Loserthink Page 2

  Based on my life of experience across multiple fields, and especially with large organizations, I’ll bet no more than a handful of people in the world are true experts in measuring global temperatures. And given that the ocean controls something like 90 percent of the heat retention on the planet, do you believe we can measure the average ocean temperatures, both now and in our far distant history, to a precision necessary to know if a few degrees up or down have happened before, and at what rate? Maybe we can. I can’t rule it out. I’ll just say it doesn’t pass my sniff test, but I acknowledge that my sniffing is not science. I’d like to be wrong and learn that scientists can measure to that level of accuracy.

  I have been researching climate science claims for a few months to see if I could arrive at a rational opinion on my own, and I see the following pattern over and over:

  CLIMATE SCIENTIST: Here’s my chart using official and publicly available temperature data proving the planet is warming at an alarming rate.

  SKEPTIC: Here’s my chart using official and publicly available temperature data showing you are wrong, and here’s why . . .

  CLIMATE SCIENTIST: Here’s a paper showing why the way you are charting things is incorrect.

  SKEPTIC: Here’s a logical argument showing you why that paper is wrong.

  CLIMATE SCIENTIST: Oh, yeah? Well, here’s my logical argument for why your logical argument is wrong.

  And so on to infinity.

  In theory, a nonscientist should be able to follow the climate debate to its conclusion and judge whether the scientists or the skeptics have the best argument. But in reality, all one can do is chase the arguments back and forth until one of the players says something scientific that you don’t understand. Then, if you are like most normal adults, you default to believing whichever side you already thought was right. The topic of climate science is effectively impenetrable for nonscientists.

  Consider the skeptical argument about the alleged “seventeen-year pause” in warming from 1996 to 2014 that NASA satellites measured. Skeptics say the pause disproves human-driven climate change because CO2 was rising sharply in that time while temperatures were not. Climate scientists counter that criticism by saying you can’t draw any conclusions from looking at a “cherry-picked” period less than thirty years in duration because short-term natural variations can mask the CO2-caused warming that is happening on average over the long term. But climate scientists also tell us that our most recent thirty years are showing warming that is highly meaningful. How can both things be true? Thirty years of temperature data either tells you something useful or it doesn’t. I assume the real problem here is my personal ignorance, and not necessarily a problem with climate science. I assume climate scientists have a good response to the alleged temperature pause, but I wouldn’t understand it if I heard it. My point is that a concerned citizen is largely helpless in trying to understand how settled the science of climate change really is. But that doesn’t stop us from having firm opinions on the topic. Ask Seth MacFarlane.

  If you have no experience in the field of science, you might think the climate models created by scientists are “science” because scientists make them. But prediction models are not science. They are an intelligent combination of scientific thinking, math, human judgment, and incomplete data. That’s why there are lots of different climate models, all a bit different.

  If you have not studied the methods of magicians and scam artists, you might not recognize that climate forecast models fit a common scam model. The scam works by sending thousands of emails with, let’s say, three different stock predictions to random people while claiming your proprietary algorithm says those stocks will rise. If any one of the three stocks goes up, entirely by chance, the group that got that particular stock recommendation will think the algorithm works. Then the scammer sends another batch of three different stock predictions to subsets of the group that got the lucky guesses from the first round.

  By chance, a few people in the second group might receive stock recommendations that performed well for no predictable reason. Now they think the algorithm is two-for-two in success. By the third round of this scam, the few people who ended up with three amazing stock predictions, completely by chance, will send the scammers a large check to invest on their behalf. After all, what are the odds of three stock predictions in a row being so accurate? The scam works because the targets of the scam don’t see any of the predictions that were wrong, so they lack important context.

  Similar to the stock scam, climate scientists discard climate models that don’t fit with observations. The public doesn’t hear about the models that are discarded. If you start with hundreds of different predictions, and you discard the ones that miss their initial predictions, you are nearly guaranteed to end up with some models that seem to predict the future, but only by chance.

  Did you know that?

  If all you know is how many times someone hit a target, it is loserthink to judge how accurate they are. You also need to know how many times they missed.

  If you were already aware that climate models are not science, and that they fit the pattern of well-known scams (sometimes called marketing), and that it is fairly normal for the consensus of scientists to be dead wrong, you probably have a healthy skepticism about climate predictions of doom.

  One thing I can say with complete certainty is that it is a bad idea to trust the majority of experts in any domain in which both complexity and large amounts of money are involved. You end up with this:

  Well, yes, our predictions were completely wrong, but now we know why they were wrong. If you give us a million dollars to fix it, our predictions will be accurate from this point on. Don’t ask me what we fixed or how we did it because you wouldn’t understand. It’s complicated.

