Simplistic thinking in a complex world
By: Daniel Bookman
Tags: Political Correctness, Empathy, Complexity, Conversations

Photo by Matthew Henry

I have been a consistent reader for the last 15+ years across a wide variety of topics. This year I decided to be more targeted in my reading, largely limiting it to philosophy-related texts. However, in pursuit of my curiosity I’ve allowed myself the indulgence of also reading multiple titles in Oxford’s ‘Very Short Introductions’ (VSI) series. These books are as the titles suggest: very short, high-level introductions to topics that (1) have always sparked my interest and (2) I consider essential tools to assist in the comprehension of the world around us. Topics I’ve selected, with no specific criteria, include ‘time’, ‘chaos’ and importantly for this piece: ‘complexity’.

This particular VSI title dealt with complexity theory as it relates to complex physical and adaptive systems. While the logic and frameworks used to analyze said systems went a little over my head, the book brought something I’ve been struggling with into sharp focus.

Although there’s arguably never been a better time to be a human being on planet earth, we’re an angry and divided bunch. There are many valid hypotheses as to how we got here, and I’m going to add to the chorus. I think the current state of global discourse is partially due to two factors:

Our inability to accept or process complexity, resulting in simplistic thinking; and The overpowering desire to be ‘right’, instead of making actual progress.

As we’ll discuss, we have reverted to simplistic thinking in a world of increasing complexity. Where we combine simplistic thinking and a desire to prove others ‘wrong’, we become optimized for yelling. Conversations that involve shouting usually don’t benefit its participants. They benefit people who sell megaphones.

Simplistic thinking in a complex world.

We now tend to think of the world in terms of ‘true’ or ‘false’ and ‘right’ or ‘wrong’. The reality is that the world is much more complex than these conclusions allow. Complexity is what makes this blue marble so remarkable. Consider the complexity of the Amazon rainforest and its 10 million species of animals, plants and insects; the intricacy of the (dying) Great Barrier Reef, the world’s largest structure made of living organisms; the energy and interconnectedness of the world’s global supply chains; the explosion of the internet and the advent of global connectivity.

The VSI book on complexity delved into how these complex systems exhibit the property of ‘emergence’, whereby the action of the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. These complex systems and their interaction with each other give rise to the emergent phenomenon of life on this anonymous rock floating in space. Complexity is what makes life beautiful.

Complexity also exists on the micro scale, where we live with complexity in our own lives. We are all members of multiple communities, belonging to those relating to our gender, nationality, social leanings, politics, sport, culture, heritage and religion. I am Australian. I am also a male, a Jew, a New York resident, of Lithuanian/Polish/South African/New Zealand descent, a Zionist, a social progressive, an investor, an operator and a Humanist.

These different communities combine to form a complex picture of who I am. To some, my list is an incongruous one. How can I be a Zionist and socially progressive at the same time? How can I be an ‘Australian’ if my heritage is not actually Australian? How can I be a (albeit non-religious) Jew and Humanist?

We are all full of contradictions, beliefs and opinions that are difficult to reconcile for those who do not share our unique make-up. I am the way I am because of my unique characteristics, and it is flawed logic to assume that my characteristics mesh to create the emergent phenomenon of ‘Daniel’ as a predictable and rational being. It is difficult to apply rules to our views and opinions. Every person has their own complex and unique identity, which itself is impacted by the particular group they associate with more strongly or temporally.

Let’s take a personal and controversial example: my support of Israel. I am a Jew and a Zionist (which is now a very dirty word). I am a supporter of the State of Israel and its right to exist in its current location as the Jewish homeland. My great-grandfather was the only survivor of the Holocaust of 8 siblings. The existence of a strong Jewish state is therefore very personal. For me, the only place for the Jewish state is Israel, not Uganda, the USSR or Madagascar.

While I am a strong supporter of the Jewish state, I am not an unconditional supporter of the government’s policies or the attitudes of large number of its Jewish constituents. My humanist and socially progressive elements strongly empathize with the Palestinians, their plight and its many causes (including Israeli policies and Palestinian terrorist leadership).

Ultimately, to reconcile my Zionism with my Humanism, I have decided that the former is my primary driver when considering this complex situation. For my views to be considered racist, there must be a fundamental misunderstanding of, or wilful blindness towards, the complexity of the situation.

My personal feelings and experience may generate an opinion that appears inconsistent with elements of my make-up, but this is a not a result of ignorance, or a lack of care or empathy. I believe we should all be allowed to hold views that necessarily acknowledge hardship for those on opposing sides of the viewpoint. This is a function of complexity, not malice.

Right intentions. Not-so-right outcomes.

We appear to be crafting a world on the basis of universal and absolute truths, but unfortunately seem to neglect the fact that the interface of these ‘truths’ and reality is human beings. To assume that people will not overlay their individual experience and make-up onto the application of said truths is naïve.

