How to Survive in a Post-Truth World — Avoid this Devastating Obstacle
The path back to rationality is about understanding the irrationality of humanity
Everybody always encourages you to believe the facts.
- What do the facts and figures tell you?
- What are the experts saying?
- What does the evidence suggest?
If that’s true why is contrarian thought so successful?
Why have the poles for recent elections in multiple countries all been wrong?
Contrarian thinking, to me, is understanding what conventional wisdom is actually true that the rest of the population has been convinced is false.
But it’s also about understanding which facts are lies or untrue.
Contrarian thinking is about understanding that what people say they will do and what they actually will do are two completely different things.
Lies are not necessarily blatant. People lie to themselves all the time and if they are doing so you are never likely to know the truth until it happens. It’s why the world is so reactionary currently, nobody can predict what will happen next.
You need to know what people will do in order to be a success.
- This is why data is so much more valuable than opinions.
- This is why Data is the new oil
- This is why Facebook and Google and Amazon are winning
Psychologist and data scientist Michal Kosinski has found that seemingly mundane activity — such as the brands and celebrities people “like” on Facebook — can be leveraged to reliably predict, among other things, intelligence, personality traits and politics.
After the most recent American presidential election, the company Cambridge Analytica boasted that its techniques were “instrumental in identifying supporters, persuading undecided voters and driving turnout to the polls” on Donald Trump’s behalf. All these little actions we think of as our “private” business are actually data points that can be aggregated and wielded to manipulate our world.
Law professor Paul Ohm has been warning against the power of big data for years. He fears that the companies compiling this data could create a “database of ruin” that would someday connect all people to compromising information about their lives. “In the absence of intervention,” he later wrote, “soon companies will know things about us that we do not even know about ourselves.” Or as the social scientist and Times contributor Zeynep Tufekci said in a recent talk: “People can’t think like this: I didn’t disclose it, but it can be inferred about me.” When a peeping Tom looks between the blinds, it’s clear what has been revealed. But when a data firm cracks open our inboxes, we may never find out what it has learned.
Reading Daniel Kahneman and ‘The Undoing Projects’ about he and Amos Tversky taught me many things. It is a glorious insight into the human condition and how subjects that seem tedious from the out set can be so compelling and fascinating.
It also shows you how easily experts can lie to themselves in the face of evidence which is contrarian to their own beliefs. In order to protect ourselves from our own inadequacies, we construct falsified accounts of everything we encounter which prevents us from seeing the truth if the truth is juxtaposed to the one we have created. We are all susceptible to the bias of not believing any information that contradicts our own beliefs.
We must challenge ourselves more rigorously to uncover the real actual truth.
Kahneman and Tversky didn’t initially kickstart a paradigm shift in economics because of their groundbreaking work, though it did eventually. The seismic shift occurred due to the rest of the professions refusal to accept the inconsistencies of the human mind.
Even world renowned experts are incapable of believing the facts presented to them, proving nobody is infallible.
We are today living in a post-truth world. We have slowly begun to realise that the majority of things portrayed as facts are nothing more than expensive opinions.
We now see talking heads on TV, who in the past were respected and their words were taken as gospel, for what they are — expensive puppets for multi-billion dollar corporations peddling the agenda of the person who pays their wages.
The media is nothing but an extension of whichever company funds its propaganda. Stories which further their mission are unmercifully stretched to serve the purpose they are required.
For the most part this has spelt the end for traditional journalism.
For too long we have been sold stories of ‘facts’ based on statistics taken from too broad a section of society, been told it is indicative of a larger spread of the populous, but the truth is that it’s not. It only accurate in so far as the next user you ask confirms the bias you are perpetuating.
Manipulation of populous by nudging them towards certain decision based on a falsified belief of the direction the general population is moving in is not befitting of a democratic state.
That’s why people are resisting. The disintegration of monopolised new dissemination has hastened this effect.
And it is a revolution that is required.
Sure there may be more ‘Fake News’ stories, but is this really more harmful than the distribution of news edited by a select elite pedalling their own agendas?
The most unique and powerful skill in this new world is an ability to see the truth everyone else has dismissed.
In reality, Brexit and Trump were entirely predictable, but that is only true in hindsight. All the evidence and indications were there, but the media missed it. did you see it coming?
What else are they missing?
What are you missing?
At the intersection of these two question is contrarian reality.
By straddling this line you can oppose conventional wisdom and ride it to unimaginable success.
Are you ready to climb aboard?
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