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Coordination Problems: What It Takes to Change the World

Reading Time: 6 minutes

The key to major changes on a societal level is getting enough people to alter their behavior at the same time. It’s not enough for isolated individuals to act. Here’s what we can learn from coordination games in game theory about what it takes to solve some of the biggest problems we face.

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What is a Coordination Failure?

Sometimes we see systems where everyone involved seems to be doing things in a completely ineffective and inefficient way. A single small tweak could make everything substantially better—save lives, be more productive, save resources. To an outsider, it might seem obvious what needs to be done, and it might be hard to think of an explanation for the ineffectiveness that is more nuanced than assuming everyone in that system is stupid.

Why is publicly funded research published in journals that charge heavily for it, limiting the flow of important scientific knowledge, without contributing anything? Why are countries spending billions of dollars and risking disaster developing nuclear weapons intended only as deterrents? Why is doping widespread in some sports, even though it carries heavy health consequences and is banned? You can probably think of many similar problems.

Coordination games in game theory gives us a lens for understanding both the seemingly inscrutable origins of such problems and why they persist.

The Theoretical Background to Coordination Failure

In game theory, a game is a set of circumstances where two or more players pick among competing strategies in order to get a payoff. A coordination game is one where players get the best possible payoff by all doing the same thing. If one player chooses a different strategy, they get a diminished payoff and the other player usually gets an increased payoff.

When all players are carrying out a strategy from which they have no incentive to deviate, this is called the Nash equilibrium: given the strategy chosen by the other player(s), no player could improve their payoff by changing their strategy. However, a game can have multiple Nash equilibria with different payoffs. In real-world terms, this means there are multiple different choices everyone could make, some better than others, but all only working if they are unanimous.

The Prisoner’s Dilemma is a coordination game. In a one-round Prisoner’s Dilemma, the optimal strategy for each player is to defect. Even though this is the strategy that makes most sense, it isn’t the one with the highest possible payoff—that would involve both players cooperating. If one cooperates when the other doesn’t, they receive a diminished payoff. Seeing as they cannot know what the other player will do, cooperating is unwise. If they cooperate when the other defects, they get the worst possible payoff. If they defect and the other player also defects, they still get a better payoff than they would have done by cooperating.

So the Prisoner’s Dilemma is a coordination failure. The players would get a better payoff if they both cooperated, but they cannot trust each other. In a form of the Iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma, players compete for an unknown number of rounds. In this case, cooperation becomes possible if both players use the strategy of “tit for tat.” This means that they cooperate in the first round, then do whatever the other player previously did for each subsequent round. However, there is still an incentive to defect because any given round could be the last, so cooperating can never be the Nash equilibrium in the Prisoner’s Dilemma.

Many of the major problems we see around us are coordination failures. They are only solvable if everyone can agree to do the same thing at the same time. Faced with multiple Nash equilibria, we do not necessarily choose the best one overall. We choose what makes sense given the existing incentives, which often discourage us from challenging the status quo. It often makes most sense to do what everyone else is doing, whether that’s driving on the left side of the road, wearing a suit to a job interview, or keeping your country’s nuclear arsenal stocked up.

Take the case of academic publishing, given as a classic coordination failure by Eliezer Yudkowsky in Inadequate Equilibria: Where and How Civilizations Get Stuck. Academic journals publish research within a given field and charge for access to it, often at exorbitant rates. In order to get the best jobs and earn prestige within a field, researchers need to publish in the most respected journals. If they don’t, no one will take their work seriously.

Academic publishing is broken in many ways. By charging high prices, journals limit the flow of knowledge and slow scientific progress. They do little to help researchers, instead profiting from the work of volunteers and taxpayer funding. Yet researchers continue to submit their work to them. Why? Because this is the Nash equilibrium. Although it would be better for science as a whole if everyone stopped publishing in journals that charge for access, it isn’t in the interests of any individual scientist to do so. If they did, their career would suffer and most likely end. The only solution would be a coordinated effort for everyone to move away from journals. But seeing as this is so difficult to organize, the farce of academic publishing continues, harming everyone except the journals.

How We Can Solve and Avoid Coordination Failures

It’s possible to change things on a large scale if we are able to communicate on a much greater scale. When everyone knows that everyone knows, changing what we do is much easier.

We all act out of self-interest, so expecting individuals to risk the costs of going against convention is usually unreasonable. Yet it only takes a small proportion of people to change their opinions to reach a tipping point where there is strong incentive for everyone to change their behavior, and this is magnified even more if those people have a high degree of influence. The more power those who enact change have, the faster everyone else can do the same.

To overcome coordination failures, we need to be able to communicate despite our differences. And we need to be able to trust that when we act, others will act too. The initial kick can be enough people making their actions visible. Groups can have exponentially greater impacts than individuals. We thus need to think beyond the impact of our own actions and consider what will happen when we act as part of a group.

In an example given by the effective altruism-centered website 80,000 Hours, there are countless charitable causes one could donate money to at any given time. Most people who donate do so out of emotional responses or habit. However, some charitable causes are orders of magnitude more effective than others at saving lives and having a positive global impact. If many people can coordinate and donate to the most effective charities until they reach their funding goal, the impact of the group giving is far greater than if isolated individuals calculate the best use of their money. Making research and evidence of donations public helps solve the communication issue around determining the impact of charitable giving.

As Michael Suk-Young Chwe writes in Rational Ritual: Culture, Coordination, and Common Knowledge, “Successful communication sometimes is not simply a matter of whether a given message is received. It also depends on whether people are aware that other people also receive it.” According to Suk-Young Chwe, for people to coordinate on the basis of certain information it must be “common knowledge,” a phrase used here to mean “everyone knows it, everyone knows that everyone knows it, everyone knows that everyone knows that everyone knows it, and so on.” The more public and visible the change is, the better.

