Make Sense Out of Nonsense

Our brains love to make sense out of a world filled with nonsense (aka uncertainty). We have an innate desire to have an answer for everything, right or wrong.

To run against our own biological grain, it’s important to face this is head on, acknowledge how our brain works, and work to be better at sifting through the nonsense. In this post, I’ll try to outline just how to do that.

Sensemaking out of nonsense is no easy feat. In fact, it’s fundamentally human to seek to understand. Our brains wouldn’t work. Shoot, we wouldn’t even be able to function!

Hope is not all lost, however. First we need to address what our brain is doing.

Our brain making sense out of nonsense

• By finding patterns and causal relationships, our brains feel better about events that happened or will happen. Even if it’s just to fit the answer we want to hear.
• Use one cases to explain a general phenomenon — our brains are OK with a small sample size!
• Our brains auto-believe what ‘experts’ tell us, even if they are only marginally less uncertain than we are (oil is going to $30!).
• Finding success and thinking the next time will be exactly the same. Our brains like certainty and don’t like factoring in chance/luck.

There are countless times in my life where my brain has one, and facts have lost.

Are there times in your life where you’ve done this? Think back to a time, either in Poker or otherwise, where you have made a conclusion around something that was completely uncertain, or based on a very small case. If you’re like me, there are countless.

For example, a salesperson convincing himself he closed an additional 10% of sales because he made two extra calls this week. Yes, the two calls helps from a sheer volume perspective, but maybe it was his attitude. Maybe the buyer was having a great day. Maybe the story fit the narrative they were trying to tell there boss. Our brains us to think it was all due to our hard work, but there is a lot more going on.

Success comes in all shapes sizes and one of the reasons why I like Steve Jobs quote from his 2005 Stanford commencement speech.

“You can’t connect the dots looking forward, you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something: your gut, destiny, life, karma whatever. Because believing the dots will connect down the road will give you the confidence to follow your heart, even when it leads you off the well worn path.”

As much as our brains think we can predict the future, we can only do so looking backwards.

Ways I’ve found to help

I’ve found a few different ways to over come this natural defect.

Generalities over individual cases

Rather than looking for answers from individual cases (whether it be history or a poker hand), think in more generalities. For example, asking yourself, why did this Lodden say there are 46 dolphins in the world? Or why did I lose this particular hand.

It’s much better to take a step back and ask, “in general, why would someone think there are so few dolphins in the world? Is there a bigger force in play? Can most people not think in big numbers?” You’ll be more adept at wading through the nonsense and finding theories that aid in your thinking, not confuse it.

Question sources

Always questions where the data came from. It doesn’t matter if it’s your professor, somebody on CNBC, a professional poker player, or your mother. Go deeper into where the data is coming from.

Factor in chance

In a lot of cases, chance plays a big factor in our wins. Think thoughts like: what factors were in play outside of my control that lead to this win? Are there areas I’m not even thinking about?

Cause and effect

Effects can have million causes. Make sure you think about problems from a higher level, a smaller level, a wider level, a more shallow level. It’s easy to say because of X, there is Y. Usually XZACD all add up to X. Think thing through.

Don’t allow yourself to make sense out of nonsense (or do your best). Understand there is uncertainty, ask the right questions, think in generalities or laws, and jump.

Mistakes will happen, we all do them. It’s a matter of self-correcting, being objective, and making sure they don’t happen more than once. Nobody says it would be easy. If it was easy, everybody would be great thinkers and really really rich.