Not really having this argument (E)

0:00Here's an easy and fun experiment you can do if you're an undergrad in psych or if you want to get published in the Journal of Wine Economics of Wine Economics. in one glass put a$10 bottle of wine and in another a glass from a$100 bottle of wine. Well, this study has been done and it has shown definitively that people prefer in a double blind study $10 bottles of wine. After people see these results, of course, they continue to buy the wine they used to buy. Hey, it's Arav, and this is a special archived episode of Akimbo.

1:03Years ago, I was waiting for a flight from Springfield, Illinois, back to New York on United Airlines. Even though Springfield is the capital of Illinois, it's not a particularly busy route. And so the planes that fly are fairly small. The woman in front of me, waiting to check in, says to the person at the counter, I'm here to check in for the flight. I am flying first class. And the person behind the counter seemed sort of puzzled, because the plane only had 16 or 24 seats in it, and there were no first class seats. There were never first class seats. And the woman kindly began to explain that.

1:43This caused the passenger to get very upset. She started to hyperventilate. She started to yell. She has agoraphobia, aquaphobia, fear of flying, fear of small places, claustrophobia, every phobia. And she was told it was a first-class seat. She needs a first-class seat, and she's going to get a first-class seat. The argument was on. Except it wasn't. I was stunned and delighted to see the person behind the counter take a breath and realize that she wasn't having an argument that the other person thought they were having. That it takes two to have this sort of argument, to prove that there are no first-class seats.

2:27It was impossible that this person got a first-class seat to show her on her receipt, on her boarding pass, that she wasn't sold a first-class seat. The woman did none of those things because she understood that that's not what was being discussed. Instead, she smiled and she said, Oh, of course, you're right. All the seats on this plane are first class. Problem solved. What we believe, why we believe it. Copernicus and the people who worked around Copernicus's time were not good news for astrologers. Astrology has been around for tens of thousands of years. As long as man has been looking at the stars, there has been astrology.

3:17And astrology is based pretty definitively on the idea that the sun goes around the earth, that the earth is the center of everything and the stars are rotating around it. So when Copernicus and other scientists point out and then prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that, no, the Earth is not the center of the universe, and no, the sun does not rotate around the Earth, what is an astrologer to do? Because all of the calculations, all of it, is wrong. Wrong if we're having a conversation about what is true, about what is scientifically verifiable in a double-blind study where it's not clear which side you are on, all we're doing is testing the truth.

4:11But there's a difference between belief and truth. If it's true, you don't need to believe it. It's still true. Chevy versus Ford, Yankees versus Red Sox. At the end of the season, if the Red Sox end up beating the Yankees or the Yankees end up beating the Red Sox. Do the fans change sides? Of course not. Because what it means to be a fan is that you believe in your team, not that you have proof that your team is better. And what has happened in our culture just in the last few hundred years is we have added to a conversation about belief a second conversation, a conversation that has, in many circles, more status.

5:00It's a conversation about truth, about replicability, about understanding the causes behind things. It's about building bridges that don't fall down. If you believe a bridge is going to stay up and it falls down, the bridge doesn't care that you believed it. But your belief isn't always related to what is true. Consider the idea of docking the tail of a dog, which I believe is a horrible practice. It's been going on for a very long time. The reason that we cut the tail off a dog like a Doberman is the fact that there was a myth in Roman days that either long tails caused rabies, or perhaps when someone saw the ligaments inside a dog that was injured inside their tail, they came to the conclusion that they were worms because they look a little alike and that maybe cutting off the tail would prevent worms.

6:01Along the way, lots of reasons have been surfaced about why it's okay to cut off the tail of a dog. It keeps it from getting stuck in the bushes if the dog's hunting. But most people don't have a dog for hunting anymore, and yet there's still controversy about cutting the tail off a dog. Why is that? because it's based on culture. It's based on belief. It's not based on the truth. Look up the list of religions on Wikipedia. You can see the list in the show notes. It's hundreds and hundreds of religions long. We can say one thing for sure. There are a lot of religions. We can also assert that many people who believe in many of the religions believe that their religion is true.

6:52True like it's true that this bridge isn't going to fall down. Not true like I believe it. But you don't have to have a PhD in logic to realize that diametrically opposed religions can't both be true. True in the sense that the bridge isn't going to fall down. And yet the arguments persist. Because along the way, we've come to the conclusion that it's better to believe in something because it's true, which I think short changes the very idea of having faith in something, which is, I believe it because I can't prove that it's true. And so we have endless pages online of people arguing about how old the earth is.