  Whenever you have a lot of money in play, combined with the ability to hide misbehavior behind complexity, you should expect widespread fraud to happen. Take, for example, the 2019 Duke University settlement in which the university agreed to pay $112.5 million for repeatedly submitting research grant requests with falsified data. Duke had a lot of grant money at stake, and lots of complexity in which to hide bad behavior. Fraud was nearly guaranteed.3

  When lots of money and lots of complexity are in play, fraud is nearly guaranteed.

  If you have been on this planet for a long time, as I have, and you pay attention to science, you know that the consensus of scientists on the topic of nutrition was wrong for decades. The most striking example of that involved the introduction of the USDA’s food guide pyramid in 1992, which recommended that consumers eat more bread, cereal, rice, and pasta than vegetables and fruits. That is opposite what nutrition experts recommend today. Critics make a compelling case that the food industry influenced nutrition science and the USDA’s recommendations to the point of making nutrition “science” a complete joke. But it was a joke the public thought was science until we learned it wasn’t.4

  Personally, I believed what nutrition scientists were saying in the nineties—so much so that I started a food company dedicated to making the most nutritious food item possible, using science as my guide. I called it the Dilberito, and it was fortified with all of the vitamins and minerals the government said you needed, based on science, I thought. The Dilberito also had a good ratio of protein to carbs. Sounds great, right? The problem, which I learned the hard way, was that what the experts “knew” about nutrition kept changing. Over time, it became painfully obvious to me that nutrition science wasn’t science at all. It was some unholy marriage of industry influence, junk science, and government. Any one of those things is bad, but when you put those three forces together, people die. That isn’t hyperbole. Bad nutrition science has probably killed a lot of people in the past few decades.5

  Scientists were wrong when they predicted we had already reached so-called peak oil. Scientists were wrong about the ozone layer being beyond repair (the hole is shrinking).6 Experts were wrong that the year 2000 computer bug would crash computer systems worldwide (it got fixed in time). But if I am being fair, those problems probably got solved because we panicked about them ahead of time. A little bit of creative panic goes a long way.7

  If you have studied psychology and economics, you would understand that the overwhelming consensus of climate scientists could easily be more wrong than right, and it wouldn’t be unusual in human history. Whenever you have money, reputations, power, ego, and complexity in play, it is irrational to assume you are seeing objective science. The fields of psychology and economics have shown us in a thousand ways that people are influenced by all sorts of forces while generally not being aware of how much they are being biased. In other words, the only way one could be dead certain that the consensus of scientists is right on any topic that can’t be replicated in a controlled experiment, or proven true by math, is by ignoring the entire fields of psychology, economics, history, and—if you are older—your own experience.

  On top of that, if you also have a background in business and economics, you might understand that, in the face of unknown risks, it is wise to keep your economy humming at maximum strength in case you later need to make an expensive push to scrub the CO2 out of the air (which is already possible but insanely expensive) or perhaps to fix whatever the climate breaks.

  If you have a background in economics and business, you might recognize that the cost of scrubbing CO2 from the air—should we ever need to do so—will likely drop in cost every year with new technology. And that means that waiting a few years to get serious on funding CO2 air-scrubbers is likely the smarter play than going hard at it now when the technology is super expensive and less efficient than future versions are likely to be. Starting later could easily get you to the point you want sooner and cheaper.

  A good example of this dynamic is my investment in solar panels for my home a decade ago. If I had waited three years to install the solar panels on my roof, taking advantage of the falling cost and higher efficiency of newer units, I would have saved money and ended up with a system that was better for the environment in the long run. I understood that dynamic when I made the decision, but I installed the solar panels anyway for a variety of social reasons. In California, if you have a new home and no solar panels, it’s a bad look.

  When scientists say human activity increases the rate of climate warming, I take it seriously. The basic science around climate change (chemistry and physics, for example) is likely to be more reliable than the prediction models. I only object to arguments that say the consensus of scientists agree with the prediction models, and therefore so should you. The prediction models are more about persuasion than science. I don’t object to well-intentioned persuasion, so long as it is for the common good.

  Climate scientists might be 100 percent right when they say the planet is warming at a dangerous rate and that CO2 is the main driver. I am not qualified to check their work. But I am qualified to say that the way climate science is presented to the public is not credible to people who have my type of experience, even if it turns out that most climate scientists are right.

  I don’t intend to change your mind about climate change. I haven’t even made up my own mind, and perhaps I never will, given the difficulty in mastering the topic. The point is to show you how your experience, and therefore your filters on a topic, can get you to very different opinions compared to other smart people using the same set of facts. Does your opinion of climate change look a lot like mine, or is it closer to MacFarlane’s view that it makes sense to follow the consensus of experts? My hope is that you can now look at the topic of climate change through more than one filter. For many of you, this will be the first time you can do that. Some of you were already there.