We can prevent coordination failures in the first place by visible guarantees that those who take a different course of action will not suffer negative consequences. Bank runs are a coordination failure that were particularly problematic during the Great Depression. It’s better for everyone if everyone leaves their deposits in the bank so it doesn’t run out of reserves and fail. But when other people start panicking and withdrawing their deposits, it makes sense for any given individual to do likewise in case the bank fails and they lose their money. The solution to this is deposit protection insurance, which ensures no one comes away empty-handed even if a bank does fail.

Game theory can help us to understand not only why it can be difficult for people to work together in the best possible way but also how we can reach more optimal outcomes through better communication. With a sufficient push towards a new equilibrium, we can drastically improve our collective circumstances in a short time.

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The Art of Being Alone

Reading Time: 7 minutes

Loneliness has more to do with our perceptions than how much company we have. It’s just as possible to be painfully lonely surrounded by people as it is to be content with little social contact. Some people need extended periods of time alone to recharge, others would rather give themselves electric shocks than spend a few minutes with their thoughts. Here’s how we can change our perceptions by making and experiencing art.

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At a moment in time when many people are facing unprecedented amounts of time alone, it’s a good idea for us to pause and consider what it takes to turn difficult loneliness into enriching solitude. We are social creatures, and a sustained lack of satisfying relationships carries heavy costs for our mental and physical health. But when we are forced to spend more time alone than we might wish, there are ways we can compensate and find a fruitful sense of connection and fulfillment. One way to achieve this is by using our loneliness as a springboard for creativity.

“Loneliness, longing, does not mean one has failed but simply that one is alive.”

— Olivia Laing

Loneliness as connection

One way people have always coped with loneliness is through creativity. By transmuting their experience into something beautiful, isolated individuals throughout history have managed to substitute the sense of community they might have otherwise found in relationships with their creative outputs.

In The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone, Olivia Laing tells the stories of a number of artists who led isolated lives and found meaning in their work even if their relationships couldn’t fulfill them. While she focuses specifically on visual artists in New York over the last seventy years, their methods of using their loneliness and transmitting it into their art carry wide resonance. These particular artists tapped into sentiments many of us will experience at least once in our lives. They found beauty in loneliness and showed it to be something worth considering, not just something to run from.

The artist Edward Hopper (1882–1967) is known for his paintings of American cityscapes inhabited by closed-off figures who seem to embody a vision of modern loneliness. Laing found herself drawn to his signature images of uneasy individuals in sparse surroundings, often separated from the viewer by a window or some other barrier.

Why, then, do we persist in ascribing loneliness to his work? The obvious answer is that his paintings tend to be populated by people alone, or in uneasy, uncommunicative groupings of twos and threes, fastened into poses that seem indicative of distress. But there’s something else too; something about the way he contrives his city streets . . . This viewpoint is often described as voyeuristic, but what Hopper’s urban scenes also replicate is one of the central experiences of being lonely: the way a feeling of separation, of being walled off or penned in, combines with a sense of near unbearable exposure.

While Hopper intermittently denied that his paintings were about loneliness, he certainly experienced the sense of being walled off in a city. In 1910 he moved to Manhattan, after a few years spent mostly in Europe, and found himself struggling to get by. Not only were his paintings not selling, he also felt alienated by the city. Hopper worked on commissions and had few close relationships. Only in his forties did he marry, well past the window of acceptability for the time. Laing writes of his early time in New York:

This sense of separation, of being alone in a big city, soon began to surface in his art . . . He was determined to articulate the day-to-day experience of inhabiting the modern, electric city of New York. Working first with etchings and then in paint, Hopper began to produce a distinctive body of images that captured the cramped, sometimes alluring experience of urban living.

Hopper roamed the city at night, sketching scenes that caught his eye. This perspective meant that the viewer of his paintings finds themselves most often in the position of an observer detached from the scene in front of them. If loneliness can feel like being separated from the world, the windows Hopper painted are perhaps a physical manifestation of this.

By Laing’s description, Hopper transformed the isolation he may have experienced by depicting the experience of loneliness as a place in itself, inhabited by the many people sharing it despite their differences. She elaborates and states, “They aren’t sentimental, his pictures, but there is an extraordinary attentiveness to them. As if what he saw was as interesting as he kept insisting he needed it to be: worth the labor, the miserable effort of setting it down. As if loneliness was something worth looking at. More than that, as if looking itself was an antidote, a way to defeat loneliness’ strange, estranging spell.”

Hopper’s work shows us that one way to make friends with loneliness is to create work that explores and examines it. This not only offers a way to connect with those enduring the same experience but also turns isolation into creative material and robs it of some of its sting.

Loneliness as inspiration

A second figure Laing considers is Andy Warhol (1928–1987). Born Andrew Warhola, the artist has become an icon, his work widely known, someone whose fame renders him hard to relate to. When she began exploring his body of work, Laing found that “one of the interesting things about his work, once you stop to look, is the way the real, vulnerable human self remains stubbornly visible, exerting its own submerged pressure, its own mute appeal to the viewer.”

In particular, much of Warhol’s work pertains to the loneliness he felt throughout his life, no matter how surrounded he was by glittering friends and admirers.

Throughout Warhol’s oeuvre, we see his efforts to turn his own sense of being on the outside into art. A persistent theme in his work was speech. He made thousands of tapes of conversations, often using them as the basis for other works of art. For instance, Warhol’s book, a, A Novel, consists of transcribed tapes from between 1965 and 1967. The tape recorder was such an important part of his life, both a way of connecting with people and keeping them at a distance, that he referred to it as his wife. By listening to others and documenting the oddities of their speech, Warhol coped with feeling he couldn’t be heard. Laing writes, “he retained a typically perverse fondness for language errors. He was fascinated by empty or deformed language, by chatter and trash, by glitches and botches in conversation.” In his work, all speech mattered regardless of its content.

Warhol himself often struggled with speech, mumbling in interviews and being embarrassed by his heavy Pittsburgh accent, which rendered him easily misunderstood in school. Speech was just one factor that left him isolated at times. At age seven, Warhol was confined to his bed by illness for several months. He withdrew from his peers, focusing on making art with his mother, and never quite integrated into school again. After graduating from Carnegie Mellon University in 1949, Warhol moved to New York and sought his footing in the art world. Despite his rapid rise to success and fame, he remained held back by an unshakeable belief in his own inferiority and exclusion from existing social circles.