Leaning on complexity theory, we understand that behaviours in a complex system are very hard to predict. Small changes in initial conditions or histories can have outsized and unpredictable impacts on a system’s dynamic. As we’ll see below, the attempt to institute a rules-based system — which for the purpose of this piece include political correctness or dogma — brings absurd results. Two examples:

Environment, Social and Governance (ESG) investing: A contextual example

As an investor, I have witnessed the challenge of implementing a rules-based system in the burgeoning ESG investing movement. The push moves us in the right direction towards investing through filters that prioritize ESG goals. However, there exists a very complex interaction between investing and positive ESG outcomes.

Attempts at creating ESG-branded investment products — like an ETF/index fund that only invests in companies that tick certain criteria — are well-intentioned but create perverse outcomes. Exxon Mobil (the world’s largest non-state-owned oil company) is included as a top holding in certain ESG funds. Why? Despite its clearly adverse impact on the environment, its size ensures that even small company initiatives can have an outsized positive impact and bring marginal improvement, due its size and low-ESG base.

I don’t wish to delve into the logic here, as I acknowledge that the issue is… complex, and Exxon needs to be part of the solution in some form. The point is that this is an attempt to apply a rules-based system (ESG filters) to an incredibly complex system (the investment world) with somewhat absurd outcomes (the world’s largest oil producer’s inclusion in an ESG fund).

Intersectionality: A relevant example

The concept of ‘intersectionality’ is a more relevant example, as it touches on issues of political correctness and dogma. Intersectionality was borne out of the feminist movement and is described as:

‘a framework for conceptualizing a person, group of people, or social problem as affected by a number of discriminations and disadvantages. It takes into account people’s overlapping identities and experiences in order to understand the complexity of prejudices they face.’[1]

The theory states that all prejudices are interconnected and that each individual prejudice adds to all other prejudices. Again, I do not wish to debate the logic, I only wish to highlight how a rules-based system applied to complex issues produces somewhat absurd results.

The 2019 Women’s March held in the US provides a useful example. The feminist event effectively ostracized Jewish participants and the use of rainbow flags with a Star of David on the basis that Zionism and Feminism are mutually exclusive because Zionism is inherently racist. It still strikes me as absurd. The leaders of an event founded on the basis of female empowerment and inclusion decided that support for the state of Israel was an exclusionary position.

To add to that, pro-life feminist groups were also removed from the official list of participants and sponsors, because the March considers itself pro-choice. This too is patently absurd. Surely female empowerment involves empowering women to make their own choices. This position simply replaces one oppressor (the patriarchy) with another (intersectional feminism). There is a wilful blindness towards the complexity inherent in each of these individual issues, let alone their interaction.

The only path forward involves: (1) understanding why somebody who does not share our unique make-up may hold a very different view of a situation and (2) why they have ascribed primacy to certain imperatives, aka ‘empathy’.

In relation to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, I institute my own hierarchy and I do not begrudge others doing the same. It is a difference of opinion on a complex issue. Our inclination to resort to the use of labels proscribed by the rules of political correctness or dogma do not do justice to the complexity inherent in certain situations and entrench the slide towards simplistic thinking. To paraphrase Ricky Gervais, the freedom to express ideas is more important than the freedom of not being offended by speech. Unfortunately, we have lost the ability to accept opposing viewpoints.

The consequences of simplistic thinking.

Political correctness and labels facilitate a simplistic view of the world. In the previous example, those labels were Feminist, Zionist, Pro-Choice, Pro-Life. The labels allow us to quickly analyze somebody on the basis of a snapshot of their views and reduce their opinion on a complex issue, to a more easily understandable picture.

But the picture we get is merely a caricature, and does not fairly represent a person, their values, and their unique experience. A rancher in Arizona with legitimate concerns regarding immigration and open borders does not consider himself a xenophobe, nor does he wish to be called one; a young mother in Kentucky with strong views on how she wants her child to be taught about gender is not transphobic, nor does she want to be labelled as such; and a Jew living in New York who prioritizes Israel’s security over the Palestinian’s right to self-determination is not a racist, nor does he see himself as one.

The effect of labelling is that it primes participants on both sides of a discussion for confrontation. The underlying issue at hand is subordinated to the shitfight around what each person is or is not. Labelling is an especially useful tool for those who are incapable of debating an issue on its merits. Once you’ve forced somebody to defend against an inappropriate label, you’re halfway to ‘winning’ the debate.

