The result was a complete shift in the consumption habits of American women. It wasn’t just about selling the cigarette, it was reorganizing society to make cigarettes an inescapable part of the American woman’s daily experience.
Bernays’s efforts to make smoking in public socially acceptable had equally startling results. He linked cigarette smoking with women’s emancipation. To smoke was to be free. Cigarettes were marketed as “torches of freedom.” He orchestrated public events, including an infamous parade on Easter Sunday in 1929 which featured women smoking as they walked in the parade. He left no detail unattended, so public perception of smoking was changed almost overnight. He both normalized it and made it desirable in one swoop.
Although the campaign utilized more principles than just inversion, it was the original decision to invert the approach that provided the framework from which the campaign was created and executed. Bernays didn’t focus on how to sell more cigarettes to women within the existing social structure. Sales would have undoubtedly been a lot more limited. Instead he thought about what the world would look like if women smoked often and anywhere, and then set about trying to make that world a reality. Once he did that, selling cigarettes to women was comparatively easy.
This inversion approach became a staple of Bernays’s work. He used the descriptor “appeals of indirection”, and each time when “hired to sell a product or service, he instead sold whole new ways of behaving, which appeared obscure but over time reaped huge rewards for his clients and redefined the very texture of American life.”8
What are you trying to avoid? Instead of thinking through the achievement of a positive outcome, we could ask ourselves how we might achieve a terrible outcome, and let that guide our decision-making. Index funds are a great example of stock market inversion promoted and brought to bear by Vanguard’s John Bogle.9 Instead of asking how to beat the market, as so many before him, Bogle recognized the difficulty of the task. Everyone is trying to beat the market. No one is doing it with any consistency, and in the process real people are losing actual money. So he inverted the approach. The question then became, how can we help investors minimize losses to fees and poor money manager selection? The results were one of the greatest ideas—index funds—and one of the greatest powerhouse firms in the history of finance.
The index fund operates on the idea that accruing wealth has a lot to do with minimizing loss. Think about your personal finances. Often we focus on positive goals, such as “I want to be rich,” and use this to guide our approach. We make investing and career choices based on our desire to accumulate wealth. We chase after magical solutions, like attempting to outsmart the stock market. These inevitably get us nowhere, and we have usually taken some terrible risks in the process which actually leave us worse off.
Instead, we can try inverting the goal. It becomes, not getting rich, but avoiding being poor. Instead of trying to divine the decisions that will bring wealth, we first try to eliminate those behaviors that are guaranteed to erode it. There are some pretty obvious ones. Spending more than we make, paying high interest rates on debt so that we can’t tackle paying back the principal, and not starting to save as early as we can to take advantage of the power of compounding, are all concrete financial behaviors that cost us money. We can more readily secure wealth by using inversion to make sure we are not doing the worst things that prevent the accumulation of wealth. — Sidebar: Inversion Leads to Innovation
One of the theoretical foundations for this type of thinking comes from psychologist Kurt Lewin.10 In the 1930s he came up with the idea of force field analysis, which essentially recognizes that in any situation where change is desired, successful management of that change requires applied inversion. Here is a brief explanation of his process:
Identify the problem
Define your objective
Identify the forces that support change towards your objective
Identify the forces that impede change towards the objective
Strategize a solution! This may involve both augmenting or adding to the forces in step 3, and reducing or eliminating the forces in step 4.
Even if we are quite logical, most of us stop after step 3. Once we figure out our objective, we focus on the things we need to put in place to make it happen, the new training or education, the messaging and marketing. But Lewin theorized that it can be just as powerful to remove obstacles to change.
The inversion happens between steps 3 and 4. Whatever angle you choose to approach your problem from, you need to then follow with consideration of the opposite angle. Think about not only what you could do to solve a problem, but what you could do to make it worse—and then avoid doing that, or eliminate the conditions that perpetuate it.
«He wins his battles by making no mistakes.»
Sun Tzu11
This inversion approach was used by Florence Nightingale to help significantly reduce the mortality rate of British soldiers in military hospitals in the late 19th century. She is often remembered as the founder of modern nursing, but she was also an excellent statistician and was the first woman elected to the Royal Statistical Society in 1858.
During the first winter of the Crimean War, 1854–55, the British Army endured a death rate of 23%. The next winter that rate had dropped to 2.5%.12 The main reason for the change was a much better understanding of what was actually killing the soldiers, an understanding that rested on the detailed statistics that Florence Nightingale started to collect. She demonstrated that the leading cause of death by far was poor sanitation. In her famous polar-area chart, a completely new way of presenting data at the time, she captured a visual representation of the statistics that made them easy to understand. Improve the sanitary conditions in the hospitals, she explained, and many soldiers’ lives will be saved.
