After reading several weeks worth of discussions on the Tentec Reflector,
here's what a friend of mine had to say about the current level of Orion
discussions. And oh does this fit.
73
Bob, K4TAX
Why smart people defend bad ideas
We all know someone that's intelligent, but who occasionally defends
obviously bad ideas. Why does this happen? How can smart people take up
positions that defy any reasonable logic? Having spent many years working
with smart people I've catalogued many of the ways this happens, and I have
advice on what to do about it. I feel qualified to write this essay as I'm a
recovering smart person myself and I've defended several very bad ideas. So
if nothing else this serves as a kind of personal therapy session. However,
I fully suspect you'll get more than just entertainment value out of what I
have to say on this topic.
Success at defending bad ideas
I'm not proud to admit that I have a degree in Logic and Computation from
Carnegie Mellon University. Majoring in logic is not the kind of thing that
makes people want to talk to you at parties, or read your essays. But one
thing I did learn after years of studying advanced logic theory is that
proficiency in argument can easily be used to overpower others, even when
you are dead wrong. If you learn a few tricks of logic and debate, you can
refute the obvious, and defend the ridiculous. If the people you're arguing
with aren't as comfortable in the tactics of argument, or aren't as arrogant
as you are, they may even give in and agree with you.
The problem with smart people is that they like to be right and sometimes
will defend ideas to the death rather than admit they're wrong. This is bad.
Worse, if they got away with it when they were young (say, because they were
smarter than their parents, their friends, and their parent's friends) they've
probably built an ego around being right, and will therefore defend their
perfect record of invented righteousness to the death. Smart people often
fall into the trap of preferring to be right even if it's based in delusion,
or results in them, or their loved ones, becoming miserable. (Somewhere in
your town there is a row of graves at the cemetery, called smarty-pants
lane, filled with people who were buried at poorly attended funerals, whose
headstones say "Well, at least I was right.")
Until they come face to face with someone who is tenacious enough to dissect
their logic, and resilient enough to endure the thinly veiled intellectual
abuse they dish out during debate (e.g. "You don't really think that do
you?" or "Well if you knew the <insert obscure reference here>
rule/law/corollary you wouldn't say such things"), they're never forced to
question their ability to defend bad ideas. Opportunities for this are rare:
a new boss, a new co-worker, a new spouse. But if their obsessive-ness about
being right is strong enough, they'll reject those people out of hand before
they question their own biases and self-manipulations. It can be easier for
smart people who have a habit of defending bad ideas to change jobs,
spouses, or cities rather than honestly examine what is at the core of their
psyche (and often, their misery).
Short of obtaining a degree in logic, or studying the nuances of debate,
remember this one simple rule for defusing those who are skilled at
defending bad ideas: Simply because they cannot be proven wrong, does not
make them right. Most of the tricks of logic and debate refute questions and
attacks, but fail to establish any true justification for a given idea.
For example, just because you can't prove that I'm not the king of France
reincarnated doesn't make it so. So when someone tells you "My plan A is the
best because no one has explained how it will fail" know that there is a
logical gap in this argument. Simply because no one has described how it
will fail, doesn't necessarily make it the best plan. It's possible than
plans B, C, D and E all have the same quality, or that the reason no one has
described how A will fail is that no one has had more than 30 seconds to
scrutinize the plan. As we'll discuss later, diffusing bad thinking requires
someone (probably you) to construct a healthier framework around the bad
thinking that shows it for what it is.
The second stop on our tour of commonly defended bad ideas is the seemingly
friendly notion of communal thinking. Just because everyone in the room is
smart doesn't mean that collectively they will arrive at smart ideas. The
power of peer pressure is that it works on our psychology, not our
intellect. As social animals we are heavily influenced by how the people
around us behave, and the quality of our own internal decision making varies
widely depending on the environment we currently are in. (e.g. Try to write
a haiku poem while standing in an elevator with 15 opera singers screaming
15 different operas, in 15 different languages, in falsetto, directly at you
vs. sitting on a bench in quiet stretch of open woods).
That said, the more homogeneous a group of people are in their thinking, the
narrower the range of ideas that the group will openly consider. The more
open minded, creative, and courageous, a group is, the wider the pool of
ideas they'll be capable of exploring.