The more corrosive impact of labelling is the chilling effect it has on honest and frank discussion. The threat of being slapped with a derogatory label is a strong disincentive to stop people raising even mildly non-politically correct opinions. It is an example of ‘groupthink’. It has created an environment where we are unable to acknowledge that there are competing interests at hand in every complex issue we address. There are material logistical and security imperatives for why a country like the United States cannot maintain open borders; to insist as much is not racist. There are strong humanitarian and legal imperatives for fairly and humanely processing those seeking asylum; to insist as much is not ‘lunacy’ or an invitation to ‘violent crime, drugs and human trafficking.’

We are struggling to have productive conversations over meals, on Twitter, at the Women’s March, in the media or in Congress. At this point, it’s important to consider what has primed us to think simplistically and what has led us to our current predicament.

What primes us for simplistic thinking?

There are many potential causes of simplistic thinking: a lack of independent or critical thinking, anger and disillusionment. These are all valid reasons, but themselves are a symptom of a larger problem. My view is that the incentives inherent within the attention economy we now live within are the biggest culprit, and I’ll explain why.

Living in the attention economy, we are primed for consumption and short formats. Tweets, Facebook videos, Instagram stories, headlines, click-bait. The attention economy is exactly that: a marketplace where our attention is the currency. The merchants (social platforms and media companies) provide access to our attention, allowing their suppliers (advertisers) to shop their wares. As long as large media platforms maintain a free model, advertising revenue will remain the core driver of internet commerce.

Short formats have become the default media format. Dramatic or sensationalist hooks are now the most effective instrument in the content creators’ toolkit to garner attention. The media landscape has bent to this paradigm and is now built on incentives aligned with attention grabbing and its associated revenue. As a result, the entire media landscape has been optimized for this outcome: attention. Context, detail and nuance are roadkill.

‘The map is not the territory’ - Alfred Korzybski

This sentiment has been adapted to explain the difference between perception and reality and is instructive in explaining our current media landscape. The media has always played a role in providing the masses with a portal into topics they otherwise do not directly interact with, including politics, national security, the broader economy and international relations.

When you overlay the journalistic intent with the corporate imperative for attention (=advertising revenue), deft explanations, nuance and complexity are subordinated to clickbait. What we are left with is a Fourth Estate that we rely upon as the map, but which is actually providing a distorted, angry, sensationalist view of the territory. We must acknowledge the incentives inherent in the modern media business in order to qualify its content and acknowledge it may not represent the territory. This is itself a tragedy.

Simplistic thinking is a response, not a choice.

The characterization above is not ground-breaking but is important context for the discussion to follow, where we consider how the constant competition for attention causes us to resort to simplistic thinking. I say resort instead of choose, because we do not choose to think simplistically. We do not wish to think that our decisions and conclusions are based on incomplete information, short-cut thinking or labels; we like to think that our views are considered and were formed on the basis of somewhat complete information and measured thinking. But per the conversation above, our attention is being competed for by well-resourced and motivated actors, with outcomes targeted at satisfying their incentives.

How is one then forced to respond in the face of the overwhelming competition for attention? At its core, this is a signal processing challenge, and luckily, we all possess a finely-tuned signal processor that can provide a useful analogy. At this point, I would really love to delve into some brain chemistry and neuroscience, because it’s incredible. But I’m clearly not qualified to do so and would risk losing your valuable attention.

Suffice to say that the brain is incredibly complex, comprised of close to 100 billion neurons. Part of the reason it has evolved this complexity is to deal with the incredible amount of information — in the form of signals — that we receive on a daily basis. Our brains have therefore developed a system of short-cuts, in the form of ‘heuristics’, that assist us in processing information:

‘Heuristics play important roles in both problem-solving and decision-making. When we are trying to solve a problem or make a decision, we often turn to these mental shortcuts when we need a quick solution. The world is full of information, yet our brains are only capable of processing a certain amount. If you tried to analyze every single aspect of every situation or decision, you would never get anything done. In order to cope with the tremendous amount of information we encounter and to speed up the decision-making process, the brain relies on these mental strategies to simplify things so we don’t have to spend endless amounts of time analyzing every detail.’[2]

When dealing with inherently complex and polarizing issues, our brain relies on these heuristics to assist in decision making. While heuristics are powerful and essential tools, their capacity for entrenching biases is well-known.

When it comes to complex issues like those covered earlier (immigration, feminism, zionism, gender education, pro-life/choice), our brains are hopelessly overmatched. The content creator or media companies’ incentives do not include prioritizing our attention’s welfare. Facebook engineers or TV news producers have no sympathy for what else we would like to do with our attention. Their sole focus is in the moment: how do I grab this person and not let them go?

In the face of this ceaseless competition for our attention, when it comes to complex topics, we do not have a choice. We resort to heuristics as a coping mechanism for making sense of the information endlessly flowing in. The questions regarding complex issues shift from empathy, to ‘right’ or ‘wrong’. This is the filter we must apply to keep our head above water. Not letting immigrants in = wrong; teaching non-binary gender courses = right; negative gearing = good.

