How To Know If You Believe BS

It is almost impossible to master more than a small number of things in life. Given our inability to master everything, we are presented with a problem. Our condition of limitation and ignorance impels us to trust someone with more expertise than us, but who? We all have a friend who is a “computer guy” or a “fashionista” and we defer to their expertise because we know and trust them. We defer to trusted and often institutional authorities. Today, the traditional authorities are declining and our social networks are larger but more superficial and so increasingly we do not have access to trusted sources. This, however, has not made us less confident in our beliefs. So what’s happening?

The internet is a marvel but it has produced a unique problem, namely that information is no longer scarce or expensive. It’s plentiful and cheap. When information was scarce, we had no choice but to contend with whatever we had access to. We all read the same one book and we all had to deal with it. We had to develop opinions, accept or reject, and so on. Our concepts of rigor, logic, and skepticism emerged from that condition. Today, in a world of information abundance, we no longer have to do that. We no longer contend with information. We don’t vet it or validate it. Instead, we seek out the information that confirms our psychological desires, and it’s readily available. We even do the same thing with people. We don’t have to contend with the hundred people in our village. We don’t have to learn to deal with them or identify who is competent or trustworthy. We don’t have to learn the social skills necessary to navigate a closed community. We now have thousands of “friends” and access to people all over the world. We can pick the people who tell us what we want to hear or are easiest to deal with.

We no longer live in an age of belief or an age of skepticism. We live in an age of confirmation. We do this with information, with friends, and even jobs, and so on. The result of this is that we end up believing a lot of BS.

There is this notion that “other,” more dimwitted people than ourselves are being convinced by billionaires and their propaganda or activists or religion or whatever but that’s not really true. We are being persuaded but it’s not external and artificial. We are persuading ourselves and we’re inviting in the source of that persuasion. No political add convinces anyone of anything. We WANT to believe something and so when the information comes along that confirms what we want to believe, we adopt it and then work extremely hard to convince ourselves of its validity. We are the ones doing the persuading and with the ready access of information, we can easily seek it out ourselves.

Persuasion is a tricky thing because it relies on ignorance. We all have gaps in our knowledge and persuasion only happens in the gaps. If you know something for certain then no persuasion can happen. Consider a math equation. 2+x=5. Most of us can clearly see that the unknown (x) is 3 and we will not consider another option. We cannot be persuaded, but a more complex equation will make us think a bit more to figure out the answer. That’s the gap. That’s when we consider multiple answers. In math, we can check our answer and so we are punished for pursuing a preferred outcome over the correct one but in most areas of belief, there is no immediate “check.” We are free to believe what we want and so we do. The consequences are usually far enough removed that we can place the blame wherever we’d like, which is generally anywhere but the actual error.

This the key idea. If persuasion happens in the gaps then there is a easy way to know if you’ve been persuaded. Do you have a strong opinion about something you don’t understand? I sure do. I’m a sports fan and I have lots of strong opinions about players and plays and schemes but no expert in his right mind would trust my opinion because it’s mostly BS. Personally, I try to reserve my BS opinions for harmless things like sports. It’s more of a problem when you adopt BS for politics, family, or literally anything important.

Marketers have long sought out access to people in the hopes of persuading them but that’s no longer the right approach. What they need to do today is identify the psychology of people and their underlying value assumptions about the world. This will inform them of what people WANT to believe. Then they’ll know who to target but they won’t have to convince them. If you already know what they want to believe then you need only present yourself in a complimentary way and they will make the sale themselves.

More BS.

This is how we date. This is how we search for jobs. This how we vote. We’re driven by BS. Most of our passionate beliefs will fall by the wayside in five years or ten. We’ll move on. You saw this with the gay marriage debate. In early 2000’s in liberal California, the overwhelming majority opposed gay marriage and within a decade, a clear majority support it. The facts didn’t change. The moral beliefs didn’t change. Most of us never had credible opinions on the matter. Our first vote was BS and so was our second. It’s just that we displaced the old BS with the new.

The real problem with BS is that you’re making the sale, you’re doing the persuading, but you aren’t developing the belief. It belongs to someone else. Odds are, you don’t know who they are and they don’t care who you are. They have no interest in your well-being and often don’t even care about the issue itself. They are motivated by something and because they aren’t your neighbor or a trusted source, you have no idea what is motivating them. That’s the killer. Christians advocate following God’s will, and atheists always think they’re following logic and reason, but when they adopt BS, they’re not listening to God or reason or logic or “science.” They’re listening to me or someone like me. They’re being catered to by someone who knows what they want and has served them up an inviting plate of BS. Bon appetit.