You Are Not So Smart

by David McRaney

  Looking at the factors from a distance, you can accept the reality of random chance. You are lulled by the signal. You forget about noise. With meaning, you overlook randomness, but meaning is a human construction. You have just committed the Texas sharpshooter fallacy.

  The fallacy gets its name from imagining a cowboy shooting at a barn. Over time, the side of the barn becomes riddled with holes. In some places there are lots of them, in others there are few. If the cowboy later paints a bull’s-eye over a spot where his bullet holes clustered together, it looks like he is pretty good with a gun. By painting a bull’s-eye over a cluster of bullet holes, the cowboy places artificial order over natural random chance. If you have a human brain, you do this all of the time. Picking out clusters of coincidence is a predictable malfunction of normal human logic.

  When you are dazzled by the idea of Nostradamus predicting Hitler, you ignore how he wrote almost one thousand ambiguous predictions, and most of them make no sense at all. He seems even less interesting when you find out Hister is the Latin name for the Danube River. When you marvel at the similarities between the Titan and the Titanic, you disregard that in the novel only thirteen people survived, and the ship sank right away, and the Titan had made many voyages, and it had sails. In the novel, one of the survivors fought a polar bear before being rescued. When you are befuddled by the Lincoln and Kennedy connections, you neglect to notice Kennedy was Catholic and Lincoln was born Baptist. Kennedy was killed with a rifle, Lincoln with a pistol. Kennedy was shot in Texas, Lincoln in Washington, D.C. Kennedy had lustrous auburn hair, while Lincoln wore a haberdasher’s wet dream.

  With all three examples there are thousands of differences, all of which you ignored, but when you draw the bull’s-eye around the clusters, the similarities—whoa. If hindsight bias and confirmation bias had a baby, it would be the Texas sharpshooter fallacy.

  When reality shows are filmed, the producers have hundreds of hours of footage. When they condense that footage into an hour, they paint a bull’s-eye around a cluster of holes. They find a narrative in all the mundane moments, extracting the good bits and tossing aside the rest. This means they can create any orderly story they wish from their reserves of chaos. Was that one girl really a horrific bitch? Was that guy with the gelled hair and fake tan really that dumb? Unless you can pull back and see the entire barn, you’ll never know.

  The reach of the fallacy is far greater than reality shows, presidential trivia, and spooky coincidences. When you use the sharpshooter fallacy to determine cause from effect, it can harm people. One of the reasons scientists form a hypothesis and then try to disprove it with new research is to avoid the Texas sharpshooter fallacy. Epidemiologists are especially wary of it as they study the factors that lead to the spread of disease. If you look at a map of the United States with dots assigned to where cancer rates are highest, you will notice areas of clumping. It looks like you have a pretty good indication of where the groundwater must be poisoned, or where high-voltage power lines are bombarding people with damaging energy fields, or where cell phone towers are frying people’s organs, or where nuclear bombs must have been tested. A map like that is a lot like the side of the sharpshooter’s barn, and presuming there must be a cause for cancer clusters is the same as drawing bull’s-eyes around them. More often than not, cancer clusters have no scary environmental cause. There are many agents at work. People who are related tend to live near one another. Old people tend to retire in the same areas. Eating, smoking, and exercise habits tend to be similar region to region. And, after all, one in three people will develop cancer in his or her lifetime. To accept that things like residential cancer clusters are often just coincidence is deeply unsatisfying. The powerlessness, the feeling you are defenseless to the whims of chance, can be assuaged by singling out an antagonist. Sometimes you need a bad guy, and the Texas sharpshooter fallacy is one way you can create one.

  According to the Centers for Disease Control the number of autism cases among eight-year-olds increased 57 percent from 2002 to the 2006. Looking back over the last twenty years, the rate of autism has gone up 200 percent. Today, one in seventy male children has some form of autism spectrum disorder. It seemed absolutely nuts when those numbers were first released. Parents around the world panicked. Something must be causing autism numbers to rise, right? Early on, a bull’s-eye was painted around vaccines because symptoms seemed to show up about the same time as kids were getting vaccinated. Once they had a target, a cluster, people failed to see all the other correlations. After years of research and millions of dollars, vaccines have been ruled out, but many refuse to accept the findings. Singling out vaccines while ignoring the millions of other factors is the same as noting the Titan hit an iceberg but omitting it had sails.

  Lucky streaks at the casino, hot hands in basketball, a tornado sparing a church—these are all examples of humans finding meaning after the fact, after the odds are tallied and the numbers have moved on. You are ignoring the times you lost, the times the ball missed the basket, and all the homes the tornado blindly devoured.

  In World War II, Londoners took notice when bombing raids consistently missed certain neighborhoods. People began to believe German spies lived in the spared buildings. They didn’t. Analysis afterward by psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky showed the bombing strike patterns were random.

  Anywhere people are searching for meaning, you will see the Texas sharpshooter fallacy. For many, the world loses luster when you accept the idea that random mutations can lead to eyeballs or random burn patterns on toast can look like a person’s face.

