The Right Answer
Admit it. You read movie reviews after a movie. Just to know how others felt about it, of course. You thought Inside Out was childish and boring. But all those rave reviews! Hmm.. maybe it wasn't so bad after all.
Collective wisdom. At a scale unimaginable because of the Internet! Or wait, did I mean groupthink?
We crave simplification. To be certain. And other people’s opinions are often a shortcut to feeling more certain in your own thinking. That and “science”.
Want to convince people about something? Write a well-formatted pseudo scientific article on it and cite random scientific studies to it. No one ever reads the citations. There’s so much faith in “science” these days, that it’s a new religion. I digress.
As kids we're conditioned to get immediate feedback on whether our answer is ‘right’ or not. Marks are awarded to each answer and most schools don't have the motivation/resources to try something more holistic.
Mathematics in particular, involves plenty of exercise questions. The first thing you do on solving one, is to turn back to the appendix and check your answer. Solve a few in a row without checking, and you aren't as sure of yourself. This translates reasonably well into the physical sciences as well. The answer to which molecule binds with another is rather unambiguous. You have plenty of one word answers and fill in the blanks since these questions have objective answers.
“Do you think South Africa played a pivotal role in shaping Gandhi’s tactics in India?”
— The social sciences is where we learn that things don't always have a single straight answer. Or well…where we should have. Except that during Board Exams, teachers correct several thousand papers each. Expecting each teacher to evaluate multiple different ‘right’ answers in a standard way is near impossible.
Why does it matter? It pays to know if your ideas are simply a regurgitation of what you hear, and when you've thought through something yourself and can trust it. If you're a teacher, take extra effort to show your students that there can be multiple answers, not necessarily one correct one.
If you want to be an entrepreneur, then being comfortable with incomplete information is essential. Your own conviction in Uberizing refrigeration use needs to survive several months/years of others doubting you. Hell, if you could use Google to validate it, I'll bet there’s plenty of startups already trying.
Have a little more faith in your own analysis and decision making facility. Find restaurants you like by tasting the food, not by the reviews you hear. Bet some money on stocks based off trends you see directly. Decide that data science is cool because you understand what it is and can make a first principles argument on why it has a future. Dislike coffee, despite everyone always drinking it. If you're used to offloading these decisions to Google, taking a personal risk on an off-beat startup idea (which people aren't talking about yet or have dismissed) just doesn't sound like your cup of tea.
Let’s go down a slippery slope with this. Deciding which restaurant to go to is a pain. So you have food review apps to help you with this. But reviewing restaurants on an app is a pain too. Fortunately, apps monitor everything you do, so they find the “best” restaurant for you. Life decisions in general are a chore too, but with all that data on you, you can ask google what to do now! Meanwhile, science has gotten so complicated, that you trust everything “scientific” you read on the net. People will be sure that that “Data Science” is their passion even if they can't describe what it is (or isn’t). Yup. In the future there will be no “free will” since we'll just do the “optimal” and “recommended” thing anyway. Cheers!
All this while, that kid in the basement, who wrote the troll article on how twerking is good for health? He’s still scratching his head wondering why people took it so seriously.
The age of the Internet and quick answers is affecting how comfortable we are with taking truly independent decisions. Not quite convinced? Why don't you google it? ;)
** If you've done some original first-principle analysis on any topic, say, “Why we won’t have work by 2030", we'd love to add it to Slippery Slope.
Some links to make all this sound more convincing:
