We’ve all been sold a lot of lies for most of our lives, and these lies turn into conventional wisdom. One of the biggest lies you’ve been told is that you should “trust your gut” and “follow your intuition”, but this is a terrible way to make decisions. I’m not sure what’s going on, but in the last 24 hours, I’ve seen multiple people decide to bullshit because the answer felt intuitive.
Today, I’m going to give you an amazing gift that was bestowed upon me not too long ago. I’m going to teach you how your intuition is making you look like a clown to others and how to avoid it in the easiest way possible.
Intuition and common sense are not your friends
Not too long ago, I wrote about some possible explanations for why we don’t seek the truth. We live in the information age, and it’s never been easier to access information. Any questions you have, you can type into Google and start looking for answers. As long as you know how to look for decent sources, you should be alright.
Unfortunately, we often choose to not take this simple step and follow our intuition instead.
This is such a strange human behavior because it contradicts so many other aspects of our lives. For example, think about why clickbait titles work. Many of them are about to give you some brand new information that you didn’t know.
In his bestselling book Contagious: Why Things Catch On, Jonah Berger explains his S.T.E.P.P.S. model, and the first thing on the list is social currency. He explains social currency as:
People care about how they look to others. They want to seem smart, cool, and in-the-know.
We love knowing little fun facts that we don’t think anyone else knows. Maybe that’s why people loved Snapple caps so damned much. They’d give you a random fact, you get to impress a friend like you’re super smart, and everyone wins.
But for some reason, this behavior is extremely selective, and I have yet to find a solid answer to why that is. Based on what I know about our belief systems, I’d assume it has something to do with how strongly we feel about that specific topic.
When we’re not looking to impress others and gain some social currency, we follow intuition instead, and this is such a big mistake. There are things that just feel right, so we use heuristics to take a shortcut, and this gives us the false sense of confidence in our answer.
Here’s a fun experiment the sociologist Paul Lazarsfeld did way back in 1949 while writing about The American Soldier. Since he can explain it better than I can, here’s an excerpt from Duncan Watts’ book Everything Is Obvious: *Once You Know the Answer:
…a then-recently published study of more than 600,000 servicemen that had been conducted by the research branch of the war department during and immediately after the Second World War. To make his point, Lazarsfeld listed six findings from the study that he claimed were representative of the report. For example, number two was that “Men from rural backgrounds were usually in better spirits during their Army life than soldiers from city backgrounds.” “Aha,” says Lazarsfeld’s imagined reader, “that makes perfect sense. Rural men in the 1940s were accustomed to harsher living standards and more physical labor than city men, so naturally they had an easier time adjusting. Why did we need such a vast and expensive study to tell me what I could have figured out on my own?”
Why indeed…But Lazarsfeld then reveals that all six of the “findings” were in fact the exact opposite of what the study actually found. It was city men, not rural men, who were happier during their Army life. Of course, had the reader been told the real answers in the first place she could just as easily have reconciled them with other things that she already thought she knew: “City men are more used to working in crowded conditions and in corporations, with chains of command, strict standards of clothing and social etiquette, and so on. That’s obvious!” But that’s exactly the point that Lazarsfeld was making. When every answer and its opposite appears equally obvious, then, as Lazarsfeld put it, “something is wrong with the entire argument of ‘obviousness.’ ”
This is from the preface of the book, so if you find this interesting, I beg of you to go get Duncan Watts’ book ASAP. It’s one of my favorites, and it opened my eyes to how common sense and intuition fail us.
If you don’t think this is a big deal, just play a scenario out in your head about how much of a clown you’d look like pulling the same thing
Let’s say you’re at a job interview, and the potential employer wants to see if you’re full of shit and does this type of experiment to you. Or, what if you just meet the man or woman of your dreams, and they test you like this to see if you’re a bullshit artist?
It’s not a good look, and it leads us to our next topic; bullshit.
Bullshit bullshit bullshit
If you’re wondering about the header, it’s because I’m trying to get more comfortable using the word. I really wish there was a more formal word for this, but there’s not. Bullshit is what we were left with, so we might was well teach ourselves to get used to it.
Bullshit can be used in all sorts of contexts. For example, if I die to something dumb in a video game, I’ll shout, “That was bullshit!” If you get an unexpected charge on your bill, you might say, “Well, that’s some bullshit right there.” But today, we’re talking about the epistemological form of bullshit.