  If you were to shuffle a deck and draw out ten cards, the chances of the sequence you drew coming up are in the trillions, no matter what the cards are. If you drew out an ordered suit, it would be astonishing, but the chances are the same as any other set of ten cards. The meaning is a human construct.

  Look outside. See that tree? The chances of it growing there on that spot, on this planet, circling this star, in this galaxy, among the billions of galaxies in the known universe, are so incredibly small it seems to have meaning, but that meaning is only a figment of your imagination. You are drawing a bull’s-eye around a cluster on a vast barn. The odds of it being there are no less astronomical than the odds of it being in the patch of dirt beside it. The same is true if you looked out onto a desert and found a lizard, or into the sky and found a cloud, or into space and saw nothing but hydrogen atoms floating alone. There is a 100 percent chance something will be there, be anywhere, when you look; only the need for meaning changes how you feel about what you see.

  To admit the messy slog of chaos, disorder, and random chance rules your life, rules the universe itself, is a painful conceit. You commit the Texas sharpshooter fallacy when you need a pattern to provide meaning, to console you, to lay blame. You mow your lawn, arrange your silverware, comb your hair. Whenever possible, you oppose the forces of entropy and thwart their relentless derangement. Your drive to do this is primal. You need order. Order makes it easier to be a person, to navigate this sloppy world. For ancient man, pattern recognition led to food and protected people from harm. You are able to read these words because your ancestors recognized patterns and changed their behavior to better acquire food and avoiding becoming it. Evolution has made us into beings looking for clusters where chance events have built up like sand into dunes.

  Carl Sagan said in the vastness of space and the immensity of time it was a joy to share a planet and epoch with his wife. Even though he knew fate didn’t put them together, it didn’t take away the wonder he felt when he was with her.

  You see patterns everywhere, but some of them are formed by chance and mean nothing. Against the noisy background of probability things are bound to line up from time to time for no reason at all. It’s just how the math works out. Recognizing this is an important part of ignoring coincidences when they don’t matter and realizing what has real meaning for you on this planet, in this epoch.

  6
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br />   Procrastination

  THE MISCONCEPTION: You procrastinate because you are lazy and can’t manage your time well.

  THE TRUTH: Procrastination is fueled by weakness in the face of impulse and a failure to think about thinking.

  Netflix reveals something about your own behavior you should have noticed by now, something that keeps getting between you and the things you want to accomplish. If you have Netflix, especially if you stream it to your TV, you tend to gradually accumulate a cache of hundreds of films you think you’ll watch one day.

  Take a look at your queue. Why are there so damn many documentaries and dramatic epics collecting virtual dust in there? By now you could draw the cover art to Dead Man Walking from memory. Why do you keep passing over it?

  Psychologists actually know the answer to this question, to why you keep adding movies you will never watch to your growing collection of future rentals, and it’s the same reason you believe you will eventually do what’s best for yourself in all the other parts of your life, but rarely do.

  A study conducted in 1999 by Read, Loewenstein, and Kalyanaraman had people pick three movies out of a selection of twenty-four. Some were lowbrow, like Sleepless in Seattle or Mrs. Doubtfire. Some were highbrow, like Schindler’s List or The Piano. In other words, it was a choice between movies that promised to be fun and forgettable and those that would be memorable but required more effort to absorb. After picking, the subjects had to watch one movie right away. They then had to watch another in two days and a third two days after that. Most people picked Schindler’s List as one of their three. They knew it was a great movie because all of their friends said it was, and it had earned dozens of the highest awards. Most didn’t, however, choose to watch it on the first day. Instead, people tended to pick lowbrow movies on the first day. Only 44 percent went for the heavier stuff first. The majority tended to pick comedies, like The Mask, or action flicks, like Speed, when they knew they had to watch their choice forthwith. Planning ahead, people picked highbrow movies 63 percent of the time for their second movie and 71 percent of the time for their third. When they ran the experiment again but told subjects they had to watch all three selections back-to-back, Schindler’s List was thirteen times less likely to be chosen at all. The researchers had a hunch people would go for the junk food first, but plan healthy meals in the future.

  Many studies over the years have shown you tend to have time-inconsistent preferences. When asked if you would rather have fruit or cake one week from now, you will usually say fruit. A week later, when the slice of German chocolate and the apple are offered, you are statistically more likely to go for the cake.

  This is why your Netflix queue is full of great films you keep passing over for Family Guy. With Netflix, the choice of what to watch right now and what to watch later is like candy bars versus carrot sticks. When you are making plans, your better angels point to the nourishing choices, but in the moment you go for what tastes good.

  This is sometimes called present bias—being unable to grasp that what you want will change over time, and what you want now isn’t the same thing you will want later. Present bias explains why you buy lettuce and bananas only to throw them out later when you forget to eat them. This is why when you are a kid you wonder why adults don’t own more toys. Present bias is why you’ve made the same resolution for the tenth year in a row, but this time you mean it. You are going to lose weight and forge a six-pack of abs so ripped you can deflect arrows.

