Last week's post was pretty darn depressing wasn't it? Well, at least it depressed me. I can't stand the idea that I might be narcotizing myself, and I certainly don't want to fool myself into thinking I'm being "part of the solution" or "becoming informed" when really I'm just lulling myself (and worse, those around me) into inaction and complacency.
The only course of action is to take action--and so today's post is an attempt to offer solutions that readers (and I) can use to avoid, subvert and beat the problem of narcotizing dysfunction.
Four things:
1) Eliminate the narcotic. What I mean by this, obviously, is stop consuming media. And for good measure, stop all news, all broadcast media, all social media, and most importantly, stop consuming peoples' rage-driven posts about any issue you care about. These things narcotize you and lull you into apathy, while fooling you into thinking you're doing something about the issue. Embrace a low-information, zero-media diet.
2) Read less about the specific issue that's important to you. Not more, less! Admittedly, this seems counter-intuitive. We all like to think we're missing out on being informed when we read less about an issue, but remember, we're up against a media that has interests that differ substantially from our own. In other words, the information made accessible to us through media isn't the information we want. Which brings us to the next solution...
3) While reading less, go directly to the source for your subject or issue information, do not use media or social media intermediaries that distort or impose (their) narratives on the information reaching you. Thus, read books or papers by genuine experts in the subject--and then read an oppositional book by opposing experts to make sure your own brain doesn't impose its own narrative on you either. I'll share an example in the domain of personal investing: I go directly to company quarterly earnings report transcripts (they are free at SeekingAlpha.com) and never read analyst reports or financial media reports telling me their interpretation of what happened. I don't want the intermediary's perception! I want to shape my own.
4) Be aware of the phenomenon itself, always. If you can remind yourself that "this information I'm seeing about issue X (or this discussion I'm having about topic Y) is likely displacing or supplanting action I would rather be taking" you are far less likely to be lulled into narcotized complacency.
5) Take specific action. Fricking actually do something about the thing. And no, once again, posting rubbish on social media does not count. True action involves putting your own skin in the game: If you want to do something about the pay gap, hire a woman. If you want to do something about wealth inequality, teach people how to invest. If you want to do something about XYZ political issue, run for office. If you want to write a novel... write a novel. Do not talk about it or consume media about it unless you wish to be narcotized and made inert and impotent. See how that works?
To summarize:
Eliminate media consumption.
Read less about the issue.
Go directly to source documents; never use informational intermediaries.
Be aware of the phenomenon: you are always at risk of being narcotized.
Take action.
***************************
You can help support the work I do here at Casual Kitchen by visiting Amazon via any link on this site. Amazon pays a small commission to me based on whatever purchase you make on that visit, and it's at no extra cost to you. Thank you!
And, if you are interested at all in cryptocurrencies, yet another way you can help support my work here is to use this link to open up your own cryptocurrency account at Coinbase. I will receive a small affiliate commission with each opened account. Once again, thank you for your support!
Showing posts with label logic. Show all posts
Showing posts with label logic. Show all posts
How Cut Through The Bullsh*t
It's interesting (uh, well, to me at least) how writing a post on one topic often inspires a tangential post, then another tangential post, and then another... until you're totally orthogonal to the original topic. Two weeks ago I wrote a post on how we fool ourselves by reading and talking about things, then last week I pursued a tangent on how cooking is a beautifully action-based, low-BS domain.
Today is the orthogonal essay: it's a humble (and probably incompetent) effort on my part to structure my thoughts on BS in general, and how to cut through it. It's a bit of a mindwank, it has nothing to do with cooking, and worst of all it's probably too long. Feel free to skip it.
With that friendly warning out of the way, let's get into the BS.
Defining BS
First, let me spend a minute defining what BS is, at least by my thinking. It's when someone starts giving opinions that are:
1) Frequently without any serious knowledge of the subject, and
2) Typically unaccompanied by any concrete action, planning or goals.
Essentially, BS is talk ("tawk") with neither follow-through nor competence.
One other fascinating characteristic of BS: a person BS-ing never thinks he's BS-ing. That's how it works. If you realized you were outside your circle of competence and had no idea what you were talking about, you wouldn't offer an opinion! Or at the least you'd severely qualify that opinion beforehand.
Finally, the worst characteristic of BS: we all do it and we all like to think we don't.
Some examples of BS might be:
* I can't believe how greedy Big Food is. They make all these delicious, high fat foods just to make us all fat.
* Our government was so stupid to bail out the banks back in 2009.
* This summer Tom Brady and Bill Belichick are finally going to split up. I can feel it coming.
* The rich really ought to pay more in taxes.
* The stock market is overvalued and about to crash.
Two quick caveats: First, I'm not saying that these statements are true or false. I could have easily offered contra-statements to each of the above examples and they'd still be BS. Second, there is nothing necessarily wrong with making statements like these. At least from time to time.
But there is, however, something very wrong if this describes the vast majority of the statements someone makes. Why? Because they are all passive (even effete) statements, unaccompanied by personal action, personal growth, or personal accountability.
The single worst source of BS
Of course, the worst source of BS is media-packaged news, and TV news is the worst of the worst. A vast portion of the punditry opining on television, in editorials and in print and online media are spreading BS too, and this gets us into an important (and toxic) aspect of BS: typically, media pundits make highly confident statements with no accountability whatsoever if it turns out that they're wrong. This lack of accountability is important: it's why Nicholas Taleb angrily uses the phrase "BS vendors" to describe most punditry. It's deeply unfair and unethical if you attempt to persuade people around you to hold an opinion, but you yourself have no downside exposure if that opinion is wrong.
Worse still, the media (and its confidently-stated opinions) tends to be the source of most of the topics we talk about. Let's face it, most people need to be given things to think. Sadly, salient, attention-garnering topics like like crime, violence, inflation, unemployment, inequality, obesity, the latest in studies show science, politics, etc., is what the media gives us to think about. And talk about. This is true only to the extent we consume media and news of course.
A simple solution to BS
Now, let's move on to solutions. Let's say someone around you starts regurgitating opinions on some topic du jour. And you, well, you don't enjoy BS-ing. You don't enjoy trading effete opinions about the world or getting into debates over things that are entirely outside your circle of control. You're much more interested in learning something useful about how the other person thinks, or learning something useful about how to navigate reality. How best to cut through the BS?
Here's what to do: use open-ended questions to ask what specific actions others are taking. What specifically are they doing to prepare for the outcomes they consider likely, for the outcomes that will happen if their opinions are correct?
For a concrete example, let's say you're talking to someone opining confidently that the stock market is massively overvalued and about to crash. Useful open-ended questions to ask might be phrased in these ways:
* Tell me, what are you personally doing about this?
* Would you share with me what you are specifically doing in your personal situation to prepare for what you think is going to happen?
* If you think X is a major problem, what actions are your taking, then, to protect yourself and your family?
Suddenly, the conversation stops being about hand-wringing and pontificating and starts being about how to function more effectively in a world where we hold a given set of opinions. It becomes about how to better navigate reality. It becomes useful, actionable and solution-minded, and no longer just "tawk."
Then again, if the person doesn't have a ready answer to any of these questions, if they mumble, if they come up empty-handed and can't immediately offer any concrete actions they've taken... then they are BS-ing. Both themselves and you. It's time to smile, agree and deflect.
In my former investing career, we used a slightly more jargon-based phrasing of the same question: "Okay, so you think X [the stock market's going to crash/hyperinflation is coming/rates are going higher, etc]. How are you positioned?"
The opining person then has an opportunity to describe what specific actions they've taken: in this case it would likely be a list of the various investment actions they've taken to manage any exposure to their opinion set.
This is a gloriously BS-vaporizing question. It tells you instantly if the person is BS-ing your or not. If someone thought hyperinflation was coming and wanted to say so credibly, they'd be able to articulate specific investment actions they've taken to prepare. Instantly.
Thus if the answer is something like "I hold 25% of my assets in gold, the only stocks I have left are either of companies with very strong pricing power or of companies that have direct commodity exposure, I'm experimenting with some small investments in cryptocurrencies, and I recently bought some arable land in Upstate New York just in case" I can be fairly confident that this person is not BS-ing me. Why? Because it's not just "tawk"! He has taken meaningful financial actions to protect himself from the specific risks he's concerned about.
He might be right or he might be wrong, but at least he isn't BS-ing you.
This is totally, totally different from a pundit BS-ing on TV. Media pundits rarely disclose how they are positioned--and they are likely not positioned in any way at all. Thus they get the benefits of media attention today with zero downside and zero accountability if wrong about their opinions.[1] They get all the upside, while you--the consumer innocently seeking advice and counsel from "experts" in the financial media--suffer all the downside.[2]
We're all BS vendors now
If you think about it, the same thing happen in person-to-person BS as happens with media pundit BS-ing: Opining with no downside. Which is why the question "what specific actions have you taken?" is so clarifying and so anti-BS. It takes the conversation into specific solutions so you can see whether the person opining has any skin in the game, and whether their opinion merits being listened to.
One quick caveat: we probably ought to exclude high BS/low personal action domains like sports from this discussion. If someone spouts the opinion "I think Tom Brady and Bill Belichick are finally going to split up this summer." and you ask "what specific actions are you taking to prepare for this?" you'll get a blank stare. At best.
BS heuristics
I'll close this post off with a few more heuristics on high-BS domains:
1) Any domain where there exists jargon easily adopted and regurgitated by everyone (e.g., bump stocks, quantitative easing, tariffs, etc.) is likely a very high-BS domain. The jargon--and our easy use of it--tends to give us a dangerous illusion of knowledge.
2) Some domains are by definition non-action based and therefore high-BS: politics and economics are worst offenders here. See also professional sports. Again, it's totally fine to talk about these or any other BS-heavy topics! Just know it for what it is.
3) Anything heavily covered in the news or media is likely high-BS. Generally these subjects are laughably oversimplified, offer enormous illusion-of-competence risks, and typically the debate is already pre-framed for us, if not outright propagandized. This is a feature, not a bug, of media coverage.
And, to make this post a little more action-based, let me offer two heuristics we can use to detect and limit our own BS:
1) Try to not forget, ever, that we know very much less than we think we know.
2) It pays to drastically limit our strongly-held opinions. At the very least to limit them only to domains that we have actually performed at an advanced level.
These last two heuristics have a lot to do with the deliciously ironic Dunning-Kruger Effect, which essentially says that people vastly overestimate their competence when they are incompetent in a given domain. And once they actually start to get good at that domain, only then do they begin to realize how incompetent they are (and were). This is psychology's embodiment of Bertrand Russell's fabulous quote "The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt."
Which takes us to our final conclusion. In those (likely very, very few) domains where you have truly deep expertise, you will have tremendous humility about your opinions, and if you have a strong opinion it is a reliable indicator that in that domain you are BS-ing and do not know it.
READ NEXT: Using Your Sophistication and Great Taste Against You
Footnotes:
[1] It's a useful exercise for practicing epistemic humility (and also like shooting fish in a barrel) to come up with examples of pundit wrongness. Here are three from the finance and investing media that stick in my mind:
a) "Legendary" investor Bill Miller repeatedly recommended bank stocks on CNBC mere months before the 2008 bank crisis;
b) After allegedly "predicting" the 2008-2009 crash, economic pundit Nouriel "Dr. Doom" Roubini continues, broken record-like, to predict doom and gloom for years afterward, keeping many investors out of one of history's best-performing stock markets.
c) The mother of all stock market "heads I win, tails you lose" BS artists might be Elaine Garzarelli, who after blindly lucking into predicting the 1987 crash became a nearly perfect contrary indicator thanks to the utter wrongness of all her market calls thereafter.
[2] Worse still, articles and interviews about crashes and bubbles get extra coverage, so of course the media brings those to us relentlessly. Think back over the past nine (nine!) years since the 2009 stock market bottom. Have you seen more negative or bearish stories than positive stories in the financial media? How many articles attempted to scare you out of stocks all the way up during this incredible, life-altering bull market? Astute readers might be able to deduce a heuristic here to help them improve their financial decision-making in the future.
[3] If you made it this far down the page, congratulations. :)
***********************
Readers! You can help support the work I do here at Casual Kitchen by visiting Amazon via any link on this site. Amazon pays a small commission to me based on whatever purchase you make on that visit, and it's at no extra cost to you. Thank you!
And, if you are interested at all in cryptocurrencies, yet another way you can help support my work here is to use this link to open up your own cryptocurrency account at Coinbase. I will receive a small affiliate commission with each opened account. Once again, thank you for your support!
Today is the orthogonal essay: it's a humble (and probably incompetent) effort on my part to structure my thoughts on BS in general, and how to cut through it. It's a bit of a mindwank, it has nothing to do with cooking, and worst of all it's probably too long. Feel free to skip it.
With that friendly warning out of the way, let's get into the BS.
Defining BS
First, let me spend a minute defining what BS is, at least by my thinking. It's when someone starts giving opinions that are:
1) Frequently without any serious knowledge of the subject, and
2) Typically unaccompanied by any concrete action, planning or goals.
Essentially, BS is talk ("tawk") with neither follow-through nor competence.
One other fascinating characteristic of BS: a person BS-ing never thinks he's BS-ing. That's how it works. If you realized you were outside your circle of competence and had no idea what you were talking about, you wouldn't offer an opinion! Or at the least you'd severely qualify that opinion beforehand.
Finally, the worst characteristic of BS: we all do it and we all like to think we don't.
Some examples of BS might be:
* I can't believe how greedy Big Food is. They make all these delicious, high fat foods just to make us all fat.
* Our government was so stupid to bail out the banks back in 2009.
* This summer Tom Brady and Bill Belichick are finally going to split up. I can feel it coming.
* The rich really ought to pay more in taxes.
* The stock market is overvalued and about to crash.
Two quick caveats: First, I'm not saying that these statements are true or false. I could have easily offered contra-statements to each of the above examples and they'd still be BS. Second, there is nothing necessarily wrong with making statements like these. At least from time to time.
But there is, however, something very wrong if this describes the vast majority of the statements someone makes. Why? Because they are all passive (even effete) statements, unaccompanied by personal action, personal growth, or personal accountability.
The single worst source of BS
Of course, the worst source of BS is media-packaged news, and TV news is the worst of the worst. A vast portion of the punditry opining on television, in editorials and in print and online media are spreading BS too, and this gets us into an important (and toxic) aspect of BS: typically, media pundits make highly confident statements with no accountability whatsoever if it turns out that they're wrong. This lack of accountability is important: it's why Nicholas Taleb angrily uses the phrase "BS vendors" to describe most punditry. It's deeply unfair and unethical if you attempt to persuade people around you to hold an opinion, but you yourself have no downside exposure if that opinion is wrong.