Becoming a machine also meant having relationships with machines, using physical devices as a way of filling the uncomfortable, sometimes unbearable space between self and world. Warhol could not have achieved his blankness, his enviable detachment, without the use of these charismatic substitutes for intimacy and love.

Later in the book, Laing visits the Warhol museum to see his Time Capsules, 610 cardboard boxes filled with objects collected over the course of thirteen years: “postcards, letters, newspapers, magazines, photographs, invoices, slices of pizza, a piece of chocolate cake, even a mummified human foot.” He added objects until each box was full, then transferred them to a storage unit. Some objects have obvious value, while others seem like trash. There is no particular discernable order to the collection, yet Laing saw in the Time Capsules much the same impulse reflected in Warhol’s tape recordings:

What were the Capsules, really? Trash cans, coffins, vitrines, safes; ways of keeping the loved together, ways of never having to admit to loss or feel the pain of loneliness . . . What is left after the essence has departed? Rind and skin, things you want to throw away but can’t.

The loneliness Warhol felt when he created works like the Time Capsules was more a psychological one than a practical one. He was no longer alone, but his early experiences of feeling like an outsider, and the things he felt set him apart from others, like his speech, marred his ability to connect. Loneliness, for Warhol, was perhaps more a part of his personality than something he could overcome through relationships. Even so, he was able to turn it into fodder for the groundbreaking art we remember him for. Warhol’s art communicated what he struggled to say outright. It was also a way of him listening to and seeing other people—by photographing friends, taping them sleeping, or recording their conversations—when he perhaps felt he couldn’t be heard or seen.

Where creativity takes us

Towards the end of the book, Laing writes:

There are so many things that art can’t do. It can’t bring the dead back to life, it can’t mend arguments between friends, or cure AIDS, or halt the pace of climate change. All the same, it does have some extraordinary functions, some odd negotiating ability between people, including people who have never met and yet who infiltrate and enrich each other’s lives. It does have a capacity to create intimacy; it does have a way of healing wounds, and better yet of making it apparent that not all wounds need healing and not all scars are ugly.

When we face loneliness in our lives, it is not always possible or even appropriate to deal with it by rushing to fill our lives with people. Sometimes we do not have that option; sometimes we’re not in the right space to connect deeply; sometimes we first just need to work through that feeling. One way we can embrace our loneliness is by turning to the art of others who have inhabited that same lonely city, drawing solace and inspiration from their creations. We can use that as inspiration in our own creative pursuits which can help us work through difficult, and lonely, times.

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When Safety Proves Dangerous

Reading Time: 5 minutes

Not everything we do with the aim of making ourselves safer has that effect. Sometimes, knowing there are measures in place to protect us from harm can lead us to take greater risks and cancel out the benefits. This is known as risk compensation. Understanding how it affects our behavior can help us make the best possible decisions in an uncertain world.

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The world is full of risks. Every day we take endless chances, whether we’re crossing the road, standing next to someone with a cough on the train, investing in the stock market, or hopping on a flight.

From the moment we’re old enough to understand, people start teaching us crucial safety measures to remember: don’t touch that, wear this, stay away from that, don’t do this. And society is endlessly trying to mitigate the risks involved in daily life, from the ongoing efforts to improve car safety to signs reminding employees to wash their hands after using the toilet.

But the things we do to reduce risk don’t always make us safer. They can end up having the opposite effect. This is because we tend to change how we behave in response to our perceived safety level. When we feel safe, we take more risks. When we feel unsafe, we are more cautious.

Risk compensation means that efforts to protect ourselves can end up having a smaller effect than expected, no effect at all, or even a negative effect. Sometimes the danger is transferred to a different group of people, or a behavior modification creates new risks. Knowing how we respond to risk can help us avoid transferring danger to other more vulnerable individuals or groups.

Examples of Risk Compensation

There are many documented instances of risk compensation. One of the first comes from a 1975 paper by economist Sam Peltzman, entitled “The Effects of Automobile Safety Regulation.” Peltzman looked at the effects of new vehicle safety laws introduced several years earlier, finding that they led to no change in fatalities. While people in cars were less likely to die in accidents, pedestrians were at a higher risk. Why? Because drivers took more risks, knowing they were safer if they crashed.

Although Peltzman’s research has been both replicated and called into question over the years (there are many ways to interpret the same dataset), risk compensation is apparent in many other areas. As Andrew Zolli and Ann Marie Healy write in Resilience: Why Things Bounce Back, children who play sports involving protective gear (like helmets and knee pads) take more physical risks, and hikers who think they can be easily rescued are less cautious on the trails.

A study of taxi drivers in Munich, Germany, found that those driving vehicles with antilock brakes had more accidents than those without—unsurprising, considering they tended to accelerate faster and stop harder. Another study suggested that childproof lids on medicine bottles did not reduce poisoning rates. According to W. Kip Viscusi at Duke University, parents became more complacent with all medicines, including ones without the safer lids. Better ripcords on parachutes lead skydivers to pull them too late.

As defenses against natural disasters have improved, people have moved into riskier areas, and deaths from events like floods or hurricanes have not necessarily decreased. After helmets were introduced in American football, tackling fatalities actually increased for a few years, as players were more willing to strike heads (this changed with the adoption of new tackling standards.) Bailouts and protective mechanisms for financial institutions may have contributed to the scale of the 2008 financial crisis, as they led to banks taking greater and greater risks. There are numerous other examples.

We can easily see risk compensation play out in our lives and those of people around us. Someone takes up a healthy habit, like going to the gym, then compensates by drinking more. Having an emergency fund in place can encourage us to take greater financial risks. Wearing a face mask during a pandemic might mean you’re more willing to hang out in crowded places.

