The average person has one testicle and one breast, but you're unlikely to encounter many individuals who fit this description.
Using averages to understand the world can often result in our perception becoming distorted, like a caricature of reality. Advice aimed at the average person may be well-intentioned and technically “truthful”, but it can often be ineffective and misleading.
By asking the right questions you can improve the decisions that you make, and become a more critical thinker with advice that you are given.
The Myth of Average
Last Christmas, my American family and I drove from North Carolina to Baltimore, where we would fly to Iceland for the holidays. Before our flight, we planned to spend a night in Baltimore, giving us a few days to explore the city.
Personally, I’m not worried about visiting places that seem unsafe. I’ve been to North Korea, Honduras, and Palestine, but I found that I was more on edge in Baltimore than in any other country I’ve been to. I looked up the crime statistics for Baltimore and found that if Baltimore were a country it would be more dangerous than Jamaica.
We have a tendency to use averages to assess how safe a country is, often forgetting to drill down, and researching how safe a specific region or city is. This is the mistake that I made with Baltimore. I unconsciously used the logic that Baltimore is in America and America is relatively safe, therefore I did not need to worry about my safety. Imagine how useless a map would be if the contour lines were averaged over the whole country, yet we use a similar logic when we determine how safe a country is, looking at the statistics of the country as a whole.
Nicholas Taleb highlights this point when he wrote: “Never cross a river that is on average 4 feet deep”. If there are sections of the river that are much deeper, despite the average height being only 4 feet, you might face difficulty and end up dying. A better question to ask is: What is the height of the river at its deepest point?
Balancing Simplicity with Usefulness
Government advice tends to be simple so that the entire country can understand it. In America, the average person's reading age is lower than an 8th-grade level. Material that is considered "easy to read" must be written below a 6th-grade level.
Now, I am all for making something as simple as possible, but reductionism that ignores nuisance in exchange for a simple answer runs the risk of becoming distorted. It’s like averaging the results from a survey that asks respondents about their favorite food, if the only two answers are ‘ice cream’ and ‘Indian food’, the average result is Curry Ice cream…..something that no one wants to eat!
Government Advice is Probably Not for You
When you understand that government advice needs to account for all people, including those who don’t have the time, inclination, or ability to understand more complex things, you begin to realize that government advice often isn’t intended for you.
It’s like having one classroom for an entire school of abilities. You might advise a child who is learning to count to use their fingers, but that same advice would be silly for someone who is learning calculus.
The Danger of One-Size-Fits-All Advice
The average daily sleep recommendation is 8 hours, but as Professor Russell Foster, an expert on sleep, highlights, the optimal amount of sleep depends on the person, ranging anywhere between 6 and 10.5 hours.
How many times have you laid awake worrying? Wondering if you are getting the recommended 8 hours, possibly causing you even more anxiety and difficulty in sleeping, resulting in a self-fulfilling prophecy.
The Success Sequence
The success sequence is a simple formula that is promoted by researchers to help improve teenagers' chances of success in life. The simple formula is:
Finish high school.
Get a full-time job.
Get married before you have children.
97% of people who follow this advice won’t be poor by the time they reach their thirties. How could anyone argue with advice that has statistics like that to back it up?
Well, firstly, instead of calling it the success formula, I think it should be called the poverty avoidance formula. Not quite as catchy perhaps, but if you want a life that is above average you need to do things differently than the average person.
Finishing school, getting a job, and waiting to have kids might seem like good advice…..and logically, the opposite of good advice might be bad advice, but as Rory Sutherland says,“The opposite of a good idea can also be a good idea.”
Risk of Ruin
No one is going to tell you to skip university, load up on debt, and take drugs. This goes against all conventional wisdom.
The reason these things are considered bad advice is because of the risk that is associated with them. You don’t want to recommend drugs or debt because of the potential that someone kills themselves or goes bankrupt, even though, if used correctly, they can be some of the most effective tools for financial independence or for finding meaning.
Asking the Right Questions
I’ve noticed that when I stay at a hotel and ask the concierge which restaurants they recommend, I usually get a rather vanilla reply. Understandably, the concierge doesn’t want to recommend an authentic, hole-in-the-wall, because he doesn’t want to risk that I might not enjoy the experience. The concierge is going to play it safe, and avoid the risk of a complaint. If you want to get good advice, you need to ask the right questions and provide enough information to make the advice useful.
Instead of asking a waiter what they recommend, ask them which item on the menu would be the last thing they would order. This eliminates the incentive of the waiter suggesting the most expensive dish on the menu, it will also avoid a vanilla response, and it will confirm if the dish that you had in mind was perhaps the worst item on the menu.
Instead of asking a rich person, how should you invest your money? Ask them, where would you invest $100,000 over the next 5 years, if you were my age and willing to take a big risk?
We need to be skeptical, critical thinkers, and understand how incentives cause people to use data that helps promote their agenda. We have to know what we want and what our values are.
General advice or averages can be useful as a starting point, but the “wisdom of the crowd” can become the “tyranny of the masses”, when incentives from multiple actors push and pull. The advice can become distorted like a caricature of reality.
Comments