12. Switch Cost Effect
We simultaneously inhabit two worlds — online and off — and both regularly interrupt us with demands/notifications, so we’re never able to settle in either. The constant switching of attention apparently lowers working IQ by around 10 points, dumbifying us twice as much as being high on cannabis.
13. St. George in Retirement Syndrome
Many who fight injustice come to define themselves by their fight against injustice. So, as they defeat the injustice, they must invent new injustices to fight against, simply to retain a sense of purpose in life.
14. Goodhart’s Law
When a measure becomes a goal, it ceases to be a good measure. Since schools started to use test-scores as targets, they’ve gradually stopped teaching kids how to live fulfilling lives — and now mainly teach them how to pass school tests.
15. Hotelling’s Law
Rival products — burgers, pop songs, political parties — tend to grow more alike over time, because creators copy more successful rivals to steal their customers or audiences. Paradoxically, this increases the value of being different.
16. Segal’s Law
“A man with a watch knows what time it is. A man with 2 watches is never sure.” Ancient societies followed a single narrative. Modern societies are cacophonies of competing narratives. Without trust, more data doesn’t make us more informed but more confused.
17. Parkinson’s Law
Work expands to fill the time allotted for it. No matter the size of the task, it will often take precisely the amount of time you set aside to do it, because more time means more deliberation and procrastination. The underlying principle, known as induced demand, applies to many other resources: software expands to fill memory (Wirth’s law), patient numbers expand to fill hospital beds (Roemer’s law), energy consumption expands to meet supply (Jevon’s paradox), road congestion expands to fill roads (Braess’ paradox).
18. Pareidolia
We see whatever we look for. For aeons, survival favoured the paranoid — those able to discern a predator from the vaguest outline. From these survivors we inherited hyperactive pattern-detection, which once saved us from the lions, but now curses us to see them even in the skies.
19. Safetyism
After US schools banned peanuts because some kids had allergies, more kids developed peanut allergies from lack of exposure. We’re increasingly protecting kids from life, which only makes them more vulnerable to it. Too much safety is dangerous.
20. Nutpicking
Online political debate mainly involves cherry-picking the most outlandish members of the enemy side and presenting them as indicative in order to make the entire side look crazy. The culture war is essentially just each side sneering at the other side’s lunatics.
21. Celine’s 1st Law
National security is the chief cause of national insecurity. Government attempts to stop a threat to security lead it to draft harsher laws and to spy on its citizens, which eventually becomes a greater threat than that which it’s protecting against.
22. Problem Selling
Problem solvers take an issue and break it down into small solvable chunks. Problem sellers — such as politicians, or the press — do the opposite, blaming many small issues on one big problem that looks insurmountable and terrifying.
23. Idiocy Saturation
Online, people who don’t think before they post are able to post more often than people who do. As a result, the average social media post is stupider than the average social media user.
24. Celine’s 2nd Law
Honest communication occurs only between equals. If one person has power over another, then the less powerful person can’t risk saying what they really think. Thus, in any hierarchy, honest communication only occurs horizontally.
25. Crabtree’s Bludgeon
It’s possible to create a coherent explanation for any set of observations — even ones that are mutually contradictory. In other words, there is at least one seemingly rational argument to justify even the most idiotic bullshit. So be careful.
26. Presentism
We judge history by modern standards. We regard slave-owners as evil, but slavery was so common and familiar to our forebears that they were blind to its iniquities, as we are to the industrial slaughter of animals — for which we too will eventually be called evil.
27. Cynical Genius Illusion
Cynical people are widely seen as smarter, but sizeable research suggests they actually tend to be dumber. Cynicism is not a sign of intelligence but a substitute for it, a way to shield oneself from betrayal and disappointment without having to do or think.
28. Boxer’s Child Paradox
Each generation tries to make life better for the next, but this deprives future generations of the ordeals needed to build character. In our relentless quest for ever more convenience, are we dooming posterity to weakness?
29. Ambiguity Aversion
A 2016 study found that test participants who were told they had a small chance of receiving an electric shock exhibited much higher stress levels than those who knew they’d certainly receive an electric shock. People tend to find uncertain outcomes less tolerable than bad outcomes.