Risk Homeostasis

According to psychology professor Gerald Wilde, we all internally have a desired level of risk that varies depending on who we are and the context we are in. Our risk tolerance is like a thermostat—we take more risks if we feel too safe, and vice versa, in order to remain at our desired “temperature.” It all comes down to the costs and benefits we expect from taking on more or less risk.

The notion of risk homeostasis, although controversial, can help explain risk compensation. It means that enforcing measures to make people safer will inevitably lead to changes in behavior that maintain the amount of risk we’d like to experience, like driving faster while wearing a seatbelt. A feedback loop communicating our perceived risk helps us keep things as dangerous as we wish them to be. We calibrate our actions to how safe we’d like to be, making adjustments if it swings too far in one direction or the other.

What We Can Learn from Risk Compensation

We can learn many lessons from risk compensation and the research that has been done on the subject. First, safety measures are more effective the less visible they are. If people don’t know about a risk reduction, they won’t change their behavior to compensate for it. When we want to make something safer, it’s best to ensure changes go as unnoticed as possible.

Second, an effective method to reduce risk-taking behavior is to provide incentives for prudent behavior, giving people a reason to adjust their risk thermostat. Just because it seems like something has become safer doesn’t mean the risk hasn’t transferred elsewhere, putting a different group of people in danger as when seat belt laws lead to more pedestrian fatalities. So, for instance, lower insurance premiums for careful drivers might result in fewer fatalities than stricter road safety laws because it causes them to make positive changes to their behavior, instead of shifting the risk elsewhere.

Third, we are biased towards intervention. When we want to improve a situation, our first instinct tends to be to step in and change something, anything. Sometimes it is wiser to do less, or even nothing. Changing something does not always make people safer, sometimes it just changes the nature of the danger.

Fourth, when we make a safety change, we may need to implement corresponding rules to avoid risk compensation. Football helmets made the sport more dangerous at first, but new rules about tackling helped cancel out the behavior changes because the league was realistic about the need for more than just physical protection.

Finally, making people feel less safe can actually improve their behavior. Serious injuries in car crashes are rarer when the roads are icy, even if minor incidents are more common, because drivers take more care. If we want to improve safety, we can make risks more visible through better education.

Risk compensation certainly doesn’t mean it’s not a good idea to take steps to make ourselves safer, but it does illustrate how we need to be aware of unintended consequences that occur when we interact with complex systems. We can’t always expect to achieve the changes we desire first time around. Once we make a change, we should pay careful attention to the effects on the whole system to see what happens. Sometimes it will take the testing of a few alternate approaches to bring us closer to the desired effect.

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Mental Models For a Pandemic

Reading Time: 8 minutes

Mental models help us understand the world better, something which is especially valuable during times of confusion, like a pandemic. Here’s how to apply mental models to gain a more accurate picture of reality and keep a cool head.

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It feels overwhelming when the world changes rapidly, abruptly, and extensively. The changes come so fast it can be hard to keep up—and the future, which a few months ago seemed reliable, now has so many unknown dimensions. In the face of such uncertainty, mental models are valuable tools for helping you think through significant disruptions such as a pandemic.

A mental model is simply a representation of how something works. They are how we simplify complexity, why we consider some things more relevant than others, and how we reason. Using them increases your clarity of understanding, providing direction for the choices you need to make and the options you want to keep open.

Models for ourselves

During a pandemic, a useful model is “the map is not the territory.” In rapidly changing situations like a global health crisis, any reporting is an incomplete snapshot in time. Our maps are going to be inaccurate for many reasons: limited testing availability, poor reporting, ineffective information sharing, lack of expertise in analyzing the available information. The list goes on.

If past reporting hasn’t been completely accurate, then why would you assume current reporting is? You have to be careful when interpreting the information you receive, using it as a marker to scope out a range of what is happening in the territory.

In our current pandemic, we can easily spot our map issues. There aren’t enough tests available in most countries. Because COVID-19 isn’t fatal for the majority of people who contract it, there are likely many people who get it but don’t meet the testing criteria. Therefore, we don’t know how many people have it.

When we look at country-level reporting, we can also see not all countries are reporting to the same standard. Sometimes this isn’t a matter of “better” or “worse”; there are just different ways of collating the numbers. Some countries don’t have the infrastructure for widespread data collection and sharing. Different countries also have different standards for what counts as a death caused by COVID-19.

In other nations, incentives affect reporting. Some countries downplay their infection rate so as to not create panic. Some governments avoid reporting because it undermines their political interests. Others are more worried about the information on the economic map than the health one.

Although it is important to be realistic about our maps, it doesn’t mean we shouldn’t seek to improve their quality. Paying attention to information from experts and ignoring unverified soundbites is one step to increasing the accuracy of our maps. The more accurate we can get them, the more likely it is that we’ll be able to unlock new possibilities that help us deal with the crisis and plan for the future.

There are two models that we can use to improve the effectiveness of the maps we do have: “compounding” and “probabilistic thinking.”

Compounding is exponential growth, something a lot of us tend to have a poor intuitive grasp on. We see the immediate linear relationships in the situation, like how one test diagnoses one person, while not understanding the compounding effects of that relationship. Increased testing can lead to an exponential decrease in virus transmission because each infected person usually passes the virus onto more than just one other person.

One of the clearest stories to illustrate exponential growth is the story of the man who asked to be paid in rice. In this story, a servant is to be rewarded for his service. When asked how he wanted to be paid, he asks to be paid in rice, using a chessboard to determine the final amount. Starting with one grain, the amount of rice is to be doubled for each square. One grain on the first square looks pathetic. But halfway through the chessboard, the servant is making a good yearly living. And after doubling the rice sixty-four times, the servant is owed more rice than the whole world can produce.

Improving our ability to think exponentially helps us understand how more testing can lead to both an exponential decrease in testing prices and an exponential increase in the production of those tests. It also makes clear just how far-reaching the impact of our actions can be if we don’t take precautions with the assumption that we could be infected.

Probabilistic thinking is also invaluable in helping us make decisions based on the incomplete information we have. In the absence of enough testing, for example, we need to use probabilistic thinking to make decisions on what actions to pursue. We ask ourselves questions like: Do I have COVID-19? If there’s a 1% chance I have it, is it worth visiting my grandparents?