  You weigh yourself. You buy a workout DVD. You order a set of weights. One day you have the choice between going for a run or watching a movie, and you choose the movie. Another day you are out with friends and can choose a cheeseburger or a salad. You choose the cheeseburger. The slips become more frequent, but you keep saying you’ll get around to it. You’ll start again on Monday, which becomes a week from Monday. Your will succumbs to a death by a thousand cuts. By the time winter comes, it looks like you already know what your resolution will be the next year.

  Procrastination manifests itself within every aspect of your life.

  You wait until the last minute to buy Christmas presents. You put off seeing the dentist, or getting that thing checked out by the doctor, or filing your taxes. You forget to register to vote. You need to get an oil change. There is a pile of dishes getting higher in the kitchen. Shouldn’t you wash clothes now so you don’t have to waste a Sunday cleaning everything you own?

  Perhaps the stakes are higher than choosing to play Angry Birds instead of doing sit-ups. You might have a deadline for a grant proposal, or a dissertation, or a book.

  You’ll get around to it. You’ll start tomorrow. You’ll take the time to learn a foreign language, to learn how to play an instrument. There’s a growing list of books you will read one day.

  Before you do though, maybe you should check your e-mail. You should head over to Facebook too, just to get it out of the way. A cup of coffee would probably get you going; it won’t take long to go grab one. Maybe just a few episodes of that show you like.

  You can try to fight it back. You can buy a daily planner and a to-do list application for your phone. You can write yourself notes and fill out schedules. You can become a productivity junkie surrounded by instruments to make life more efficient, but these tools alone will not help, because the problem isn’t you are a bad manager of your time—you are a bad tactician in the war inside your brain.

  Procrastination is such a pervasive element of the human experience there are more than 600 books for sale promising to snap you out of your bad habits, and this year alone 120 new books on the topic were published. Obviously this is a problem everyone admits to, so why is it so hard to defeat?

  To explain, consider the power of marshmallows.

  Walter Mischel conducted experiments at Stanford University throughout the late 1960s and early 1970s in which he and his researchers offered a bargain to children. The kids sat at a table in front of a bell and some treats. They could pick a pretzel, a cookie, or a giant marshmallow. They told the little boys and girls they could either eat the treat right away or wait a few minutes. If they waited, they would double their payoff and get two treats. If they couldn’t wait, they had to ring the bell, after which the researcher would end the experiment.

  Some made no attempt at self-control and just ate right away. Others stared intensely at the object of their desire until they gave in to temptation. Many writhed in agony, twisting their hands and feet while looking away. Some made silly noises. In the end, one third couldn’t resist. What started as an experiment about delayed gratification has now, decades later, yielded a far more interesting set of revelations about metacognition—thinking about thinking.

  Mischel has followed the lives of all his subjects through high school, college, and into adulthood, where they accumulated children, mortgages, and jobs. The revelation from this research is kids who were able to overcome their desire for short-term reward in favor of a better outcome later weren’t smarter than the other kids, nor were they less gluttonous. They just had a better grasp of how to trick themselves into doing what was best for them. They watched the wall instead of looking at the food. They tapped their feet instead of smelling the confection. The wait was torture for all, but some knew it was going to be impossible to just sit there and stare at the delicious, gigantic marshmallow without giving in. The ones who were better at holding off their desire to snatch the marshmallow used that same power to squeeze more out of life. The ones who rang the bell quickly showed a higher incidence of behavioral problems. The ones who could hold out ended up with SAT scores that were on average more than two hundred points higher than scores for the ones who ate the marshmallow.

  Thinking about thinking—this is the key. In the struggle between should versus want, some people have figured out something crucial: Want never goes away. Procrastination is all about choosing want over should because you don’t have a plan for those times when you can expect to be tempted. You are really bad at p
redicting your future mental states. In addition, you are terrible at choosing between now and later. Later is a murky place where anything could go wrong.

  If I were to offer you $50 now or $100 in a year, which would you take? Clearly, you’ll take the $50 now. After all, who knows what could happen in a year, right? OK, so what if I instead offered you $50 in five years or $100 in six years? Nothing has changed other than adding a delay, but now it feels just as natural to wait for the $100. After all, you already have to wait a long time. A being of pure logic would think, more is more, and pick the higher amount every time, but you aren’t a being of pure logic. Faced with two possible rewards, you are more likely to take the one that you can enjoy now over one you will enjoy later—even if the later reward is far greater. In the moment, rearranging the folders on your computer seems a lot more rewarding than some task due in a month which might cost you your job or your diploma, so you wait until the night before. If you considered which would be more valuable in a month—continuing to get your paycheck or having an immaculate desktop—you would pick the greater reward. The tendency to get more rational when you are forced to wait is called hyperbolic discounting, because your dismissal of the better payoff later diminishes over time and makes a nice slope on a graph.

  Evolutionarily it makes sense to always go for the sure bet now; your ancestors didn’t have to think about retirement or heart disease. Your brain evolved in a world where you probably wouldn’t live to meet your grandchildren. The stupid monkey part of your brain wants to gobble up candy bars and go deeply into debt.

  Hyperbolic discounting makes later an easy place to throw all the things you don’t want to deal with, but you also overcommit to future plans for the same reason. You run out of time to get things done because you think in the future, that mysterious fantastical realm of possibilities, you’ll have more free time than you do now.