Worse still, the media (and its confidently-stated opinions) tends to be the source of most of the topics we talk about. Let's face it, most people need to be given things to think. Sadly, salient, attention-garnering topics like like crime, violence, inflation, unemployment, inequality, obesity, the latest in studies show science, politics, etc., is what the media gives us to think about. And talk about. This is true only to the extent we consume media and news of course.
A simple solution to BS
Now, let's move on to solutions. Let's say someone around you starts regurgitating opinions on some topic du jour. And you, well, you don't enjoy BS-ing. You don't enjoy trading effete opinions about the world or getting into debates over things that are entirely outside your circle of control. You're much more interested in learning something useful about how the other person thinks, or learning something useful about how to navigate reality. How best to cut through the BS?
Here's what to do: use open-ended questions to ask what specific actions others are taking. What specifically are they doing to prepare for the outcomes they consider likely, for the outcomes that will happen if their opinions are correct?
For a concrete example, let's say you're talking to someone opining confidently that the stock market is massively overvalued and about to crash. Useful open-ended questions to ask might be phrased in these ways:
* Tell me, what are you personally doing about this?
* Would you share with me what you are specifically doing in your personal situation to prepare for what you think is going to happen?
* If you think X is a major problem, what actions are your taking, then, to protect yourself and your family?
Suddenly, the conversation stops being about hand-wringing and pontificating and starts being about how to function more effectively in a world where we hold a given set of opinions. It becomes about how to better navigate reality. It becomes useful, actionable and solution-minded, and no longer just "tawk."
Then again, if the person doesn't have a ready answer to any of these questions, if they mumble, if they come up empty-handed and can't immediately offer any concrete actions they've taken... then they are BS-ing. Both themselves and you. It's time to smile, agree and deflect.
In my former investing career, we used a slightly more jargon-based phrasing of the same question: "Okay, so you think X [the stock market's going to crash/hyperinflation is coming/rates are going higher, etc]. How are you positioned?"
The opining person then has an opportunity to describe what specific actions they've taken: in this case it would likely be a list of the various investment actions they've taken to manage any exposure to their opinion set.
This is a gloriously BS-vaporizing question. It tells you instantly if the person is BS-ing your or not. If someone thought hyperinflation was coming and wanted to say so credibly, they'd be able to articulate specific investment actions they've taken to prepare. Instantly.
Thus if the answer is something like "I hold 25% of my assets in gold, the only stocks I have left are either of companies with very strong pricing power or of companies that have direct commodity exposure, I'm experimenting with some small investments in cryptocurrencies, and I recently bought some arable land in Upstate New York just in case" I can be fairly confident that this person is not BS-ing me. Why? Because it's not just "tawk"! He has taken meaningful financial actions to protect himself from the specific risks he's concerned about.
He might be right or he might be wrong, but at least he isn't BS-ing you.
This is totally, totally different from a pundit BS-ing on TV. Media pundits rarely disclose how they are positioned--and they are likely not positioned in any way at all. Thus they get the benefits of media attention today with zero downside and zero accountability if wrong about their opinions.[1] They get all the upside, while you--the consumer innocently seeking advice and counsel from "experts" in the financial media--suffer all the downside.[2]
We're all BS vendors now
If you think about it, the same thing happen in person-to-person BS as happens with media pundit BS-ing: Opining with no downside. Which is why the question "what specific actions have you taken?" is so clarifying and so anti-BS. It takes the conversation into specific solutions so you can see whether the person opining has any skin in the game, and whether their opinion merits being listened to.
One quick caveat: we probably ought to exclude high BS/low personal action domains like sports from this discussion. If someone spouts the opinion "I think Tom Brady and Bill Belichick are finally going to split up this summer." and you ask "what specific actions are you taking to prepare for this?" you'll get a blank stare. At best.
BS heuristics
I'll close this post off with a few more heuristics on high-BS domains:
1) Any domain where there exists jargon easily adopted and regurgitated by everyone (e.g., bump stocks, quantitative easing, tariffs, etc.) is likely a very high-BS domain. The jargon--and our easy use of it--tends to give us a dangerous illusion of knowledge.
2) Some domains are by definition non-action based and therefore high-BS: politics and economics are worst offenders here. See also professional sports. Again, it's totally fine to talk about these or any other BS-heavy topics! Just know it for what it is.
3) Anything heavily covered in the news or media is likely high-BS. Generally these subjects are laughably oversimplified, offer enormous illusion-of-competence risks, and typically the debate is already pre-framed for us, if not outright propagandized. This is a feature, not a bug, of media coverage.
And, to make this post a little more action-based, let me offer two heuristics we can use to detect and limit our own BS:
1) Try to not forget, ever, that we know very much less than we think we know.
2) It pays to drastically limit our strongly-held opinions. At the very least to limit them only to domains that we have actually performed at an advanced level.
These last two heuristics have a lot to do with the deliciously ironic Dunning-Kruger Effect, which essentially says that people vastly overestimate their competence when they are incompetent in a given domain. And once they actually start to get good at that domain, only then do they begin to realize how incompetent they are (and were). This is psychology's embodiment of Bertrand Russell's fabulous quote "The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt."
Which takes us to our final conclusion. In those (likely very, very few) domains where you have truly deep expertise, you will have tremendous humility about your opinions, and if you have a strong opinion it is a reliable indicator that in that domain you are BS-ing and do not know it.
READ NEXT: Using Your Sophistication and Great Taste Against You
Footnotes:
[1] It's a useful exercise for practicing epistemic humility (and also like shooting fish in a barrel) to come up with examples of pundit wrongness. Here are three from the finance and investing media that stick in my mind:
a) "Legendary" investor Bill Miller repeatedly recommended bank stocks on CNBC mere months before the 2008 bank crisis;
b) After allegedly "predicting" the 2008-2009 crash, economic pundit Nouriel "Dr. Doom" Roubini continues, broken record-like, to predict doom and gloom for years afterward, keeping many investors out of one of history's best-performing stock markets.
c) The mother of all stock market "heads I win, tails you lose" BS artists might be Elaine Garzarelli, who after blindly lucking into predicting the 1987 crash became a nearly perfect contrary indicator thanks to the utter wrongness of all her market calls thereafter.
[2] Worse still, articles and interviews about crashes and bubbles get extra coverage, so of course the media brings those to us relentlessly. Think back over the past nine (nine!) years since the 2009 stock market bottom. Have you seen more negative or bearish stories than positive stories in the financial media? How many articles attempted to scare you out of stocks all the way up during this incredible, life-altering bull market? Astute readers might be able to deduce a heuristic here to help them improve their financial decision-making in the future.
[3] If you made it this far down the page, congratulations. :)
***********************
Readers! You can help support the work I do here at Casual Kitchen by visiting Amazon via any link on this site. Amazon pays a small commission to me based on whatever purchase you make on that visit, and it's at no extra cost to you. Thank you!
And, if you are interested at all in cryptocurrencies, yet another way you can help support my work here is to use this link to open up your own cryptocurrency account at Coinbase. I will receive a small affiliate commission with each opened account. Once again, thank you for your support!
Nobody Wants to Find the Errors
I wanted to share one more thought about the various crises in "studies show" science.
We're finding a lot of errors in a lot of past studies, and--hopefully--we're fixing them. Or at the least we've been given the opportunity to change our beliefs when it turns out they were based on erroneous or unreplicable studies. This is good. And it's a halfway decent attempt at actually using the scientific method.
But think about this: Imagine you're a "studies show" scientist, and consider the various pressures out there arrayed against you if take it upon yourself to uncover these types of errors. It takes precious time away from your own research. You look vaguely like a jerk for criticizing your peers. You get stonewalled when you ask to see peoples' data. And the research world is small: nobody wants to find errors in the work of someone you might work with (or worse, work for) in the future.
Worst of all by far: you don't get paid for it.
There is absolutely no incentive structure out there for finding study errors. In fact there are enormous incentives not to find them.
So it makes you even more cynical about "studies show" science: if they're finding as many errors as they are--despite all the pressures and reasons not to find them--how many more errors must there be?
READ NEXT: Rebellion Practice
We're finding a lot of errors in a lot of past studies, and--hopefully--we're fixing them. Or at the least we've been given the opportunity to change our beliefs when it turns out they were based on erroneous or unreplicable studies. This is good. And it's a halfway decent attempt at actually using the scientific method.
But think about this: Imagine you're a "studies show" scientist, and consider the various pressures out there arrayed against you if take it upon yourself to uncover these types of errors. It takes precious time away from your own research. You look vaguely like a jerk for criticizing your peers. You get stonewalled when you ask to see peoples' data. And the research world is small: nobody wants to find errors in the work of someone you might work with (or worse, work for) in the future.
Worst of all by far: you don't get paid for it.
There is absolutely no incentive structure out there for finding study errors. In fact there are enormous incentives not to find them.
So it makes you even more cynical about "studies show" science: if they're finding as many errors as they are--despite all the pressures and reasons not to find them--how many more errors must there be?
READ NEXT: Rebellion Practice
You May Now Ignore All Scientific Studies
Readers, I've developed a cognitive rule of thumb for "scientific studies" that I now use whenever I hear or read about any study. Here it is:
Heuristic: Any study you see, ever, anywhere, that happens to reach you through the media is wrong in some fundamentally significant way. You may safely ignore it.
My first halting step toward this admittedly cynical mental rule came a long time ago: when "scientists" decided--but then later undecided--that margarine was better for you than butter. I took another halting step toward this cynical rule when the "don't eat eggs" study came out, a study that blissfully ignored the fact that dietary cholesterol is not blood serum cholesterol.
My steps became a lot less halting thereafter, as I thought through what "scientists" used to think was true. Things like:
* "Healthy whole grains."
* An entirely upside down food pyramid.
* Recommendations for statin meds because of a "studies show" link to cardiovascular health that turned out to be wholly imaginary.
* The fact that the medical profession can't seem to define normal blood pressure.
* That toast causes cancer (yes, I'm serious: Google it).
There are many, many more examples, of course, some amusing, some not funny at all, some actually life-or-death. And all wrong. And if you have even a cursory understanding of decline effects[1] and the great crisis of reproducibility,[2] you will lose any remaining faith in "studies show" science.
Still more severe examples include South Korea's misguided war on thyroid cancer[3], or the highly counterintuitive discoveries that annual mammography screenings have zero effect on life expectancy and that, shockingly, prostate cancer screenings negatively affect life quality and life expectancy.[4]
And when it seems "studies show" science couldn't be any more wronger, it gets worse: We've discovered that even some of the most important and foundational studies in twentieth century psychology cannot be reproduced.[5] We're seeing major, domain-shattering acts of sheer data fabrication--see vaccines[6] and social psychology[7] for two object examples. Even in the food industry, one of America's best known dietary scientists, Cornell University's Brian Wansink, just got caught fabricating and torturing data to find links that don't really exist.[8]
And this is to say nothing of the various types of errors that inevitably show up in the study industry, as well as the rampant errors common to media coverage trumpeting study findings. These include errors like baseline risk error (an increase in a risk that's too small to matter is still too small to matter), p-hacking (mining data for statistical anomalies first, then forming a post hoc hypothesis on something that is almost assuredly spurious), and many others, some of which we've already discussed elsewhere at Casual Kitchen. And don't forget the well-known pressure to "publish or perish" in academia, which is most likely the prime driver of many of the industry's data fabrication and data-torturing scandals.
Last but certainly not least, there's the structural fact that the media--and it does not matter which media--inevitably oversimplifies or exaggerates all study claims to the point of making them into anti-information. And I have yet to read an article in my life saying "XYZ perfectly normal everyday activity shows no link to cancer." It's always the opposite.
You can safely ignore it all.
Finally, for any readers who consider this article to be somehow anti-science, keep in mind: "studies show" science is not science. It never was.
Footnotes/Resources:
[1] A readable article on the "Decline Effect," a genre of the problem of reproducibility.
[2] More good articles on the reproducibility crisis here and here.
[3] Korea and its misguided search for thyroid cancer as a textbook example of two types of silent risks: overscreening risk and overdiagnosis risk.
[4] For excellent discussions of why prostate screenings and mammography screenings carry silent risks and do not extend life, see Gerd Giggerenzer's book Risk Savvy and Gilbert Welch's book Less Medicine, More Health.
[5] Classic and foundational studies in pyschology cannot be successfully replicated.
[6] See for example the famously fraudulent “vaccines cause autism” study. Ironically, the paper pointing out the fraudulence itself had to be later corrected because it never acknowledged financial support from MMR vaccine makers. (!)
[7] “2011: A Year of Horrors” in social psychology.
[8] Bombshell allegations of data mining, p-hacking and other types of malfeasance shatter the credibility of dietary science professor Brain Wansink's entire department at Cornell University: here, here, and most depressingly: here.
Heuristic: Any study you see, ever, anywhere, that happens to reach you through the media is wrong in some fundamentally significant way. You may safely ignore it.
My first halting step toward this admittedly cynical mental rule came a long time ago: when "scientists" decided--but then later undecided--that margarine was better for you than butter. I took another halting step toward this cynical rule when the "don't eat eggs" study came out, a study that blissfully ignored the fact that dietary cholesterol is not blood serum cholesterol.
My steps became a lot less halting thereafter, as I thought through what "scientists" used to think was true. Things like:
* "Healthy whole grains."
* An entirely upside down food pyramid.
* Recommendations for statin meds because of a "studies show" link to cardiovascular health that turned out to be wholly imaginary.
* The fact that the medical profession can't seem to define normal blood pressure.
* That toast causes cancer (yes, I'm serious: Google it).
There are many, many more examples, of course, some amusing, some not funny at all, some actually life-or-death. And all wrong. And if you have even a cursory understanding of decline effects[1] and the great crisis of reproducibility,[2] you will lose any remaining faith in "studies show" science.
Still more severe examples include South Korea's misguided war on thyroid cancer[3], or the highly counterintuitive discoveries that annual mammography screenings have zero effect on life expectancy and that, shockingly, prostate cancer screenings negatively affect life quality and life expectancy.[4]
And when it seems "studies show" science couldn't be any more wronger, it gets worse: We've discovered that even some of the most important and foundational studies in twentieth century psychology cannot be reproduced.[5] We're seeing major, domain-shattering acts of sheer data fabrication--see vaccines[6] and social psychology[7] for two object examples. Even in the food industry, one of America's best known dietary scientists, Cornell University's Brian Wansink, just got caught fabricating and torturing data to find links that don't really exist.[8]
And this is to say nothing of the various types of errors that inevitably show up in the study industry, as well as the rampant errors common to media coverage trumpeting study findings. These include errors like baseline risk error (an increase in a risk that's too small to matter is still too small to matter), p-hacking (mining data for statistical anomalies first, then forming a post hoc hypothesis on something that is almost assuredly spurious), and many others, some of which we've already discussed elsewhere at Casual Kitchen. And don't forget the well-known pressure to "publish or perish" in academia, which is most likely the prime driver of many of the industry's data fabrication and data-torturing scandals.
