Common Sense is Everything but Common (Tech & People vol XII)
Why do we believe so much nonsense?
People say the stupidest things. That’s usually not a big problem, because you can dismiss something stupid somebody said as the nonsense that it is, most of the time. But every once in a while people say stupid things that are not so easy to dismiss. Why? Well, because someone really important said them, who is generally considered to know what they are talking about. Or they seem to have data to back up their claims. Or even worse, sometimes EVERYONE in power or of authority seems to say the same stupid thing, and then it puts you in a funny position, immortalized by the great Dane Hans Christian Andersen in the story about The Emperor’s new Clothes. It’s not so easy to be the one who calls bullshit.
This human predicament is the stuff behind speculative bubbles in financial assets (one of the causes, for sure - there are others). If someone writes a book titled “Dow 36,000” and the stock market has been going up for years, it’s hard to go through the thought process of why that doesn’t make any sense.
But speculative mania is just one kind of something stupid people say. Here’s another example. Some enlightened public transport enthusiasts have gotten in the habit of saying: “let’s build cities for people, not for cars”. That’s the kind of thing that sounds really clever in a dinner party, but is utter and complete nonsense. No one in the 1950s— when a lot of the parking lots and highways were built that so irk the urban literati these days — was ever building cities for cars. They built highways so that people could use incredibly innovative and life-improving products (for the time) called cars, which helped people get to work, travel further than they could before, shop, and see drive-in movies (which I’ll admit I romantically miss). They built parking lots because given the mode of transportation by cars (which was optimal at the time), it was excellent use of land, economically speaking, to build parking lots where people could park their cars.
Now you may now think that for today’s population, with all the urbanization we’ve seen since then, and environmental considerations, and changes in preferences — that cars and parking lots don’t make sense any more. Fine. But it’s idiotic to say they were built for their own sake. That too, doesn’t make any sense.
I’ve been thinking about writing this newsletter installment for a long time, and the trigger that finally made me do it was the New Yorker piece about Dan Ariely’s and Francesca Gino’s allegedly fraudulent research papers. It’s an excellent long read and you should go and read it now. I’ll resume when you’re back!
Welcome back!
Now there are a lot of takeaways that come to the intellectual mind after you read an article like this. You might reflect on incentives, how it paid Ariely and Gino to do what they allegedly did. They became super stars. They impressed Obama like no other, maybe apart for Yuval Noah Harari (but that’s for another newsletter). They made money. They got academic chairs and citations. You might reflect on the problem of p-hacking, and the importance of scientific reproducibility. You might think there must be another explanation, maybe they didn’t really cheat by changing those specific lines in those spreadsheets. Maybe.
For me all of that is besides the point. What gets to me is that we believed them!
You ,me, other smart people. We read paper after paper about stuff like how making people write down (even a few of) the ten commandments before filing insurance claims reduced cheating by 10%, and we never stopped to think.
We never once stopped to think - that doesn’t make any sense!
I mean, the guys who write data colada did stop and think. Hats off to them! But the vast majority of the thinking public did not. Not for a minute.
And you know what? we really should have. If this is an Agatha Christie murder mystery type thing, the clues were all over the place. And the biggest clue of them all, the only clue we really properly should have needed, was that it didn’t make any sense.
Even as the evidence started to pile up that nudging doesn’t’ actually work (to the great embarrassment of world leaders like Obama and UK’s Cameron who invested untold amounts in enacting nudging policies), we didn’t see it.
Why say we? I, me, Tzvika - when I read that paper about the ten commandments, which I did, I should have used my common sense to realize that:
10% is actually a small effect, and the research was based on small numbers - and -
I was not born yesterday, and I know how people behave, and I know that if they can and want to cheat their insurer they will freaking cheat their insurer.
I should have but I didn’t. Shame on me. Shame on all of us.
So Ariely got governments to work with him, and Gino became the highest paid person at Harvard (in itself a shocker - Harvard medical school researchers alone have won 10 Nobel prizes between them for stuff like pioneering organ transplants - surely they should have been paid more even if the ten commandment stuff was real). In the grand scheme of things, not too bad. I don’t know Gino but I’ve been on meetings and lectures by Ariely. He’s great. The content he creates, if it turns out it was indeed bad science after all, is still great entertainment for corporate types (like me). Not much harm in that!
What does get to me is that we never learn. This keeps happening and happening. Chamath says SPACs are going to to rule the world and are far superior to tried and tested IPOs, even though they patently aren’t? Sure, why not. Self-interested Bitcoin maximalists say that it’s “unstoppable money”? We promptly forget that it is in fact just prime numbers useful only (and that, doubtfully) for money laundering. Oh, and never-mind that it costs more energy to run than Italy. A man who thought WeWork is the future of work declares that Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) is coming in 10 years? We all work that assumption into the plans. And so on and so on.
Now you might be thinking: Tzvika, this is illogical. According to your reasoning, nothing new is ever possible. I mean, if people used common sense to guess whether Kitty Hawk would fly, they surely would have said flight was impossible, right? Wrong. By the time the Wright brothers flew, there was a long history of research into heavier-than-air flight, and many teams were working on reasonable designs. The factors like weight and strength were known. It was more a question of when than if.
So this is not some tirade against innovation. Only an impassioned plea for all of us to use the common sense the good lord gave us, and think for ourselves. If it doesn’t make sense, it probably doesn’t make sense. Voltaire is said to have said that “common sense is not so common.” Readers of data colada would probably agree.