Being able to evaluate reasonable probability has huge impacts on how we approach physical distancing. Combining the models of probabilistic thinking and map is not the territory suggests our actions need to be guided by infection numbers much higher than the ones we have. We are likely to make significantly different social decisions if we estimate the probability of infection as being three people out of ten instead of one person out of one thousand.

Bayesian updating can also help clarify the physical distancing actions you should take. There’s a small probability of being part of a horrendous chain of events that might not just have poor direct consequences but also follow you for the rest of your life. Evaluating how responsible you are being in terms of limiting transmission, would you bet a loved one’s life on it?

Which leads us to Hanlon’s Razor. It’s hard not to get angry at reports of beach parties during spring break or at the guy four doors down who has his friends over to hang out every night. For your own sanity, try using Hanlon’s Razor to evaluate their behavior. They are not being malicious and trying to kill people. They are just exceptionally and tragically ignorant.

Finally, on a day-to-day basis, trying to make small decisions with incomplete information, you can use inversion. You can look at the problem backwards. When the best way forward is far from clear, you ask yourself what you could do to make things worse, and then avoid doing those things.

Models for society

Applying mental models aids in the understanding the dynamics of the large-scale social response.

Currently we are seeing the counterintuitive measures with first-order negatives (closing businesses) but second- and third-order positives (reduced transmission, less stress on the healthcare system). Second-order thinking is an invaluable tool at all times, including during a pandemic. It’s so important that we encourage the thinking, analysis, and decision-making that factors in the effects of the effects of the decisions we make.

In order to improve the maps that our leaders have to make decisions, we need to sort through the feedback loops providing the content. If we can improve not only the feedback but also the pace of iterations, we have a better chance of making good decisions.

For example, if we improve the rate of testing and the speed of the results, it would be a major game-changer. Imagine if knowing whether you had the virus or not was a $0.01 test that gave you a result in less than a minute. In that case, we could make different decisions about social openness, even in the absence of a vaccine (however, this may have invasive privacy implications, as tracking this would be quite difficult otherwise).

As we watch the pandemic and its consequences unfold, it becomes clear that leadership and authority are not the same thing. Our hierarchical instincts emerge strongly in times of crisis. Leadership vacuums, then, are devastating, and disasters expose the cracks in our hierarchies. However, we also see that people can display strong leadership without needing any authority. A pandemic provides opportunities for such leadership to emerge at community and local levels, providing alternate pathways for meeting the needs of many.

One critical model we can use to look at society during a pandemic is Ecosystems. When we think about ecosystems, we might imagine a variety of organisms interacting in a forest or the ocean. But our cities are also ecosystems, as is the earth as a whole. Understanding system dynamics can give us a lot of insight into what is happening in our societies, both at the micro and macro level.

One property of ecosystems that is useful to contemplate in situations like a pandemic is resilience—the speed at which an ecosystem recovers after a disturbance. There are many factors that contribute to resilience, such as diversity and adaptability. Looking at our global situation, one factor threatening to undermine our collective resilience is that our economy has rewarded razor-thin efficiency in the recent past. The problem with thin margins is they offer no buffer in the face of disruption. Therefore, ecosystems with thin margins are not at all resilient. Small disturbances can bring them down completely. And a pandemic is not a small disturbance.

Some argue that what we are facing now is a Black Swan: an unpredictable event beyond normal expectations with severe consequences. Most businesses are not ready to face one. You could argue that an economic recession is not a black swan, but the particular shape of this pandemic is testing the resiliency of our social and economic ecosystems regardless. The closing of shops and business, causing huge disruption, has exposed fragile supply chains. We just don’t see these types of events often enough, even if we know they’re theoretically possible. So we don’t prepare for them. We don’t or can’t create big enough personal and social margins of safety. Individuals and businesses don’t have enough money in the bank. We don’t have enough medical facilities and supplies. Instead, we have optimized for a narrow range of possibilities, compromising the resilience of systems we rely on.

Finally, as we look at the role national borders are playing during this pandemic, we can use the Thermodynamics model to gain insight into how to manage flows of people during and after restrictions. Insulation requires a lot of work, as we are seeing with our borders and the subsequent effect on our economies. It’s unsustainable for long periods of time. Just like how two objects of different temperatures that come into contact with each other eventually reach thermal equilibrium, people will mix with each other. All borders have openings of some sort. It’s important to extend planning to incorporate the realistic tendencies of reintegration.

Some final thoughts about the future

As we look for opportunities about how to move forward both as individuals and societies, Cooperation provides a useful lens. Possibly more critical to evolution than competition, cooperation is a powerful force. It’s rampant throughout the biological world; even bacteria cooperate. As a species, we have been cooperating with each other for a long time. All of us have given up some independence for access to resources provided by others.

Pandemics are intensified because of connection. But we can use that same connectivity to mitigate some negative effects by leveraging our community networks to create cooperative interactions that fill gaps in the government response. We can also use the cooperation lens to create more resilient connections in the future.

Finally, we need to ask ourselves how we can improve our antifragility. How can we get to a place where we grow stronger through change and challenge? It’s not about getting “back to normal.” The normal that was our world in 2019 has proven to be fragile. We shouldn’t want to get back to a time when we were unprepared and vulnerable.

Existential threats are a reality of life on earth. One of the best lessons we can learn is to open our eyes and integrate planning for massive change into how we approach our lives. This will not be the last pandemic, no matter how careful we are. The goal now should not be about assigning blame or succumbing to hindsight bias to try to implement rules designed to prevent a similar situation in the future. We will be better off if we make changes aimed at increasing our resilience and embracing the benefits of challenge.

Still curious? Learn more by reading The Great Mental Models.

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Rethinking Fear

Reading Time: 4 minutes

Fear is a state no one wants to embrace, yet for many of us it’s the background music to our lives. But by making friends with fear and understanding why it exists, we can become less vulnerable to harm—and less afraid. Read on to learn a better approach to fear.