Some teams of people look to focus groups, consultancies, and research
methods to bring in outside ideas, but this rarely improves the quality of
thinking in the group itself. Those outside ideas, however bold or original,
are at the mercy of the diversity of thought within the group itself. If the
group, as a collective, is only capable of approving B level work, it doesn't
matter how many A level ideas you bring to it. Focus groups or other outside
sources of information can not give a team, or its leaders, a soul. A bland
homogeneous team of people has no real opinions, because it consists of
people with same backgrounds, outlooks, and experiences who will only feel
comfortable discussing the safe ideas that fit into those constraints.
If you want your smart people to be as smart as possible, seek a diversity
of ideas. Find people with different experiences, opinions, backgrounds,
weights, heights, races, facial hair styles, colors, past-times, favorite
items of clothing, philosophies, and beliefs. Unify them around the results
you want, not the means or approaches they are expected to use. It's the
only way to guarantee that the best ideas from your smartest people will be
received openly by the people around them. On your own, avoid homogenous
books, films, music, food, sex, media and people. Actually experience life
by going to places you don't usually go, spending time with people you don't
usually spend time with. Be in the moment and be open to it. Until recently
in human history, life was much less predictable and we were forced to
encounter things not always of our own choosing. We are capable of more
interesting and creative lives than our modern cultures often provide for
us. If you go out of you way to find diverse experiences it will become
impossible for you to miss ideas simply because your homogenous outlook
filtered them out.
Thinking at the wrong level
At any moment on any project there are an infinite number of levels of
problem solving. Part of being a truly smart person is to know which level
is the right one at a given time. For example, if you are skidding out of
control at 95 mph in your broken down Winnebago on an ice covered
interstate, when a semi-truck filled with both poorly packaged fireworks and
loosely bundled spark plugs slams on its brakes, it's not the right time to
discuss with your passengers where y'all would like to stop for dinner. But
as ridiculous as this scenario sounds, it happens all the time. People worry
about the wrong thing at the wrong time and apply their intelligence in ways
that doesn't serve the greater good of whatever they're trying to achieve.
Some call this difference in skill wisdom, in that the wise know what to be
thinking about, where as the merely intelligent only know how to think. (The
de-emphasis of wisdom is an east vs. west dichotomy: eastern philosophy
heavily emphasizes deeper wisdom, where-as the post enlightenment west, and
perhaps particularly America, heavily emphasizes the intellectual flourishes
of intelligence).
In the software industry, the common example of thinking at the wrong level
is a team of rock star programmers who can make anything, but don't really
know what to make: so they tend to build whatever things come to mind, never
stopping to find someone who might not be adept at writing code, but can see
where the value of their programming skills would be best applied. Other
examples include people that always worry about money despite how much they
have, people who struggle with relationships but invest their energy only in
improving their appearance (instead of in therapy or other emotional
exploration), or anyone that wants to solve problem X but only ever seems to
do things that solve problem Y.
The primary point is that no amount of intelligence can help an individual
who is diligently working at the wrong level of the problem. Someone with
wisdom has to tap them on the shoulder and say, "Um, hey. The hole you're
digging is very nice, and it is the right size. But you're in the wrong
yard."
Killed in the long term by short term thinking
>From what we know of evolution it's clear that we are alive because of our
inherited ability to think quickly and respond to change. The survival of
living creatures, for most of the history of our planet, has been a short
term game. Only if you can out-run your predators, and catch your prey, do
you have the luxury of worrying about tomorrow.
It follows then that we tend to be better at worrying about and solving
short term issues than long term issues. Even when we recognize an important
long term issue that we need to plan for, say protecting natural resources
or saving for retirement, we're all too easily distracted away from those
deep thoughts by immediate things like dinner or sex (important things no
doubt, but the driving needs in these pursuits, at least for this half of
the species, are short term in nature). Once distracted, we rarely return to
the long term issues we were drawn away from.
A common justification for abuse of short term thinking is the fake
perspective defense. The wise, but less confident guy says "hey - are you
sure we should be doing this." And the smart, confident, but less wise guy
says "of course. We did this last time, and the time before that, so why
shouldn't we do this again?". This is the fake perspective defense because
there's no reason to believe that 2 points of data (e.g. last time + the
time before that) is sufficient to make claims about the future. People say
similar things all the time in defense of the free market economy,
democracy, and mating strategies. "Well, its gotten us this far, and it's
the best system we have". Well, maybe. But if you were in that broken down
Winnebago up to your ankles in gasoline from a leaking tank, smoking a
cigarette in each hand, you could say the same thing.
Put simply, the fact that you're not dead yet doesn't mean that the things
you've done up until now shouldn't have, by all that is fair in the
universe, already killed you. You might just need a few more data points for
the law of averages to catch up, and put a permanent end to your short term
thinking.
