Following on from this post about the advice we’d give to our younger selves, here’s more advice from other peoples’ experiences sourced from Quora that I’ve found helpful.

Christian Bonilla – Customer Feedback Flattens Hierarchies

This contributor is quoting Jeff Bezos, the CEO of Amazon. Bezos was pointing out that in the online sales context, understanding the customer matters more than technical ability. Bonilla writes: ‘It doesn’t matter if you’re a senior executive or a junior staffer, opinions that are not founded in [a] deep understanding [of] the customer won’t get far at Amazon.’

Bonilla ports this insight over to his area of interest, product management. He writes that product managers sometimes fall prey to insular thinking. This can be solved with UserMuse, a service which ‘connect[s] the people who make enterprise tools with people in their target markets who fit their customer profile.’ By having access to this sort of targeted feedback, product managers get improved market validation.

Courtland Allen – Learn From the Experiences of Others

Courtland Allen notes that because we are like other people, we can learn from their experiences. Doing so will allow us to avoid unnecessary pitfalls and put ourselves in a position to navigate life better. However, we often don’t learn from the experiences of others. The optimism bias suggests that we are inclined to think that we are less likely to fall into the same traps that others fall into, even if we are in similar circumstances.

For example, even though we’ve met people who are currently doing the kind of work we want to do but who report that they are unhappy, or who telegraph their dissatisfaction in their body language, we are nevertheless likely to think that the experience would be different for us, that we’d find satisfaction. Or, even though we’ve seen how difficult some work has been for generations of people who’ve come before us, we are nevertheless likely to think that we’d be able to accomplish it easily. For more of this, read Dan Gilbert’s Stumbling on Happiness (2006).

There are plausible adaptive reasons for this. Optimism, that is, anticipating positive future outcomes, is connected to hope; and hope enables us to thrive under otherwise destitute conditions. Optimism is good for our health. Among other things, it decreases our chances of being chronically ill. Anecdotally, optimism makes us more likable too.

Pessimistic people are inclined to see the world more clearly and make more accurate forecasts about their prospects. However, because many of our prospects fluctuate (if you haven’t already realized, we live in an uncertain world), they cause perennial anxiety among accurate forecasters, which deteriorates their mental and physical health.

This does not mean, however, that we need to be pessimistic to learn from the experiences of others. Because a moderate amount of optimism comes naturally to most of us, we can retain that optimistic mindset while remembering that the experiences of others have a great deal to teach us. These may include the experiences of parents, teachers, friends, colleagues, and strangers (for example, in forums, blogs, books, etc.). Doing so may help us to minimize unnecessary loss, pain, heartache, and failure.

Dave Consiglio – Make Informed Decisions

Dave Consiglio writes that it is best to make decisions based on their likelihood of success: ‘Analyse your options to the best of your ability. Then, choose wisely. It’s no guarantee against failure, but it’s the best option reality offers.’ There are many ways to make better decisions. One is to be familiar with the probabilities intrinsic to the outcomes of the decisions we are intending to make. In some domains, making simple Bayesian calculations can help. On how to do this for the non-mathematically inclined, see Nate Silver’s The Signal and the Noise (2012).

Another is to be aware of the cognitive heuristics and biases that permeate our decision-making processes. As it is with the optimism bias, psychological research has shown that we routinely commit fallacies of rational thought in domains which diverge from the environment in which our brains evolved, i.e., the Pleistocene Epoch. Very broadly speaking, we, like other animals, possess cognitive and perceptual systems which co-evolved with our environment. Our 21^st-century environment, however, is only a brief flicker compared to the much longer time we’ve spent in hunter-gatherer communities for about 200,000 years, after we speciated from our hominin ancestors, and before we coalesced into civilizations at Mesopotamia, Ancient Egypt, and East Asia along with the dawn of agriculture. 

This means that our cognitive and perceptual systems have been calibrated to operate in and favour communities which were broadly egalitarian, not hierarchical, did not number above 150 (this is an estimate based on the evolution of our neocortex size which governs our ability to handle social information), and did not have to deal with anything which required facility with large numbers and probabilities on which modern science and technology rely. The societies that most of us live in, however, are hierarchically structured, are populated in the millions, and feature jobs which require said facilities (for more on our evolutionary heritage, I recommend Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens). It is not hard, therefore, to see why so many of us routinely make suboptimal decisions.

But this does not mean that we are doomed to making only suboptimal decisions. Biology is not destiny. We have also evolved brains which are incredibly plastic, i.e., capable of social learning and reliably assimilating cultural evolution.

So, now that cognitive psychologists have uncovered these heuristics and biases, we can learn about them and try to avoid them. Complete avoidance is impossible, as the Nobel Prize-winning researcher in behavioral economics Daniel Kahneman concedes. These heuristics and biases are so intricately woven into our cognitive architecture, and, in some domains, so crucial to our survival, that our minds will always tend to default to them when confronted with cues like uncertainty. We should still try anyway. Knowing what they are is a good way to progress on this front.