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In The Gift of Fear: Survival Signals That Protect Us From Violence, author Gavin de Becker argues that we all have an intuitive sense of when we are in danger. Drawing upon his experience as a high-stakes security specialist, he explains how we can protect ourselves by paying better attention to our gut feelings and not letting denial lead us to harm. Our intuition, honed by evolution and by a lifetime of experience, deserves more respect.

By telling us to value our intuition, de Becker isn’t telling anyone to live in fear permanently, always alert for possible risks. Quite the opposite. De Becker writes that we misunderstand the value of fear when we think that being constantly hypervigilant will keep us safe. Being afraid all the time doesn’t protect us from danger. Instead, he explains, by trusting that our gut feelings are accurate and learning key signals that portend risk, we can actually feel calmer and safer:

Far too many people are walking around in a constant state of vigilance, their intuition misinformed about what really poses danger. It needn’t be so. When you honor accurate intuitive signals and evaluate them without denial (believing that either the favorable or unfavorable outcome is possible), you need not be wary, for you will come to trust that you’ll be notified if there is something worthy of your attention. Fear will gain credibility because it won’t be applied wastefully.

When we walk around terrified all the time, we can’t pick out the signal from the noise. If you’re constantly scared, you can’t correctly notice when there is something genuine to fear. True fear is a momentary signal, not an ongoing state. De Becker writes that “if one feels fear of all people all the time, there is no signal reserved for the times when it’s really needed.”

What we fear the most is rarely what ends up happening. Fixating on particular dangers blinds us to others. We focus on checking the road for snakes and end up getting knocked over by a car. De Becker writes that it matters that we’re receptive to fear, not that we’re watching out for what scares us the most (though of course, different things pose different risks to different people, and we should evaluate accordingly.) After all, “we are far more open to signals when we don’t focus on the expectation of specific signals.”

Fear vs. anxiety

Fear is not the same as anxiety. Although people experiencing anxiety are often afraid of both the anxiety and what they presume to be its cause, these two states have different triggers. De Becker explains one of the key factors that differentiates the two:

Anxiety, unlike real fear, is always caused by uncertainty. It is caused, ultimately, by predictions in which you have little confidence. When you predict that you will be fired from your job and you are certain the prediction is correct, you don’t have anxiety about being fired. You might have anxiety about the things you can’t predict with certainty, such as the ramifications of losing the job. Predictions in which you have high confidence free you to respond, adjust, feel sadness, accept, prepare, or to do whatever is needed. Accordingly, anxiety is reduced by improving your prediction, thus increasing your certainty.

Understand that when we’re anxious, it’s because we’re uncertain. The solution to this, then, isn’t worrying more—it’s doing all we can to either find clarity or working to accept that uncertainty is part of life.

Using fear

What can we learn from de Becker’s call to rethink fear? We learn that we’ll be in a better position if we can face possible threats with a calm mind, alert to our internal signals but not anticipating every possible bad thing that could happen. While being told to stop panicking never helped anyone, we benefit by understanding that being overwhelmed by fear will hurt us more. Our imaginary fears harm us more than reality ever does.

If this approach sounds familiar, it’s because it echoes ideas from Stoic philosophy. Much like de Becker, the Stoics urged us to be realistic about the fact that bad things can and will happen to us throughout our lives. No one can escape that. Once we’ve faced that reality, some of the shock goes away and we can think about how to prepare. After all, catastrophe and tragedy are part of the journey, not an unexpected detour. Being aware and accepting of the inevitable terrible things that will happen is actually a critical tool in mitigating both their severity and impact.

We don’t need to live in fear to stay safe. A better approach is to be aware of the risks we face, accept that some are unknown or unpredictable, and do all we can to be prepared for any serious or imminent dangers. Then we can focus our energy on maintaining a calm mind and trusting that our intuition will protect us.

“We are more often frightened than hurt; and we suffer more from imagination than from reality.”

— Seneca

 

The Stoics also taught us that we should view terrible events as survivable. It would do us well to give ourselves more credit—we’ve all survived occurrences that once seemed like the worst-case scenario, and we can survive many more.

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Bad Arguments and How to Avoid Them

Reading Time: 13 minutes

Productive arguments serve two purposes: to open our minds to truths we couldn’t see — and help others do the same. Here’s how to avoid common pitfalls and argue like a master.

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We’re often faced with situations in which we need to argue a point, whether we’re pitching an investor or competing for a contract. When being powerfully persuasive matters, it’s important that we don’t use bad arguments that prevent useful debate instead of furthering it. To do this, it’s useful to know some common ways people remove the possibility of a meaningful discussion. While it can be a challenge to keep our cool and not sink to using bad arguments when responding to a Twitter troll or during a heated confrontation over Thanksgiving dinner, we can benefit from knowing what to avoid when the stakes are high.

“If the defendant be a man of straw, who is to pay the costs?” 

— Charles Dickens

 

To start, let’s define three common types of bad arguments, or logical fallacies: “straw man,” “hollow man,” and “iron man.”

Straw man arguments

A straw man argument is a misrepresentation of an opinion or viewpoint, designed to be as easy as possible to refute. Just as a person made of straw would be easier to fight with than a real human, a straw man argument is easy to knock to the ground. And just as it might look a bit like a real person from a distance, a straw man argument has the rough outline of the actual discussion. In some cases, it might seem similar to an outside observer. But it lacks any semblance of substance or strength. The sole purpose is for it to be easy to refute. It’s not an argument you happen to find inconvenient or challenging. It’s one that is logically flawed. A straw man argument may not even be invalid; it’s just not relevant.