In 2005, Harry Frankfurt popularized the term in his wonderful book On Bullshit. Frankfurt is still kicking around today at the ripe age of 93 years old, and decades ago, he noticed this phenomenon of our propensity for bullshit.
In short, bullshit is a complete disregard for the truth. Right now, your intuition may be telling you that this is just lying. But I just told you to stop trusting your intuition, so you ignored intuition’s voice, right?
Here’s what Frankfurt says comparing bullshit to lying:
Both in lying and in telling the truth people are guided by their beliefs concerning the way things are. These guide them as they endeavor either to describe the world correctly or to describe it deceitfully. For this reason, telling lies does not tend to unfit a person for telling the truth in the same way that bullshitting tends to. …The bullshitter ignores these demands altogether. He does not reject the authority of the truth, as the liar does, and oppose himself to it. He pays no attention to it at all. By virtue of this, bullshit is a greater enemy of the truth than lies are.
So, he’s talking about people who just run around not giving a single fuck about the truth. Imagine how bad that can get.
If you went and asked someone for directions, and they said with complete confidence, “That way!” but had no clue what they were talking about, you’d be pissed.
We can even get more extreme with it. What if you asked someone standing next to a rickety old bridge hundreds of feet above ground, “Is this safe to cross?” Without testing the bridge or having any evidence of it’s safety, the person says, “Hell yeah, it’s safe!” Then you walk, you fall, and you splat.
Not cool, right?
Frankfurt also goes on to say this:
…where people are frequently impelled—whether by their own propensities or by the demands of others—to speak extensively about matters of which they are to some degree ignorant.
I’m hoping that you’re here because you care about the truth. If that’s the case, join me in recognizing and calling out bullshit. In fact, a fantastic book that I recently gave another read is The Life-Changing Science of Detecting Bullshit by John V. Petrocelli. John is a professor and researches bullshit, and he believes the way we combat it is by calling it out.
Hopefully, by the end of this, you’ll start looking like less of a clown. Maybe, by calling out others, you can help them take off the makeup and clown shoes as well.
Causes of bullshit
I’m always trying to figure out human behavior, and that’s why I love reading so many books. I also really enjoy not looking like a jackass, and staying intellectually humble helps me out a lot with this.
There are a million reasons for why we bullshit when we’re completely ignorant about the answers. I think a lot of it has to do with how we’re always trying to seek status. We want to look smart to others to raise our status, and we want to make others look dumb to push their status down and raise ours up. And to learn more about that, read The Status Game by Will Storr.
But, for the sake of brevity, I just wanted to list a few common issues that combine with intuition and turn us into bullshitters. Hopefully, it helps you take a step back and ask yourself if you really want to say that next thing.
The Dunning-Kruger effect
Yeah yeah. The Dunning-Kruger effect. The thing we all know about. And for the few who don’t know, this is a cognitive bias that makes us believe we’re way smarter than we are…or is it?
The Dunning-Kruger effect is misused all the time, and it really takes away from the core lesson that we’re supposed to learn from it. People often say, “There’s the Dunning-Kruger effect!” just to insult someone’s intelligence.
It’s not about intelligence; it’s about confidence.
What psychologists David Dunning and Justin Kruger found is that people with less knowledge about a specific topic are far too confident. However, people with more knowledge are less confident precisely because they know more about the topic.
We have to always remember that we don’t know what we don’t know. While we often think we understand something, it’s our intuition fucking with us again. It gives us this overconfidence that tees us up to look like massive clowns.
Let’s use cars as an example. It’s a manly thing to know about cars, but I worked in automotive service for years, and the amount of bullshit customers would say was truly astounding. I was young back then and was deathly afraid of being fired, so I just let customers pretend they knew about how cars worked and just nodded along.
Meanwhile, in the shop, the great mechanics we had would do so much research. Technology in cars is constantly changing, and they knew that. If they just assumed they knew how every new piece of tech worked, they’d be out of a job pretty quick. Some actually did this, and it led to some horror stories. The good ones humbled themselves and realized how much they didn’t know.
