WHY BRILLIANT PEOPLE BELIEVE NONSENSE is the title of an exceptionally fine book on critical and creative thinking written by J. Steven Miller, who teaches a course on this topic at Kennesaw State University in Georgia, and by his wife, Cherie Miller.
Having taught science at Harvard, I'm well aware of how even the brightest students can draw wrong conclusions. This book would be a great foundation for anyone beginning college, or simply beginning adult life.
Why did no one want to represent the Beatles when they first came to America? Why was the hit TV-series "Lost" initially denigrated by people in the industry? Does exposure to cold temperatures increase your likelihood of catching a cold? Miller starts with a few such examples to get us wondering, then examines the reasons why so many experts have gotten so much so wrong, a theme taken up in David Freedman’s book of a few years ago, 'Wrong."
Why do they go astray? Let the Millers’ chapters show the ways:
• They’re Over-confident:
“Humble learners trump the educated by arrogant,” which is why WalMart’s Sam Walton and and G.E.’s Jack Welch never stopped learning and why Google avoids candidates with large egos.
• They’re Under-confident:
“Passionate research trumps expert opinion.” Did deeper. Wikipedia harnesses the power of crowds and diversity, but lacks the authority of experts; use, with caution.
• They’re Married to Brands:
Is a Lexus worth that much more than a Toyota? Are you measuring reliability or comfort or how much it impresses others? Why New Coke failed and Classic Coke prevailed, despite not tasting as good in taste tests.
• They’re Blinded by Prejudices, Preconceptions and Biases:
“All writing slants the way the writer believes, and no man is born perpendicular,” Steve Miller quotes author-editor E.B. White. We often see things as we are, rather than as they are. Musician Elton John, “the guy with big glasses,” struggled mightily to get his music heard, and once it finally was, he rapidly became a mega-star.
Miller asks his readers to examine our own prejudices, and he lists about a dozen widely held beliefs about people that are stereotypes of little or no validity, such as “preppies are snobs.“ He cites a study done of professors’ pre-conceived notions about 1200 students, many of them predicting outcomes that were quite wrong.
The antidote: diversify your experiences, your colleagues, your sources of information, and those with whom you do business.
• They Believe What They Want to Believe
“If you can only read one newspaper, read the opposition’s,” anonymous advice rarely taken, quoted by the Millers.
Steve Jobs’s brilliance and passion distorted reality for those Apple employees around him, helping them achieve what otherwise might not have been possible, but it may have killed him, as his refusal to take conventional treatments for his pancreatic cancer led to a delay that probably cost him his life prematurely.
The “power of positive thinking” can help you overcome obstacles, but can be taken too far. If you are seven feet tall, pro basketball could be a good career choice, at six feet, a dubious one, and at five feet, forget it, despite all the positive thinking you can muster.
We tend to tune out views opposed to our own, as they make us uncomfortable. When we hear them, we often supply our own rebuttal, while accepting uncritically what our allies say. To Socrates’ “Know thyself,” Steve Miller adds, “Doubt thyself.”
•They’re Trapped in Traditions
“We’ve always done it that way” may be words of wisdom or words of doom, depending on changes in your environment, goals, competition. Check your premises. Check your data. The Millers give extended an example of Starbucks and its slow adoption of the option of low-fat milk for the lattes. If we didn’t pay attention to past performance, we couldn’t build bridges, but if we become entranced by the past, the future will pass us by.
•They Fail to Identify Hidden Assumptions
The Millers note that in 1998 Yahoo dominated Internet search, with 75% of the searches. You know the rest: focusing on improved search techniques, Google is now the fifth largest company in the world. Yahoo…not so much. What should you do? Prize honest, candor, criticism. Think, rather than just remember. Reward innovation. Question authority and “authorities.”
•They Underestimate the Power of the Paradigm
Steve Miller recalls that the great physicist Albert Einstein refused to believe in quantum mechanics, well established in theory and experiment, because it went against his views of determinism. Einstein likewise would not accept the idea of an expanding universe, despite its being predictable from his basic equations. Despite the mounting evidence in its favor, the Big Bang theory of a dynamic universe was long rejected by many scientists.
