And yet we (mostly) won't! Because we're human
Most so-called change experts talk about outlier's not norms
A few days ago, I saw a post on my feed from Shane Parrish which said…
“You always have the option of having no opinion”
— Marcus Aurelius
True. But, will we have no opinion? How many people in a given situation have no opinion on any subject? So, in effect, Shane was propagating a point that was an outlier rather than a norm, that most people are going to ignore anyway or going to find impossible to implement or change since we are just that - humans.
It boggles my mind when one offers the “It works for me, so use it” argument, or here is “something that is good for you”. Answers are never context-free. And answers that work for outliers are therefore not a good answer for all humans, though it might be useful to some of them some of the time.
If we consider several parameters that define humans, we find that we are all outliers in one thing or the other. We live in a spectrum for each of the parameters that in combination drive us.
I am not crying over spilled milk here - I am a practicing stoic amongst other things that I practice. But in spite of all the practice in the world, I realize that I am also human by design.
We need to realize that indeed most of us are going to have an opinion on everything. The same applies to bias. There are more than 176 identified biases that we are prone to. And there are considerable training monies spent in organizations on realizing and understanding what these are. But, yet, we cannot overcome them. These are ingrained in our subconscious. Even our cognitive evaluation of something cannot take the complex set of parameters that we are biased by when we make a decision of any kind. We have to accept that we are biased by design, and we are going to be biased.
If we agree on that, then our questions change. The question is no longer how to remove these biases, but to make the best decision in spite of these biases. And how to use these biases by design for our advantage, clearly knowing that we indeed are going to be biased anyway.
You want your cake (opinion, biases) and eat it too. Do you know how?
And yet we (mostly) won’t…