I actually think this is why some people respect different forms of art and creativity. For example, I don’t know shit about painting, and frankly, I’m just not an art fan. But for those who are painters, love art, and understand painting, it’s completely different. They can look at something and be totally in awe by the techniques that are used because they have more knowledge. They understand how difficult it was for the artist to pull something off.
And because we’re on the topic, I think this is why people are making a lot of money on TikTok by selling their work. There are people who make custom rugs, wooden tables, bowls out of skateboards, and all sorts of strange things on there. They manage to take a process that took them all day and shorten it to a 1- to 3-minute video.
As I watch in amazement at how much skill and effort goes into it, I love to guess how much they sell it for. When I look at the final product, most of the time, I think, “I guarantee I could buy something similar for extremely cheap if I shopped around.” Sometimes, I know for a fact that I could find something similar in a thrift store.
But, since the person has showed the skill and technique with their video, I know they must sell it for a ton of money, and that’s always the situation. These people are selling things for hundreds or even thousands of dollars, and they’re always sold out.
Maybe it’s because of my background in marketing, but I think its genius. Most of us don’t know how these things are made, but when we see it, it decreases the Dunning-Kruger effect. We can see how it’s made and become willing to pay much more. But someone who doesn’t know values it much less.
Sorry to get off-track for a second, but maybe reading this just provided you with some more value, and now you’ll start showcasing your creating process on TikTok.
The illusion of explanatory depth
I regularly think about this one, and we don’t talk about it nearly enough when it comes to making better decisions and not looking silly. The illusion of explanatory depth is extremely common, but it doesn’t get anywhere near the attention as the Dunning-Kruger effect.
Here’s a decent description of it from The Decision Lab:
The illusion of explanatory depth (IOED) describes our belief that we understand more about the world than we actually do. It is often not until we are asked to actually explain a concept that we come face to face with our limited understanding of it.
I think I first learned about this from either The Intelligence Trap by David Robson or Philip Fernbach’s book The Knowledge Illusion.
Basically, because of our new enemy intuition, if someone were to ask us if we know how an everyday item works, we’d say that we do. We’d be pretty confident about this, but when put to the test, we’d look really dumb.
They’ve done studies where they ask people if they know how things like a toilet or a bicycle work, and people say yes. Then, when asked for them to explain it, they can’t. So, they bullshitted the person, and then, some people try to bullshit their way through explaining how something works.
We take for granted how complex everyday items are because we use them all the time. Now, think about things even more complex than your toilet or bicycle. I die a little inside when I see people trying to go toe-to-toe with scientists and other experts like they somehow know more than the expert.
Like, what?
This issue has become so much worse in the age of public intellectuals. Not long ago, I wrote about Jordan Peterson and strategic ignorance. Just because you know a ton about one thing doesn’t mean you know a ton about everything. For example, just because you’re a psychologist doesn’t mean you know how vaccines work.
That’s really stupid to believe that, Jordan.
Ego and a lack of humility
Lastly, I wanted to toss these in here even though they’re not like the other two. The best thing to ever happen to me was getting sober and having people pound into my head that my ego was ruining my life.
Our egos are such assholes, and they make us look like a clown on a regular basis. The ego makes it so hard for us to say, “I don’t know,” or “I’m not sure. Let me look into that.” Our ego tells us we know everything so we don’t do a little bit of research to find answers. Instead, we just bullshit.
I don’t have any book recommendations off the top of my head, but for a while, I read a ton of books on Buddhist philosophy, and I loved how they discuss the ego. Confidence is great, but ego makes it run wild. So, I highly recommend you check find some books to get your ego in check.
Personally, I remind myself on a daily basis that I don’t know nearly as much as I think I do. I usually have a rotation of a dozen or more books that I’m reading, and one of them is always a book that reminds me how dumb I am. By this, I mean books that teach me about thinking errors like everything we’ve been talking about.
One book I can recommend is Ego is the Enemy by Ryan Holiday. As I’ve learned more and grown more, I now think he’s a douchebag, but this book helped me out a ton at a low point in life where I needed to check my ego.
Let’s bring it all together
Originally, this piece was going to be extremely short and just point out some clowns I’ve come across in the last 24 hours. I like the direction we went instead. But, I think it’s important to show you what inspired this piece.
