Better to be wrong and learn the lesson on your own

The great jedi master once asked:

Who’s the bigger fool, the fool or the fool that follows him?

This question comes from a fictional character, but that doesn’t make it any less applicable to real life.

Take our society’s biggest vice, advice. God bless the internet and all its magic, but it’s officially operationalized our impulsive human need to give guidance about everything, even though we’re overwhelmingly unqualified to give advice about almost anything.

Today it’s never been easier for people to share their uninformed, unsolicited and utterly biased and opinions with each other. And it’s toxic to the fabric of society.

But the difficult question is, who’s to blame? Do we scorn the lard mouthed, hyper opinionated advice giver who’s spreading misinformation like a goddamn virus? Or is the true guilty party the insecure, echo chambered dolt who can’t think critically for himself and outsources his problem solving to strangers on the internet?

I stumbled across a study from the journal of judgment and decision making, and they’re favoring the asker.

The research suggests that many decisions we make do occur in an interactive, social context. When we’re uncertain about something, we often seek advice from others to enhance decision quality. Advice taking is considered an important, adaptive aspect of human decision making. And aggregated judgments based on multiple opinions are usually more accurate than individual judgments because aggregation balances out random errors.

My challenge to that theory is, at what cost? Are the gains in accuracy worth the losses in efficacy? What good is the increase in the perception of our competence if we cripple our ability to solve problems independently?

Maybe it’s just my personality, but I’d rather be wrong and learn the lesson on my own, than be right and have other people do my thinking for me. Because at least the insight would be generated internally. At least the perspective would come from lived experience.

Look, I understand we all hurt, feel alone, seek validation and need to vent. The internet was originally built to fulfill those very human needs. Matter of fact, I love using message boards to spark my thinking and see that I’m not completely crazy in my opinions.

But at a certain point in our maturity, we have to trust that everything we need is already inside of us. We have to assume the burden for making our lives better and take real agency over our circumstances. Otherwise we’re just fools following other fools.

How are you finding agency where others see nothing but impossibility? Do you have a favorite tool for taking your own advice?

Dalio, the billionaire investor, entrepreneur and author, writes how his secret to success is converting his principles into equations and programing them into a computer that helps him execute profitable ventures.

He refers to it as algorithmic trading. He takes a rule, an expression of his criteria, and then puts it into an algorithm.

This may sound super technically advanced, but don’t let that word scare you. An algorithm is simply a finite sequence of well defined instructions. It’s process or set of rules to be followed to solve a problem.

Everyone uses algorithms. If you wake up and brush your teeth and take a shower and eat an energy bar on the commute to work, that’s an algorithm. Because you’ve figured out what sequence of variables are associated with success.

All the elements may not be formalized written code, but it’s still an algorithm.

The beauty is, thinking algorithmically helps you stop basing your decisions on emotions in the current moment, or on a skewed view of the past.

Instead, you’re moving forward based on data. What you know rather than what you think. Doesn’t mean there aren’t human biases. And doesn’t mean your decisions are flawless and can’t fail, but it’s certainly better than outsourcing your thinking to the masses.

How algorithmic is your mind? How does your deep understanding of yourself become the data from which you make smart decisions?

If you’ve never ventured down this cognitive road before, here’s an exercise you can try.

Write an if this then that statement for something you’re currently struggling with. If this becomes your trigger, then that becomes the action. The sum of the two is the algorithm.

Imagine you’re looking for a new job, and you have several interviews scheduled for this week. Here’s what you announce to yourself ahead of time.

If this job interview makes me feel energized, then I put that company at the top of my list. If talking to the hiring manager makes all the blood drain from my face, then I will delete that company from my list immediately and move onto other opportunities.

Having clear rules like this gives you a simple, easy way to make decisions without thinking too hard and from scratch each time. You can just plug your current situation into the algorithm.

If this, then that.

Such a tool is an expression of trust for ourselves. We’re assuming the burden for making our lives better and taking agency over our circumstances.

We’re not fools following other fools.

To what degree are you think critically for yourself and solving your problems internally?