Why We’re All Flawed Tools
“Unless you have confidence in the ruler’s reliability, if you use a ruler to measure a table you may also be using the table to measure the ruler.”
Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Fooled by Randomness
I have a pump that incorrectly measures the air pressure in my bike’s tires. Compared with several other pressure gauges, it over-reports air pressure by 10-20 PSI. Measuring a tire’s air pressure with this pump tells me more about the pump than about the air pressure. I don’t know what my tire pressure is, but I know for sure that the pressure gauge on the pump is broken and incorrect.
If the measurement tool is reliable, you can count on it to tell you something meaningful about the thing it’s designed to measure. A trustworthy tape measure would tell you how long a table is. If the tape measure is unreliable, the act of measuring becomes bidirectional, and the table being measured has just as much to say (or more) about the tape measure. You can only come to simple truths like “the tape measure is longer than the table, it can’t be trusted beyond that, and I don’t even know why I’m wasting my time with this shit.”
A reliable measuring tool also becomes unreliable if you measure the wrong thing. A thermometer can provide reliable insights about temperature, but it is no more reliable than a broken tape measure if you want to know how long a table is. If you’re using thermometers to measure your furniture, you’ve got bigger problems and should probably seek help.
All of this comparison and measurement stuff is probably self-evident and obvious, and now you’re pissed because I made you read about it for three paragraphs before we got to the good stuff. It becomes powerfully insightful when we recognize that we are, every one of us, constantly acting as measuring tools. We constantly pass judgment and form opinions about world events, the news, politicians, and mom’s new boyfriend Jed. Like my bike pump, the BS we come up with often has more to say about us than it does about what we’re evaluating. If you hate your mom’s stupid new boyfriend Jed before you’ve even met him, that probably says more about you than it does about Jed. We are, every one of us, constantly acting as measuring tools. We constantly pass judgment and form opinions about the world around us. I’ll be the first to pull a half-baked theory out of my ass, not recognizing that my opinions on topics like immigration and abortion probably have more to do with my group identity and adopted belief systems than with the comprehensive and objective truth of those issues.
the wisdom and discretion to recognize you are a broken measurement instrument
Most people’s default state of mind is to go about their daily lives acting like a broken measurement instrument. And we’re completely oblivious to the broad scope of our ignorance and faulty opinions as we form automatic judgments about the world. We rarely slow down enough to distinguish between the automatic judgments and opinions and the reality we’re layering onto. If we’re not carefully, we end up experiencing these judgments and opinions as part of reality, not as separate and potentially fallible.
The challenge is to notice when your experience of the world blends with the involuntary and unconscious judgments you form. Notice every time you think someone is wrong, that they’re stupid, that they’re evil. These are all truth statements. Are they really true? Can you be absolutely sure they’re true? It might be more helpful instead to think to yourself that you don’t like them, that you don’t think they’re smart, or that your belief system clashes with theirs (so much that you default to thinking they’re evil). These alternatives are not much different, but they all leave room for something that likely is true: you’re not enough of an expert to pass judgment reliably.
