Continuing to do obviously complicated things in a naïve way that doesn’t work
Also, not researching alternatives
April 4, 2022 — February 8, 2025
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A problem that I have is spending too much time researching things before diving in. George, in Do, Then Think, identifies times when this is pathological. I am working on trying to direct my compulsive autodidact tendencies better.
One reason this is hard for me is that I observe a counterposed pathology out there of under-researching stuff that I clearly should research, whci fills me with a slow horror. People, including me, dive in without making sufficient effort to muster adequate research, even when there is a lot of it available, potentially not proceeding to do that research even when they (or I) have ample evidence that their first attempt at doing it naïvely was unsatisfactory. They (I) continue to avoid doing that research for years at a time.
1 Examples from my actual real life
A certain local cohousing group confessed that after ten years of gruelling, unsatisfactory, amateurish meeting processes and defective governance, they were finally researching how to improve their meeting process and governance. Ten years in to sclerotic stressful meetings, about the largest financial decision of their lives, about how they will spend a multi-decade chunk of their lives with each other, and they have started now to research how to work together.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but cohousing is mostly about governance. Nonetheless, it seems like they felt like they had to invent all the concepts of meeting and organising a project together from the ground up, badly, for themselves, and when that didn’t work it just didn’t occur there were alternatives. For a decade.
On a happy note, they got their housing project built in the end, so I guess that’s fine?
Friends distressed by the state of some Bad Thing, e.g. global climate risk, who attempt to get social support for it by doing some media stunt that alienates the people they aim to recruit.. I think this behaviour is often based on replicating a Greenpeace media stunt they saw a long time ago, without pausing to ask if
- it was effective even back then, or rather an idea that Greenpeace tried and discarded for being ineffectual, and
- if it was effective, whether there was something specific that Greenpeace was doing relating to some situation in the world or Greenpeace’s strategy that is rather different in this case, or
- it would be effective in the world as it is now, even if it was back then, or
- where they could get the information about whether it would be strategic to do that thing now, and
- if it would be effective now, whether perhaps Greenpeace is about to do it better and there are other niches that would be more effective to fill.
When their media stunts fail to make a discernible improvement in fixing the Bad Thing, they repeat again and again, eventually becoming discouraged and/or burnt out, without dipping into the massive body of research about theories of change, and pivoting to alternative strategies.
Disclosure: This one is my sin. Years, I wasted. Years.
Terrible business ideas based on taking some passion-project/hobby and making it into a day job, where the business model turns out, upon testing, to have no path to profitability or even sustainability, and yet the plan is not revised. Delicacy prevents me from naming names or details, but suffice it to say: I have a friend who, in order to keep the fun and spontaneity in their business, runs said business so badly that it becomes a grind devoid of fun, spontaneity or even cash flow. Actually, upon introspection, I know several friends who run horrible grinding cash-hole businesses, and when I read this back to myself recently, I realised that I was not even sure which friend I was thinking of when I wrote it.
Communication. We are communicative animals and human interaction is one of the most complicated things that we do. It is also very easy to learn to do better. Observationally, though, most of us would rather fulminate about how infuriating everyone is rather than learn the comparatively easy skills of communicating with them better.
I have a ritual that I have performed quite a few times: a friend complains about how their needs are not met at their job and if only there were some way they could assert them. And I sympathise and say, that sounds difficult, have you tried assertive communication? It seems like it solves exactly the problem you are describing, and look, I have a copy of a book about it right here you can have it! Here, take it. It’s quite short to read and it cannot hurt to try. And if it works, you will solve a huge stressful problem. Almost no one I have done this for has ever opened the book, and I’ve done this dozens of times. Usually, I hear back later that they quit the job or equivalent, and I ask, did you try the book? and they say no, I didn’t have time. And I say, but you had time to quit the job? and they say yes, I had to quit the job because of the stress and I say, but the book is about how to reduce the stress. And then we look at each other uneasily for a moment and then they complain about their new job and how their needs are not met.
I’m not saying I have the answer to every workplace problem (and yes advice is hard). I am saying that I have a book that is literally about the problem my friend is describing and that problem is very important, they could read it and it might help, and yet they do not.
The book is Back, Back, and Bates (1991), by the way; you can buy it for $4 on abebooks.com. I read it and it helped me, making me less stressed and more effective, so there is at least one data point that it can work.
2 What is this?
The common trajectory I am interested in in
- taking some under-informed model of society or of group dynamics, as given. (We all do that, so no shade there) and then
- never interrogating that model despite that model demonstrably leading to bad outcomes.
