Pseudoscience, Fooling Yourself, Game Theory and viral tweets

1 Marketing Breakdown

Today’s piece is gonna be a bit more technical. If you only like the practical stuff, skip this one and wait for tomorrow’s essay. If you want to develop a more complete understanding of entrepreneurial science and hone your craft, keep reading.

What’s good Young and Eager mind?!

Shipping a bit later again cuz I just wrapped up a live session in the Solopreneur Gym.

Some people write their content in bulk and then schedule it but for me, it’s like fruit… it rots when it sits.

I gotta publish it while it’s still fresh.

Anywho, two days ago, the Twitter (ahem X) Sphere was taken over by this:

More on this later. But first…

How focussed should a curriculum be?

You see… there’s a temptation to make the curriculum in any field as practical as possible.

Maybe teaching solopreneurship should only be about the things you enjoy learning.

If you wanna become a therapist, why should you get a 4-yr psychology degree?

Why waste time reading scientific literature, learning about statistics, and learning about things like confirmation biases and self-justification, or the anatomy of the brain and how it works?

Who gives a hoot? Surely, the only thing that matters is clinical practice, right?

Well… yes… To an extent.

You see, as much as I hate to admit it, there really is something to the whole “teaching you how to think” propaganda universities (which are just businesses, not institutions) love to promote.

Fooling yourself: Why scientific training matters

Understanding how to think scientifically decreases the likelihood that others can fool you.

But more importantly, it decreases the odds that YOU can fool yourself!

Read How to Not Fool Yourself 101.

In therapy circles, there was a popular idea in the ‘90s:

People commonly “repress” their memories of traumatic experiences. Fortunately, those memories could be retrieved using fancy techniques like hypnosis and dream analysis.

These “experts” went on to “help” many people.

They were even called on to testify in court when adults “remembered” their repressed childhood memories of sexual assault.

Many lives were destroyed in the process because… turns out… it was all a bunch of bullshit.

You see, memory is fragile.

Worse still, there’s virtually no correlation between the intensity with which someone believes in their memories and their accuracy.

Repression doesn’t exist. There’s no empirical evidence for it. And it doesn’t even pass the smell test: Where are the hundreds of thousands of Jews who repressed their tragic WWII memories?

Turns out that what was actually happening was “experts” (without malice) implanting memories.

Inception isn’t just a fun sci-fi movie, there’s a grain of truth in it.

Experts would push victims until they remembered what they wanted them to remember.

This was (and still is) used to get innocent people to admit to crimes. Of course, the people that use such techniques don’t think the suspects are innocent which is how they justify it.

Similar techniques were used to get kids to “remember” being sexually assaulted by teachers.

Some of them have spent years behind bars and as a result, have changed the interview protocols to prevent the creation of false memories.

Richard McNally, a clinical scientist and professor at Harvard, reviewed the evidence in his book Remembering Trauma: “The notion that the mind protects itself by repressing or dissociating memories of trauma, rendering them inaccessible to awareness, is a piece of psychiatric folklore devoid of convincing empirical support.”

Professor Tavris: “It took 10 years but in the early 2000s, with the recovered-memory movement in disarray due to successful malpractice suits against some of its most egregious proponents and to the overturning of many (but not enough) wrongful convictions of parents and teachers, it seemed that the wars had subsided, that science was vindicated.” ¹

This is the consequence of a lack of formal training.

An education in science doesn’t preclude you from making mistakes, but you should be more skeptical of bro-science theories by the end of it.

These experts fell victim to their confirmation bias.

I’ve been in my field for a long time, I know what I’m doing.

If a patient gets better, I was right. If they don’t, they did something wrong.

Remember that if there’s no way to falsify a theory, it’s not science.

Lastly, there’s the well-rounded argument

Learning about things that might seem overkill can help you get a better understanding of your craft.

Look at how much stuff medical students need to learn. But all that seemingly superfluous stuff helps them get a better, more holistic understanding of the human body.

So with that, let’s FINALLY get into the reason I’m writing this today.