It’s important not to confuse a strawman argument with a simplified summary of a complex argument. When we’re having a debate, we may sometimes need to explain an opponent’s grounds back to them to ensure we understand it. In this case, this explanation will be by necessity a briefer version. But it is only a straw man if the simplification is used to make it easier to attack, rather than to facilitate clearer understanding

There are a number of common tactics used to construct straw man arguments. One is per fas et nefas (which means “through right and wrong” in Latin) and involves refuting one of the reasons for an opponent’s argument, then claiming that discredits everything they’ve said. Often, this type of straw man argument will focus on an irrelevant or unimportant detail, selecting the weakest part of the argument. Even though they have no response to the rest of the discourse, they purport to have disproven it in its entirety. As Doug Walton, professor of philosophy at the University of Winnipeg, puts it, “The straw man tactic is essentially to take some small part of an arguer’s position and then treat it as if that represented his larger position, even though it is not really representative of that larger position. It is a form of generalizing from one aspect to a larger, broader position, but not in a representative way.”

Oversimplifying an argument makes it easier to attack by removing any important nuance. An example is the “peanut butter argument,” which states life cannot have evolved through natural selection because we do not see the spontaneous appearance of new life forms inside sealed peanut butter jars. The argument claims evolutionary theory asserts life emerged through a simple combination of matter and heat, both of which are present in a jar of peanut butter. It is a straw man because it uses an incorrect statement about evolution as being representative of the whole theory. The defender of evolution gets trapped into explaining a position they didn’t even have: why life doesn’t spontaneously develop inside a jar of peanut butter.

Another tactic is to over-exaggerate a line of reasoning to the point of absurdity, thus making it easier to refute. An example would be someone claiming a politician who is not opposed to immigration is thus in favor of open borders with no restrictions on who can enter a country. Seeing as that would be a weak view that few people hold, the politician then feels obligated to defend border controls and risks losing control of the debate and being charged as a hypocrite.

“The light obtained by setting straw men on fire is not what we mean by illumination.”

— Adam Gopnik

 

Straw man arguments that respond to irrelevant points could involve ad hominem points, which are sort of relevant but don’t refute the argument—for example, responding to the point that wind turbines are a more environmentally friendly means of generating energy than fossil fuels by saying, “But wind turbines are ugly.” This point has a loose connection, yet the way wind turbines look doesn’t discredit their benefits for power generation. A person who made an ad hominem point like that would likely be doing so because they knew they had no rebuttal for the actual assertion.

Quoting an argument out of context is another tactic of straw man arguments. “Quote mining” is the practice of removing any part of a source that proves contradictory, often using ellipses to fill in the gaps. For instance, film posters and book blurbs will sometimes take quotes from bad reviews out of context to make them seem positive. So, “It’s amazing how bad this film is” becomes “Amazing,” and “The perfect book for people who wish to be bored to tears” becomes “The perfect book.” Reviewers face an uphill battle in trying not to write anything that could be taken out of control in this manner.

Hollow man arguments

A hollow man argument is similar to a straw man one. The difference is that it is a weak case attributed to a non-existent group. Someone will fabricate a viewpoint that is easy to refute, then claim it was made by a group they disagree with. Arguing against an opponent which doesn’t exist is a pretty easy way to win any debate. People who use hollow man arguments will often favor vague, non-specific language without explicitly giving any sources or stating who their opponent is.

Hollow man arguments slip into debate because they’re a lazy way of making a strong point without risking anyone refuting you or needing to be accountable for the actual strength of a line of reasoning. In Why We Argue (And How We Should): A Guide to Political Disagreement, Scott F. Aikin and Robert B. Talisse write that “speakers commit the hollow man when they respond critically to arguments that nobody on the opposing side has ever made. The act of erecting a hollow man is an argumentative failure because it distracts attention away from the actual reasons and argument given by one’s opposition. . . . It is a full-bore fabrication of the opposition.”

An example of a hollow man argument would be the claim that animal rights activists want humans and non-human animals to have a perfectly equal legal standing, meaning that dogs would have to start wearing clothes to avoid being arrested for public indecency. This is a hollow man because no one has said that all laws applying to humans should also apply to dogs.

“The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum.”

— Noam Chomsky

 

Iron man argument

An iron man argument is one constructed in such a way that it is resistant to attacks by a challenger. Iron man arguments are difficult to avoid because they have a lot of overlap with legitimate debate techniques. The distinction is whether the person using them is doing so to prevent opposition altogether or if they are open to changing their minds and listening to an opposer. Being proven wrong is painful, which is why we often unthinkingly resort to shielding ourselves from it using iron man arguments.

Someone using an iron man argument often makes their own stance so vague that nothing anyone says about it can weaken it. They’ll make liberal use of caveats, jargon, and imprecise terms. This means they can claim anyone who disagrees didn’t understand them, or they’ll rephrase their contention repeatedly. You could compare this to the language used in the average horoscope or in a fortune cookie. It’s so vague that it’s hard to disagree with or label it as incorrect because it can’t be incorrect. It’s like boxing with a wisp of steam.

An example would be a politician who answers a difficult question about their policies by saying, “I think it’s important that we take the best possible actions to benefit the people of this country. Our priority in this situation is to implement policies that have a positive impact on everyone in society.” They’ve answered the question, just without saying anything that anyone could disagree with.

Why bad arguments are harmful

What is the purpose of debate? Most of us, if asked, would say it’s about helping someone with an incorrect, harmful idea see the light. It’s an act of kindness. It’s about getting to the truth.

But the way we tend to engage in debate contradicts our supposed intentions.

Much of the time, we’re really debating because we want to prove we’re right and our opponent is wrong. Our interest is not in getting to the truth. We don’t even consider the possibility that our opponent might be correct or that we could learn something from them.

As decades of psychological research indicate, our brains are always out to save energy, and part of that is that we prefer not to change our minds about anything. It’s much easier to cling to our existing beliefs through whatever means possible and ignore anything that challenges them. Bad arguments enable us to engage in what looks like a debate but doesn’t pose any risk of forcing us to question what we stand for.

We debate for other reasons, too. Sometimes we’re out to entertain ourselves. Or we want to prove we’re smarter than someone else. Or we’re secretly addicted to the shot of adrenaline we get from picking a fight. And that’s what we’re doing—fighting, not arguing. In these cases, it’s no surprise that shoddy tactics like using straw man or hollow man arguments emerge.