30. Semantic Stopsign
One way people end discussions is by disguising descriptions as explanations. For instance, the word “evil” is used to explain behaviour but really only describes it. It resolves the question not by creating understanding but by killing curiosity.
31. Opinion Shopping
Many who conduct research online ignore every source they disagree with till they find one they agree with, and then use this source as an authority to justify what they already believe. They don’t consider someone an expert unless they agree with them.
32. Compassion Fade
“One death is a tragedy, a million is a statistic.” When presented with two appeals for charity — one based on famine statistics and one based on a single starving girl — people tend to donate much more to the girl. Our minds can’t grasp big numbers, so we navigate the world through stories, not statistics. We’re moved by drama, not data.
33. Bonhoeffer’s Theory of Stupidity
Evil can be guarded against. Stupidity cannot. And the world’s few evil people have little power without the help of the world’s many stupid people. Therefore, stupidity is a far greater threat than evil.
This is an edited version of lists that first appeared on The Prism.
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SubscribeSuperb. Thank you
Indeed. And a pleasure to start the new year by agreeing with you.
I particularly like the “Problem Selling” one which neatly encapsulates politicians’ preference for talking about problems rather than actually solving them. That goes for all parties, of course.
Off topic, I’ve decided I need to “gamify” the next UK GE – perhaps running a series of predictions through the year with friends to see who gets closest – and turn it into a form of entertainment as it’s going to be a long, miserable year otherwise (though not I suspect for you).
Yes I struggle to have any here I don’t really like. Saved the list as a result and v much afraid I’ll be guilty of some plagiarism during 24 – albeit plagiarism first form of flattery wasn’t it?
On 24 and a happier year for somebody re: GE result – I can’t make up my mind if I fear a v close result, and hence a weak Govt even if of different persuasion, more than a v clear result either way. Extremes in both main Parties for me had too much say in recent years and that’d perpetuate with a relatively close result. I think we need a strong, secure Govt prepared to do some difficult things. And on these things I think the majority of Country would generally align. But I suspect the result may yet be closer than Polls predict and we might drift and decline yet more as a result.
Still not until the autumn. Sunak doesn’t look like a ‘roll of the dice’ man to me.
CONCEPT SHOPPING
Given a list of concepts presented as new, falsely or otherwise, readers will cherry-pick those which match their existing prejudices.
Yes I’m sure an element of that maybe.
34. BOGUS WISDOM
People will often try to justify sweeping and highly contestable statements by invoking what “studies have shown.”
Agreed – this list is terrible. This is what humanism-by-tech-bro looks like. The author repeatedly hoists himself on his own petard. There are a couple of interesting aphorisms, but a mass of misleading over-simplifications, ideologies masquerading as eternal verities, and many plain truisms.
One example: of course you can guard against stupidity, we do it all the time… seat belts, blade guards, child-proof pill bottles, etc.
Another example: descriptions and explanations are related in complex ways. Often it is not possible to distinguish between them, or the difference is contested. Is a diagnosis a syndrome or a disease? Well, does your treatment plan work and do you know why it does? Opinions will differ. “Evil” is both a description and an explanation, depending on context and what you think it means to say someone is ‘evil.’
Another example: honest communication does not depend on an individual’s power, but on his integrity. The fact we are losing sight of this plain truth about human character is terrifying.
A final example: is presentism right or wrong? Why did people once think slavery was OK? Perhaps it’s *not* because they were less moral than us… rather, we judge the past by the social and economic standards of the present, and then we conflate those standards with ‘morals.’ If the time ever comes that the ‘industrial slaughter’ of animals (ie, cheaply and efficiently feeding billions of humans with delicious and healthy animals) is considered wrong, it won’t be because we humans become more moral. It’ll be because changes in society, economics and technology have produced better ways of satisfying the human wants and needs that are currently met that way.