In his "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions," philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn convincingly demonstrated how hard it is for scientists to give up their paradigms, their ways of viewing the world. If hard for scientists, seeking what is true, how much harder for the laity, less committed to that search?
Miller paraphrases physicist Max Planck’s dictum: science progresses one funeral at a time. Will this be the story of Global Warming? The Millers do not take sides.
•They Fail to Account for Worldviews
Marxism captivated many intellectuals and activists in the twentieth century, with its “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs,” pursued ruthlessly, because “the ends justify the means,” including theft, lying, and murder. Soviet Russia, Maoist China, the killing fields of Cambodia were the results of the worldview put into practice. For political purity, their scientists had to deny the Big Bang and the Second Law of Thermodynamics, and their historians had to worship Progress. Examples of worldviews are listed.
•They Contradict, Leave Out Valid Options, Knock Down Straw Men
If you accept logic, an argument cannot be both true and false. Although some modern philosophers have tried to fashion arguments to maintain that there is no objective truth, such claims are themselves self-contradictory, as we need not, cannot accept them as truth if there is no truth.
Leaving out valid options from our arguments produces erroneous conclusions.
What’s a “straw man” argument? One that is easily refuted, often because it is a radical simplification or falsification of your opponent’s view.
The Millers recommend: take time to consider the arguments; don’t be impressed with your opponent’s credentials; don’t automatically accept what you like and reject what you dislike; try to think of counter-examples to premises being offered; try to reduce the argument to standard form, such as a syllogism; get the opinions of others, too.
•They Fall for Common Fallacies
A diligent search led Steve Miller to a list of 27 common fallacies. He provides appendices that analyze these in depth, beyond brief explanations in the body of his book. As an exercise for the reader, the 27 fallacies are listed to be matched with statements in random order that reflect the fallacies.
•They Either Fail to Recognize Fallacies, or They Misapply Ones They Know
•They Jump to Conclusions
Malcolm Gladwell, in his Outliers, extolled a “10,000-hour” rule, seeming to suggest that almost anyone can become expert at almost anything by putting in 10,000 hours of practice. He cited a few plausible examples, and a couple of studies, but more generally we find that talent is important and that those lacking talent probably get discouraged well before practicing for 10,000 hours. Talent and practice are intertwined.
•Success Bias
Have you heard the term “success bias”? It refers to evidence that comes from looking at the outstanding examples: Warren Buffett in finance, Mary Kay Ash in marketing, Tom Brady in football, as examples. We are led to believe that if we do what they did, we will be comparably successful. When we try and fail, we are puzzled. Evidence based on extremes, especially favorable extremes is of little real value: it shows it was done, if true, but not that it can be done by you. Sure, someone wins the lottery, but what were the odds? What fraction of the practitioners of "The Secret" got their visions fulfilled? Reading lots of biographies will show that sometimes contradictory approaches are equally successful.
•Seeing Patterns Mistakenly
Have you seen a cloud or an ink blot that looked like something very different? You have “found” a pattern where none really exists, a common problem smart people tend to do. Much of scientific procedure is designed to prevent this, and yet even scientists draw incorrect conclusions from apparent patterns in data later shown to be spurious.
Buying when the stock market seems to be going up and selling when it seems to be going down appears to make sense, but every buyer needs a seller, one who sees just the opposite tendencies, “already too high” or “already too low.” The Millers give recent examples of boom and bust: the housing bubble, the dot com bubble. We tend to see a pattern when two similar things happen in a row; if we are investing and this makes us money, we get an endorphin high and credit the “trend”; in retrospect, we tend to remember or wins and forget our losses.
“Past performance is no guarantee of future results.” Investors are always warned this way. Some of what once occurred was random, some dependent on the conditions at the time. Underlying causes are hard to decipher. Of course, we cannot ignore the past entirely, either.
•Be Skeptical of Scare Stories
Do we need to increase the number of students pursuing STEM (science, technical, engineering, math) degrees? The Millers analyze the actual data, rather than just the scary percentage figures, and conclude the crisis does not exist.
Are most 15-year-olds having sexual intercourse? The author analyzed the data and found than 80% of 15-year-old girls had not had sex voluntarily, despite the general belief that in that age group “everybody is doing it.”