7:36Well, the true answer, the answer that's verifiable and persistent and consistent, that can be duplicated by people regardless of their point of view, is that the earth is more than 4 billion years old. But there are people who feel like they need to persuade others that it is true that they want to have an argument about the fact that the earth is merely 5 ,000 years old, the same way that woman wanted to have an argument about being in first class. But the fact is there's two conversations going on here, not one. One of them is, I have feelings, I have emotions. There are things that I need to give me solace to get through the day.

8:20There are underpinnings to the way I see myself in the world. And then there's a second conversation, which is what happens to the carbon-14 atom over time? One is about physics and math and science, and one is about belief. So Ignaz Semmelweis learned this the hard way, and so did hundreds of thousands of women who died needlessly. He wrote a seminal, essential, important paper, a building block of the way we understand statistics today. It took him 20 years to publish his paper because he got so much pushback from the establishment in Vienna. Semmelweis proved by any scientific measure that the way to prevent women from dying in childbirth was to have doctors wash their hands after they visited the morgue, but before they delivered a baby.

9:17He proved it. There was no doubt. And yet, years later, 10 to 15 % of the women were dying in childbirth. Not at his hospital. At his hospital, it was less than 1%. What more could you ask for? Well, apparently what you could ask for was a story that would help establishment status-seeking doctors save face without having to admit that they were wrong. Consider the idea of biblical archaeology, which is a fascinating topic, which tries to use archaeology, a science, digging things up, putting facts together, to prove or disprove what's actually in the Bible. The thing is, when they compare, for example, one edition of the Bible after another, because they know which scribe wrote it and when, they see the Bible changing.

10:21There is no one edition of the Bible. Some of the parables come and some of them go. Some of them were clearly made up 800 years later. Doesn't matter. Because what makes it a fool's errand is it's not a discussion about science. It's a discussion about belief. So before we get to the interesting thing that one can do when confronted with these two different kinds of conversations, a small homage to Tony Verna. Tony Verna, in 1963, pioneered something that isn't as well-received as we might imagine. Rivers. Open. Jackson drops it, and Polamalu almost makes the interception. In fact, they play on the field as if he did.

11:09I thought it hit the ground. Polamalu's still on his feet. He's able to shake free from three hits and still going. Now he falls on his own. Let's see if it's a pick.

11:22Unbelievable. What a catch. Wow. I don't know. Still not sure. He got his hand underneath there. Take another look. That's right. The instant replay with slow motion. Before that, the Army-Navy game in 1963, football wasn't particularly popular on television. That's because football is no fun to watch on television when there's one camera really far away. Marshall McLuhan famously pointed out that all a TV broadcast of football used to be was a second-best version of going to the game itself. But once we had instant replay with multiple cameras, It meant that the entire game of football changed.

12:06It also meant that you could see the truth of the play, that you could see the truth of the referee's call. And a lot of people don't want to see the truth. They would rather argue about it. Because arguing about it gives them satisfaction. It amplifies their belief. It's about us versus them. It's about I am right. But once we see the instant replay, once we see the math behind quantum mechanics, once we understand how it actually works, we have a difficult choice to make. And the difficult choice is accept the truth and suspend belief or deny the truth and accept belief. We're not hardwired for either of those choices.

12:57and that's the conflict of our culture right now, is that we're not comfortable saying to people, I don't care what the science says. I believe this. Please let me believe this because the truth is irrelevant to my feelings. Or at the same time, we're not comfortable saying, I want to know the truth. I accept the results of the double blind study regardless of what it does to the way I want the world to be. And now we come to the obligating question. The obligating question comes from the idea of direct selling, one-on-one selling. I heard about it first from Zig Ziglar. He wrote about it 50 years ago.

13:46And the idea is simple. Someone is coming to buy a car and you show them the car and they have a couple of objections. Well, I don't like the fact that it's a standard. Well, oh, it comes with an automatic transmission. I don't like the fact that it costs this much. Well, I have a used one on the lot for half the price. Once you answer a few objections, if the person continues to make objections, what you learn is this. They might not really want to buy the car. They might simply be making objections because objections are supporting their belief, are helping them hide from their fear, are allowing them to be who they want to be without confronting what's right in front of them.

14:33And so the obligating question, the one that pays off a thousand times, and you can use it from here on in. It's a simple question asked with respect, and it goes like this. The objection. Well, yeah, I sort of like it, but I only want a car that's red. Instead of saying, I have a car that's red in the back, the obligating question is, if I could get you this car in red, would you be willing to buy it today? That puts it right back on the prospect, right back on the prospect to now tell you the truth. Because the truth is either, yeah, that's exactly what I want, and now the deal is done. Or, well, actually no, I'm just dreaming.