….. i have to disagree about the slaughtering: the transport to the slaughterhouse, the waiting around etc will reduce the quality of the meat. And mass production of meat always creates animals that are not healthy when they are slaughtered. I find it difficult to understand how one can call a product issues from a stressed (during rearing and at slaughtering) animal can be seen as healthy. I am not against meat consumption, it is not really possible to farm in a health way without animals being part of the system: but farm systems need to become healthy: we are way off from this (apart from many small scale attempts) This is also because of government regulation stops farmers from abandoning chemicals and intensive farming. (who influences the rules made for farming… the industry that benefits from it…not the farmers)
Once i realised that very few cows in farms are actually healthy (a very large percentage live with unstable rumen function) I withdrew milk from the table and our very young children drank water or fruit juice. They are all in their thirties now and have healthy bones…
I’m currently in the Antarctic watching penguins fight daily against their predators. The life of animals without human intervention is ‘nasty brutish and short.’ Cows and other domesticated animals have much easier and ‘healthier’ lives than they otherwise would. But that’s beside the point… whatever eternal value the mental lives of animals have (whatever that even means), it’s of tiny importance compared to the physical health of humans. Humans are way more important than animals. Welcome to 2024, where such things must be said.
Indeed.
What particularly annoyed me, even more than the bogusness (Bogosity? Or in postmodern terms, bogusicity?) was the smugness: see the writer’s first paragraph.
9. Dysrationalia
Just because someone is intelligent, it doesn’t mean their intelligence is pursuing intelligent goals. It’s possible to devote a genius-level intelligence to justifying idiotic opinions and behaviours. Tragically, a common fate of intellectuals.
Technocrats
Or of course Brexit leading exponents, as proven.
Are you tacictly admitting that the most intelligent people were Brexit supporters ?
Not sure where you got the ‘most’ from PB. The point made by AR didn’t refer to ‘most’. Likes of Farage, Hannan, Gove, even Bojo, are not unintelligent, but on this they certainly backed an unintelligent idea, as subsequently shown. Thus great example of Dysrationalia
Anyone having an ideology, Eurocrats included.
Aren’t you one of the ones calling Brexit supporters “Gammons”?
Cornel West comes to mind, along with Tucker Carlson and Glen Greenwald among many others. John McWhorter and Glenn Loury even, both of whom I admire. Disparate characters, but nonetheless intelligent people with some lousy ideas.
Brilliant! 31 and 33 are the two most relevant. We are populated by opinioned stupid people!
Gotta love a good aphorism list. Makes things sound smart.
The problem is taking on board lists like this will make one stupid – I did not read them all, and anyone who did deserves a gold * But the problem is although it is great cod-psychology, it misses the actual truth – the deepest, of good and evil love and God.
They reduce the life experience to clever behavioral jingles, and the actual core of life is good and evil and Love.
‘..and the actual core of life is good and evil and Love.’…and most unfortunately Hate?
Brilliant stuff. Thanks. I might print this off. This one definitely needs to be at the header of every internet comments section:
The same applies to scepticism. Too many people think that just disbelieving everything is the big brain way but you are supposed to question first then reach rational conclusions on the evidence available. The second part is much much harder.
This is a tough one for me. For example, I am wholly cynical about sexual reassignment surgery for minors. No matter how many scientific papers I read on it about how it reduces suicides and increases happiness, I simply can’t bring myself to believe that this procedure is good for children’s sexual, physical, and psychological development. I just have a built-in aversion to it that goes beyond rational thought.
Overall, the quality of research conducted in this area appears to be very poor – as highlighted vividly by Unherd’s Singal last April (Singal, 2023), but high-quality, long-term studies, that focus on morbidity and mortality outcomes, arguably support your intuitions (Dhejne et al., 2011; Blok et al., 2021).
Blok, C. J. de, Wiepjes, C. M., Velzen, D. M. van, Staphorsius, A. S., Nota, N. M., Gooren, L. J., Kreukels, B. P., & Heijer, M. den. (2021). Mortality trends over five decades in adult transgender people receiving hormone treatment: A report from the Amsterdam cohort of gender dysphoria. The Lancet Diabetes & Endocrinology, 9(10), 663–670. https://doi.org/10.1016/S2213-8587(21)00185-6
Dhejne, C., Lichtenstein, P., Boman, M., Johansson, A. L. V., Långström, N., & Landén, M. (2011). Long-term follow-up of transsexual persons undergoing sex reassignment surgery: Cohort study in Sweden. PLOS ONE, 6(2), e16885. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0016885
Singal, J. (2023, April 17). The media is spreading bad trans science. UnHerd. https://unherd.com/2023/04/the-media-is-spreading-bad-trans-science/
On my reading reassignment surgery doesn’t actually reduce suicide or make children happy generally.
