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'There's No Good Way To Kill a Bad Idea' (qz.com)
The world is filled with bad, baseless, factually inaccurate ideas that refuse to die. From an article: Philosopher Russell Blackford, a lecturer at the University of Newcastle in Australia, tweeted about this phenomenon earlier this month: "The momentum behind bad ideas can be enormous -- they can plunge on, gathering force, long after receiving devastating criticism." If you've ever found yourself unable to halt someone else's idiotic plans once they were already in motion, you're not alone. Whether you're a politician trying to make congress see sense or simply a manager trying to halt an atrocious team-building plan, there's simply no foolproof way to kill a terrible idea. Blackford blames the momentum behind bad ideas on cascade effects. Yes, individuals are prone to making poor decisions for emotional or biased reasons (known as "cognitive heuristics") and this irrationality is part of the problem. But there's also a broader sociological issue, in that others' opinions carry a huge amount of weight in influencing our views. A cultural consensus -- even without proper evidence -- can form pretty quickly. If one person convinces a second, says Blackford, then a third person will be far more likely to agree with the majority view. This effect exponentially increases with each person who agrees with the others. "We soon have a sociological effect whereby everyone knows that, say, a certain movie is very good or very bad, even though everyone might have 'known' the exact opposite if only a few early voices had been different," says Blackford.
Like, for example, unicode?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
The previous story about "Modern Languages"?
This concept is also know as "escalation of commitment", where you feel you're welded to an idea and backing down will cause you to look bad. It's especially common in groupthink scenarios.
The Challenger disaster is one that comes to mind almost immediately. Plenty of people thought the launch was a bad idea, but groupthink set in and the launch proceeded.
Well, we did derail the whole Clinton train for a while. That has to count for something. But whether we successfully killed it, time will tell.
BTW, it looks like the Internet Archive now has most of the "Shattered" book online if you're feeling ghoulish.
https://archive.org/details/ShatteredInsideHillaryClintonsDoomedCampaign
I don't know about you, but to me, 174 Petawatts of untapped energy seems like it should be able to power the planet. Sure, one has to determine how one stores-up energy to use when the planet's rotation obscures the sun, but given that fossil-fuel-based power required all sorts of intermediate steps to get where we are today anyway, this does not seem like an impossible task.
There are more ways of storing potential energy than chemical batteries.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
...ideas you think are bad aren't really bad?
If you can't kill a "bad idea", that suggest that there are people who believe it to be a "good idea".
This whole exercise presumes that he is the one in possession of the Truth and that all others are idiots.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
Nope. We have great examples after great examples of people doing what "sounds good", which ends up fucking up everyone else. See Venezuela and Bernie's pride in that country's socialism (before it collapsed) ..
“These days, the American dream is more apt to be realized in South America, in places such as Ecuador, Venezuela and Argentina, where incomes are actually more equal today than they are in the land of Horatio Alger.”
Socialism is a proven failure, time and again.Yet it "sounds good" and that is enough to keep in propped up on college campuses and dens of Liberals everywhere.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
The unkillable idea owes its invulnerability in large part to two phenomena: the sunk cost fallacy, and the Abilene paradox.
In short, once a group of people have agreed (even very reluctantly) on a course of action and expended resources in pursuit of the goal, nobody wants to openly admit it was a bad idea to begin with, and everyone will fight to defend it.
There's a bit more to it. An alderman around here once said: "There is tremendous pressure to build concensus and get something going, and the effort to reach an agreement on how to proceed is considerable. Once that has happened there is no going back, even if everyone thinks the agreement is shit. And in politics, everyone is focused on passing motions, any motion, the contents do not matter all that much, let alone that we ever evaluate the effectiveness later on"
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
Affordable compared to what? What's the cost difference between building a massive solar plant that stores energy in the form of some kind of superheated substrate to emit that heat back to generate power, plus the maintenance of that facility, compared to the cost to build and fuel a power plant that burns fossil fuel?