Last but certainly not least, there's the structural fact that the media--and it does not matter which media--inevitably oversimplifies or exaggerates all study claims to the point of making them into anti-information. And I have yet to read an article in my life saying "XYZ perfectly normal everyday activity shows no link to cancer." It's always the opposite.
You can safely ignore it all.
Finally, for any readers who consider this article to be somehow anti-science, keep in mind: "studies show" science is not science. It never was.
Footnotes/Resources:
[1] A readable article on the "Decline Effect," a genre of the problem of reproducibility.
[2] More good articles on the reproducibility crisis here and here.
[3] Korea and its misguided search for thyroid cancer as a textbook example of two types of silent risks: overscreening risk and overdiagnosis risk.
[4] For excellent discussions of why prostate screenings and mammography screenings carry silent risks and do not extend life, see Gerd Giggerenzer's book Risk Savvy and Gilbert Welch's book Less Medicine, More Health.
[5] Classic and foundational studies in pyschology cannot be successfully replicated.
[6] See for example the famously fraudulent “vaccines cause autism” study. Ironically, the paper pointing out the fraudulence itself had to be later corrected because it never acknowledged financial support from MMR vaccine makers. (!)
[7] “2011: A Year of Horrors” in social psychology.
[8] Bombshell allegations of data mining, p-hacking and other types of malfeasance shatter the credibility of dietary science professor Brain Wansink's entire department at Cornell University: here, here, and most depressingly: here.
When Things Don’t Make Sense
There are some really strange and kooky things in our modern food system. Like, for example, the fact that there are 20-30 different kinds of jams and jellies in your local grocery store.
An easy career move any aspiring food pundit or food blogger can make is to write an article pointing out something weird or senseless like this (it's ridiculous for there to even *exist* 30 kinds of jam!), and then use that seemingly weird, senseless fact as self-congratulatory proof that "our food system is broken."
There was even a book about the "jam problem," at least in part: The Paradox of Choice,
in which author Barry Schwartz[1] discusses many instances where the modern consumer environment offers what he sees as an inappropriately dizzying array of choices.
One way we can react to seemingly senseless or dumb things, like 30 kinds of jam, is to shake our fists and wonder why things are so stupid. Even better: if you wonder out loud to the people around you about how weird and dumb these things are, you can score bonus virtue-signalling points too![2]
Except that situations like the jam/jelly problem, as weird and dumb as they may seem, are cognitively tricky, trickier than they at first appear. And the first thing we need to do in cognitively tricky situations like this (uh, right after shaking our fist and pointing out how weird and dumb things are), is to consider one of our minds' worst habits: They like to form quick explanations for things. And worse still: our minds love quick explanations that neatly fit into our existing world view.
Well, it really is kind of ridiculous to have 30 kinds of jams and jellies. I can't see any other reason for it other than pure corporate greed.
Can you believe all of these jams and jellies? The store should use this space to sell healthy quinoa, or... or lentils! The food industry is trying to make us all fat.
First, let's start with a heuristic: Any relatively simple explanation that fits your worldview should be spontaneously rejected as unlikely. We'll see why shortly.
Second, just because something doesn't make sense to you doesn't mean it doesn't make sense. We are limited beings. We may not see the whole picture, or whatever system we observe might simply be opaque to us.
Third, any explanation (for anything) that comes to mind comes from our minds. As circular as that statement may sound, it hides an insight: when things come out of our minds, they're almost always dripping with solipsism, with our own narrow way of looking at the world.
We can see now that our brains, in just a couple of rapid-fire thoughts, have reached three distinct layers of cognitively suspect conclusions:
a) Our initial opinion, that it's ridiculous that there even exist 30 kinds of jam, is likely wrong.
b) Our explanation for why there are 30 kinds of jams and jellies is likely wrong too. Our brain leaped to it too quickly, and it too neatly fits our existing world view.
c) Finally, most of our ideas and explanations will suffer from some (possibly calamitous) degree of solipsism.
Sadly, we now have SCIENCE!!! piling on too, explaining to us why things are the way they are, and how they should be instead. Now, one would hope that credentialed experts will take their time to form explanations, using careful study design and even more careful testing methods. Their conclusions will be rigorous, correct, and not pre-fit to some pre-existing world view.
Hmmmm. Let's see if this is true about jams and jellies.
Well, as a matter of fact, one of the best known studies in the genre of choice paradox was the famous "jam study," where, conclusively, it was found that when customers were given far fewer choices, they buy more jam. A lot more: some ten times as many customers purchased jam when faced with six choices compared to customers faced with 24 choices.
So the idea that it was ridiculous and dumb to have 30 kinds of jam in the grocery store now had the blessing of evidence-based, credentialed SCIENCE!!! Intelligent consumers everywhere were given a clean, simple explanation, and that explanation had the added bonus fitting our world view: It really is stupid to have so many kinds of jams and jellies! Nobody needs all that.
Now let's step back a moment. The so-called "jam study" dates from the mid 1990s. That's more than twenty years ago. If it were actually that much more profitable to sell far fewer types of jam, don't you think grocery stores all over the world would have done so? If greed supposedly explains everything they do, you'd think they'd leap at the chance to put these credentialed scientific conclusions to work ...and make even more money.
Whenever we find ourselves at war with reality, we're given an opportunity to consider that we're wrong.
And it turns out the jam study (and Barry Schwartz for that matter) studied the wrong thing: Neither considered the fact that almost all jam-buying consumers have already long ago settled on a brand and type. They already know what they want, and if they don't find "their" jam, they don't buy at all.[3]
Thus the grocery store isn't actually subjecting consumers to a dizzying array of choice by carrying dozens of types of jams and jellies. The idea that there were "too many choices" was an error of solipsism--an error committed by Schwartz, by the designers of the fatally flawed study, and us!
When a store carries what seems like a "ridiculous" number of types of the same product, all these brands and types are not there for you or me. We buy the specific type we want, and so do all other customers. Collectively, these products, as long as they remain profitable for the store to sell, make up the what the store carries. The grocery store simply offers the brands and types that consumers have already settled on, and as a result, there are exactly the right number of types of jams and jellies.
In reality, what the "jam and jelly aisle" really represents--to Schwartz, to the jam study people, and to many consumers who consider themselves smarter than the marketplace in which they participate--is essentially a problem of aesthetics. We're all intelligent people, and it just doesn't make sense to have so many more jams and jellies than any of us as intelligent individuals would think was necessary.
To us, there are more varieties than there needs to be, it doesn't make sense, and somebody should do something about it. See how that works?
Footnotes:
[1] Note that I do not intend the specific criticisms of this post in any way to take away from the many valuable insights in Schwartz's book. For me, one of the most profound insights I learned from The Paradox of Choice was the concept of "satisficing."
[2] The virtue-signalling here is nuanced and often difficult to see (all virtue-signalling must be non-obvious, by definition, in order to be truly effective). The mechanism here: by pointing out something dumb, one appears smart by (unstated) comparison. Look around carefully, and you will see all kinds of examples of this type of behavior. One common current example occurs when people point out how stupid (or inarticulate, or hotheaded, or treasonous, or gesticulatory, or racist, or orange, etc.) our President is. This particular example also shows how easy it is to virtue-signal without us realizing we're actually doing it.
[3] See this interesting article on a re-analysis of 99 studies of choice paradox, which uncovered explanations why you actually might want dozens of kinds of jam after all.
An easy career move any aspiring food pundit or food blogger can make is to write an article pointing out something weird or senseless like this (it's ridiculous for there to even *exist* 30 kinds of jam!), and then use that seemingly weird, senseless fact as self-congratulatory proof that "our food system is broken."
There was even a book about the "jam problem," at least in part: The Paradox of Choice,
in which author Barry Schwartz[1] discusses many instances where the modern consumer environment offers what he sees as an inappropriately dizzying array of choices. One way we can react to seemingly senseless or dumb things, like 30 kinds of jam, is to shake our fists and wonder why things are so stupid. Even better: if you wonder out loud to the people around you about how weird and dumb these things are, you can score bonus virtue-signalling points too![2]
Except that situations like the jam/jelly problem, as weird and dumb as they may seem, are cognitively tricky, trickier than they at first appear. And the first thing we need to do in cognitively tricky situations like this (uh, right after shaking our fist and pointing out how weird and dumb things are), is to consider one of our minds' worst habits: They like to form quick explanations for things. And worse still: our minds love quick explanations that neatly fit into our existing world view.
Well, it really is kind of ridiculous to have 30 kinds of jams and jellies. I can't see any other reason for it other than pure corporate greed.
Can you believe all of these jams and jellies? The store should use this space to sell healthy quinoa, or... or lentils! The food industry is trying to make us all fat.
First, let's start with a heuristic: Any relatively simple explanation that fits your worldview should be spontaneously rejected as unlikely. We'll see why shortly.
Second, just because something doesn't make sense to you doesn't mean it doesn't make sense. We are limited beings. We may not see the whole picture, or whatever system we observe might simply be opaque to us.
Third, any explanation (for anything) that comes to mind comes from our minds. As circular as that statement may sound, it hides an insight: when things come out of our minds, they're almost always dripping with solipsism, with our own narrow way of looking at the world.
We can see now that our brains, in just a couple of rapid-fire thoughts, have reached three distinct layers of cognitively suspect conclusions:
a) Our initial opinion, that it's ridiculous that there even exist 30 kinds of jam, is likely wrong.
b) Our explanation for why there are 30 kinds of jams and jellies is likely wrong too. Our brain leaped to it too quickly, and it too neatly fits our existing world view.
c) Finally, most of our ideas and explanations will suffer from some (possibly calamitous) degree of solipsism.
Sadly, we now have SCIENCE!!! piling on too, explaining to us why things are the way they are, and how they should be instead. Now, one would hope that credentialed experts will take their time to form explanations, using careful study design and even more careful testing methods. Their conclusions will be rigorous, correct, and not pre-fit to some pre-existing world view.
Hmmmm. Let's see if this is true about jams and jellies.
Well, as a matter of fact, one of the best known studies in the genre of choice paradox was the famous "jam study," where, conclusively, it was found that when customers were given far fewer choices, they buy more jam. A lot more: some ten times as many customers purchased jam when faced with six choices compared to customers faced with 24 choices.
So the idea that it was ridiculous and dumb to have 30 kinds of jam in the grocery store now had the blessing of evidence-based, credentialed SCIENCE!!! Intelligent consumers everywhere were given a clean, simple explanation, and that explanation had the added bonus fitting our world view: It really is stupid to have so many kinds of jams and jellies! Nobody needs all that.
Now let's step back a moment. The so-called "jam study" dates from the mid 1990s. That's more than twenty years ago. If it were actually that much more profitable to sell far fewer types of jam, don't you think grocery stores all over the world would have done so? If greed supposedly explains everything they do, you'd think they'd leap at the chance to put these credentialed scientific conclusions to work ...and make even more money.
Whenever we find ourselves at war with reality, we're given an opportunity to consider that we're wrong.
And it turns out the jam study (and Barry Schwartz for that matter) studied the wrong thing: Neither considered the fact that almost all jam-buying consumers have already long ago settled on a brand and type. They already know what they want, and if they don't find "their" jam, they don't buy at all.[3]
Thus the grocery store isn't actually subjecting consumers to a dizzying array of choice by carrying dozens of types of jams and jellies. The idea that there were "too many choices" was an error of solipsism--an error committed by Schwartz, by the designers of the fatally flawed study, and us!
When a store carries what seems like a "ridiculous" number of types of the same product, all these brands and types are not there for you or me. We buy the specific type we want, and so do all other customers. Collectively, these products, as long as they remain profitable for the store to sell, make up the what the store carries. The grocery store simply offers the brands and types that consumers have already settled on, and as a result, there are exactly the right number of types of jams and jellies.
In reality, what the "jam and jelly aisle" really represents--to Schwartz, to the jam study people, and to many consumers who consider themselves smarter than the marketplace in which they participate--is essentially a problem of aesthetics. We're all intelligent people, and it just doesn't make sense to have so many more jams and jellies than any of us as intelligent individuals would think was necessary.
To us, there are more varieties than there needs to be, it doesn't make sense, and somebody should do something about it. See how that works?
Footnotes:
[1] Note that I do not intend the specific criticisms of this post in any way to take away from the many valuable insights in Schwartz's book. For me, one of the most profound insights I learned from The Paradox of Choice was the concept of "satisficing."
[2] The virtue-signalling here is nuanced and often difficult to see (all virtue-signalling must be non-obvious, by definition, in order to be truly effective). The mechanism here: by pointing out something dumb, one appears smart by (unstated) comparison. Look around carefully, and you will see all kinds of examples of this type of behavior. One common current example occurs when people point out how stupid (or inarticulate, or hotheaded, or treasonous, or gesticulatory, or racist, or orange, etc.) our President is. This particular example also shows how easy it is to virtue-signal without us realizing we're actually doing it.
[3] See this interesting article on a re-analysis of 99 studies of choice paradox, which uncovered explanations why you actually might want dozens of kinds of jam after all.
In Defense of Big Farms
Readers, I'm travelling right now, so please enjoy this post from Casual Kitchen's archives. See you in another week or two, and thank you for indulging me while I take a brief break from writing.
**********************************
Anyone who bites into a rock-hard California tomato in February and compares it to a sweet Jersey tomato in August quickly learns an indisputable truth: there are certain things large-scale agriculture can do, and certain things it can't.
And that's one of the many reasons everyone enjoys driving over to the local farmstand to buy produce. Not only are you supporting your local economy, you get a tomato that, well, actually tastes like a tomato.
But what happens during a drought, or a flood, or a poor year for crops in your part of the country? What happens when there's a shortage of local food?
I'll share one recent, and sobering, example of what happens. Remember the rice shortage of 2008? Most Americans don't, for reasons we'll get to in a moment. But sadly, this shortage created severe problems in dozens of countries around the world. In fact, nations like Senegal and Haiti faced skyrocking rice prices, food hoarding--even food riots.
But in the USA, no one even remembers. Why? Because our ag and transport industries adapted so quickly that consumers hardly noticed. In fact, the only evidence of a rice shortage in our local grocery stores here in northern New Jersey was a brief limit of two 20-pound bags of rice per customer. And within two weeks, rice in our local stores was in oversupply and put on sale at 50% off.
Remember: this was a shortage severe enough to cause food riots in some countries. And while there was plenty of panicked media coverage of the horrors of the rice shortage, I never saw a single article discussing how our food industry adjusted to it so effectively.