But my reading is probably selective, people I generally agree with, not least Unherd. What a breath of fresh air it can be!
I suppose that’s the thing; the list made me think and question myself and my motivations. That’s not a bad thing, is it?
There’s a word for that, new insights and challenge and that, isn’t there? Begins with E…an Epi something. Tut! It’ll come to me.
Love it. Crabtree’s Bludgeon is my favourite, Mrs Robbie is particularly good at that.
Please don’t knock the Qwerty keyboard layout
The idea that future enlightened generations will disavow industrial animal slaughter might itself be a form of ‘presentism,’ projecting current liberal beliefs and assuming an inevitable continuity into the future, extending to ‘animal rights’. It’s just as likely that future scarcity-societies will look back at current abundance of food with wonder and envy.
But it’s a great helpful, concise article. Added to my bookmarks.
I agree, I was enjoying it up to that point
If one touch types, then I can’t see that a keyboard in alphabetical order is any better than a qwerty or any other designed one. Perhaps better though if one uses one finger peering at the keyboard.
I’m old enough to remember an experiment on “Tomorrow’s World” of a new keyboard that placed letters in more convenient places vs a fast touch typist using QWERTY.
The new keyboard outperformed – but it didn’t take off as everyone was used to the QWERTY format and didn’t want to change…
Not everybody uses the Qwerty keyboard – it’s just that as you moved from office to office all machines (in the Anglosphere) allowed you to touchtype. If you are in the “Germanosphere” you might be using a slightly different layout. You can also change your laptop keyboard layout (easier than changing the ‘basket’). Changing from portrait to landscape – easy – just get the long platen out of the cupboard. I suspect that the experiment was weighted against the new layout – how much time did the new typists have to retrain? Memories,memories.
There’s never a ‘good’ opportunity to put billions of us Qwerty users on hold while some benevolent or Taylorist entity magically both replaces our current, post-typewriter keyboards on all our devices to a more ergonomic layout, and rewires our muscle memory instantly to match. On the other hand, many younger, supposedly more digitised (ha) folks, who never had to learn how to touch-type during the pre-screen epoch, may still fumble, finger, hunt and peck, whatever the nifty design?
Re: 30
Evil is not just a description, it is an explanatory phenomenon.
It absolutely is not explanatory.
Try explaining it to us…
It is “stupid” to place a picture of a Bugsby Berkeley style beauty pageant as somehow representative of stupidity on the internet: classic notions that all things “girl” are stupid! How about a picture of muscle men in homosocial gyms? Or proliferation of pornography? Girls are not the problem here and your choice of visual images is revealing a prejudice that can only be ameliorated by a strong dose of Taylor Swift’s superior sensibility.
Well said.
Random insights abound.
For example, there’s “Rule 34”: “If it exists, there is porn of it.”
Which is to say, such lists are of little use without a way to prioritize them, and there is no way to prioritize them without a coherent conception of what the good life is.
Or as this list’s Point 16 says,
“Ancient societies followed a single narrative. Modern societies are cacophonies of competing narratives. Without trust, more data doesn’t make us more informed but more confused.”
I resolve to live a better, more integrated life as a Christian in 2024, please God. May it prove compelling to others on the path.
“We judge history by modern standards. We regard slave-owners as evil, but slavery was so common and familiar to our forebears that they were blind to its iniquities, as we are to the industrial slaughter of animals — for which we too will eventually be called evil.”
And the industrial slaughter of the unborn child.
Jonathan, you hit the nail on the head. Institutional Child sexual mutilation, and then making it the formative mainstream concept in education stands with the genocide of the unborn as the most appalling thing ever.
