex marriage. They didn’t turn down the money because they already knew what the other side thought or because they knew that they were right. The participants explained that hearing the opposing views would be too frustrating and discomforting to them. The case was same for participants on both sides of the argument.
Being certain about our views feels good, and we get a dopamine hit every time we read a confirming fact. In contrast, hearing opposing views is genuinely unpleasant, so much so that people are ready to turn down cash just to stay in their bubble.
Forming an educated opinion takes time and effort that we never put. As a result we form opinions with zero research. This presents a serious problem.
Once we form an opinion, we fall in love with it. As we flaunt it around, it becomes part of our identity. We become a liberal or a conservative, a paleo or a vegan, a pro-life or a pro-choice person, a neo-liberal or a pro-regulation.
This is when changing our opinion becomes hard because it calls for changing our identity. This is when dissent turns into an existential death match. After a point, we simply shutoff our system, and stop listening to counter-arguments altogether, even when money is offered.
This happens because our opinions weren’t ours to begin with. They were other people’s ideas we borrowed from some video, article, debate, comment, etc. Since we didn’t do the work, they didn’t stand a chance in front of the first set of counter-arguments.
While there’s no shortcut to forming opinions, a good trick to refrain from flaunting it while you are working on it is to refer it as a Working Hypothesis.
Working means it’s a work in progress. Working means it’s less than final. Working means the hypothesis can be changed or abandoned, depending on the facts.
Opinions are defended, but working hypotheses are tested. The test is performed, not for the sake of the hypothesis, but for the sake of facts. Some hypotheses mature into theories, but many others don’t. At any point, it’s better to reject a wrong hypothesis after rigorous research than carry it around by ignoring the facts.
As Ozan Varol writes, “No one comes equipped with a critical-thinking chip that diminishes the human tendency to let personal beliefs distort the facts. Regardless of our intelligence, Feynman’s adage holds true: The first principle is that you must not fool yourself—and you are the easiest person to fool.”
Interesting Finds
The Data Behind a Once-a-Week Strength Routine — There’s good news and bad news in a remarkable new multi-year study of nearly 15,000 people who followed an ultra-minimalist strength training plan involving just one short workout a week. The good news is that the training really works, despite taking less than 20 minutes a week all in street clothes. The bad news is that it eventually stops working, or at least gets less effective.
Why We Can’t Stop Longing for the Good Old Days — People in many countries are longing for the good old days. When asked if life in their country is better or worse today than 50 years ago, 31% of Britons, 41% of Americans and 46% of the French say it’s worse. Psychologists say that this kind of nostalgia is natural and sometimes even useful: Anchoring our identity in the past helps give us a sense of stability and predictability.
On “Getting” Poetry — A subscriber to this magazine writes with a problem: “Although I have advanced university degrees, I have never ‘gotten’ poetry.” He’s not alone; I hear the same thing regularly from people who love to read novels and biographies, who are undaunted by string quartets and abstract paintings, but find poetry a closed door. No one is more aware of this disconnect between poetry and the reading public than poets themselves.
This is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things — This video is about stuff: light bulbs, printers, phones and why they aren’t getting better with time.
What I’m Reading
Certain character traits encourage the mental-models method to blossom. Fortunately, these are mostly traits you can choose: intellectual curiosity, integrity, patience, and self-criticism. Problem-solving success is not just a matter of IQ. As Munger notes, the great naturalist Charles Darwin’s worldview-changing results reflect more his working method than his raw intellect. On the flip side, examples abound of smart people making bad decisions, often showing inflexibility or a failure to appreciate psychology’s lessons.
— Michael J. Mauboussin, More Than You Know
Tiny Thought
Laziness is a slippery slope. The less you do, the easier it is for you to do less. There is truth in the old saying that if you want something done, you should ask a busy person to do it.
Don’t be busy for the sake of being busy. Be busy to build momentum so that you can get more done.
Until next Sunday,
Abhishek