No one is expecting fossil fuel plants to just be switched off, what most expect is to build new plants of new types to replace old plants as they're increasingly nonviable.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
there's simply no foolproof way to kill a terrible idea
Sure there is. In business just ask for a fully costed proposal. (This also works for killing perfectly sound ideas, too.). if the proposer ever gets that finished, just tell them it's "interesting" and then shred it.
Outside of the company, in real life, you can associate the idea with something that invokes moral outrage: when someone blurts out a mind-numbingly stupid idea, just whisper in their ear "I wouldn't suggest that, you know the person who came up with it was a child-molester" (or Nazi, or whatever group is currently demonised).
If we're talking about FAKE NEWS, there really is no reason to try to kill it, so long as you are able to insulate yourself from the effects of other people's stupidity: buying gold, taking a contrarian investment, simply ignoring it or just get into the game and come up with something even more fake or exaggerated - it can be great fun if you don't take it seriously.
if you have an evil streak, you could even encourage the FAKE NEWS promoter that it is a really good idea and that they should invest in it - big time. Maybe even telling them that you know a guy and if they just give you a cash payment, you'll pass it on ...
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
Socialism always leads to collapse of the economy, as people figure out how to game the system. Because it hasn't collapsed everywhere yet, actually goes exactly to the article's premise.
Functioning society doesn't require socialism at all. It requires social contracts of approved behavior, and enforcement of those rules. The problem is, we have a bunch of people who think that rules don't apply to them because the rules are "oppressive". Well duh, rules are oppressive to people who don't want to be bound by them.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
Maybe in that scenario. I wasn't there so I can't comment further.
But I have been in situations where my peers put on a lot of pressure.
You either fall in line with the group or you are an 'idiot'. Management does take its cues from underlings - it just sucks when you are not the underling they listen to.
The challenger case was an example of several different sorts of broken thinking:
1) Concerns engineers had over the design were not passed along to the contractor.
2) Evidence of O-ring erosion was not passed to NASA upper management.
3) The contractor identified O-ring erosion as a major problem and put into work a redesign. Shuttles were not grounded because this was considered an "acceptable flight risk."
4) We really need to get this launch going, we can't afford more delays. "I am appalled, appalled by your recommendation [to scrub the launch]. My God, Thiokol, when do you want me to launch, next April?"
5) Management ignored the express objections of engineering. They thought if the primary O-ring failed, the secondary O-ring would be sufficient, despite that being mere theory. It was a "criticality 1 component," and NASA regs forbid the reliance on a backup for a Criticality 1 component.
6) For unknown reasons, the contractor's management reversed itself the night before and recommended launch despite the temps and ice. NASA did not ask why. A chief engineer at the contracting company told his wife that night that the Space Shuttle Challenger would blow up.
The Shuttle disaster is the perfect example of reasonable, well-supported arguments being unable to penetrate the group-think of bad decisions, because other factors (launch delays, etc) were allowed to override a known flight risk.
There is also the fact that it takes more energy to make a solar panel than the panel will get back in its lifetime.
That is incredibly false. Going on basic logical analysis alone, if what you say were the case, they would never have a positive monetary return on investment unless you were manufacturing them in a location with rock-bottom energy prices (say Iceland) and using them in places with sky-high energy prices (Hawaii?). Years of installations in a huge variety of situations shows that they DO have a positive monetary return over their life.
If you want actual data you can search EROEI ("Energy Returned on Energy Invested")
it takes more energy to make a solar panel than the panel will get back in its lifetime.
This is the perfect example of a bad idea that just can't be killed. It may, possibly, have been true back in the '80s. It is not true now, and hasn't been true for a long time. Modern solar panels produce much more energy than the total energy used to manufacture them.
Look up "energy payback time".
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
Socialism is "for the collective, at the expense of individual liberty".
No.
Socialism is worker ownership of the means of production.