Mark Long – Trade-Offs and Goods

This contributor narrows his best advice to two statements. Both come from his spouse. The first is that everything in life is a trade-off: ‘If you choose one career – you’re giving up another. If you chase one dream – you’ll leave another behind. If you decide to get married – you give up that “illusion of freedom”, and yes, you have to make sacrifices.’ There will always be trade-offs because we live in a finite world. We must first acknowledge that before we can meaningfully “count the cost,” consider the uncertainties involved and make the best choices moving forward. 

Of course, we could try to tip the trade-off scales in our favor by adopting a coercive, manipulative, or otherwise unsavory attitude toward others, however much we try to justify such actions to ourselves. But, unless we happen to be sociopaths or psychopaths, inviting that much negativity into our lives will eventually have deleterious effects on our reputation, health, and well-being. It might feel good at first, especially if it gets us what we want, but it will likely bring no satisfaction to most of us in the long run.

The second piece of advice is that if it seems too good to be true, it probably is. As mentioned, we live in a finite world. The finite things that we desire, i.e., status, influence, security, love, etc., other people desire too. So, when people sell us something we desire that sounds too good to be true, it very likely is. Think, for example, of email scams that appeal to our materialism to defraud us.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N682eopajzA&index=13&list=PLSKUhDnoJjYmeW6nNasZSaVAGh4u91pEk

Think also of religious cults that appeal to our desire for existential certainty, love, and influence, for the cult leader(s) to take our resources and leave us more destitute than we were initially.  

This kind of deception is replete in nature. See, for example, Martin Stevens’ Cheats and Deceits (2016).

Because of the analogous evolutionary arms race between “deceptor” and “deceptee” in human social intelligence, deception is also very hard for us to detect. This is why so many people fall for schemes that are primarily deceptive. Their startling ubiquity is detailed in Maria Konnikova’s The Confidence Game (2016).

The bottom line is that we should try to assess our choices carefully. Look it up online, ask around, get a broad spectrum of advice. We cannot avoid being deceived – we are not omniscient, we don’t always have the time to do the requisite research, and sometimes, our emotional vulnerabilities are exploited – but we can make efforts to minimize them.

Bruce R. Bain – Everything is Not Black and White

This contributor recalled a time when he was reading an article about anti-war protesters in the United States. He was 14 at the time and he fully adopted the author’s point of view that these protestors were nothing more than a bunch of “dirty hippies.” He told his older brother that a great truth had been revealed to him. His brother responded by telling him that ‘everything is not black and white.’

When Bruce started to learn logic several years later, he encountered the black and white fallacy, an argument which formalized his brother’s insights about the ambiguity of ethical attribution caused by the complex nature of human affairs and the corresponding difficulty involved with distinguishing propagandistic publications from more balanced ones.

He, therefore, began to adopt a healthy skepticism toward the things he read. He would sift through his readings with evidential criteria, asking ‘where is the evidence for that?’ when confronted with dubious or one-sided claims. Likewise, being familiar with fallacies of reasoning as they pertain to world affairs will probably help us to gain a clearer picture of what’s going on, and, in the long run, help us make more informed decisions.

Some of these logical fallacies can be found here. For rational discussions about world affairs, check out the Rationally Speaking podcast as well. Some of the talks come with full transcripts.

Rikki Lee Godlewski – We Are All Star Dust

This contributor quotes the astrophysicist Lawrence Krauss who said that ‘every atom in your body came from a star that exploded. And, the atoms in your left hand came from a different star than your right hand […] We are all stardust.’ Rikki finds this observation both inspiring and sobering. He writes: ‘If the everyday ever seems too heavy; seeing the vastness, complexity and destruction of our universe puts me in check. Seeing that we are nothing but floating on a speck of dust, suspended in a sunray. It makes me thankful for the life I have.’

Gratefulness is a key ingredient in the recipe for happiness. And it needn’t necessarily come from the acknowledgment that the elements that constitute us were cooked in stars several billion years ago. Anything awe-inspiring will help. 

Cassandra Michael and John Shinkle – Don’t Make Assumptions/People Aren’t like Us

Experience tells us that making unwarranted assumptions leads us astray. But it can be very hard not to make assumptions. The false-consensus effect […] suggests that we are inclined to assume that other people think like us. For example, assuming that one of her new interns was like her led the behavioral specialist Vanessa Van Edwards to miscommunicate with the intern and cause the intern to quit.

Edwards recalls the intern, Eva, who was struggling to complete her assigned tasks. To resolve the issue, Edwards decided to give Eva autonomy over which projects she could work on. But this didn’t work. A week later, Eva hadn’t started on them. Edwards decided to pair her up with a mentor to encourage her, but a week later, Eva sent an email saying that she wanted to quit.

At first, Edwards was baffled. Then, she realized that she hadn’t understood Eva’s personality. On the Big Five […] personality index, Eva was almost the complete opposite to Edwards. Edwards was open, conscientious, neurotic, agreeable, and extroverted. By contrast, Eva was closed: she was overwhelmed by the autonomy. She was not conscientious: she was intimidated by Edwards’ detailed emails. She was introverted: she could not work well with the mentor and the other interns. And she was not neurotic: she was frustrated at what she perceived to be micro-management on the part of Edwards.

After realizing this, Edwards started to give her interns personality tests. In her book, she also lists several questions that we can ask to learn more about the personalities of the people we are speaking with and how to communicate with them in a way that brings out their best.