In this world, there is no room for complexity. The space to empathize and understand is hard to find. In the constant battle for our attention, we do not have the chance to consider the unique circumstances that may have made Person A maintain Position B. We do not have the time to consider how a century of history compelled Person C to represent Group D in a particular way.

As soon as the optimized content has been absorbed, we’re already subjected to the next grab at our attention and are forced to file our immediate reaction using a label or heuristic that only further undermines our ability to think in a considered way.

There is a path forward.

Again, simplistic thinking is not a choice, it is a response. Where there is a response, there must be a stimulus or cause. In this case, the stimulus is over-stimulation itself: it is the way we constantly expose ourselves to the forms of media that compete for our attention. If what we lack is time to consider complexity and nuance, then the way forward involves switching off, and regaining control over our attention.

“All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.”- Blaise Pascal

Our attention is clearly incredibly valuable to the corporations of the world. Every time we cede our attention, we are giving away our most valuable resource for free: our time. The way we can take back our attention is to remove intrusive platforms that we now take as a given in our lives.

Facebook, Twitter and Instagram are not default parts of our constitutions. I ‘quit’ Instagram 18 months ago because my relationship with it had become unhealthy. The most interesting part of the experience since has been the defensiveness I sometimes encounter from friends I tell about ‘quitting’. It is as if my decision undermines them. It is as if they’ve convinced themselves that Instagram is a non-negotiable part of their lives, because they’ve invested so much effort and anxiety in curating the avatar of them that it now is. I’ve started to think that a rejection of the platform feels to them like a repudiation of who they are.

We are not bound to social media. While social media companies do not necessarily create the content, they are the key channels distributing it. Those that convince themselves that they ‘need’ social media for certain functions generally haven’t thought hard enough about how those functions could be fulfilled through other, less-obtrusive channels. Unfortunately, the likelihood that enough people will ‘switch off’ to make a meaningful impact on this debate is low.

‘Right’, ‘wrong’, and the importance of empathy.

If we assume that the attention economy is here to stay, we must become more adept at thinking around it. As a thought experiment, let’s remove the modern attention economy and consider how we would otherwise respond to complex issues.

We should acknowledge that the following elements would still exist: heuristics and biases, partisan reporting, media echo chambers (print newspapers, periodic publications, evening news) and bad actors. These have existed for centuries (millions of years in the case of heuristics) and will continue long into the future. They are hallmarks and expressions of the human condition.

What we need to ultimately consider, is whether we’re more concerned with being ‘right’ or making real progress. If we are actually interested in getting those across the aisle in question to empathize with our position, then we have to drop the desire to prove them wrong, embarrass or ‘beat’ them in any sense.

In a world optimized for attention, it is difficult to attract and retain it through engaging in a conversation with somebody about the nuance and complexity of a particular issue. We’re much more likely to do so through ‘dunking on’ or ‘owning’ somebody. Sadly, the desire for attention has destroyed the ability to properly engage and conversations are over before they begin.

The problems we are confronting today are complex; every stakeholder in each complex situation we address likely has a legitimate reason for feeling the way that they do. Empathy is the only tool we have for understanding their concern and incorporating it into a proposed solution.

‘You’re wrong’ is not a solution. ‘You don’t understand’ is not a solution. ‘You’re an idiot’ is not a solution. ‘You’re just a misogynist’ is not a solution. ‘You’re just an anti-semite’ is not a solution. ‘You’re a homo/trans-phobe’ is not a solution. ‘You’re just racist’ is not a solution.

I absolutely wrote this piece from my personal perspective; some of the views expressed are my own. The point is that none of us should be made to feel alienated on the basis of our views if they do not conform to some rules-based system. While my views may differ strongly from those of a gun-toting god-fearing elderly man in Oklahoma, I respect his right to hold them on the basis of his unique experience and the complexity the issue entails.

The beauty of complex systems — whether it’s the Amazon rainforest, human interaction or social media — is that they will continue to operate and advance. They are not concerned with perfection, just progress. While we waste time throwing labels at each other, our world continues to evolve, as does the complexity within it.

It is on us to make conscious decisions to suppress the desire to be right, to open up possibilities to move forward. The path to a better world involves slowing down, blocking out the noise, acknowledging complexity, understanding our differences and moving forward. Together. We all have choices to make. It’s time to be more deliberate about those choices. Let’s make them count.

Note: Unless explicitly stated, views expressed on controversial issues are for illustration only and are not necessarily my own.

[1] “What is intersectionality, and what does it have to do with me?”, https://www.ywboston.org/2017/03/what-is-intersectionality-and-what-does-it-have-to-do-with-me/

[2] Heuristics and Cognitive Biases, Kendra Cherry: https://www.verywellmind.com/what-is-a-heuristic-2795235