Admittedly, Big Food and Big Ag can be hilariously easy targets to criticize. To the most paranoid among us, they represent everything wrong with America today: Big Food makes irresistible snacks as part of a master plan to fatten us all up, while Big Ag secretly grows genetically-modified produce, soaks it in e. coli for good measure, and then drives it cross-country in an orgy of fossil fuel consumption.
But this perception is parody, not reality. Today, the options available to American food shoppers have never been greater: the average American grocery store carries some 55,000 items, and in the dead of winter you can find anything from organic California raspberries at $6 a pint to regional potatoes at 59c a pound. I'll leave it to you to decide which is the better value.
In short, food is available to us in a range that is simply unimaginable to our grandparents' generation. And at the same time, American consumers are reaping the benefits of a full-blown renaissance in local food. A truly robust food industry -- one that can handle spot shortages, manage uncooperative regional weather, and adapt to the natural fluctations of food production -- needs to have both local and large-scale food production to work properly.
That's how we can protect the food needs of a nation of 320 million people.
A shorter version of this post ran in Dirt Magazine.
**********************************
Anyone who bites into a rock-hard California tomato in February and compares it to a sweet Jersey tomato in August quickly learns an indisputable truth: there are certain things large-scale agriculture can do, and certain things it can't.
And that's one of the many reasons everyone enjoys driving over to the local farmstand to buy produce. Not only are you supporting your local economy, you get a tomato that, well, actually tastes like a tomato.
But what happens during a drought, or a flood, or a poor year for crops in your part of the country? What happens when there's a shortage of local food?
I'll share one recent, and sobering, example of what happens. Remember the rice shortage of 2008? Most Americans don't, for reasons we'll get to in a moment. But sadly, this shortage created severe problems in dozens of countries around the world. In fact, nations like Senegal and Haiti faced skyrocking rice prices, food hoarding--even food riots.
But in the USA, no one even remembers. Why? Because our ag and transport industries adapted so quickly that consumers hardly noticed. In fact, the only evidence of a rice shortage in our local grocery stores here in northern New Jersey was a brief limit of two 20-pound bags of rice per customer. And within two weeks, rice in our local stores was in oversupply and put on sale at 50% off.
Remember: this was a shortage severe enough to cause food riots in some countries. And while there was plenty of panicked media coverage of the horrors of the rice shortage, I never saw a single article discussing how our food industry adjusted to it so effectively.
Admittedly, Big Food and Big Ag can be hilariously easy targets to criticize. To the most paranoid among us, they represent everything wrong with America today: Big Food makes irresistible snacks as part of a master plan to fatten us all up, while Big Ag secretly grows genetically-modified produce, soaks it in e. coli for good measure, and then drives it cross-country in an orgy of fossil fuel consumption.
But this perception is parody, not reality. Today, the options available to American food shoppers have never been greater: the average American grocery store carries some 55,000 items, and in the dead of winter you can find anything from organic California raspberries at $6 a pint to regional potatoes at 59c a pound. I'll leave it to you to decide which is the better value.
In short, food is available to us in a range that is simply unimaginable to our grandparents' generation. And at the same time, American consumers are reaping the benefits of a full-blown renaissance in local food. A truly robust food industry -- one that can handle spot shortages, manage uncooperative regional weather, and adapt to the natural fluctations of food production -- needs to have both local and large-scale food production to work properly.
That's how we can protect the food needs of a nation of 320 million people.
A shorter version of this post ran in Dirt Magazine.
Money Sundays: Second Order Thinking
Readers, I want to share a mental tool with you, a tool I used incessantly in my days as a professional investor--and still use today as a individual investor: Always ask the second order question.
What are second order questions? They're meta-questions, or questions about first-order questions. One way that helps me think in second order terms is to make a habit of asking myself "and then what?"
Let's look at an example. Consider the following (rather defeatist) first-order question: "Why bother with investing? The stock market's rigged anyway."
In its first-order form, this is a ready-made rationalization for not even bothering to learn about investing at all. Forget it, what's the point? Didn't you hear me say it's rigged? You could stop right there and be done with the whole domain.
Or, you could ask a second-order question: "If the stock market's really rigged, then what?"
This is the kind of question that opens mental doors, and often there's a gigantic opportunity behind those doors. For example, you could conclude "If the stock market's rigged, maybe I should invest in the companies that are supposedly 'rigging' it… I bet I could make some very good returns piggybacking on those guys."
Suddenly, a yuge cognitive door opens, which might help you discover the stocks of well-regarded investment managers like T. Rowe Price [TROW] or Legg Mason [LM]. Or alternatively, you might discover the stocks of well-regarded private equity firms like Carlyle Group [CG], KKR [KKR] or Blackstone [BX]. "Hmmm which of these companies pays consistent and attractive dividends with good dividend growth potential?"
Now you're off and running with some potentially very intriguing investment ideas.
There's more. As we saw in a recent post, you can now quite easily find investor letters and 13F filings that offer incredibly useful insights and investment ideas from some of the best hedge funds and investment funds around. You know, all those fatcats out there supposedly rigging the stock market.
Heck, why pay some hedge fund an insane "two and twenty" fee structure (2% of assets and 20% of gains) when you can borrow their ideas for free?
Never stop at the first-order question. Ask the second order question, and always try to engage in second order thinking. It's a lens for looking at reality. Using it helps you think more deeply, and it leads you to opportunity for you and your family.
For further reading:
For much more on the concept of second order thinking, see Howard Mark's book The Most Important Thing.
How can I support Casual Kitchen?
Easy. Do all your shopping at Amazon.com
via the links on this site! You can also link to me or subscribe to my RSS feed. Finally, consider sharing this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to Facebook, Twitter (follow me @danielckoontz!) or to bookmarking sites like reddit, digg or stumbleupon. I'm deeply grateful to my readers for their ongoing support.
What are second order questions? They're meta-questions, or questions about first-order questions. One way that helps me think in second order terms is to make a habit of asking myself "and then what?"
Let's look at an example. Consider the following (rather defeatist) first-order question: "Why bother with investing? The stock market's rigged anyway."
In its first-order form, this is a ready-made rationalization for not even bothering to learn about investing at all. Forget it, what's the point? Didn't you hear me say it's rigged? You could stop right there and be done with the whole domain.
Or, you could ask a second-order question: "If the stock market's really rigged, then what?"
This is the kind of question that opens mental doors, and often there's a gigantic opportunity behind those doors. For example, you could conclude "If the stock market's rigged, maybe I should invest in the companies that are supposedly 'rigging' it… I bet I could make some very good returns piggybacking on those guys."
Suddenly, a yuge cognitive door opens, which might help you discover the stocks of well-regarded investment managers like T. Rowe Price [TROW] or Legg Mason [LM]. Or alternatively, you might discover the stocks of well-regarded private equity firms like Carlyle Group [CG], KKR [KKR] or Blackstone [BX]. "Hmmm which of these companies pays consistent and attractive dividends with good dividend growth potential?"
Now you're off and running with some potentially very intriguing investment ideas.
There's more. As we saw in a recent post, you can now quite easily find investor letters and 13F filings that offer incredibly useful insights and investment ideas from some of the best hedge funds and investment funds around. You know, all those fatcats out there supposedly rigging the stock market.
Heck, why pay some hedge fund an insane "two and twenty" fee structure (2% of assets and 20% of gains) when you can borrow their ideas for free?
Never stop at the first-order question. Ask the second order question, and always try to engage in second order thinking. It's a lens for looking at reality. Using it helps you think more deeply, and it leads you to opportunity for you and your family.
For further reading:
For much more on the concept of second order thinking, see Howard Mark's book The Most Important Thing.
How can I support Casual Kitchen?
Easy. Do all your shopping at Amazon.com
via the links on this site! You can also link to me or subscribe to my RSS feed. Finally, consider sharing this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to Facebook, Twitter (follow me @danielckoontz!) or to bookmarking sites like reddit, digg or stumbleupon. I'm deeply grateful to my readers for their ongoing support.
If I Can’t Give Advice (!) How Do I Evangelize Frugality and Anticonsumerism?
Last week's post on advice-giving left me with grave doubts.
I feel strongly about my personal obligation to help reduce status competition. In fact, I consider it my ethical responsibility to give the people around me less to compete against. This is an important value to me, and I believe our society's health, and for that matter our planet's health, depends largely on our collective ability to reject consumerism and status competition in all forms.
But a problem came up last week. If it's true that any advice I might give produces the exact opposite effect, then the efforts I make to reduce status competition actually increase it. My attempts to do the right thing end up doing the wrong thing, and I end up hurting the planet and the people around me.
Heavy, right?
Here's another way to think about it. By being overtly and in-your-face frugal, how am I doing anything other than mere virtue-signalling? It's as if I had a little sign over my head saying "Ooh! Ooh! Look at me and how little I spend! Look at how much I love the planet! Aren't I awesome!"
So if all this is true, it takes us right back to square one: How do we really go about sharing and spreading these fundamental values of spending less, saving more, anti-consumerism and anti-status competition? How do we effectively share these values?
Well, let's start with first principles: We want to produce in others a positive, helpful response--for them. This means we have to keep in mind that most people have fragile egos and respond with reactance. This, therefore, carries significant implications for how we influence others.
A side note: It might bother us that many people have fragile egos or respond with reactance. Or, phrased a little differently, we might react with our own reactance to the reality of reactance in others. But reality doesn't care that we're bothered. And it doesn't matter what type of responses we think people should have. That's just solipsism. What matters is the responses people actually have, and whether we help them or not.
Thus our evangelism of these values probably should be counterintutive, non-overt, subtle, nuanced. Anything other than overt and direct.
And, once again with feeling: no unsolicited advice! No "you should do this"-type advice.
Further, solicited advice is possibly allowed only in very rare and unusual circumstances. For example, when you receive no excuse-making or verbal pushback from the person asking, and they seem sincerely and strongly interested in following and embracing your advice.
In the vast majority of cases, however, you should default to reverse psychology-type approaches: Once again:
Most of this stuff will be too hard for you.
This is just too difficult for the average person.
Naahhhh don't bother, it's probably not worth it to you.
These approaches, as we saw last week, produce positive effects via the mechanism of reactance.
Finally, I think we have to depend on the quiet strength of setting an example through how we live. Do things like drive an older, non-flashy car. Don't buy a mansion (or if you already did, for goodness' sake don't brag or status-signal about it). Don't go on and on about the prices of things. The point is to never status-signal in any way, thus bragging about the $300 you just spent on your new tennis racquet or how much your last luxury vacation cost is obviously off-limits.
Instead, consider employing reverse psychology and anti-brag and anti-status-signal about how little your last vacation cost!
Readers, how do you spread your values of anti-consumerism and frugality? Do you try to spread them at all? Why or why not?
READ NEXT: Constructed Preferences: How Having More Money Wastes Still MORE of Your Money
How can I support Casual Kitchen?
Easy. Do all your shopping at Amazon.com via the links on this site! You can also link to me or subscribe to my RSS feed. Finally, consider sharing this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to Facebook, Twitter (follow me @danielckoontz!) or to bookmarking sites like reddit, digg or stumbleupon. I'm deeply grateful to my readers for their ongoing support.
I feel strongly about my personal obligation to help reduce status competition. In fact, I consider it my ethical responsibility to give the people around me less to compete against. This is an important value to me, and I believe our society's health, and for that matter our planet's health, depends largely on our collective ability to reject consumerism and status competition in all forms.
But a problem came up last week. If it's true that any advice I might give produces the exact opposite effect, then the efforts I make to reduce status competition actually increase it. My attempts to do the right thing end up doing the wrong thing, and I end up hurting the planet and the people around me.
Heavy, right?
Here's another way to think about it. By being overtly and in-your-face frugal, how am I doing anything other than mere virtue-signalling? It's as if I had a little sign over my head saying "Ooh! Ooh! Look at me and how little I spend! Look at how much I love the planet! Aren't I awesome!"
So if all this is true, it takes us right back to square one: How do we really go about sharing and spreading these fundamental values of spending less, saving more, anti-consumerism and anti-status competition? How do we effectively share these values?
Well, let's start with first principles: We want to produce in others a positive, helpful response--for them. This means we have to keep in mind that most people have fragile egos and respond with reactance. This, therefore, carries significant implications for how we influence others.
A side note: It might bother us that many people have fragile egos or respond with reactance. Or, phrased a little differently, we might react with our own reactance to the reality of reactance in others. But reality doesn't care that we're bothered. And it doesn't matter what type of responses we think people should have. That's just solipsism. What matters is the responses people actually have, and whether we help them or not.
Thus our evangelism of these values probably should be counterintutive, non-overt, subtle, nuanced. Anything other than overt and direct.
And, once again with feeling: no unsolicited advice! No "you should do this"-type advice.
Further, solicited advice is possibly allowed only in very rare and unusual circumstances. For example, when you receive no excuse-making or verbal pushback from the person asking, and they seem sincerely and strongly interested in following and embracing your advice.
In the vast majority of cases, however, you should default to reverse psychology-type approaches: Once again:
Most of this stuff will be too hard for you.
This is just too difficult for the average person.
Naahhhh don't bother, it's probably not worth it to you.
These approaches, as we saw last week, produce positive effects via the mechanism of reactance.
Finally, I think we have to depend on the quiet strength of setting an example through how we live. Do things like drive an older, non-flashy car. Don't buy a mansion (or if you already did, for goodness' sake don't brag or status-signal about it). Don't go on and on about the prices of things. The point is to never status-signal in any way, thus bragging about the $300 you just spent on your new tennis racquet or how much your last luxury vacation cost is obviously off-limits.
Instead, consider employing reverse psychology and anti-brag and anti-status-signal about how little your last vacation cost!
Readers, how do you spread your values of anti-consumerism and frugality? Do you try to spread them at all? Why or why not?
READ NEXT: Constructed Preferences: How Having More Money Wastes Still MORE of Your Money
How can I support Casual Kitchen?
Easy. Do all your shopping at Amazon.com
via the links on this site! You can also link to me or subscribe to my RSS feed. Finally, consider sharing this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to Facebook, Twitter (follow me @danielckoontz!) or to bookmarking sites like reddit, digg or stumbleupon. I'm deeply grateful to my readers for their ongoing support.
Should You Give Advice Encouraging Others Not to Spend?
No. Never.
Let's start with advice-giving in its worst form: unsolicited advice. It's never a good idea to give unsolicited advice. Sure, you can try to convince people to do something other than what they want--but they're just going to do what they want anyway. By imposing your values on others (no matter how awesome you might think your values are), you're being both annoying and sanctimonious. Doubly pointless.
To repeat: do not give unsolicited advice.