Inversion Leads to Innovation
Using inversion to identify your end goal and work backward from there can lead to innovation. If you had to make a guess on who invented closed circuit television (CCTV) in the United States, whom would you choose? A large institution like the Department of Defense? A telecom company? Some techie in a police department? You probably wouldn’t name the late Marie Van Brittan Brown, who, along with her husband Albert Brown, filed the first patent for a closed circuit monitoring system in 1966. She was a nurse, living in the Jamaica neighborhood of Queens, New York, and as such worked irregular hours. When she was home alone, she felt unsafe. In an interesting example of inversion, she decided to do something about it.
In the same situation, most of us would work forward, thinking of safety-oriented additions we can make to our existing set-up, like more locks, or having a friend stay over. Van Brittan Brown, however, went a step further, asking what would need to change in order for her to feel safer. She identified that it was her inability to see and communicate with persons outside her door that made her feel the most vulnerable when home alone. Working backward, her thinking may have gone something like this: what can I do to change that situation? What would have to be in place? Van Brittan Brown followed this through, and CCTV was born.
Van Brittan Brown and her husband designed a camera system that would move between four holes in the door, feeding the images to a TV monitor set up in the home. The images would allow her to get a complete view of who was at the door, and additional technology allowed for communication with the person outside without the door being opened. Further, they developed a feature that would allow her to either let the person in, or sound an alarm to notify a neighbor or watchman.
To be fair, we will likely never know the thought process that led Van Brittan Brown to develop and patent this technology, but her story demonstrates that working backward from a goal can spur the innovation to reach it.
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Nightingale’s use of statistics helped to identify the real problem of army hospital deaths.
Nightingale’s use of statistics helped to identify the real problem of army hospital deaths. She was able to demonstrate no
t only what the army could do to improve outcomes, but, just as important, what they had to avoid doing to stop making things worse. She reflected on the knowledge that could be derived from statistics and, in another instance of inversion thinking, she advocated for their use as a means of prevention.13 It became not so much “how do we fix this problem,” but “how do we stop it from happening in the first place.” She took the knowledge and experience she gained in the Crimea and began gathering statistics not just for British Army field hospitals, but for domestic ones as well. She demonstrated that unsanitary conditions in military hospitals were a real problem causing many preventable deaths.14
Nightingale’s advocacy for statistics ultimately went much further than British military hospitals. But her use of statistics to improve sanitary conditions can be seen as an example of applied inversion. She used them to advocate for both solving problems and the invert, preventing them.
«Hence to fight and conquer in all your battles is not supreme excellence; supreme excellence consists in breaking the enemy’s resistance without fighting.»
Sun Tzu15
Conclusion
Inversion shows us that we don’t always need to be geniuses, nor do we need to limit its application to mathematical and scientific proofs. Simply invert, always invert, when you are stuck. If you take the results of your inversion seriously, you might make a great deal of progress on solving your problems.
Anybody can make the simple complicated. Creativity is making the complicated simple.
Charles Mingus1
The People Who Appear in this Chapter
William of Ockham.
1285-1347 - English philosopher and theologian. He is considered to be one of the major figures of medieval thought, and contributed to many branches of philosophy, like logic and ethics, as well as theology.
Hume, David.
1711-1776 - Scottish philosopher, historian and economist. Best known today for his influential system of philosophical empiricism, skepticism and naturalism, resting on the idea that all human knowledge is founded solely in experience.
Sagan, Carl.
1934-1996 - American astronomer, astrophysicist, and great communicator of science. He assembled the first physical messages sent into space. He also narrated and co-wrote Cosmos: A Personal Voyage, the most widely watched series in the history of American Public television.
Rubin, Vera.
1928-2016 - American astronomer. She received multiple honors for her achievements in astronomy, and spent her life advocating for and mentoring women in science.
Occam’s Razor
Simpler explanations are more likely to be true than complicated ones. This is the essence of Occam’s Razor, a classic principle of logic and problem-solving. Instead of wasting your time trying to disprove complex scenarios, you can make decisions more confidently by basing them on the explanation that has the fewest moving parts.
We all jump to overly complex explanations about something. Husband late getting home? What if he’s been in a car accident? Son grew a centimeter less than he did last year? What if there is something wrong with him? Your toe hurts? What if you have bone cancer? Although it is possible that any of these worst case scenarios could be true, without any other correlating factors, it is significantly more likely that your husband got caught up at work, you mismeasured your son, and your shoe is too tight.
We often spend lots of time coming up with very complicated narratives to explain what we see around us. From the behavior of people on the street to physical phenomena, we get caught up in assuming vast icebergs of meaning beyond the tips that we observe. This is a common human tendency, and it serves us well in some situations, such as creating art. However, complexity takes work to unravel, manage, and understand. Occam’s Razor is a great tool for avoiding unnecessary complexity by helping you identify and commit to the simplest explanation possible.