It’s never fun to admit we’re wrong about anything or to have to change our minds. But it is essential if we want to get smarter and see the world as it is, not as we want it to be. Any time we engage in debate, we need to be honest about our intentions. What are we trying to achieve? Are we open to changing our minds? Are we listening to our opponent? Only when we’re out to have a balanced discussion with the possibility of changing our minds can a debate be productive, avoiding the use of logical fallacies.

Bad arguments are harmful to everyone involved in a debate. They don’t get us anywhere because we’re not tackling an opponent’s actual viewpoint. This means we have no hope of convincing them. Worse, this sort of underhand tactic is likely to make an opponent feel frustrated and annoyed by the deliberate misrepresentation of their beliefs. They’re forced to listen to a refutation of something they don’t even believe in the first place, which insults their intelligence. Feeling attacked like this only makes them hold on tighter to their actual belief. It may even make them less willing to engage in any sort of debate in the future.

And if you’re a chronic constructor of bad arguments, as many of us are, it leads people to avoid challenging you or starting discussions. Which means you don’t get to learn from them or have your views questioned. In formal situations, using bad arguments makes it look like you don’t really have a strong point in the first place.

How to avoid using bad arguments

If you want to have useful, productive debates, it’s vital to avoid using bad arguments.

The first thing we need to do to avoid constructing bad arguments is to accept it’s something we’re all susceptible to. It’s easy to look at a logical fallacy and think of all the people we know who use it. It’s much harder to recognize it in ourselves. We don’t always realize when the point we’re making isn’t that strong.

Bad arguments are almost unavoidable if we haven’t taken the time to research both sides of the debate. Sometimes the map is not the territory—that is, our perception of an opinion is not that opinion. The most useful thing we can do is attempt to see the territory. That brings us to steelman arguments and the ideological Turing test.

Steel man arguments

The most powerful way to avoid using bad arguments and to discourage their use by others is to follow the principle of charity and to argue against the strongest and most persuasive version of their grounds. In this case, we suspend disbelief and ignore our own opinions for long enough to understand where they’re coming from. We recognize the good sides of their case and play to its strengths. Ask questions to clarify anything you don’t understand. Be curious about the other person’s perspective. You might not change their mind, but you will at least learn something and hopefully reduce any conflict in the process.

“It is better to debate a question without settling it than to settle a question without debating it.”

— Joseph Joubert

 

In Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking, the philosopher Daniel Dennett offers some general guidelines for using the principle of charity, formulated by social psychologist and game theorist Anatol Rapoport:

  1. You should attempt to re-express your target’s position so clearly, vividly, and fairly that your target says, “Thanks, I wish I’d thought of putting it that way.”
  1. You should list any points of agreement (especially if they are not matters of general or widespread agreement).
  1. You should mention anything you have learned from your target.
  1. Only then are you permitted to say so much as a word of rebuttal or criticism.

An argument that is the strongest version of an opponent’s viewpoint is known as a steel man. It’s purposefully constructed to be as difficult as possible to attack. The idea is that we can only say we’ve won a debate when we’ve fought with a steel man, not a straw one. Seeing as we’re biased towards tackling weaker versions of an argument, often without realizing it, this lets us err on the side of caution.

As challenging as this might be, it serves a bigger picture purpose. Steel man arguments help us understand a new perspective, however ludicrous it might be in our eyes, so we’re better positioned to succeed and connect better in the future. It shows a challenger we are empathetic and willing to listen, regardless of personal opinion. The point is to see the strengths, not the weaknesses. If we’re open-minded, not combative, we can learn a lot.

“He who knows only his side of the case knows little of that.”

— John Stuart Mill

 

An exercise in steel manning, the ideological Turing test, proposes that we cannot say we understand an opponent’s position unless we would be able to argue in favor of it so well that an observer would not be able to tell which opinion we actually hold. In other words, we shouldn’t hold opinions we can’t argue against. The ideological Turing test is a great thought experiment to establish whether you understand where an opponent is coming from.

Although we don’t have the option to do this for every single thing we disagree with, when a debate is extremely important to us, the ideological Turing test can be a helpful tool for ensuring we’re fully prepared. Even if we can’t use it all the time, it can serve us well in high-stakes situations.

How to handle other people using bad arguments

“You could not fence with an antagonist who met rapier thrust with blow of battle axe.”

— L.M. Montgomery

 

Let’s say you’re in the middle of a debate with someone with a different opinion than yours. You’re responding to the steel man version of their explanation, staying calm and measured. But what do you do if your opponent starts using bad arguments against you? What if they’re not listening to you?

The first thing you can do when someone uses a bad argument against you is the simplest: point it out. Explain what they’re doing and why it isn’t helpful. There’s not much point in just telling them they’re using a straw man argument or any other type of logical fallacy. If they’re not familiar with the concept, it may just seem like alienating jargon. There’s also not much point in using it as a “gotcha!” point which will likewise foster more tensions. It’s best to define the concept, then reiterate your actual beliefs and how they differ from the bad argument they’re arguing against.

  1. Edward Damer writes in Attacking Faulty Reasoning, “It is not always possible to know whether an opponent has deliberately distorted your argument or has simply failed to understand or interpret it in the way that you intended. For this reason, it might be helpful to recapitulate the basic outline . . . or [ask] your opponent to summarize it for you.”

If this doesn’t work, you can continue to repeat your original point and make no attempt to defend the bad argument. Should your opponent prove unwilling to recognize their use of a bad argument (and you’re 100% certain that’s what they’re doing), it’s worth considering if there is any point in continuing the debate. The reality is that most of the debates we have are not rationally thought out; they’re emotionally driven. This is even more pertinent when we’re arguing with people we have a complex relationship with. Sometimes, it’s better to walk away.

Conclusion

The bad arguments discussed here are incredibly common logical fallacies in debates. We often use them without realizing it or experience them without recognizing it. But these types of debates are unproductive and unlikely to help anyone learn. If we want our arguments to create buy-in and not animosity, we need to avoid making bad ones.

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