But as we'll soon see, even if someone directly asks you for advice, it's still not a good idea to give advice.
Here's why. Once you understand that everybody has an ego, that everybody suffers to some extent from not invented here syndrome, you begin to understand a rather twisted truth: when you try to "help" with advice, most people respond with reactance rather than agreement. Therefore, whenever you give overt advice, whether requested or not, it usually creates the opposite of what you intend.
In other words, by encouraging frugality in others, you actually influence people to spend more. Disturbing to say the least.
I know you didn't mean it. You never meant to produce this twisted contra-result with your heartfelt, well-meaning frugality advice. But to paraphrase the movie Unforgiven: I didn't mean it's got nothing to do with it.
Thus it is critical to observe carefully the actions and reactions of others after you give out encouragement or advice. If they respond with reactance-based or not invented here-type responses such as:
"I know that already"
"I tried that and it didn't work"
"Sure, that's easy for you, but..."
"I'm too busy to do XYZ"
...then it's time to shut up. You've already said too much.
Then again, if you want to have some fun and actually produce positive results, forget the advice and switch to reverse psychology. Say something like "You want to save more money? It's probably gonna be too difficult for you." Or perhaps phrased more diplomatically: "It's really just too hard for the average person."
For a shocking percentage of people, well more than half, these reverse-psychology statements will be far more effective than actually saying what you mean. Why? Because your statement of doubt produces reactance in others. It makes them want to prove that you're wrong to doubt them!
In other words, your reverse psychology produces the result they (and you) actually want. Yes, this is weird and a little twisted. But it doesn't change the fact that it's true.
Finally, a thought for any readers resisting the admittedly counter-intuitive idea of using reverse psychology to positively impact others. And this goes double for any reader who considers doing so to be somehow insulting or condescending.
Ask yourself which is more caring: to produce a positive, helpful response in someone... or a negative, unhelpful response? Is it in any way caring or loving to produce in someone a response that observably does not help them?
Remember, this is about the success and effectiveness of the other person. It's not about you and the type of reaction you think they should have.
READ NEXT: The Top Lame-Ass Excuses Between You and Better Health
ALSO: "Nobody Listens to Me in Real Life, But on the Internet Everyone Does"
How can I support Casual Kitchen?
Easy. Do all your shopping at Amazon.com via the links on this site! You can also link to me or subscribe to my RSS feed. Finally, consider sharing this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to Facebook, Twitter (follow me @danielckoontz!) or to bookmarking sites like reddit, digg or stumbleupon. I'm deeply grateful to my readers for their ongoing support.
Let's start with advice-giving in its worst form: unsolicited advice. It's never a good idea to give unsolicited advice. Sure, you can try to convince people to do something other than what they want--but they're just going to do what they want anyway. By imposing your values on others (no matter how awesome you might think your values are), you're being both annoying and sanctimonious. Doubly pointless.
To repeat: do not give unsolicited advice.
But as we'll soon see, even if someone directly asks you for advice, it's still not a good idea to give advice.
Here's why. Once you understand that everybody has an ego, that everybody suffers to some extent from not invented here syndrome, you begin to understand a rather twisted truth: when you try to "help" with advice, most people respond with reactance rather than agreement. Therefore, whenever you give overt advice, whether requested or not, it usually creates the opposite of what you intend.
In other words, by encouraging frugality in others, you actually influence people to spend more. Disturbing to say the least.
I know you didn't mean it. You never meant to produce this twisted contra-result with your heartfelt, well-meaning frugality advice. But to paraphrase the movie Unforgiven: I didn't mean it's got nothing to do with it.
Thus it is critical to observe carefully the actions and reactions of others after you give out encouragement or advice. If they respond with reactance-based or not invented here-type responses such as:
"I know that already"
"I tried that and it didn't work"
"Sure, that's easy for you, but..."
"I'm too busy to do XYZ"
...then it's time to shut up. You've already said too much.
Then again, if you want to have some fun and actually produce positive results, forget the advice and switch to reverse psychology. Say something like "You want to save more money? It's probably gonna be too difficult for you." Or perhaps phrased more diplomatically: "It's really just too hard for the average person."
For a shocking percentage of people, well more than half, these reverse-psychology statements will be far more effective than actually saying what you mean. Why? Because your statement of doubt produces reactance in others. It makes them want to prove that you're wrong to doubt them!
In other words, your reverse psychology produces the result they (and you) actually want. Yes, this is weird and a little twisted. But it doesn't change the fact that it's true.
Finally, a thought for any readers resisting the admittedly counter-intuitive idea of using reverse psychology to positively impact others. And this goes double for any reader who considers doing so to be somehow insulting or condescending.
Ask yourself which is more caring: to produce a positive, helpful response in someone... or a negative, unhelpful response? Is it in any way caring or loving to produce in someone a response that observably does not help them?
Remember, this is about the success and effectiveness of the other person. It's not about you and the type of reaction you think they should have.
READ NEXT: The Top Lame-Ass Excuses Between You and Better Health
ALSO: "Nobody Listens to Me in Real Life, But on the Internet Everyone Does"
How can I support Casual Kitchen?
Easy. Do all your shopping at Amazon.com
via the links on this site! You can also link to me or subscribe to my RSS feed. Finally, consider sharing this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to Facebook, Twitter (follow me @danielckoontz!) or to bookmarking sites like reddit, digg or stumbleupon. I'm deeply grateful to my readers for their ongoing support.
Checkers... and Chess
The process of writing my last two posts (the one on choicemaking and the other one on the popularity of terrible blogs) got me thinking about the nature of the various games being played around us. Writing those posts helped me grasp an insight: We want to know which games are being played, and we want to make sure we're playing the right game, the game that really matters.
Or, to put it another way: we don't want to be fooled into playing some game somebody else chose for us.
To help explain what I'm getting at, I'll use the metaphor of playing checkers vs playing chess. Playing checkers is playing a game someone else sets out for us, where the rules and the entire framework of the game are pre-set, limited, and played on their terms, not yours.
Chess, on the other hand, is the upper-level game going on around and above the people stuck playing checkers. Chess is where the real strategy happens, and it's where you have far more control--both over the framing of your choices and over the choices themselves. Thus chess is the real game, the game you want to make sure to play.
Let's consider a few scenarios that many of us might face in everyday life, each of which offer us a set of basic checkers moves... and a parallel set of nuanced chess moves.
Scenario 1: "Would you like to lease your new car or would you like to finance it?"
You're in a car dealership, you've decided to buy a new car... and suddenly a game begins around you, a game involving a set of choices about how to pay for this car you've just decided to buy.
For a checkers player, the choice is obvious: "Ooooh! The lease payments are a *lot* lower... uuhhh, I think I'll lease it." The person in this situation is given two choices (to borrow a concept from two posts ago, you might call it "choice by limitation"). And because we're playing checkers, the choices offered are the only choices, and, obediently, we choose one of them. Before we know it, we're in the financing manager's office debating whether to get window etching.
But once you understand that there might be a greater game of chess going on around you, you start asking real questions, questions that take you right out of the box they're trying to keep you in:
"What will be the total cost of leasing a car, particularly if after three years I have to give it back? What's my effective interest rate, and can I do better? Should I finance at all? Heck, should I really even be buying a car? And what the heck am I thinking paying another $128 for stupid window etching???"
Think about the people who have set up the checkers game in front of you. They don't want you asking these questions. They don't want you playing chess. They want you playing checkers!
You, on the other hand, want to play the game on more equal footing, particularly when dealing with institutions structured to rudely separate you from your money. And in order to play chess in this particular situation, you'll need advanced preparation. You might need to have a far greater degree of independence to the outcome of a car-buying situation. Perhaps you'll need to have the financial resources to pay for the car in a variety of ways--not just the "checkers" ways they offer you. Perhaps you have to not need a car in the first place, allowing you to defer the entire car-buying process until circumstances heavily favor you. This might mean waiting until the end of the sales year, or waiting until a time when the dealer is liquidating inventory and thus is offering cars for sale at prices and terms suitable to you, not them.
Now you're starting to play the greater game of chess. Let's move on to another scenario.
Scenario 2: "If you transfer your balance to our credit card, you can have 0% interest for the first three months!"
Okay, what's the checkers move here? Easy: transfer your balance. And then do it again to some other card three months from now. You can even go full checkers and fluff yourself on how you're avoiding obscenely high interest expenses on debt you shouldn't even have in the first place.
The chess move? Well, this part CK readers can fill in for themselves. Readers here already know not to needlessly buy stuff, certainly not stuff they can't afford, so they wouldn't put themselves in a situation where they'd even have a credit card balance, much less need to transfer one.
A sidenote. At some point, you might find yourself in an occasional situation where the only available move is a checkers move. Let's say you really need to buy a car, right now. Or, after a big vacation (one you lamentably didn't save up for in advance) and a surprise car repair, you get hit with an unexpectedly large credit card bill, and as a result you can't fully pay it off. In these cases, you're playing checkers, and because you're playing checkers, you are unable to control the framing of the situation. Your moves are limited.
The primary insight here is get yourself out of the checkers game you're in right now, and try to create circumstances where you play checkers as infrequently as possible. A big part of winning the game around you involves avoiding situations where your options are limited to crappy checkers moves... situations like paying credit card interest to The Man, or shopping for a car without advanced preparation.
It helps even more to be vaguely ashamed that you're not playing chess. You should be at the chess tables. You deserve to be there. And therefore the next time a situation like this comes up you'll be prepared. You are not going to let yourself get elbowed down to the checkers game.
Let's look at one final scenario.
Scenario 3: "This mutual fund was the best performing fund over the past 5 and 10 years."
The retail investor, upon hearing this statement, nods her head, makes a suitably admiring comment, and plunks her money into a high-fee fund. What can possibly go wrong? it's the best of the best!
Readers: is she playing checkers or chess?
Unfortunately, over the next five- and ten-year periods, this fund's performance mean-reverts. The fund stumbles down to the bottom quartile of its peer group, and while she doesn't yet know it, this investor will be paying extra fees for years for the exclusive right to underperform the overall market.
Yep, you were right: checkers.
Let's play chess instead. The chess player knows to be suspicious of any investment that's being sold to him, in fact he likely uses "don't buy or invest in anything sold to you" as a general heuristic in all life domains, not just investing.
Also, the chess player wants to better understand the nature of this fund's outperformance: after all, there's a good chance it might be due to sheer luck. And of course part of the backdrop of his investing knowledge includes insights like knowing that high-fee investment products are almost always doomed to underperform low-fee index funds.
Thus the chess player will smile and politely turn down this investment. And if she hasn't already, she'll question why she's doing any business at all with an individual selling her crap financial products like this.
Conclusion
Chess players arrive to a chess game with the ability to leave the table, and with a great degree of independence, even antifragility, to the outcome of the situation. They skillfully avoid being in situations where they're forced to buy, spend or pay. They don't let themselves get boxed in where the only moves are checkers moves.
Checkers is the sucker's game, the game they want you to play. Don't play it. Play chess.
Appendix: Alternate scenarios
How about few other scenarios where we might consider chess versus checkers moves?
1) At a doctor's office: "Your cholesterol is a little high, I recommend we put you on a statin to get those numbers lower."
2) At the real estate agent's office: "Well, according to your mortgage preclearance form we should really be looking at homes in the low- to mid-$400s. Also, you're going to want to lock in a mortgage as soon as possible. Rates are going up!"
3) At the gym, one woman talking to another: "I don't want to lift weights. I don't want to get big and bulky."
4) At home, a person about to pay the cable bill: "I can't believe Comcast raised rates again. We're paying $205 a month now for cable!"
5) At the insurance agent's office: "This policy has a low deductible, so if you have an accident, you'll only be responsible for paying the first $100."
Finally! For further reading
Readers, it takes me a long time, an embarrassingly long time, to arrive at relatively basic insights. I had to read, over the past few years, the entire list of books below to be able to crystallize and articulate the ideas in today's post. Imagine the insights you'd get (and probably far more quickly) from reading them too. Plus! You can support my work here at Casual Kitchen by following the Amazon links anywhere on this site: you'll pay nothing extra, but a portion of your total purchase is paid to me in the form of a small commission. As always, I thank you for your support and attention.
Games People Play by Eric Berne
Antifragile by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Fooled by Randomness by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Risk Savvy by Gerd Giggerenzer
Capital by Karl Marx
Early Retirement Extreme by Jacob Lund Fisker
The Path of Least Resistance by Robert Fritz
The Art of Learning by Josh Waitzkin
Or, to put it another way: we don't want to be fooled into playing some game somebody else chose for us.
To help explain what I'm getting at, I'll use the metaphor of playing checkers vs playing chess. Playing checkers is playing a game someone else sets out for us, where the rules and the entire framework of the game are pre-set, limited, and played on their terms, not yours.
Chess, on the other hand, is the upper-level game going on around and above the people stuck playing checkers. Chess is where the real strategy happens, and it's where you have far more control--both over the framing of your choices and over the choices themselves. Thus chess is the real game, the game you want to make sure to play.
Let's consider a few scenarios that many of us might face in everyday life, each of which offer us a set of basic checkers moves... and a parallel set of nuanced chess moves.
Scenario 1: "Would you like to lease your new car or would you like to finance it?"
You're in a car dealership, you've decided to buy a new car... and suddenly a game begins around you, a game involving a set of choices about how to pay for this car you've just decided to buy.
For a checkers player, the choice is obvious: "Ooooh! The lease payments are a *lot* lower... uuhhh, I think I'll lease it." The person in this situation is given two choices (to borrow a concept from two posts ago, you might call it "choice by limitation"). And because we're playing checkers, the choices offered are the only choices, and, obediently, we choose one of them. Before we know it, we're in the financing manager's office debating whether to get window etching.
But once you understand that there might be a greater game of chess going on around you, you start asking real questions, questions that take you right out of the box they're trying to keep you in:
"What will be the total cost of leasing a car, particularly if after three years I have to give it back? What's my effective interest rate, and can I do better? Should I finance at all? Heck, should I really even be buying a car? And what the heck am I thinking paying another $128 for stupid window etching???"
Think about the people who have set up the checkers game in front of you. They don't want you asking these questions. They don't want you playing chess. They want you playing checkers!
You, on the other hand, want to play the game on more equal footing, particularly when dealing with institutions structured to rudely separate you from your money. And in order to play chess in this particular situation, you'll need advanced preparation. You might need to have a far greater degree of independence to the outcome of a car-buying situation. Perhaps you'll need to have the financial resources to pay for the car in a variety of ways--not just the "checkers" ways they offer you. Perhaps you have to not need a car in the first place, allowing you to defer the entire car-buying process until circumstances heavily favor you. This might mean waiting until the end of the sales year, or waiting until a time when the dealer is liquidating inventory and thus is offering cars for sale at prices and terms suitable to you, not them.