15:18And so when someone says, I am against this medical intervention because it causes side effect X, Y, or Z, if we say to them, if I could demonstrate to your satisfaction that it doesn't cause side effects X, Y, and Z, would you then be in favor of using this intervention? When someone says, men didn't step on the moon, and I can prove it because there are crosshatches on the pictures that were taken and therefore they were faked, if we say back to them, if I can show you how those crosshatches got on the photos, are you then eager to accept the fact that men walked on the moon? Oh, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.

16:05No, not really. Because what we're doing in these situations, if we're the prospect, is we are pretending to have a conversation about truth, about options, about the way the world really is. But what we're actually doing is demonstrating our belief, sharing our frustration, exposing our fear. And we don't want to have the conversation end because then we will be in a jam having to confront two things that don't line up. So when you're doing customer service and someone is furious with you on the phone, the answer is not to prove that you are right. Because proving that you are right will not make them less furious.

16:50The answer is to see the person that you are engaging with for who they are, for what they believe, for what they are afraid of, for where they are seeking to go. It's not easy, but as the internet has amplified everyone's voice, it's necessary. Because we're busy having arguments where no arguments belong. We're not talking about what we think we're talking about. Hey Seth, it's Maria. Hey Seth, my name's Kyle. Greetings, Seth. This is Stephen out in Madison, Wisconsin. Hi, Seth. Alicia from Charleston here. Hi, Seth. This is Anupam. Hi, this is Caitlin. Hi, Seth. Warm greetings from Curacao.

17:28Hey, Seth. My name is Nick Ryan from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Hey, Seth. This is Rex. Hey, Seth. Hi, this is Vasilis from Greece. Hi, this is Roberta Perry. My question is... And that completes my question. Well, I asked and you came through with a ton of super questions about previous episodes. If you've got a question about anything we've talked about so far, please visit akimbo.link, that's A-K-I-M-B-O dot L-I-N-K, and press the appropriate button. Hi, Seth. This is Ami from the UK. I love your podcast. My question to you is about, you mentioned eliminating slack and how that's not a good way to have efficiencies.

18:16And that, in fact, we should build in slack into a system so that we can actually respond to situations when the system changes. how does that work with Parkinson's law where people generally where tasks generally expand to the time that's available to do the work uh I always find that when you build slack in when you build a buffer in that time gets filled up so you have to build another slack in and that almost people start stagnating so I would be really interested to hear your thoughts on this Thanks very much for what you do. I really enjoy listening to your podcast. My seven-year-old daughter also enjoys it.

19:04So thank you very much for all your insights. Thanks. Bye. Yeah, this is a great point, that in a typical bureaucracy, people will find something to do, particularly when other people can put things on our plate. That work begets work, meetings beget meetings, and the next thing you know, everyone is very busy getting not much done at all. That's not what I was talking about when I was talking about Slack. Management is a craft. And one of the things that managers need to do is organize their institution so that meetings don't beget meetings, so that people who are standing by to do the important work haven't bogged themselves down with the unimportant work.

19:55And it comes down to what are we measuring? What is the output that we are looking for? Some institutions measure the output in terms of, did it meet spec? In other words, quality. Others are measuring it based on, did you impress your boss? Do you look busy? How thick is the pile of paper that you created? So the hard work of creating slack in an institution is to replace busyness with, is it worth it? Are we measuring the right thing? Hi, this is Rose from Grand Marais, Minnesota. I have a question from the episode, The Hype Cycle. You mentioned that J.K. Rowling stuck with it and made it through the dip.

20:45And I would love to hear more about what you see that she did that was specifically so effective. I know that she's got her whole Harry Potter universe website, and obviously things have been made into movies. but is this something that is more possible if you're writing a series of books because then you are naturally supporting that first book as opposed to moving on to a totally different project what can i as an author and also a children's author do to emulate her success thanks jk rowling like apple computer is of course the answer to most questions because it's such an exceptional story.

21:27But your point about building a series, an arc, as a way of getting through the dip is actually spot on. It is exactly correct. That if you were going A to J to T to W back to C, bobbing and weaving, trying this and trying that, well, basically you're just playing a random game. But if you are going in order, one brick at a time, one listener, one reader, one customer, getting you another one, getting you another one, bit by bit, brick by brick, that is the professional's way of getting through the dip. This idea of persisting in one direction requires a huge commitment on your part because you might be going in the wrong direction.