I have been noticing this phenomenon pop up because I am an extroverted dilletante and I talk with many people about many projects. Hesitant to dansplain to someone their own pet project, which they surely know better than me because I don’t want to be the well-actually guy, I often nonetheless find myself dumping a body of foundational literature from some related field into the hands of my passionate friend, that they probably could have read earlier in their odyssey into whatever thing is not working, for what, as far as I can tell, are widely-understood reasons.
Often they seem grateful and/or surprised to find that anyone could put time into systematically working out better ways to do their project even though clearly many other people throughout history might have tried to do a very similar project, and quite a large number of them have books out, or YouTube channels. Sometimes my ideas are unwelcome, which is fine; I am not the expert in everything. But I am confused when someone who has done no basic diligence is convinced that there is no possibility that anyone could even have worked out how to do the thing they are doing and is flabbergasted to hear there are experts on this topic who have information of use to them. Living in a house? Advocating a policy? Running a business? Talking to someone? Surely no one has ever thought about that before.
HOW OFTEN DO I DO THIS MYSELF? Which projects of mine are ignorant of good practices? Which background reading am I failing to do? Should I drop into analysis paralysis even more often? Should I be soliciting way more advice? For sure, the frequency with which people do dumb things leads me to believe it must be hard to notice. AM I DOING DUMB THINGS RIGHT NOW?
Let me know in the comments. I am excruciated by the tension of not knowing what I should have known I don’t know.
3 Why is this?
Why do we do this? How can we detect it?
Am I even correct that these are errors in other people? Is this overweening arrogance on my part? Is everything great and the problem here is an annoying habit of googling things when I run into a problem with something too much?
The phenomenon I have outlined does resemble the implied mechanism of the lede example in the original (Kruger and Dunning 1999) paper (a bank robber who was crap at researching bank robberies before trying them out, despite the high cost of failure.) 1
I am indebted to Miriam Lyons for one explanation, which is that we are slow to update what was once a good idea. Garish media stunts may have been effective for Greenpeace in the 80s. Freestyle group organising may have been great in the first few months. Terrible business models may have been great for the first gig and merely failed to scale up past that one, etc. Maybe a hopelessly passive communication style was the best way to get along with your family when you were a child; it’s just not working out great in the workplace. We are, in this version, bad at continuing to learn.
That theme has come up a few times, so how about I make a new notebook about failure to update beliefs?
4 But what about bold mavericks?
In the best case, we might imagine this bold incorrigibility would lead to maverick outsiders productively disrupting the status quo.
Yeah! That’s totally a thing. I’ve witnessed that. Try a dumb thing! Flout common wisdom! By all means, be my guest.
What I more often observe in practice, and what I rant about here, is far from that best case. It’s about the failure to update when the dumb thing doesn’t work and there are whole industries dedicated to making it work.
This is especially common for people trying to act politically, in business, or in other complicated domains, and in places with emotionally loaded past experiences. This is often not a contrarian stance; more of a surely it must be easy stance which is never updated when the evidence arrives that this project is actually hard.
5 Incoming
I spent years enduring noise and some weeks borderline torturing myself trying to acclimate to the earmuffs, all while I had no idea what solutions would work, and I hadn’t tried all the easy-to-try stuff. How could I be so stupid?
One answer is that I was using an overly broad heuristic. I generally think most people trust self-experimentation too much for mundane life problems. If you want to gain muscle, doing your own research on different exercise programs is rough going because the feedback loops are long and convoluted. So I generally try to “find the best practices and follow them”. That’s a good heuristic! But this particular problem had no (legible) best practices and had a very short feedback loop.
Another answer is that it’s easy to overlook your ignorance when dealing with familiar things. Sound is complicated, yes, but it’s not obviously complicated. People hear stuff all the time but rarely report being confused by it. Articles on noise blocking don’t have “WARNING: ACOUSTIC ENGINEERING IS A WHOLE FIELD” at the top. It’s easy to read a superficial explanation and not notice that there’s no content in it.
And finally, there’s “cleverness”. I’m naturally drawn to unusual solutions. A world where every problem was best solved by doing the obvious thing would be, to me, a dull world. I want to believe that there’s free utility out there, that you can make different/weirder choices and grab it.
6 References
Footnotes
The later parts of that paper have come under methodological attack for being, essentially, a sampling bias epiphenomenon.↩︎