Now you're starting to play the greater game of chess. Let's move on to another scenario.
Scenario 2: "If you transfer your balance to our credit card, you can have 0% interest for the first three months!"
Okay, what's the checkers move here? Easy: transfer your balance. And then do it again to some other card three months from now. You can even go full checkers and fluff yourself on how you're avoiding obscenely high interest expenses on debt you shouldn't even have in the first place.
The chess move? Well, this part CK readers can fill in for themselves. Readers here already know not to needlessly buy stuff, certainly not stuff they can't afford, so they wouldn't put themselves in a situation where they'd even have a credit card balance, much less need to transfer one.
A sidenote. At some point, you might find yourself in an occasional situation where the only available move is a checkers move. Let's say you really need to buy a car, right now. Or, after a big vacation (one you lamentably didn't save up for in advance) and a surprise car repair, you get hit with an unexpectedly large credit card bill, and as a result you can't fully pay it off. In these cases, you're playing checkers, and because you're playing checkers, you are unable to control the framing of the situation. Your moves are limited.
The primary insight here is get yourself out of the checkers game you're in right now, and try to create circumstances where you play checkers as infrequently as possible. A big part of winning the game around you involves avoiding situations where your options are limited to crappy checkers moves... situations like paying credit card interest to The Man, or shopping for a car without advanced preparation.
It helps even more to be vaguely ashamed that you're not playing chess. You should be at the chess tables. You deserve to be there. And therefore the next time a situation like this comes up you'll be prepared. You are not going to let yourself get elbowed down to the checkers game.
Let's look at one final scenario.
Scenario 3: "This mutual fund was the best performing fund over the past 5 and 10 years."
The retail investor, upon hearing this statement, nods her head, makes a suitably admiring comment, and plunks her money into a high-fee fund. What can possibly go wrong? it's the best of the best!
Readers: is she playing checkers or chess?
Unfortunately, over the next five- and ten-year periods, this fund's performance mean-reverts. The fund stumbles down to the bottom quartile of its peer group, and while she doesn't yet know it, this investor will be paying extra fees for years for the exclusive right to underperform the overall market.
Yep, you were right: checkers.
Let's play chess instead. The chess player knows to be suspicious of any investment that's being sold to him, in fact he likely uses "don't buy or invest in anything sold to you" as a general heuristic in all life domains, not just investing.
Also, the chess player wants to better understand the nature of this fund's outperformance: after all, there's a good chance it might be due to sheer luck. And of course part of the backdrop of his investing knowledge includes insights like knowing that high-fee investment products are almost always doomed to underperform low-fee index funds.
Thus the chess player will smile and politely turn down this investment. And if she hasn't already, she'll question why she's doing any business at all with an individual selling her crap financial products like this.
Conclusion
Chess players arrive to a chess game with the ability to leave the table, and with a great degree of independence, even antifragility, to the outcome of the situation. They skillfully avoid being in situations where they're forced to buy, spend or pay. They don't let themselves get boxed in where the only moves are checkers moves.
Checkers is the sucker's game, the game they want you to play. Don't play it. Play chess.
Appendix: Alternate scenarios
How about few other scenarios where we might consider chess versus checkers moves?
1) At a doctor's office: "Your cholesterol is a little high, I recommend we put you on a statin to get those numbers lower."
2) At the real estate agent's office: "Well, according to your mortgage preclearance form we should really be looking at homes in the low- to mid-$400s. Also, you're going to want to lock in a mortgage as soon as possible. Rates are going up!"
3) At the gym, one woman talking to another: "I don't want to lift weights. I don't want to get big and bulky."
4) At home, a person about to pay the cable bill: "I can't believe Comcast raised rates again. We're paying $205 a month now for cable!"
5) At the insurance agent's office: "This policy has a low deductible, so if you have an accident, you'll only be responsible for paying the first $100."
Finally! For further reading
Readers, it takes me a long time, an embarrassingly long time, to arrive at relatively basic insights. I had to read, over the past few years, the entire list of books below to be able to crystallize and articulate the ideas in today's post. Imagine the insights you'd get (and probably far more quickly) from reading them too. Plus! You can support my work here at Casual Kitchen by following the Amazon links anywhere on this site: you'll pay nothing extra, but a portion of your total purchase is paid to me in the form of a small commission. As always, I thank you for your support and attention.
Games People Play by Eric Berne
Antifragile by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Fooled by Randomness by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Risk Savvy by Gerd Giggerenzer
Capital by Karl Marx
Early Retirement Extreme by Jacob Lund Fisker
The Path of Least Resistance by Robert Fritz
The Art of Learning by Josh Waitzkin
Why Bad Blogs Get More Readers (An Accidental, Secret Recipe for Massive Web Traffic)
I've often said that it bugs me to see a good blog go unread. It's one reason why I run Friday Links posts: it's my own small effort to put good stuff I find in front of more readers.
But today I want to ask the exact opposite question: why do certain really bad blogs get so much traffic?
An obvious example is The Food Babe, a site with an intriguing (and unintentional) recipe for wide readership. Deep down, we're all vaguely suspicious of modernity, technology and scary-sounding long words. If you play off these fears, worried readers come running to your site. Add in a conspiracy theory here and there for good measure, and things you write start to sound rhetorically persuasive.
Notice I said rhetorically persuasive, not scientifically persuasive. Or logically persuasive. But this is the key to the secret recipe! If you write something scientifically or logically laughable but rhetorically persuasive, you quickly generate a second-order readership. A second crew of readers, readers more competent in logic and basic scientific principles, will point out the scientific and logical flaws in your argument. Often with dripping condescension.
Then, the original readers, the credulous ones, argue back. After all, nobody likes being condescended to.
So, if there's such a thing as a typical Food Babe reader, it would break down into two general types:
1) Credulous first-order readers looking for new things to fear.
2) Second-order readers astounded at how dumb other people are.
So here's your business model: write posts for the first group, but make those posts unrigorous enough to attract the second group too. If you follow this secret recipe correctly, you get viral posts, exploding traffic stats, and some really entertaining comment wars.
This might be the only profitable business model in blogging--perhaps in all of online media. And it certainly helps explain the ubiquitous outrage porn, worry porn and political handwringing porn suffusing our overall cognitive environment these days.
And since fear-mongering and conspiracy-mongering are particularly effective forms of rhetoric, The Food Babe really cleaned up for a while there. That is, until her scientific incompetence became a little too obvious. When it got out that she wrote (but later deleted without comment or explanation) a post on the radiation risks of microwave ovens (it contained quotes like this one: "when you stand in front of a radar device you will start perspiring/cooking from the inside out, just like food is cooked in the microwave oven."), her already-tenuous credibility met its end. Fortunately for us, the internet never forgets. Eventually, goofily unscientific people get found out and exposed, even if they do try to scrub their sites of the most scientifically hilarious things they've said.
But! Some bloggers use these embarrassing things about themselves to grow their traffic even more. One of Tim Ferriss's best business insights back in the early days of SEO was to make sure he captured pageview traffic from the keywords "Tim Ferriss Scam."
So, he wrote a post titled, naturally, "Tim Ferriss Scam!" Interestingly, it doesn't rank as highly as it used to, illustrating yet another challenge of blogging: the ceaseless competition for traffic, everywhere, all the time, for any and all keywords.
Ironically, Ferriss' Tim Ferriss Scam! post actually contains some excellent ideas (the quotes from Scott Boras and Epictetus for example), and it's a smart post from the standpoint of using a writer's time, since it mostly contains meta-content, content reused and retreaded from other posts and sources. Talk about turning your detractors to your advantage.
By the way, Ferriss has had a few Food Babe moments of his own. Readers here at CK will remember my extended criticism of the flaws in his book The Four Hour Chef, for example. Or his uproariously implausible post: From Geek to Freak: How I Gained 34 lbs. of Muscle in 4 Weeks.[1]
Much like a typical Food Babe post, From Geek to Freak is an (unintended?) masterpiece of meta-conversation. With its waxed and spray-tanned before-and-after photos and its 1,300 (and growing) comments arguing over whether it's possible or impossible to gain 34 pounds of muscle in a month, it all becomes a twisted game.
His game, that is. We're the suckers, expending our attention and our finite cognitive resources. We argue for him even when we argue against him. Savvy readers ought to be able to see a parallel--a direct parallel--that's been playing out over the past several months in our political media.
The Koontz Principle of Online Incompetence
Let's get back to the [Your name here] Scam post writing technique for a moment. Vani the Food Babe did one of these posts too, writing her own "Food Babe: Scam" post, and it's a veritable tour de force in unaware rhetoric [2] that drives home an interesting, if depressing point: the internet rewards incompetence. Write something incompetent, and people will read it, get mad, comment, and link back to you. Then, incompetent people read those comments, get mad, comment more, and link back to you. Competent people respond, comment more, write about you, link back to you, your search engine ranking goes higher and higher, and so on. Rinse, repeat... and sell ads!
If we carry this to its ultimate logical conclusion, we arrive at a useful general principle. Let's call it The Koontz Principle of Online Incompetence: The most divisive and incompetent content tends to rise to the top of all search rankings. Think of it as an informational equivalent of The Peter Principle.[3]
So, in a way, maybe it's not a bad thing that sites like The Food Babe no longer attract the attention and profits they used to, and likewise, maybe it's a good sign that our biggest media institutions--as they play the same twisted game with far greater resources--are losing readers and money too.
Footnotes:
[1] Glass houses disclaimer: I've written plenty of posts that are bad, stupid, boring, unrigorous, wrong, etc., and I've also generated arguments between readers arguing for (and sometimes even against!) my incompetence. I try to do the best I can here at CK, but believe me, I come up short plenty of times too.
[2] Techniques include but are not limited to: using mean tweets against her (this is the so-called "tone fallacy": arguing that if you're not nice, your criticism is therefore disqualified); claiming "it's not about me" in a post self-evidently 100% about her, and using rhetorically powerful (but logically vacuous) phrases like "obviously, some powerful entities in the chemical and food industries have a financial incentive to try to discredit me" and "The bottom line is that many of these people who use this argument to discredit me, don't want the truth, regarding our food supply, coming out." One could easily write a satire using statements like these. Hey, wait: somebody already did!
[3] The Peter Principle states that every employee gets promoted up through an organization until he reaches a level where he's incompetent. Anyone working at any large corporation has seen this principle at work, and it is why, in the longer run, large organizations often tend toward generalized incompetence.
READ NEXT: Did Newark Mayor Cory Booker Really *Try* With His Food Stamp Challenge?
How can I support Casual Kitchen?
Easy. Do all your shopping at Amazon.com via the links on this site! You can also link to me or subscribe to my RSS feed. Finally, consider sharing this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to Facebook, Twitter (follow me @danielckoontz!) or to bookmarking sites like reddit, digg or stumbleupon. I'm deeply grateful to my readers for their ongoing support.
But today I want to ask the exact opposite question: why do certain really bad blogs get so much traffic?
An obvious example is The Food Babe, a site with an intriguing (and unintentional) recipe for wide readership. Deep down, we're all vaguely suspicious of modernity, technology and scary-sounding long words. If you play off these fears, worried readers come running to your site. Add in a conspiracy theory here and there for good measure, and things you write start to sound rhetorically persuasive.
Notice I said rhetorically persuasive, not scientifically persuasive. Or logically persuasive. But this is the key to the secret recipe! If you write something scientifically or logically laughable but rhetorically persuasive, you quickly generate a second-order readership. A second crew of readers, readers more competent in logic and basic scientific principles, will point out the scientific and logical flaws in your argument. Often with dripping condescension.
Then, the original readers, the credulous ones, argue back. After all, nobody likes being condescended to.
So, if there's such a thing as a typical Food Babe reader, it would break down into two general types:
1) Credulous first-order readers looking for new things to fear.
2) Second-order readers astounded at how dumb other people are.
So here's your business model: write posts for the first group, but make those posts unrigorous enough to attract the second group too. If you follow this secret recipe correctly, you get viral posts, exploding traffic stats, and some really entertaining comment wars.
This might be the only profitable business model in blogging--perhaps in all of online media. And it certainly helps explain the ubiquitous outrage porn, worry porn and political handwringing porn suffusing our overall cognitive environment these days.
And since fear-mongering and conspiracy-mongering are particularly effective forms of rhetoric, The Food Babe really cleaned up for a while there. That is, until her scientific incompetence became a little too obvious. When it got out that she wrote (but later deleted without comment or explanation) a post on the radiation risks of microwave ovens (it contained quotes like this one: "when you stand in front of a radar device you will start perspiring/cooking from the inside out, just like food is cooked in the microwave oven."), her already-tenuous credibility met its end. Fortunately for us, the internet never forgets. Eventually, goofily unscientific people get found out and exposed, even if they do try to scrub their sites of the most scientifically hilarious things they've said.
But! Some bloggers use these embarrassing things about themselves to grow their traffic even more. One of Tim Ferriss's best business insights back in the early days of SEO was to make sure he captured pageview traffic from the keywords "Tim Ferriss Scam."
So, he wrote a post titled, naturally, "Tim Ferriss Scam!" Interestingly, it doesn't rank as highly as it used to, illustrating yet another challenge of blogging: the ceaseless competition for traffic, everywhere, all the time, for any and all keywords.
Ironically, Ferriss' Tim Ferriss Scam! post actually contains some excellent ideas (the quotes from Scott Boras and Epictetus for example), and it's a smart post from the standpoint of using a writer's time, since it mostly contains meta-content, content reused and retreaded from other posts and sources. Talk about turning your detractors to your advantage.
By the way, Ferriss has had a few Food Babe moments of his own. Readers here at CK will remember my extended criticism of the flaws in his book The Four Hour Chef, for example. Or his uproariously implausible post: From Geek to Freak: How I Gained 34 lbs. of Muscle in 4 Weeks.[1]
Much like a typical Food Babe post, From Geek to Freak is an (unintended?) masterpiece of meta-conversation. With its waxed and spray-tanned before-and-after photos and its 1,300 (and growing) comments arguing over whether it's possible or impossible to gain 34 pounds of muscle in a month, it all becomes a twisted game.
His game, that is. We're the suckers, expending our attention and our finite cognitive resources. We argue for him even when we argue against him. Savvy readers ought to be able to see a parallel--a direct parallel--that's been playing out over the past several months in our political media.
The Koontz Principle of Online Incompetence
Let's get back to the [Your name here] Scam post writing technique for a moment. Vani the Food Babe did one of these posts too, writing her own "Food Babe: Scam" post, and it's a veritable tour de force in unaware rhetoric [2] that drives home an interesting, if depressing point: the internet rewards incompetence. Write something incompetent, and people will read it, get mad, comment, and link back to you. Then, incompetent people read those comments, get mad, comment more, and link back to you. Competent people respond, comment more, write about you, link back to you, your search engine ranking goes higher and higher, and so on. Rinse, repeat... and sell ads!
