Hopeless Fanatic

Read this. It’s important, and it goes along with the quote I posted late last night.

In Malcolm Gladwell’s book Blink, he explains one of the reasons New Coke failed. New Coke was conceived after Pepsi launched the Pepsi Challenge, a blind taste test where Pepsi really did trounce Coke by a fair margin. New Coke was designed (successfully) to win that taste test. The result was a total failure. And why?

A sip is very different from sitting and drinking a whole beverage on your own. Sometimes a sip tastes good and the whole bottle doesn’t.

Pepsi (and then New Coke) won tastes tests because it was sweeter, which gives you an advantage if you’re testing a small amount. But the “raisiny-vanilla” taste of Coca-Cola Classic is better over the long haul. So Pepsi beat Coke in tastes tests but was never able to run away with the cola market and Coca-Cola’s response to Pepsi was a total failure.

Welcome to a world run on taste tests. We still buy food based on a free sample or a nationwide challenge. But we also vote based on sound bytes. We form opinions based on headlines. We don’t read, we scan. We don’t have lasting relationship, we have lists of avatars that are our friends.

If this was just a case of people making ill-informed decisions, that would be bad enough. It’s not the case that more information always leads to a better decision, but it’s often enough that “Decide Now!” can’t be the permanent default.

Rather, the practical implication is not just that many of the decisions we make could be better, but may potentially be flat out wrong. The issue is not that we might have come up with a more refined choice had we learned more, rather we might have gone in the complete opposite direction.

It’s tempting to blame the public (for their short attention spans) or the system (for dumbing things down) but really everyone is an equal partner here. A politician may make a claim, but a person makes the decision to not look into it further.

A website provider may put the Re-Tweet button on the website (and maybe right under the headline so you might hit it before reading the article) but the person reading decides whether to hit it.

Really the problem is much like what happens when you start drinking saltwater. Sure, the salt water dehydrates you, but you’re the one who drank it in the first places and you’re the one who keeps drinking it until you die.

The problem’s roots lie in ignorance. Or rather, the connotation that ignorance has picked up.

Ignorance means, according to the dictionary on my computer a “lack of knowledge or information”. According to the dictionary definition, I am ignorant of everything in the world except for a tiny slice of information and experience.

But in popular usage, ignorance means something much different. If someone calls you ignorant, it means you are willfully uninformed on a topic. This is generally a negative but can be a positive. Plenty of people are proudly ignorant of anything they don’t agree with be other religions, opposing political thought, or just movies they think don’t look entertaining.

The result for people who don’t like being ignorant is to consume the content equivalent of a suicide (soda version). We take a little bit from as many spigots as possible, mix it all up in a cup, swallow it down, then puff out are chests about how informed we are. But you have no idea what each soda tastes like and that concoction is pretty disgusting going down.

It would be fine if we all knew we were just getting trail mix rather than a full meal. But so many people want to believe something else. A lot of people want to believe that hitting every lever on the soda fountain makes them an expert on all soda. Or that drinking Coke and loving it makes them an expert on why Sprite sucks.

These people have many names. “Single issues voters,” “dilettantes,” “posers.” These all describe people who believe that showing interest and gaining a bit of knowledge makes you an expert.

What it actually makes you is an “advanced beginner” according to the Dreyfus Model of Skills Acquisition. In the “advanced beginner” phase you’ve moved beyond being a novice where you are essentially only able to follow directions and into the realm of being able to problem-solve. But you’ve only just begun to make that move. Far too many people get from novice to advanced beginner, can finally make a decision, and think that makes them an expert.

But as Merlin Mann so succinctly puts in this video, there is no trick that will let you get from novice to expert. The only thing you can do is put in the work. And if the thing you want to be an expert on is being an informed member of society, that means:

1. Growing a healthy level of skepticism.
2. Getting your news and information from more than one source.
3. Surrounding yourself with people that don’t agree with you.
4. Learning to lurk and listen before contributing and commenting.
5. Knowing the difference between fact and opinion.

These are all difficult lessons to learn. When you ignore them, as I did recently, they smack you in the face pretty hard. While a culture that allows and promotes everyone commenting on everything immediately all the time is ultimately a good thing, it comes with a certain responsibility to know when to comment, when to listen, and when to think. Or put another way, it means knowing that you need to eat the whole meal and let it digest before deciding whether to compliment the chef.