I wanna cover a little bit of game theory

Back to the tweet:

As you can see, most people voted Blue. Blue seems like the compassionate answer. But the correct answer is actually Red.

Here’s why:

1. Ethically, you pick blue.

2. You realize, there will always be shady people who fuck it up for everyone.

3. If enough people pick red, you’d die so you switch to red.

4. You assume that everyone else is also smart enough to realize this (this is called Common Knowledge in game theory) because there are NO negative consequences to picking red to you. Everyone that picks red lives, always.

5. Everyone realizes this, picks red, and lives.

The problem of course is that not everyone reaches that point of common knowledge so you’ll lose a set of people with a certain ethical framework or a lowish IQ.

Let’s play a game: Guess the average

There are game theory examples of this phenomenon with Common Knowledge where you have a group.

See this essay and this one.

They all gotta pick a number between 1-100 and then guess the average number of the class multiplied by 0.5.

This means that even if everyone just so happened to pick 100, the highest possible avg is 50.

You then assume everyone else realizes that so no one will write down a number higher than 50.

Ergo, everyone can at most pick 50. Which gives an avg of 25.

You realize everyone also realizes this, and so on and so forth.

Everyone picks 1. Which gives an average of 0.5 but since the lowest number you could pick was 1, you write that down as your final answer.

This represents the point of Common Knowledge, where everyone is not only aware of the optimal strategy but also knows that everyone else is aware of it.

Thing is… in reality, people make mistakes.

So once you reach Common Knowledge, you gotta factor that back in.

Everyone *should* pick 1, but because people make mistakes, you reason, you pick 20 or 30 instead.

Your final number representing the degree of confidence you have in the intellect of your peers.

What about moral obligation?

A behavioral economist commented the following:

Which is a misconception. Here’s what I replied with:

“No it’s not though… it’s not about trust.

We got a poll:

Option 1: get whacked in the balls with a tiny hammer unless a special condition is met.

Option 2: nothing happens.

There’s absolutely no reason why you’d pick option 1.

Respectfully, I don’t see how your trust argument makes sense.

It seems to me that people are picking option one out of a misplaced sense of moral obligation.

But since those people weren’t forced and chose option 1 out of their own volition, they happily put themselves (or rather their crown jewels) in harm’s way, and you’re under no obligation to do the same.

This poll is not about trust.

It’s about mathematics.

It sorts out the people that understand math and those that do not.

I see your bg is in behavioral econ so I think that’s why you’re incorrectly viewing it through a behavioral lens.”

Framing saves lives

In mathematical logical, logical equivalency means that you have two statements that have the same truth value.

I.e. Two statements that convey the same info even though they look different.

Here’s someone who created a poll that’s logically equivalent. Notice how it completely shifts the percentages.

This is the power of choice architecture (framing in behavioral science).

6 Lessons you can learn from this tweet:

1. Anything that’s sufficiently divisive yet accessible (not too technical) has the potential to go viral.

2. People quickly pick teams and then it stops being about the conjecture and it starts being an us vs. them matter. (As much as people deny it, they love tribalism!)

3. A little bit of Game Theory: putting yourself in the shoes of others who’re putting themselves in the shoes of others who’re…. and so on. This is one more tool in your entrepreneurial science toolkit.

4. What feels intuitive isn’t always correct. Don’t let yourself be bullied by the loud minority or even the majority. Try to reason critically and retain your scientific skepticism (note: not cynicism).

5. The majority of people use emotion instead of reason to make decisions. Remember that when you’re selling stuff.

6. How a question is framed (EVEN IF IT’S LOGICALLY EQUIVALENT) will influence how people answer it. This creates a bias you both need to be aware of and correct for!

That’s it for today.

Go chop wood & carry water.

RJY

Notes

¹ Much of this I’ve taken from Professor Carol Tavris her book Mistakes Were Made But Not By Me.

² More technical essays: pay off matrices, prisoner’s dilemma & Nash Equilibria, Replication.