If we carry this to its ultimate logical conclusion, we arrive at a useful general principle. Let's call it The Koontz Principle of Online Incompetence: The most divisive and incompetent content tends to rise to the top of all search rankings. Think of it as an informational equivalent of The Peter Principle.[3]
So, in a way, maybe it's not a bad thing that sites like The Food Babe no longer attract the attention and profits they used to, and likewise, maybe it's a good sign that our biggest media institutions--as they play the same twisted game with far greater resources--are losing readers and money too.
Footnotes:
[1] Glass houses disclaimer: I've written plenty of posts that are bad, stupid, boring, unrigorous, wrong, etc., and I've also generated arguments between readers arguing for (and sometimes even against!) my incompetence. I try to do the best I can here at CK, but believe me, I come up short plenty of times too.
[2] Techniques include but are not limited to: using mean tweets against her (this is the so-called "tone fallacy": arguing that if you're not nice, your criticism is therefore disqualified); claiming "it's not about me" in a post self-evidently 100% about her, and using rhetorically powerful (but logically vacuous) phrases like "obviously, some powerful entities in the chemical and food industries have a financial incentive to try to discredit me" and "The bottom line is that many of these people who use this argument to discredit me, don't want the truth, regarding our food supply, coming out." One could easily write a satire using statements like these. Hey, wait: somebody already did!
[3] The Peter Principle states that every employee gets promoted up through an organization until he reaches a level where he's incompetent. Anyone working at any large corporation has seen this principle at work, and it is why, in the longer run, large organizations often tend toward generalized incompetence.
READ NEXT: Did Newark Mayor Cory Booker Really *Try* With His Food Stamp Challenge?
How can I support Casual Kitchen?
Easy. Do all your shopping at Amazon.com
via the links on this site! You can also link to me or subscribe to my RSS feed. Finally, consider sharing this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to Facebook, Twitter (follow me @danielckoontz!) or to bookmarking sites like reddit, digg or stumbleupon. I'm deeply grateful to my readers for their ongoing support.
Nine Terrible Ways to Make Choices (That You Probably Didn’t Know You Were Using)
This post blatantly steals ideas from an interesting and unusual little book: The Path of Least Resistance
by Robert Fritz.
********************************
There's a saying, often mis-attributed to Mark Twain, that goes "it is easier to fool people than to convince them they have been fooled."
Likewise, it's easier to fool ourselves than it to accept that we've done so.
So if you want to fool yourself--without discovering or accepting it later--one of the most effective ways is to enable conditions where your choices are artificially limited. In other words, we often covertly or subconsciously "stack the deck" in certain specific ways with our choice-making. This causes us to shut off possibilities and solutions that would otherwise be right there for the taking.
Let's consider some examples:
Choice by Limitation -- Choosing only from what currently seems possible or realistic to you. "I didn't think I could really learn to do deadlifts, so I didn't try. I just stuck to the nautilus machines." Or: "I read somewhere this great quote: 'cheap, healthy, delicious: choose only two' ...so it's obvious then that if you want to eat healthy and tasty food, it's is really gonna cost you." Note that reality doesn't care what you think, so why place arbitrary limits on it that you've totally made up?
Choice by Indirectness -- Choosing based on a process rather than by the result. Examples: choosing to go to law school/med school "to have a good career" rather than out of an actual desire for or interest in the subject matter itself. Or, in the domain of consumerism: buying a product or service to "make" you happy, rather than achieving happiness by directly satisfying the true underlying need (which ironically is usually free, or near-free).
Choice by Elimination -- Escalating a conflict such that you force an artificial or otherwise unnecessary choice. "I had to write him off, we argue way too much about politics."
Choice by Non-Choice -- Choosing not to make a choice, such that you give your power away to the situation. This is still a type of choice by the way, albeit a perverse one. Certain lifestyle anti-choices fit into this category, such as not choosing to make fitness, a healthy diet, or high-quality sleep a priority in your life.
Choice by Future Condition -- "When I reach my goal weight, I'm going to finally start on my dream of running a marathon." "When I get married, I'll finally get to..." etc. Sadly, these "choices" will likely never be made: they exist only in the future, never in the present.
Choice by Consensus -- Polling specific friends and framing the question to drive the answer you already want to hear. Examples: A woman asks her already-divorced girlfriends, "I'm no longer attracted to my husband, do you think should I divorce him?" Or: A frugal person asking her most hopelessly consumerist friend, "Should I buy this $300 dress? I really think it's cute." Um, what response did you think you'd get?
Choice by Reaction -- Whenever your situation or environment reaches a level of significant discomfort, making a reactive choice in order to lessen that discomfort. "You know, I never really started to deal with my weight until I started to have heart problems." You could easily argue that most human choices are made this way.
Choice by Adverse Possession -- Assuming if something happens to you, it's because, somehow, subconsciously, you actually wanted that thing. "I have hemorrhoids, therefore I must have somehow chosen them." You could also call this Choice by Law of Attraction.
Choice by Negation -- Instead of choosing to be healthy, choosing "not to be sick." Or, instead of making life choices with an intent to be wealthy, making choices so as "not to be poor." This may seem like merely a semantic distinction, but the negative option is typically a choice borne of fear and powerlessness, while the positive option is a choice based on true agency and power.
****************************
A Final Word
For me, the examples above collectively offer a lens I can use to evaluate the decisions and choices I make. Am I avoiding possibilities, am I needlessly limiting my options? Am I enabling circumstances to control me, giving away my power? Am I unknowingly letting someone else frame my choices... am I playing the game on someone else's terms?
Remember: the consumer marketplace, the food marketplace, the diet and fitness industry, the healthcare industry, the investment industry… all of these domains offer us all kinds of convenient-sounding default choices using systems, cues and various manipulation techniques to make us think we're really choosing for ourselves.
Often, the easy-seeming choices are the ones surreptitiously set for you by default. Don't give away your power and agency.
Readers, what do you think?
How can I support Casual Kitchen?
Easy. Do all your shopping at Amazon.com via the links on this site! You can also link to me or subscribe to my RSS feed. Finally, consider sharing this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to Facebook, Twitter (follow me @danielckoontz!) or to bookmarking sites like reddit, digg or stumbleupon. I'm deeply grateful to my readers for their ongoing support.
by Robert Fritz.********************************
There's a saying, often mis-attributed to Mark Twain, that goes "it is easier to fool people than to convince them they have been fooled."
Likewise, it's easier to fool ourselves than it to accept that we've done so.
So if you want to fool yourself--without discovering or accepting it later--one of the most effective ways is to enable conditions where your choices are artificially limited. In other words, we often covertly or subconsciously "stack the deck" in certain specific ways with our choice-making. This causes us to shut off possibilities and solutions that would otherwise be right there for the taking.
Let's consider some examples:
Choice by Limitation -- Choosing only from what currently seems possible or realistic to you. "I didn't think I could really learn to do deadlifts, so I didn't try. I just stuck to the nautilus machines." Or: "I read somewhere this great quote: 'cheap, healthy, delicious: choose only two' ...so it's obvious then that if you want to eat healthy and tasty food, it's is really gonna cost you." Note that reality doesn't care what you think, so why place arbitrary limits on it that you've totally made up?
Choice by Indirectness -- Choosing based on a process rather than by the result. Examples: choosing to go to law school/med school "to have a good career" rather than out of an actual desire for or interest in the subject matter itself. Or, in the domain of consumerism: buying a product or service to "make" you happy, rather than achieving happiness by directly satisfying the true underlying need (which ironically is usually free, or near-free).
Choice by Elimination -- Escalating a conflict such that you force an artificial or otherwise unnecessary choice. "I had to write him off, we argue way too much about politics."
Choice by Non-Choice -- Choosing not to make a choice, such that you give your power away to the situation. This is still a type of choice by the way, albeit a perverse one. Certain lifestyle anti-choices fit into this category, such as not choosing to make fitness, a healthy diet, or high-quality sleep a priority in your life.
Choice by Future Condition -- "When I reach my goal weight, I'm going to finally start on my dream of running a marathon." "When I get married, I'll finally get to..." etc. Sadly, these "choices" will likely never be made: they exist only in the future, never in the present.
Choice by Consensus -- Polling specific friends and framing the question to drive the answer you already want to hear. Examples: A woman asks her already-divorced girlfriends, "I'm no longer attracted to my husband, do you think should I divorce him?" Or: A frugal person asking her most hopelessly consumerist friend, "Should I buy this $300 dress? I really think it's cute." Um, what response did you think you'd get?
Choice by Reaction -- Whenever your situation or environment reaches a level of significant discomfort, making a reactive choice in order to lessen that discomfort. "You know, I never really started to deal with my weight until I started to have heart problems." You could easily argue that most human choices are made this way.
Choice by Adverse Possession -- Assuming if something happens to you, it's because, somehow, subconsciously, you actually wanted that thing. "I have hemorrhoids, therefore I must have somehow chosen them." You could also call this Choice by Law of Attraction.
Choice by Negation -- Instead of choosing to be healthy, choosing "not to be sick." Or, instead of making life choices with an intent to be wealthy, making choices so as "not to be poor." This may seem like merely a semantic distinction, but the negative option is typically a choice borne of fear and powerlessness, while the positive option is a choice based on true agency and power.
****************************
A Final Word
For me, the examples above collectively offer a lens I can use to evaluate the decisions and choices I make. Am I avoiding possibilities, am I needlessly limiting my options? Am I enabling circumstances to control me, giving away my power? Am I unknowingly letting someone else frame my choices... am I playing the game on someone else's terms?
Remember: the consumer marketplace, the food marketplace, the diet and fitness industry, the healthcare industry, the investment industry… all of these domains offer us all kinds of convenient-sounding default choices using systems, cues and various manipulation techniques to make us think we're really choosing for ourselves.
Often, the easy-seeming choices are the ones surreptitiously set for you by default. Don't give away your power and agency.
Readers, what do you think?
How can I support Casual Kitchen?
Easy. Do all your shopping at Amazon.com
via the links on this site! You can also link to me or subscribe to my RSS feed. Finally, consider sharing this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to Facebook, Twitter (follow me @danielckoontz!) or to bookmarking sites like reddit, digg or stumbleupon. I'm deeply grateful to my readers for their ongoing support.
Five Articles On Fear and Food
There will be an article coming up in my next Friday Links post* that asks a great, great question: "This is the safest time in human history. Why is everyone so afraid all the time?"
It got me thinking about a few things. For one, I've asked this question myself quite often here at Casual Kitchen. I've also addressed how our fears are used against us in the context of food, health, consumerism and other domains.
It's worth thinking deeply about this question, and not just because it's a good one. It's one of those questions which, when asked, begins to answer itself. It's a paradox, so it makes us think a little bit more deeply about the nature of our fears: why they're there, why they're instantaneous and autonomic, and why we react to them without much logical thought.
In fact, I'd go so far as to argue that this question, if you merely think about it, literally lessens our fears. In a world where many institutions easily profit from our fears, lessening them is a laudable goal.
So with that in mind, I wanted to share five notable articles here at Casual Kitchen on the topic of fear. Let's spend some time lessening our fears together.
1) Yoga Mats, Subway, and the Azodicarbonamide Controversy: Chemical Phobia In the Media Age
I fisk The Food Babe for her ding-a-ling and dreadfully unscientific fearmongering. One intriguing takeaway I had as I reread this article on the so-called "Azodicarbonamide controversy" is how everyone's already forgotten all about it. It's slipped down the memory hole, and nobody even cares any more. This is an extraordinarily helpful clue about the validity of most media-manufactured fears. (See also: Toxic Beans?)
2) Organic Food, Chemicals, and Worrying About All the Wrong Things
How the aspirational product category of "organic foods" preys on our fears, offering us--at a price--the illusion of control and safety in a world that seems unsafe and out of control. Interesting how that works, isn't it?
3) A Cup of Morning Death? How "Big Coffee" Puts Profits Before People
Experts agree: coffee produces a wide range of terrible--at times even terrifying--side effects and symptoms. We simply must rein in Big Coffee! Quite a few readers read this article as straight and failed to see the satire. I guess that proves two things: a) how easy it is to prey on peoples' fears, and b) Poe's Law.
4) The Cure For Worry Porn
Here I give readers a new lens to think about the nature of the "information" the media offers us, along with a discussion of the key fundamental problems inherent to all scientific studies. The next time you read some hoax-like article claiming a link between a perfectly reasonable everyday activity and some dreaded disease, you'll be ready with your own logic.
5) Create Your Own Food Myths For Fun and Profit
Scientific studies and the media aren't the only institutions geared specifically to trigger and prey upon our fears. Many ostensibly "good" public health organizations and health advocates do the exact same thing. How? Because of a gigantic--and ironic--mismatch between their goals and our good health. I give readers a textbook example of one such truth-bending public health organization in this post.
Footnote:
* You'll have to wait for it. ;)
How can I support Casual Kitchen?
Easy. Do all your shopping at Amazon.com via the links on this site! You can also link to me or subscribe to my RSS feed. Finally, consider sharing this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to Facebook, Twitter (follow me @danielckoontz!) or to bookmarking sites like reddit, digg or stumbleupon. I'm deeply grateful to my readers for their ongoing support.
It got me thinking about a few things. For one, I've asked this question myself quite often here at Casual Kitchen. I've also addressed how our fears are used against us in the context of food, health, consumerism and other domains.
It's worth thinking deeply about this question, and not just because it's a good one. It's one of those questions which, when asked, begins to answer itself. It's a paradox, so it makes us think a little bit more deeply about the nature of our fears: why they're there, why they're instantaneous and autonomic, and why we react to them without much logical thought.
In fact, I'd go so far as to argue that this question, if you merely think about it, literally lessens our fears. In a world where many institutions easily profit from our fears, lessening them is a laudable goal.
So with that in mind, I wanted to share five notable articles here at Casual Kitchen on the topic of fear. Let's spend some time lessening our fears together.
1) Yoga Mats, Subway, and the Azodicarbonamide Controversy: Chemical Phobia In the Media Age
I fisk The Food Babe for her ding-a-ling and dreadfully unscientific fearmongering. One intriguing takeaway I had as I reread this article on the so-called "Azodicarbonamide controversy" is how everyone's already forgotten all about it. It's slipped down the memory hole, and nobody even cares any more. This is an extraordinarily helpful clue about the validity of most media-manufactured fears. (See also: Toxic Beans?)