It all started yesterday when I was chatting with one of my favorite people, Ryan Bruno. I learned about him from his Substack piece Are We Too Gullible or Too Skeptical?, and I was an instant fan. He hasn’t written much lately, but go subscribe to him because I just called him out on Twitter to hopefully get him to start writing some more.
Ryan tweeted an article about how plant-based meat is the best climate investment, and it made me shoot him a DM.
I told him that I’ve been meaning to write a piece about the fascinating mental backflips meat-eaters do. I’ve been vegetarian for about 5 years now, and it’s just so damned interesting. I was actually going to write that piece today, but the responses to this poll made me want to write on this topic first. As per usual, what happened was just too interesting not to discuss.
Here’s the Twitter poll I ran:
We non-crazy vegetarians and vegans have to always let you know that we don’t care if you eat meat. So, this is me telling you that I literally couldn’t care less that you eat meat.
First off, I was delightfully surprised at how many meat-eaters said that they go meatless sometimes. Going meatless is a big ask, but going meatless one day a week is what I recommend when people ask. It’s something, and if we all did it once a week, it’d be pretty effective.
As for the poll, I worded it very specifically and wanted to target a certain demographic. I really don’t care if a climate change denier eats meat. I want to know why people concerned with climate change don’t go meatless. I had theories, but I wanted data to get some info about morality and reasoning.
The last two questions and the responses to those questions are what inspired this piece.
Those questions are giving two options. Do you not know factory farming’s effects on climate change? Or do you think you know and want to bullshit me?
As you can see, of those two questions, more people say it won’t help. Here’s one of the replies that I found interesting:
This is making two arguments: it’s too expensive, and it’s not what we should be concerned about.
The cost thing comes up all the time. As someone who regularly bitches about capitalism, I get it. But, when someone says this, they’re bullshitting.
I’m a frugal person. I have two grocery stores across the street from each other by our house, and I will legit get some things at one store and other things at the other store if it’s cheaper. I double the amount of time it takes shopping just to save money. So trust me, if meat substitutes were more expensive than meat, it’d be on my radar.
Meat alternatives don’t cost much more. After I tweeted this, I was actually grocery shopping and looked around just to be sure I wasn’t being the bullshitter. On average, meat alternatives were about $.50 to $1.00 more from what I saw.
The issue is that intuition and conventional wisdom make people bullshit their answers. We assume it’s more expensive without even checking. This might be because, in our minds, we relate vegetarian and vegan diets with wealthy liberals in New York and LA. This is a mental shortcut that can be easily avoided by checking.
As I was writing this, I went to see if I could find a chart to show, but I came across this great piece from VegNews.com. They explain how prices continue to drop for plant-based meats as well as how meat costs continue to rise. This article took me two seconds to find because it was the first thing that popped up when I typed “meat alternatives price comparison to regular meat” in Google.
So, why bullshit instead of checking first?
I did have one person say that it’d be a hard sell until it was at or below the price of regular meat. That’s a solid theory that I can’t argue with too much. I’d argue with an individual about it, but any large-scale change would be difficult.
Alright, so the first argument about cost is bullshit. Then, there’s the argument that it’s not the priority. There are two ways to think about this:
“Meat alternatives are too inconvenient and/or expensive, so it shouldn’t be the priority.”
Since my question was directed toward people who care about climate change, I assume they already do the normal stuff. They don’t litter, they try to turn lights off when they leave the room, and other typical things we do. So, what’s next? What’s next is things like solar panels and electric vehicles.
This can’t be what they meant because they said plant-based meat substitutes are too expensive. Clearly, solar panels and electric vehicles are far more expensive than meat alternatives.
They must have meant the other option.
“Factory farming isn’t the worst problem, so we don’t need to prioritize meat alternatives.”
From my experience, he meant the second one. I’m truly amazed at how many people don’t know the effect factory farming has on climate change. Either people don’t know, or they refuse to acknowledge it because then they’d have an internal moral conflict about eating meat (something I’ll write about another time).
According to EPA data, factory farming is the 2nd largest contributor to climate change. It’s right behind electricity and heat, but not by much. Electricity and heat account for 25% of climate change, and agriculture, forestry and other land use account for 24%. It’s a 1% difference.