The thing is that there maybe extreme cases where a termination is the lesser of two evils but there some 200,000 abortions each year in the UK, the overwhelming majority of which are matters of convenience. God knows, I’m grateful no to have been involved in such a dilemma myself and I really don’t condemn those women who have had an abortion but I do worry that the sentiments expressed in favour are often so glib.
The Qwerty keyboard is designed to enable fast, two handed touch-typing. Thus the Q and the U, which so often go together, are struck by different hands. Same with the G and H. And the very common words “it”, “if” and “is”. Alas, it doesn’t help we-happy-few of the hunt and peck squad!
I’m going to print this and hang it on the wall.
Segal’s law about the two watches should be regarded as a metaphor warning against trusting too much in pithy aphorisms.
If two watches start synchronized, but lose time at distinct but known rates, then at later times, the two watches for sure give the wrong time, but the correct time can be inferred from the two erroneous times.
“Problem solvers take an issue and break it down into small solvable chunks. Problem sellers — such as politicians, or the press — do the opposite, blaming many small issues on one big problem that looks insurmountable and terrifying.”
Ah, climate change politics in a nutshell. Everyone has heard of Greta Thunberg, a worthless troublemaker who hasn’t solved a single problem in her entire life and never will, but almost nobody has heard of Boyan Slat, a Dutch man who while he was still just a teenager at school, came up with an ingenious method of cleaning up ocean plastic pollution and is now busy commercialising it.
Political activists do not solve problems. Innovators, technologists and entrepreneurs solve problems. That is why a raft of policymakers are telling us all with straight faces that we must surrender mass prosperity because none of them can think of any way to maintain it. Well of course they can’t: they’re bureaucrats who haven’t had an original thought in their entire lives or activists who can barely think at all.
Climate change is a small problem that can be fairly easily solved over a couple of decades by people who know what they’re doing – but only if they’re allowed to do so by this raft of mostly-worthless shouty clowns whose narrow interests are better served by NOT solving the problem than actually solving it.
No10 – Fanbaiting – this isn’t restricted only to movie marketing. Social media influencers do this too by leveraging negative reactions to their content just as effectively as positive reactions. Some of them seem to thrive exclusively on negative feedback, such as the influencer Ali C, a spectacularly-fat young woman who acts as if she’s the most beautiful woman on the planet, and who draws almost exclusively contemptuous reactions from millions of people as a consequence.
The algorithm that promotes her content, however, cares not a jot for this: it just looks at how successful she is at drawing attention to herself online, and while people are furiously bashing out their reactions to her latest example of self-delusion, she’s earning a lot of money off the adverts that appear in the sidebars and banners alongside the comment itself.
What a fabulous set of insights. If I can commit a few of these to memory I may appear intellectual at my next dinner party
20: Nutpicking
“Online political debate mainly involves cherry-picking the most outlandish members of the enemy side and presenting them as indicative in order to make the entire side look crazy.The culture war is essentially just each side sneering at the other side’s lunatics.”
There’s a problem with this one: the other side the the culture war divide on the specific matter of radical transgender politics contains openly-identifiable nuts who insist that a man becomes a woman by a matter of mere assertion on his part, and a larger number of people who know perfectly well that this is demented nonsense but who refuse to argue with it for reasons having nothing to do with the subject matter of the argument itself.
Both types of person are wrong. In saying that I am surely not simply an example of the mirror-image of the nut in question. I am factually correct, while the people who dispute the binary reality of sex, either through open rejection or a passive refusal to admit it, are simply wrong. This is not a matter of one political extremist versus the opposite, or moderate vs moderate.
A criticism of a soundbite world through creation of 33 soundbites. Nice. You are clearly not one of the stupid people of this Brave New World.
I’m guilty of quite a few of these social media transgressions. I suppose the best thing is to recognize it and work to improve.
Very happy Bonhoeffer on stupidity was included at the end. I’ve been posting and reposting his quote on that for the past several months.
“Of all the many ideas I collected last year, I present to you the 33 best, to help ensure that you begin 2024 wisely.” Here’s an idea for you: encourage your readers not to abandon your articles after the first paragraph by treating them like sentient adults.
See #27