  When you are done with this book, you will be equipped to go beyond calling a suboptimal argument stupid/idiotic/moronic and the like. You’ll be able to identify loserthink wherever you see it, and you will be able to point to relevant chapters in this book when you want to flag an example of it in others. You’ll be amazed how well that works compared to insulting people’s intelligence.

  In the first part of this book, I will introduce you to the most useful thinking patterns from a variety of disciplines. I’ll stick with the ideas that have direct use in your daily life, not the exotic theories and math. Once you have that grounding, I’ll teach you how to identify your own mental prison walls and push through them. And finally, I’ll teach you how to help others out of their mental prisons.

  Mental prison: The illusions and unproductive thinking that limit our ability to see the world clearly and act upon it rationally.

  MY QUALIFICATIONS

  What makes me qualified to help people think more productively?

  That’s a fair question. I think you deserve an answer before you go much further in this book.

  You probably know I’m the creator of the Dilbert comic strip, which is one of the most successful comic strips in history. I make fun of the jargon-talkers, the fad-believers, and the bull****ers in every workplace. People have been telling me for years that I helped them see past management pseudoscience and other ridiculous beliefs that infect the workplace. With Dilbert, my primary tools for helping readers escape their mental prisons are humor and mockery.

  I learned years ago that it is nearly impossible to mock a good idea unless you also lie about its nature or leave out important context. Mockery only succeeds in persuading against absurd beliefs—the kind that form mental prison walls. If I can make you laugh at your situation, I’m probably helping you see your mental prison walls more clearly.

  I am also a trained hypnotist, and I have studied and written on the topic of persuasion for decades. My prior book, Win Bigly, is entirely about persuasion. I have been using a persuasion skill set for most of my adult life to help people see the world more clearly. And I know from experience that doing so isn’t a task the untrained can do. Your smart friends don’t have the right tools and techniques to get out of their mental prisons, and there’s a good chance that describes you as well. The business models of the press and social media act in concert to keep you in your mental prison, like some sort of indentured servant working on a click farm. As long as you are clicking on the media’s content, that’s all they need from you. And they know you’ll click with more passion if they can keep you spinning around in your biased bubble.

  There is no job title called Mental Prison Escape Consultant. If you have an actual mental health problem, doctors and therapists can help. But they won’t help you know how wrong you are about the everyday fabric of reality. Your doctor can’t cure you from watching biased news sources and believing what you hear. Your therapist won’t try to talk you out of the political conspiracy theory you think is true. If you’re generally healthy, both mentally and physically, it isn’t anyone’s job to also help you be “right” about your perceptions of reality. You were on your own for that until you wisely started reading this book.

  I’ll be like a rogue magician who breaks the Magician’s Code and explains to you how the tricks are done. You won’t need to be a magician yourself to understand what makes a trick work. The “magic” in a magic show is mysterious only until you hear how it is done. Likewise, when I explain to you the walls of your mental prisons, the walls will first become more visible and then start to dissolve with little or no effort on your part.

  Once you learn to see the walls of your mental prison, and you learn how to escape, you will have better tools to help usher in what I call the Golden Age. I’ll talk more about that in a later chapter.

  This is an incredible time in human history. Most of our problems with resource shortages are solved, or solvable, so long as we get our mental game in order. I’ll help you do just that.

  CHAPTER 2

  Political Warming

  I wrote this book to help you navigate a world in which the guardians of reality have abandoned their posts. If you live in the modern world, there’s a 99 percent chance you are living in a bubble-reality just like your neighbors. And you might be confused about why people who are in different bubbles can’t see the wisdom and truth in everything you say. Your bubble doesn’t have a communication channel to the other bubbles. When you try to convince others that your worldview is true, the other bubbles put up their shields and don’t let your point of view in. They have their own realities and there is little you can do to change that from the outside unless you are a trained and experienced persuader.

  Complicating matters, other people will accuse you of being the one in the bubble. And on that point at least, they are probably at least half right. Generally speaking, you can recognize when others are in bubble realities created by their own loserthinking more easily than you can recognize it in yourself.

  Our old understanding of reality is rapidly dissolving. Fake news and conspiracy theories have become the building blocks of what we mistakenly believe to be the world we live in. Any two of us can look at the same evidence and have entirely different interpretations of what it all means. Politicians, businesses, and even scientists routinely mislead us. Not always, and not necessarily intentionally, but often enough that we generally can’t be sure what is true and what is not.

  Recently I saw a debate on television about the cost of single-payer health insurance in the United States. One side said it would cost $32 trillion over ten years. The other side said it would actually save money. That’s at least a $32 trillion difference in how the two sides are seeing reality. For reference, $32 trillion is approximately three times the GDP of China. You can’t get much further apart than that in terms of agreeing on reality.