The EPA states:
Agriculture, Forestry, and Other Land Use (24% of 2010 global greenhouse gas emissions): Greenhouse gas emissions from this sector come mostly from agriculture (cultivation of crops and livestock) and deforestation. This estimate does not include the CO2 that ecosystems remove from the atmosphere by sequestering carbon in biomass, dead organic matter, and soils, which offset approximately 20% of emissions from this sector.
So, when someone tells you that factory farming isn’t a primary contributor to climate change, they’re bullshitting you. I don’t want to pick on this guy, specifically, either. A ton of people I talk to do this exact same thing. They spit out their reasoning without even checking.
There are other nuanced debates to be had about how we farm for the plants that go into these meat alternatives, but that’s not what 90% of people bring up. They’re just oblivious to the information and act as though they know.
After showing people the correct data, I typically encounter a sour grapes scenario. They say something along the lines of, “Well, it wouldn’t help that much, so why do it.” They switch the topic from it not contributing to climate change that much to saying that it won’t help.
My goal by calling out bullshit is to plant a seed. The hope is to get someone to update that specific belief, but I doubt that happens often. What I think happens more often is that a person may think twice before bullshitting someone else.
I did have one pleasant encounter, though. It was due to using some good ol’ Socratic questioning and street epistemology.
This person came in hot by firing off three rapid-fire tweets. Their argument was that this was all so new, and we have no clue how it’ll affect our bodies. Then, they went on this rant about science and how we just try things without knowing the long-term side effects on our health.
I paused and asked, “What’s this person really saying?” They were saying that these meat alternatives were something we’ve never eaten before. This is incorrect. Look no further than the fact that they’re traditionally called “plant-based meats”.
So, I asked him how he knew that we don’t know the long-term effects. Then, I went to ask him which ingredients in these foods were new and experimental. His intuition had led him astray, and I wanted to get him back on track.
After replying so much, he simply said he’d be back.
About 30 minutes later, he came back and said nevermind. By simply asking him how he knew what he knew, he started questioning what he thought he knew. I assume in that 30 minutes he went and did some research. When he finally replied, I told him that I respected his ability to admit he may have been wrong. Then, I showed him a list of ingredients from one of the meat alternatives we eat regularly.
It’s not a perfect list of ingredients, but it’s definitely nothing new:
Then, after some discussions with people about meat alternatives, I randomly replied to another tweet and got some bullshitter responses. Being in the questioning blood, I decided to play the game.
In short, the original tweet was saying a politician was bad for wanting to reduce the sentence for people who don’t disclose they have HIV to sexual partners. I simply replied that while I don’t necessarily disagree, there’s no evidence that longer sentences do anything to prevent crimes.
To be clear, I think this is a terrible thing to do. But speaking with moral philosopher Krista Thomason on my podcast has made something stick in my head:
We shouldn’t ask if it’s morally justified. We should be asking if its effective.
If something isn’t effective, we’re just being vengeful. Our goals should be to prevent and reduce crime. Why? Doing this reduces the amount of victims. Unfortunately, we often search for our perception of justice rather than what would be the most beneficial to society.
But, you guessed it. In response to saying that longer sentences don’t reduce crime, intuition kicked in, and some people said some bullshit.
This was much more difficult than the meat conversation. People turn into real assholes with this topic. They want to believe that harsh punishments are the best solution so bad. And then, for some reason, they think bringing up the worst crimes imaginable like rape and pedophilia is going to give them an instant win.
I tried to bust out more street epistemology and ask how they knew longer sentences were effective. I asked them if they had any sources.
The bullshit that came after that could fill up a football stadium. Here’s one claim that was made:
This was bullshit. When I asked for a source, the conversation quickly changed. I’m sure this person heard this somewhere. Or worse, their intuition kicked in and said, “This guy says there’s research pointing out the opposite of what I believe. So, I’m going to bullshit and act like I know about this research and say that it’s from terrible sources.”
I don’t plan on breaking the law anytime soon, so I don’t have much skin in the game. I just care about effectiveness. So, when I read about the prison industrial complex and arguments for prison reform, everyone agrees that harsher sentences are not effective.
I’ll transition into another book recommendation by showing you another bullshit response that fits perfectly:
First off, this is a common form of dissonance to be aware of. When someone challenges your belief, you instantly fire back that clearly, they have bad sources. This gentleman decided to call it “random research” and assume I read about this on a popsicle stick or something.
