Bias vs Agenda (SIM #86)

I'm obsessed with the power of confirmation bias (Wikipedia refresher link). In the past, I thought of confirmation bias as one of many relatively equivalent, natural decision-making flaws that impact our ability to view things rationally (SIM #24 - Confirmation Bias & SIM #50 - Confirmation Bias Squared). With how information is now shared, controlled and amplified, I now view confirmation bias as the most insidious of human flaws and its being preyed upon.

Confirmation bias builds upon another bias highlighted by the famous line from Garrison Keillor about Lake Wobegon, where "all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking and all the children are above average." We believe WE are the ones that know best (overconfidence bias). The most highly valued enterprises in the world are those that control and enable the information we receive, most often with a strong profit incentive to maintain our attention - on a separate note, it's a shame that advertising has basically become our most valuable economic driver. It's this playbook to maintain our attention that has elevated confirmation bias to what might be an unrecoverable place. Every topic now seems to be immediately and forever polarized and we're being told/influenced what to believe, what to discuss and what to amplify by whoever our personal pundits and entertainers might be. I don't know how this changes, but my hope is that we will see leaders emerge that cut through the noise of polarization to focus on the signal of honesty, effectiveness and collaboration, which I think of as harnessing positive energy for 1+1 to equal 3.

Like everyone else when it comes to opinions, I believe that I'm above average and can keep confirmation bias at bay. I mean, of course I think for myself and I don’t suffer from what everyone else seems to suffer from (I’m a unicorn). I'd bet a significant sum that just about everyone reading this feels similarly (not about me, but about themselves, lol). And I'm confident this audience skews well above average on what would be standard IQ tests and measures of professional success. Yet isn't it interesting that there are some strongly different opinions among my “smart” readers, many of these opinions being mutually exclusive, at least at face value. Should we be so confident?

We all come from our own perspectives and I believe there's great value in that. My experience, growing up in Madison, Wisconsin with social-service oriented parents is a big part of how I interpret the world, as is my professional experience in the heart of capitalism's belly working in financial services. I think appreciating others' perspectives is a big part of understanding alternative world views and ultimately drives the diplomacy that I think is necessary to manage or support a highly complex and intertwined system and world – for those interested, this long article about cost-cutting and optimization in complex systems highlights why “draining the swamp” is so much harder than everyone thinks. No doubt that these different perspectives lead to individual biases, but to me, when properly harnessed, these are the biases that can lead to healthy debate and progress (cognitive diversity), as they're based on lived experience. Bias doesn't have to be a four-letter word, rather I think it's unavoidable and something to be mindful of; we all have it.

That said, when the bias is not one of perspective, but rather comes from a place with a self-serving agenda that harms others, this becomes highly problematic. Agenda is the four-letter word for me, as I view it as a willingness to intentionally be dishonest or at a minimum be disingenuous through omission. And this is where I see much of our media-driven content today, capitalism, as it should, has determined what keeps our attention (lots of confirmation bias). And now we find ourselves in self-reinforcing loops feeding our own biases and feeding hate or at least disdain and apathy for others, often with an underlying, unverbalized sentiment of how others must be so hateful, stupid and/or gullible, but not us. In our complex system, this appears to be a self-fulfilling prophecy.

What can we do? My strongest preference would be to stop paying attention to the most abusive sources of information, with "abusive" unfortunately being in the eye of the beholder, yet I don’t think it’s hard to find many of the agendas. One tell would be that if you find yourself agreeing with the information you're receiving most of the time, you need to be paying attention to many other things; you should be disagreeing with, or at a minimum questioning, much of what you come across. The opposite is also likely true, if you're always disagreeing with a source, you might actually find some benefit in trying to get beyond thinking that it's simply "fake news" and understand if there are any real insights to be had. The biggest tell for me is when I see a significant thread of underlying hate or fear inducement, usually in the form of trying to grab the moral high ground, such as “look at how bad these others are.”

I also believe that if you hold someone or a particular information source in high regard that speaks with certainty on a large number of topics, you should generally question whether there’s an underlying agenda that you’re falling prey to, even if that agenda is selling advertising, as is often the case. I’m always amazed at the underlying complexity of a topic when you really dive into it; it’s truly impossible to have deep knowledge of a lot of topics. The most impressive folks that I know tend to be excellent at making insightful connections, asking relevant questions and knowing the limits of their knowledge, never afraid to say “I don’t know.”

The optimist in me wants to think most of the time we're dealing with biases and not agendas, particularly when talking about individual journalists or content creators. But when it comes to attaining and retaining power and influence, we’re seeing a tremendous amount of agenda right now, not simply bias.

Josh