2) Organic Food, Chemicals, and Worrying About All the Wrong Things
How the aspirational product category of "organic foods" preys on our fears, offering us--at a price--the illusion of control and safety in a world that seems unsafe and out of control. Interesting how that works, isn't it?
3) A Cup of Morning Death? How "Big Coffee" Puts Profits Before People
Experts agree: coffee produces a wide range of terrible--at times even terrifying--side effects and symptoms. We simply must rein in Big Coffee! Quite a few readers read this article as straight and failed to see the satire. I guess that proves two things: a) how easy it is to prey on peoples' fears, and b) Poe's Law.
4) The Cure For Worry Porn
Here I give readers a new lens to think about the nature of the "information" the media offers us, along with a discussion of the key fundamental problems inherent to all scientific studies. The next time you read some hoax-like article claiming a link between a perfectly reasonable everyday activity and some dreaded disease, you'll be ready with your own logic.
5) Create Your Own Food Myths For Fun and Profit
Scientific studies and the media aren't the only institutions geared specifically to trigger and prey upon our fears. Many ostensibly "good" public health organizations and health advocates do the exact same thing. How? Because of a gigantic--and ironic--mismatch between their goals and our good health. I give readers a textbook example of one such truth-bending public health organization in this post.
Footnote:
* You'll have to wait for it. ;)
How can I support Casual Kitchen?
Easy. Do all your shopping at Amazon.com
via the links on this site! You can also link to me or subscribe to my RSS feed. Finally, consider sharing this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to Facebook, Twitter (follow me @danielckoontz!) or to bookmarking sites like reddit, digg or stumbleupon. I'm deeply grateful to my readers for their ongoing support.
Taking Away Our Fun
Readers, I want to share a brief exchange between a reporter and Berkshire Hathaway directors Warren Buffet and Charlie Munger. It crystallizes the central debate between food advocates who want to limit access to things like soda and snacks--and those who want to eat and drink what they please without getting scolded.
[Andrew Ross Sorkin, CNBC reporter] "Warren, for the last several years of this meeting, you've been asked about the negative health effects of Coca-Cola products, and you've done a masterful job of dodging the question by telling us how much Coke you drink personally.
Statistically you may be the exception. According to a peer-reviewed study by Tufts University, soda and sugary drinks may lead to 184,000 deaths among adults every year. The study found that sugar-sweetened beverages contributed to 130,000 deaths from diabetes, 45,000 deaths from cardiovascular disease, 6,450 deaths from cancer.
...Again, removing your own beverage consumption from the equation, please explain directly why we Berkshire Hathaway shareholders should be proud to own Coke."
Buffett answers this rather obnoxious-sounding question in his own folksy way (if you're curious, you can see how he responds in the video and article here).
However, what really intrigued me wasn't Buffett's response. What grabbed me was Charlie Munger's answer as he unexpectedly jumped in:
[Charlie Munger] "I drink a lot of diet Coke. And I think the people who ask questions like that one always make one ghastly error that’s really inexcusable. They measure the decrement without measuring the advantage. Well that's really stupid. That's like saying we should give up air travel through airlines because 100 people die a year in air crashes or something. That would be crazy. The benefit is worth the risk.
And if every person has to have about 8 or 10 glasses of water every day to stay alive and it's pretty cheap and sensible and improves life to add a little extra flavor to your water and a little stimulation and a little calories if you want to eat that way. There are huge benefits to humanity in that, and it's worth having some disadvantages.
We ought to almost have a law in the editorial world--here I'm sounding like Donald Trump [NB: here Buffett laughs out loud]--where these people shouldn't be allowed to cite the defects without citing the offsetting advantages. It's immature and stupid." [Laughter, applause from crowd]
Now (finally!) to the point of this post. This answer, typical of 92-year-old Charlie Munger's blunt truthiness, crystallized something new for me about why people get so irritated and annoyed at "Food Police" type food advocates:
They come across like grim, humorless scolds trying to take away our fun.
Warren Buffett, Charlie Munger and lots of other people really enjoy things like Coke, ice cream, candy, Doritos, and so on. These humble little things gives them pleasure, make them happy. Frankly, life ain't always all that fun, and many so-called consumer advocates--who seem to think they know better than we do what's good for us--sure do seem like they're trying to take away (or tax, or ban, or limit) something fun that we really like.
They seem like scolds! Like schoolmarms.
Before we go any further, however, let’s make one thing crystal, crystal clear. In this post I am not trying to say that food advocates are wrong. Not at all!
This isn't a discussion of food advocates and their policies. It is a discussion about the perception of food advocates and their policies. There is an enormous difference, mainly because of the sad fact that, for many people, their perception of a thing is more important than the thing itself.
So, imagine: If food advocates could seem a lot less schoolmarmish, a lot less like food policing fun-killers trying to take away our fun, wouldn't they achieve far more traction with their ideas and policies? Wouldn’t it be a lot easier for them to find support?
Which brings me to my final question, one I simply can't answer: Why don't they do this?
Readers, what do you think?
READ NEXT: Shopping at More Than One Grocery Store: Worth It, Or a Waste?
AND: Money Sundays: All-Time Favorite Charlie Munger Quotes
How can I support Casual Kitchen?
Easy. Do all your shopping at Amazon.com via the links on this site! You can also link to me or subscribe to my RSS feed. Finally, consider sharing this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to Facebook, Twitter (follow me @danielckoontz!) or to bookmarking sites like reddit, digg or stumbleupon. I'm deeply grateful to my readers for their ongoing support.
[Andrew Ross Sorkin, CNBC reporter] "Warren, for the last several years of this meeting, you've been asked about the negative health effects of Coca-Cola products, and you've done a masterful job of dodging the question by telling us how much Coke you drink personally.
Statistically you may be the exception. According to a peer-reviewed study by Tufts University, soda and sugary drinks may lead to 184,000 deaths among adults every year. The study found that sugar-sweetened beverages contributed to 130,000 deaths from diabetes, 45,000 deaths from cardiovascular disease, 6,450 deaths from cancer.
...Again, removing your own beverage consumption from the equation, please explain directly why we Berkshire Hathaway shareholders should be proud to own Coke."
Buffett answers this rather obnoxious-sounding question in his own folksy way (if you're curious, you can see how he responds in the video and article here).
However, what really intrigued me wasn't Buffett's response. What grabbed me was Charlie Munger's answer as he unexpectedly jumped in:
[Charlie Munger] "I drink a lot of diet Coke. And I think the people who ask questions like that one always make one ghastly error that’s really inexcusable. They measure the decrement without measuring the advantage. Well that's really stupid. That's like saying we should give up air travel through airlines because 100 people die a year in air crashes or something. That would be crazy. The benefit is worth the risk.
And if every person has to have about 8 or 10 glasses of water every day to stay alive and it's pretty cheap and sensible and improves life to add a little extra flavor to your water and a little stimulation and a little calories if you want to eat that way. There are huge benefits to humanity in that, and it's worth having some disadvantages.
We ought to almost have a law in the editorial world--here I'm sounding like Donald Trump [NB: here Buffett laughs out loud]--where these people shouldn't be allowed to cite the defects without citing the offsetting advantages. It's immature and stupid." [Laughter, applause from crowd]
Now (finally!) to the point of this post. This answer, typical of 92-year-old Charlie Munger's blunt truthiness, crystallized something new for me about why people get so irritated and annoyed at "Food Police" type food advocates:
They come across like grim, humorless scolds trying to take away our fun.
Warren Buffett, Charlie Munger and lots of other people really enjoy things like Coke, ice cream, candy, Doritos, and so on. These humble little things gives them pleasure, make them happy. Frankly, life ain't always all that fun, and many so-called consumer advocates--who seem to think they know better than we do what's good for us--sure do seem like they're trying to take away (or tax, or ban, or limit) something fun that we really like.
They seem like scolds! Like schoolmarms.
Before we go any further, however, let’s make one thing crystal, crystal clear. In this post I am not trying to say that food advocates are wrong. Not at all!
This isn't a discussion of food advocates and their policies. It is a discussion about the perception of food advocates and their policies. There is an enormous difference, mainly because of the sad fact that, for many people, their perception of a thing is more important than the thing itself.
So, imagine: If food advocates could seem a lot less schoolmarmish, a lot less like food policing fun-killers trying to take away our fun, wouldn't they achieve far more traction with their ideas and policies? Wouldn’t it be a lot easier for them to find support?
Which brings me to my final question, one I simply can't answer: Why don't they do this?
Readers, what do you think?
READ NEXT: Shopping at More Than One Grocery Store: Worth It, Or a Waste?
AND: Money Sundays: All-Time Favorite Charlie Munger Quotes
How can I support Casual Kitchen?
Easy. Do all your shopping at Amazon.com
via the links on this site! You can also link to me or subscribe to my RSS feed. Finally, consider sharing this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to Facebook, Twitter (follow me @danielckoontz!) or to bookmarking sites like reddit, digg or stumbleupon. I'm deeply grateful to my readers for their ongoing support.
Raw Milk: The Irony
I don't have a dog in the fight on raw milk vs. pasteurized milk.
But from a food debate standpoint, raw milk is an utterly fascinating topic. Why? Because it shows how certain food industry issues simply do not line up into a clean political matrix, with a clear "left side" and a clear "right side" telling us what positions we should hold.
In fact, holding a generalized position on the overall food industry can put you on the wrong side of an issue when it comes to a specific food product.
Raw milk is one such product.
To illustrate what I mean, imagine a Brooklyn-based foodie who dislikes and distrusts Big Food, Big Ag, Big Corn and Big Soda and anything else with a capital B, including Wal-Mart and Monsanto. In her view, the food industry clearly puts profits before people, and it should therefore be more heavily regulated by the government. Probably much more.
Further, this idealistic foodie thinks we need to change the default food environment, which she believes contributes heavily to society's obesity problem. This is why she strongly supported New York City's large soda ban, and it's why she also believes we'd be far better off if the government went ahead and just banned HFCS too. In her view, strict policies and regulations like these are good things: they are for our benefit and for our protection.
Now, we may not agree with all of her views, but I think we can at least agree that, in general, her positions are internally consistent. And please note: we at Casual Kitchen are not passing judgment on the merits of these various positions in any way! Reasonable minds can disagree reasonably.
One day, however, this Brooklyn foodie learns about all the incredible merits of raw milk. She discovers, from scanning some websites, that raw milk is delicious, healthful, and far superior to pasteurized milk. She can't wait to become a regular raw milk drinker.
But to her horror, she discovers that her government is as strict with raw milk as it she wishes it would be with HFCS! In fact, the federal government mandates the pasteurization of milk and milk products--for our benefit and for our protection.
Worse, eighteen states strictly prohibit the sale of raw milk under any conditions--including her neighboring state of New Jersey. And even in her home state of New York, raw milk is strictly regulated. In New York it is entirely illegal to sell raw milk at retail stores--again, for our benefit and our protection. Raw milk can only be purchased at specifically licensed and regulated farms, and there are strict rules that these farms must follow, including prominently posting signs warning consumers that this milk does not have the “protection” of pasteurization.
"Wait a minute," she thinks. "Why does the government force pasteurization on us? And how can the government possibly decide it's illegal to buy raw milk? This makes no sense at all!"
Our Brooklyn foodie's confidently-held, generalized position on the overall food industry ended up depositing her on the exact wrong side of the debate over raw milk. She's discovered, to her intense confusion, that she wants a more heavily-regulated food industry--except when she doesn't. Hopefully she'll see the irony.
Readers, what do you think?
Read Next: Oppositional Literature: The Key Tool For Achieving True Intellectual Honesty
How can I support Casual Kitchen?
Easy. Do all your shopping at Amazon.com via the links on this site! You can also link to me or subscribe to my RSS feed. Finally, consider sharing this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to Facebook, Twitter (follow me @danielckoontz!) or to bookmarking sites like reddit, digg or stumbleupon. I'm deeply grateful to my readers for their ongoing support.
But from a food debate standpoint, raw milk is an utterly fascinating topic. Why? Because it shows how certain food industry issues simply do not line up into a clean political matrix, with a clear "left side" and a clear "right side" telling us what positions we should hold.
In fact, holding a generalized position on the overall food industry can put you on the wrong side of an issue when it comes to a specific food product.
Raw milk is one such product.
To illustrate what I mean, imagine a Brooklyn-based foodie who dislikes and distrusts Big Food, Big Ag, Big Corn and Big Soda and anything else with a capital B, including Wal-Mart and Monsanto. In her view, the food industry clearly puts profits before people, and it should therefore be more heavily regulated by the government. Probably much more.
Further, this idealistic foodie thinks we need to change the default food environment, which she believes contributes heavily to society's obesity problem. This is why she strongly supported New York City's large soda ban, and it's why she also believes we'd be far better off if the government went ahead and just banned HFCS too. In her view, strict policies and regulations like these are good things: they are for our benefit and for our protection.
Now, we may not agree with all of her views, but I think we can at least agree that, in general, her positions are internally consistent. And please note: we at Casual Kitchen are not passing judgment on the merits of these various positions in any way! Reasonable minds can disagree reasonably.
One day, however, this Brooklyn foodie learns about all the incredible merits of raw milk. She discovers, from scanning some websites, that raw milk is delicious, healthful, and far superior to pasteurized milk. She can't wait to become a regular raw milk drinker.
But to her horror, she discovers that her government is as strict with raw milk as it she wishes it would be with HFCS! In fact, the federal government mandates the pasteurization of milk and milk products--for our benefit and for our protection.
Worse, eighteen states strictly prohibit the sale of raw milk under any conditions--including her neighboring state of New Jersey. And even in her home state of New York, raw milk is strictly regulated. In New York it is entirely illegal to sell raw milk at retail stores--again, for our benefit and our protection. Raw milk can only be purchased at specifically licensed and regulated farms, and there are strict rules that these farms must follow, including prominently posting signs warning consumers that this milk does not have the “protection” of pasteurization.
"Wait a minute," she thinks. "Why does the government force pasteurization on us? And how can the government possibly decide it's illegal to buy raw milk? This makes no sense at all!"
Our Brooklyn foodie's confidently-held, generalized position on the overall food industry ended up depositing her on the exact wrong side of the debate over raw milk. She's discovered, to her intense confusion, that she wants a more heavily-regulated food industry--except when she doesn't. Hopefully she'll see the irony.
Readers, what do you think?
Read Next: Oppositional Literature: The Key Tool For Achieving True Intellectual Honesty
How can I support Casual Kitchen?
Easy. Do all your shopping at Amazon.com
via the links on this site! You can also link to me or subscribe to my RSS feed. Finally, consider sharing this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to Facebook, Twitter (follow me @danielckoontz!) or to bookmarking sites like reddit, digg or stumbleupon. I'm deeply grateful to my readers for their ongoing support.
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