But do you see how intuition is failing him? He says, “Use logic for obvious stuff.” But as Duncan Watts teaches us, common sense fails us. It seems obvious that harsher sentences prevent crime. But why is this obvious? What evidence do we have? Or has it just turned into conventional wisdom that we no longer question.
So, the book that gave me a massive “aha” moment about this topic was Until We Reckon: Violence, Mass Incarceration, and a Road to Repair by Danielle Sered. It’s a fantastic book, and if you want to learn more about prison reform, definitely check it out. Danielle has been studying this stuff for years, and aside from her research and studies she uses in the book, she also has incredible solutions that are proven. It was really eye-opening.
One study she cites in the book is about this very topic. It shows that longer sentences don’t do anything. First off, just look at the rate of reoffenses. A while back, BBC wrote a great piece about this topic and said this:
Studies also show that reoffending remains high. A 2009 study found that in the US, after three years in prison, 67% of the prisoners were rearrested for a new offence, 46.9% were reconvicted for a new crime, and 25.4% were resentenced to prison. In the UK, almost 70% are reconvicted within a year of release.
I hope you read that and thought, “What the actual fuck?” If this isn’t a big fat failing grade, I don’t know what is. Clearly, retributive justice isn’t working. If prisons were better at reforming prisoners, maybe longer sentences would work in conjunction with it, but that’s not the case.
One thing we do know is that longer sentences don’t work. In her book, Sered explains why. She says that most people don’t even know the sentences for different crimes. When she said that, it just clicked for me. You’d think that would be the common-sense response.
So, in response to that guy, I didn’t even bring up the research. I used his logic against him. I was kind of a dick about it, but by this point, I was tired of the confidence these people had with their ignorant responses.
I replied with something along the lines of the following:
Alright, let’s pretend the research doesn’t exist and use logic for a minute.
Do you think the thing stopping pedophiles is the sentence? Do you really think before they such a monstrous act, they’re like, “I would BUT that sentencing…”?
Follow-up question for you where we can use some logic: How many people do you think know the sentence for anything? Let’s test it: list me all the sentences for every crime in your state.
He didn’t reply, but hopefully, I planted the seed that helps him not bullshit in the future. Worst case, someone else read that, and it made them second-guess what they believed about the justice system.
Embrace curiosity
Now, I hope you see how intuition makes us look like a clown. We step right into a trap. And to drive this point home, I’ll let you know about the asshole I used to be.
I grew up on the internet. I was also loved talking a lot of shit. It used to bring me joy to make people look stupid and to prove them wrong. Growing up on internet forums, you had to pick your battles and only go in when you knew you were right.
I cannot stress to you enough the dopamine rush people like me get when someone bullshit an answer and you have the opportunity to make them look really stupid in front of a lot of people.
Since getting sober, I’ve changed a lot. I’m no longer that person, but some of that internet shit talker is still in me. Today, I hope to educate people rather than just make them look stupid. But, as you saw, I can get sassy when people really get on my nerves, and that’s usually when I log off for the night.
What I’m saying is, don’t give assholes like me the satisfaction. It makes them happy and makes you look bad.
From my experience, the best way to prevent this is to embrace curiosity and to stay humble. I read hundreds of books each year because I’m forever curious. I have a million questions, and when one pops up, I find a book that may answer it. There’s usually someone out there who has spent years researching my question, and they’re a lot smarter than me. Most of the time, they write an entire book about it.
We don’t all have to read entire books on a topic, but think about how simple it is to just Google something real quick. That one guy started to realize his alternative meat reasoning was bad, took a step back, and realized he might be wrong.
Not only does it help you not look stupid to one specific person, but on the internet, we’re in front of an audience. Do you really think people don’t notice the mental gymnastics we pull after we say some bullshit? There are people who are just lurkers. They see all of it, and their opinion of us is going down.
I’m a firm believer that we could all benefit from not caring so much what other people think of us, but this is much different. Following our intuition and being a bullshitter is bad for us and bad for society. We form a bad habit of not caring about the truth and then infecting others with this type of laziness.
So, the next time you feel like jumping into the ring on a topic that you barely know anything about, just pause for a minute. Ask yourself if what you’re about to say is rooted in facts and research or your shitty intuition and ego.
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