Definitions matter. One respondent to a survey asking about her being “sexually active” said that she wasn’t, “I just kind of lie there.”
•Political Lies
“Politicians torture data until it confesses what they want it to say,” one reason why some people think we are in a recession and others think the economy is booming. A low “unemployment rate” seems good, until you learn that it does not include those who have given up looking for a job. A low “labor participation rate” is much more significant and much more of a legitimate concern. The Millers’ example is a ranking of the U.S. versus other countries in performance of or students on a standardized test. If all the countries in the world are used, we look pretty good. If only the highly developed countries are used, we look average. If the top 14 are listed, we come last. Ah, a crisis needing a political remedy!
•What about Learning from History?
The Millers quote Santayana, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” Steve Miller loves his history books. Of course, a skeptic might reply that history is the story written by the winners….a kind of success bias.
Create your own history by doing a bit of what it is you might like to make into your career. Why did you like or dislike it? Smarts are good, but experience is a unique teacher. Ask a successful person how it was done. Volunteer for something. Get work someone will actually pay you to do.
History depends on evidence and interpretation.
I was fascinated by the Millers’ dissection of this issue: what caused our recent Great Recession? Depends on whether you are asking Democrats or Republicans. A dozen or so factors are offered up. Life offers multitudinous facts and stories from which to cherry-pick our preferred explanation. Historians have fads, like anybody else.
•Definitions Can Be Slippery
The Millers quote Socrates, “The beginning of wisdom is the definition of terms.” Defining seems so dry! Yet it is essential. We think we know what we mean by “genius,” but Steve Miller shows that most of our criteria would have labeled Albert Einstein as definitely non-genius.
Use Analogies and Parallels Properly
Often Americans’ performances are compared with those of people in foreign countries, to our disadvantage. But selection of topics and selection of populations being compared often make these comparisons spurious. If we don’t seem to do as well as Finland (see parentheses next) in educating our students, why is that? Which differing elements are crucial?
•Handle Figurative Pieces Carefully
Fiction, that is novels and short stories, can make powerful impressions. My horror at the depravity of the Nazi concentration camps was first generated by Erich Maria Remarque’s novel, The Spark of Life, and President Abraham Lincoln once called Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of the moving novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the little woman who started the Civil War. We have to be careful that we are not led astray by an author’s skill in arousing strong emotions, until we know more about the topic at hand.
Which parts of the Bible to take literally and which to treat as parables produces much of the disagreement among its readers.
And, even the author does not intend or claim there to be a parallel, there still may be. For fun, Miller analyzes the song “American Pie,” showing how information and imagination can develop plausible, but not definitive, explanations for puzzling lyrics. Psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud had sexual interpretations for many common objects, to which humorist Ogden Nash quipped:
Everything reminds me of sex
Because almost everything is somewhat concave or convex.
•Don’t Let Emotion Overwhelm Reason and Common Sense
Miller uses the catastrophic collapse of Enron, run by what one author called “The Smartest Guys in the Room,” to illustrate how emotions like over-confidence and greed can make even brilliant people blunder badly and end up in jail, like Enron’s Jeff Skilling. To keep from making such big mistakes, keep humble, recognize your emotions, passions, vulnerabilities, limited perspective, temptations, and fears.
Stay skeptical!
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Authenticity drives thoughtful stimulation and creates lasting impact
I am challenged and just beginning the journey into the text. While and after reading, my response is lasting and I find myself wanting more. The seeking of wisdom beyond knowledge (or in addition to as they are difficult to separate) drives my interest in gleaning lasting and impactful applications. As an educator, the push to gain clarity and thinking creatively are challenges I feel that I face due to constraints and social mores that are part of the education system. The format is such that I can read, reflect, review, and ... be restored ... to learn limitlessly. I have enjoyed that eclectic plethora of content and thoughtful images of context that connect to areas of emphasis that many readers can aspire to. Transcending content knowledge, J. Steve Miller hones the edges of the mind to gain precision and retain a sharp approach to the initial thoughts of persuasion and then to transform personal decisions into authentic realities.