22:20But what we know is that the people who are rejecting you aren't looking at it from your point of view. They have no idea if you're going in the right direction or not. They just know that on this day, Tuesday, at 3 o 'clock, when you pitched them what you pitched them, it wasn't for them. And there are a thousand reasons it might not have been for them. And so the assertion the creator has to make is, do I believe enough in this direction, in this compass point, that I am willing to commit to it over time, drip by drip, to get to the other side? And it really helps if you're going down a path that someone before you has gone down.

23:07So J.K. Rowling didn't invent her genre. Tolkien did, and people before Tolkien. It is known that it can work. That is different than saying, I am committing everything I own to opening a chain of dehydrated water stores that are going to sell silly gadgets. Because no one's pulled that off. not at the scale you're envisioning. So I'm not sure I'm going to encourage you to spend your life on that path. But if you are a creator who can see where the journey leads, and it rhymes with something that's come before, that is the route through the dip. Hey Seth, it's Morgan from Denver, Colorado. I've been thinking about your recent Q &A on education and false merit, and some of your previous episodes as well, it's clear that some measures like the SAT aren't actually good at measuring what we want to know.

24:07So I'm wondering about maybe a narrow case where a university, whether it's Princeton, Emory, or just a local public, is convinced that they have limited space for students and must select who they accept in and don't. I'm familiar with your thoughts around what education is for, solving interesting problems and cultivating leaders, but what would you propose as a better measure for these universities to start using instead of the SAT or a recommendation from the water polo coach? Or is this just an irrelevant question that feeds the status fame loop that famous colleges want to preserve in the face of new technology that opens the doors for everyone?

24:53Just curious for your thoughts. Thanks for all work. It's been transformative. Thank you for this question about college. I spent a lot of time working with the people who ran the admissions office when I was in college. One of my friends was the head of admissions for the engineering school. So I saw this firsthand. And the truth is this. At most famous colleges, there are more qualified applicants than there are spots. That if they were being truthful, what they would tell you is perhaps 30 % of the people who applied, if they got in and attended, it would be a fine addition to the class. But they can only let in 3 % of the people.

25:36And so what they do is they add on top of it a whole bunch of make-believe merit points, a whole bunch of classifications that have never been shown to actually add any value to how they are sorting the class. So what's the alternative? Well, there's a non-profit in Yonkers, New York called the Greyston Foundation. They make actually all of the brownies in Ben and Jerry's Brownies Ice Cream. Their model is very simple and to many organizations, quite scary. They use open hiring. What does open hiring mean? It means you put your name on a list And when a job opens up, the next person on the list gets a job.

26:21It doesn't matter what your background is. It doesn't matter if you've been to prison. It doesn't matter if you've been fighting off drug addiction your whole life. What matters is that you can show up for training and that you can get through the training and that you are a contribution to the organization. And if you get through the training, you have a job. Period. Open hiring. Open hiring is transformative. Because what it does, and this is true for many, many jobs where we are measuring simply output, is it eliminates all of the cruft about what you look like and what you remind us of and who you are, and instead gets to one thing.

27:02Here's this job. Can you do it? If you can do it, we'll support you. We'd love to have you join us. So back to the idea of colleges. What would happen? Here's the simple example first. If famous colleges said, you are one of the 35 % that we have deemed because of your leadership capabilities, because of the fact that you did fine in high school, because of your references, you are one of the people who is qualified to come here. And on Tuesday, we're going to randomly pick, and that's going to be our class. You didn't get in because you were magically or mythically better than the other people who were good enough to get in.

27:44you got in because we picked you out of a hat. Wouldn't that be refreshing? Wouldn't that be scary? Wouldn't that enervate so many people who are stuck on the idea that they were entitled? Let's take it one step further and get way more efficient. What happens if 30 schools that all concur that this is a better way to sort people out, let the students who apply to any circle of the 30, pick their favorites, and then with a fairly simple computer algorithm, work to randomly allocate the slots to the qualified so that no one gets into 10 and someone gets into zero. But in fact, it maximizes the chances that the student ends up at the famous college that's most appropriate for them based on who they are and what they want, as opposed to this sort of double-blind, double-not-blind system that randomly assigns people but pretends it's truly based on merit.

28:48The very fact that this seems scary, that open hiring frightens off people who run manufacturing facilities, tells us a lot about how much control we want to feel like we have over the incoming. We'll get to more questions next time. As always, thanks for listening. Go make a ruckus.