Every time we do something, every action we initiate, is based on some sort of analysis. There is a risk / reward assessment even for the tiniest thing that we do, and that’s how we can function consistently. But some of these risk / rewards assessments, as useful as they are for long term survival, can prove deceiving short or medium term.
How come?
Well, let’s start by making the difference between facts and signals.
The simplest way to do this is by imagining we’re close to a forest, in which we know there are some wild animals, let’s say bears.
If we see some bush moving, we immediately infer that a bear might be behind that bush. That’s a signal.
If we actually see a bear appearing from behind the bush, well, that’s a fact.
In both cases, though, we’re inclined to run (and in the second, we’d better do that, or else…).
The Long Term Benefits Of Signals
There is a certain benefit in taking this action, especially long term. We’re not always in a position to check that a bear is actually behind the bush, so our odds of survival are higher if we just infer that there is one. In this situation, it’s mostly ok if we act on the signal, not on the fact.
Some of these signals are acquired as a species (humans fear bears, most of the time, whereas wolves may not). But some of them are acquired during our lifetime. The same learning process is applied: every time there is some sort of causality between events, we record them, and next time we try to predict the outcome early on, based on our recollections. When we record a certain positive outcome, based on something identifiable as a signal, we chose to act on that, because we remember there might be some benefits in there – one of them being that we simply can’t always assess all the facts properly.
But as the overall quantity of information around us increases, our cognitive capacities are under heavy stress and we act more and more on signals, rather than on facts.
By now, you should have realized that one of the major drawbacks of this approach is what we call “false positives”. What if there wasn’t any bear behind the bush? Well, we will never know for sure, and now it’s too late.
We react on signals of perceived beauty when we are attracted by a potential partner, not by the actual ability to form and maintain a relationship. Sometimes there is match, but this is so unlikely, that we invented terms like “one true love”, or “soul mates”, to identfiy these events.
We react on signals when we decide to buy and sell stocks (and that’s an actual technical term in trading, “selling” or” buying” signal). We don’t have the time, neither the capacity to analyze the enormous amount of data that will put is in a better place, so we look at shapes made by the price charts, and when we see something resembling to “head and shoulders”, for instance, or “ascending triangle”, we hit the buy or sell button. Just based on that signal. Sometimes we’re right, sometimes we’re not.
We react on signals when we decide to vote for those who we delegate to take care of the society every four years. We don’t have time to assess if they are really good at doing what they preach they do. Mostly because their narrative is built in such a way that it sends the “right signals” to us, they are “pushing all the right buttons”.
In recent times, this phenomenon became so prevalent, that, once again, we had to invent a name for it. We call this “fake news”. And this “fake news” thing is classified as “fake” only in hindsight, only after certain people spend the time to do some fact checking and point us in the right direction. It’s becoming increasingly difficult to do this, though, with the rise of AI, and the evolution of “fake news” into “deep fake”. A video impersonation of Barrak Obama is undistinguishable from a real discourse of him.
Truthfulness
And with that, we come to the most important part. We apply a certain amount of “truthfulness” to everything that we perceive around us, or a value of “truth”, based predominantly on signals, not on facts. Our notion of truth is so twisted, yet we can hardly realize how far we are from the facts, sometimes. The urge to “get by”, to continue living, to survive, is way more powerful than our intentions to act “in accordance with truth”.
We’re not living in a lie, just in a very incomplete, approximative representation of the real world.
It’s worth thinking about this next time someone tells you: “I’m sure about that”.
It’s also worth thinking about this next time you say to somebody else: “I’m also sure about that”.