Most people today seem to have long since lost track of what socialism is actually defined as, but if you're going to be pedantic, be pedantic and correct.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
Socialism always leads to collapse of the economy, as people figure out how to game the system. Because it hasn't collapsed everywhere yet, actually goes exactly to the article's premise.
That's an assertion that has been made un-falsifiable by weasel-wording. You could say the same thing about anything. Democracy. Speaking French. Taxing liquor sales.
"Democracy always leads to collapse of the economy, as people figure out how to game the system. Because it hasn't collapsed everywhere yet, actually goes exactly to the article's premise." What, some democracies haven't collapsed? That just proves my point!
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
And in fact, it *does* power the planet. It's only our narrow focus on things that are literally "accounted for" in our economy that makes it appear otherwise. If we had to replace all the things that sunlight does for us with our non-renewable energy sources they wouldn't even come close, but that all happens off the books so it's invisible.
Now I worked for environmental organizations in the years of transition from crying indian environmentalism to "sustainability" based environmentalism, and I always had a problem with the new framing: non-sustainability is by definition a self-correcting problem.
So if we survive as a society, that society will eventually be powered by (and limited by) solar energy. The problem isn't non-sustainability per se, but the predictable costs of running unprepared into the limits of the processes we depend on.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
I use this example when talking to people about anti-vaxxers. You can't just say vaccines don't cause autism. You are much better off talking about how bad the diseases are that can be cured by vaccines. Alternatively, you could talk about the research on the efficacy of vaccines in preventing diseases, or even just discuss the history of vaccines and Jonas Salk. What you can't do, is tell somebody "not X." All they hear is "X." Then I tell my friend who I am explaining this to, "Did you know that JFK was not a homosexual?" And whoever I'm talking to, no matter their political bent, instantly starts thinking, "wait... was he?"
By stating the opposite of a thing, you reinforce the original thing -- even if they weren't thinking about it in the first place! Imagine how much stronger that reinforcement is, if they already had that notion.
I forget where I first learned this trick. Probably on this godforsaken forum. But it always causes people to realize they have been arguing with others the wrong way. If you know somebody is wrong, you can deflect to something you know is right. You can ask them to elaborate on exactly how they know the thing they say they know. You can try to find common ground. You can state facts that support a counterargument, and let them connect the dots. But if you just say the opposite of their argument, you will not succeed.
It's a hard lesson to remember and use in real life, because human nature is to say "nu-uh." But if you can do a little verbal jujitsu, you are much more likely to succeed in getting people to see your point of view.
(I just noticed this whole post is sort of meta, since I'm disagreeing with the premise of the article without actually saying so.)
religious brainwashing early in life. Innocent children are taught that they should be unquestioningly accepting of wacky ideas just because their elders seem to believe them. Their natural scepticism is denounced as heresy.
The whole idea that anything should just be accepted as a matter of faith is a threat to democracy. Sunday school is clearly a form of child abuse. (even when it's done on Saturday)
... the gods themselves contend in vain, Schiller said.
But maybe not. I just finished Hanah Arendt's famous Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, about the abduction and trial of the former SS officer who was in charge of "evacuating" Jews to the death camps. Eichmann claimed -- probably truthfully -- to be horrified and distressed when he saw what was happening in the extermination camps. But his horror was greatly mollified at the a conference in the Berlin suburb of Wannsee in which many important and respectable people discussed the Final Solution frankly and unabashedly, as if it were no big deal.
Arendt also points out something interesting about Denmark, a country which was under total military domination by the Third Reich but in which society from the King down resisted the expulsion of Jews. Not only were the Germans unable to expel even stateless Jews from Denmark, confirmed SS officers posted to Denmark would suddenly become unreliable on the Jewish Question.
This suggests to me that when you feel like you're powerless against stupid or even evil ideas, there is always something you can do that can be very powerful: you can set an example.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
No one is expecting fossil fuel plants to just be switched off, what most expect is to build new plants of new types to replace old plants as they're increasingly nonviable.
I think you're very mistaken there, many people expect exactly that.