How many data points you need to feel comfortable continuing a behavior is
entirely a matter of personal philosophy. The wise and skeptical know that
even an infinite number of data points in the past may only have limited
bearing on the future. The tricky thing about the future is that its
different than the past. Our data from the past, no matter how big a pile of
data it is, may very well be entirely irrelevant. Some find this lack of
predictive ability of the future quite frustrating, while others see it as
the primary reason to stick around for a few more years.
Anyway, my point is not that Winnebago's or free market economies are bad.
Instead I'm saying that short term bits of data are neither reliable nor a
wise way to go about making important long term decisions. Intelligent
people do this all the time, and since it's so commonly accepted as a rule
of thumb (last time + the time before that), it's often accepted in place of
actual thinking. Always remember that humans, given our evolution, are very
bad at seeing the cumulative effects of behavior, and underestimate how
things like compound interest or that one cigarette a day, can in the long
term, have surprisingly large impacts despite clearly low short term
effects.
How to prevent smart people from defending bad ideas
I spent my freshman year at a small college in NJ called Drew University. I
had a fun time, ingested many tasty alcoholic beverages, and went to lots of
great parties (the result of which of course was that I basically failed out
and had to move back to Queens with my parents. You see, the truth is that
this essay is really a public service announcement paid for by my parents -
I was a smart person that did some stupid things). But the reason I mention
all this is because I learned a great bit of philosophy from many hours of
playing pool in the college student center. The lesson is this: "Speed
kills". I was never very good at pool, but this one guy there was, and
whenever we'd play, he'd watch me miss easy shots because I tried to force
them in with authority. I chose speed and power over control, and I usually
lost. So like pool, when it comes to defusing smart people who are defending
bad ideas, you have to find ways to slow things down.
The reason for this is simple. Smart people, or at least those whose brains
have good first gears, use their speed in thought to overpower others. They'll
jump between assumptions quickly, throwing out jargon, bits of logic, or
rules of thumb at a rate of fire fast enough to cause most people to become
rattled, and give in. When that doesn't work, the arrogant or the pompous
will throw in some belittlement and use whatever snide or manipulative
tactics they have at their disposal to further discourage you from
dissecting their ideas.
So your best defense starts by breaking an argument down into pieces. When
they say "it's obvious we need to execute plan A now." You say, "hold on.
You're way ahead of me. For me to follow I need to break this down into
pieces." And without waiting for permission, you should go ahead and do so.
First, nothing is obvious. If it were obvious there would be no need to say
so. So your first piece is to establish what isn't so obvious. What are the
assumptions the other guy is glossing over that are worth spending time on?
There may be 3 or 4 different valid assumptions that need to be discussed
one at a time before any kind of decision can be considered. Take each on in
turn, and lay out the basic questions: what problem are we trying to solve?
What alternatives to solving it are there? What are the tradeoffs in each
alternative? By breaking it down and asking questions you expose more
thinking to light, make it possible for others to ask questions, and make it
more difficult for anyone to defend a bad idea.
No one can ever take away your right to think things over, especially if the
decision at hand is important. If your mind works best in 3rd or 4th gear,
find ways to give yourself to time needed to get there. If when you say "I
need the afternoon to think this over", they say "tough. We're deciding now".
Ask them if the decision is an important one. If they say yes, then you
should be completely justified in asking for more time to think it over and
ask questions.
Find a sane person people listen to
Some situations require outside help. Instead of taking a person on
directly, get a third party that you both respect, and continue the
discussion in their presence. This can be a superior, or simply someone
smart enough that the other person might possibly concede points to them.
It follows that if your team manager is wise and reasonable, smart people
who might ordinarily defend bad ideas will have a hard time doing so. But
sadly if your team manager is neither wise nor reasonable, smart, arrogant
people may convince others to follow their misguided ways more often than
not.
And yet more reasons
I'm sure you have stories of your own follies dealing with smart people
defending bad ideas, or where you, yourself, as a smart person, have spent
time arguing for things you regretted later. Given the wondrous multitude of
ways the universe has granted humans to be smart and dumb at the same time,
there are many more reasons why smart people behave in stupid ways. For fun,
here's a few more.
Smart people can follow stupid leaders (seeking praise or promotion)
Smart people may follow their anger into stupid places
They may be trained or educated into stupidity
Smart people can inherit bad ideas from their parents under the guise of
tradition
They may simply want something to be true, that can never be
By Scott Berkun, April 2005
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