Named after the medieval logician William of Ockham, Occam’s Razor is a general rule by which we select among competing explanations. Ockham wrote that “a plurality is not to be posited without necessity”—essentially that we should prefer the simplest explanation with the fewest moving parts.2,3 They are easier to falsify, easier to understand, and generally more likely to be correct. Occam’s Razor is not an iron law but a tendency and a mind-frame you can choose to use: If all else is equal, that is if two competing models both have equal explanatory power, it’s more likely that the simple solution suffices.
Of course, it’s unlikely that Ockham himself derived the idea. It had been in use since antiquity. Nor was Ockham the last to note the value of simplicity. The principle was stated in another useful way by the 18th-century Scottish philosopher David Hume, in his famous Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding. Writing about the truth or untruth of miracles, Hume stated that we should default to skepticism about them.4
Why? It wasn’t simply that Hume was a buzzkill. He had a specific, Occam-like reason for being cautious about miracles. By definition, a miracle is something which has happened outside of our normal understanding of the way nature works. If the miracle was not outside of our common experience, we wouldn’t consider its occurrence miraculous. If there was a simple explanation for the occurrence based on mostly common knowledge, we likely wouldn’t pay much attention to it at all.
Therefore, the most simple explanation for a miracle is that the miracle-witnesser is not describing the event correctly, or the miracle represents a more common phenomenon that we currently don’t properly understand. As scientist and writer Carl Sagan explains in The Demon Haunted World,
A multitude of aspects of the natural world that were considered miraculous only a few generations ago are now thoroughly understood in terms of physics and chemistry. At least some of the mysteries of today will be comprehensively solved by our descendants. The fact that we cannot now produce a detailed understanding of, say, altered states of consciousness in terms of brain chemistry no more implies the existence of a ‘spirit world’ than a sunflower following the Sun in its course across the sky was evidence of a literal miracle before we knew about phototropism and plant hormones.5
The simpler explanation for a miracle is that there are principles of nature being exploited that we do not understand. This is Hume’s and Sagan’s point.
Dark what?
In the mid-1970s astronomer Vera Rubin had a very interesting problem. She had a bunch of data about the behavior of galaxies piling up that wasn’t explained by contemporary theories.6,7,8
Rubin had been observing the behavior of the Andromeda Galaxy, and had noticed something very strange. As explained in an article on Astronomy.com, “the vast spiral seemed to be rotating all wrong. The stuff at the edges was moving just as fast as the stuff near the center, apparently violating Newton’s Laws of Motion (which also govern how the planets move around our Sun).” This didn’t make any sense. Gravity should exert less pull on distant objects, which should move slower. But Rubin was observing something entirely different.
One possible explanation was something that had been theorized as far back as 1933, by Swiss astrophysicist Fritz Zwicky, who coined the phrase “dark matter” to describe a mass we couldn’t see, but which was influencing the behavior of the orbits in the galaxies. Dark matter became the simplest explanation for the observed phenomenon, and Vera Rubin has been credited with providing the first evidence of its existence. What is particularly interesting is that to this day no one has ever actually discovered dark matter.
Why are more complicated explanations less likely to be true? Let’s work it out mathematically. Take two competing explanations, each of which seem to equally explain a given phenomenon. If one of them requires the interaction of three variables and the other the interaction of thirty variables, all of which must have occurred to arrive at the stated conclusion, which of these is more likely to be in error? If each variable has a 99% chance of being correct, the first explanation is only 3% likely to be wrong. The second, more complex e
xplanation, is about nine times as likely to be wrong, or 26%. The simpler explanation is more robust in the face of uncertainty.
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It was Rubin’s observations of the Andromeda galaxy that led to her to collect the first evidence in support of the theory of dark matter—a substance that does not emit energy or light.
Dark matter is an excellent theory with a lot of explanatory power. As Lisa Randall explains in Dark Matter and the Dinosaurs, measurements of dark matter so far fit in exactly with what we understand about the Universe. Although we can’t see it, we can make predictions based on our understanding of it, and test those predictions. She writes, “It would be even more mysterious to me if the matter we can see with our eyes is all the matter that exists.”9 Dark matter is currently the simplest explanation for certain phenomena we observe in the Universe. The great thing about science, however, is that it continually seeks to validate its assumptions.
Sagan wrote that “extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof.”10 He dedicated much ink to a rational investigation of extraordinary claims. He felt most, or nearly all, were susceptible to simpler and more parsimonious explanations. UFOs, paranormal activity, telepathy, and a hundred other seemingly mystifying occurrences could be better explained with a few simple real world variables. And as Hume suggested, if they couldn’t, it was a lot more likely that we needed to update our understanding of the world than that a miracle had occurred.
The Great Mental Models Page 11
