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Rory Sutherland’s ten rules, and how these translate into the JC’s messed up, post-structuralist view.
- The opposite of a good idea can be another good idea: The idea that there even is a single right answer, let alone that you know it, hails from a profoundly deterministic, reductionist world view. If you subscribe to this view, and you believe you have the right answer, then any other answer is necessarily sub-optimal, therefore wrong, and therefore you are objectively justified in suppressing it. The benign view (which Sutherland takes) is the “no-one got fired for hiring IBM” approach: I took the correct, rational path, I was objective, so I cannot be blamed should things go wrong. (By the way, isn’t that a depressing, negative, glass-almost-empty disposition to take to your work? We are but actors, all the world’s a stage, we are but frozen in the starlight and determined by events; we cannot influence outcomes, so my dearest aspiration is not to be blamed? Especially since, if you adopt this view, no-one can be blamed for anything anyway since the outcome of the universe in every particular was set in stone from the original singularity? As Sutherland says, “that’s wonderful if you want to keep your job; if you want to have an original idea it’s potentially disastrous.”
- It is not more rewarding to think that not only can you influence outcomes, but that this is your sacred quest? Chatbots cannot do this, folks. This is your spidey-sense.
- Don’t design for average: Models which aggregate individuals into some kind of archetypal mean create a dead end. This is of a piece with Matthew Syed’s obdservaston about the fightercoc kpit designed for the average pilot, whcih turned out to fit no-one. Firstly the average may fit noone: the spatial average of all the positions on a sphere is no where near any of them. Secondly, the proxy for the average, the median, is the mediocre.
- Don’t be logical where everyone else is being logical: This is a corollory of designing for the average. To be logical is to be predictable. To prioritise logic is to converge on the same spot that all your (logic-prioritising) competitors are converging, and leaving the rest of design-space to the unconventional thinkers. While you and your fellow bald men race to the bottom in a fight over the same comb, someone else is eating all the pudding you didn’t have the imagination to see. It is to see the world as mediocristan, obeying a normal distribution, and able to be navigated by probabilities, which are better calculated by machine than human.
- Our expectation affects our experience:
- A flower is simply a weed with a marketing budget: It is not about efficiency. Sometimes the very inefficiency is what marks out effectiveness.
- Logic kills off magic: People don't percieve the word objectively. So, address people’s perceptions of reality, not necessarily reality itself.
- A good guess which stands up to empirical obsewrvation is still science: Random accidents can generate progress.
- Test counterintuitive things because no-one else will: See also no-one got fired for hiring IBM. Creat a small space where people can test things that don’t make sense. So, a Skunkworks. All the more reason if your competitors are too scasred to go there.
- Solving problems using only rationality is like playing golf using only one club: Rationality has uses; but it is a naive model of the world, and what it leaves might be more inmportant than what it leaves in. The moment you say is “the way to solve the problem is like this ~” you have defined the problem in a way that allows only a very small solution set. There are lots of reasons beople behave as they do, and economic incentives only over a small part of them.