How being irrational helps us cooperate and survive
⌛ It’s Wednesday, and it’s also… the Wednesday of the year? We’re officially 52.46% of our way through 2024.
Issue #116: landing a six-figure publishing deal, haiku stand-up, and unnecessary words
By Harris Sockel
Yesterday, I came across a fascinating Medium story on the so-called “myth of human rationality” — the idea that, though we tell ourselves stories about evaluating evidence and weighing our options, we’re still predictably irrational. We’re overly swayed by first impressions. We’re okay standing in crowded lines but hate short ones. We’re obsessed with keeping our options open, even when doing so wastes time in the long run.
That all seems… not great (if only we could just make better decisions based on data!) but psychotherapist-turned-software-developer Pierz Newton-John has a somewhat surprising revelation to share: Being irrational helps us cooperate and survive. “It is probably more important for survival that people have a stable internal model of the world than for that model to be strictly correct,” he writes. Most of the shared fictions that help us cooperate (money, religion, national borders, law) don’t stand up to science, but we believe in them anyway.
To explore more ways humans don’t see the world clearly, I recommend bestselling author and philosopher Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s “How to be Rational about Rationality.” He makes the case that most cognitive biases benefitted us at one point — we’re swayed by first impressions because it’s convenient, and we keep our options open because we’re scared of dying. His quote about human vision is burned into my brain: “Your eyes are not sensors aimed at getting the electromagnetic spectrum of reality. Their job description is not to produce the most accurate scientific representation of reality; rather the most useful one for survival.”
Elsewhere on Medium…
- Want to know whether a new project or feature is worth investing in? Just ask your customers point-blank if they want it — but make it quick.
- Ghostwriter (and non-ghost writer) Aimee Liu details how she wrote a book proposal that landed a six-figure publishing deal. Proposals are really only relevant if you’re trying to sell a nonfiction book, and the best ones distill your voice and expertise down to around 25–50 pages.
- Haiku: a medieval Japanese art form that inspires contemplation, solitude, and attention to the beauty of language. Also, jokes. You can joke-ify pretty much any art form that’s inherently short. Remember Tweets?
- Speaking of haiku, illustrator Jason McBride is creating gorgeous mash-ups of words and pictures. The idea is to accentuate haiku’s focus on wabi-sabi, or finding the beauty in imperfection. These images are gorgeous, yet imperfect, just like all art:
Your daily dose of practical wisdom: about unnecessary words
Benjamin Dreyer, Random House copy chief and the author of Dreyer’s English: An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style roasts anyone who’s ever used the phrase “end result” (hi) — and lists about 100 more redundant words you don’t need to type. Let’s all agree to stop saying “fall down,” “moment in time,” and “plan ahead.”
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Edited and produced by Scott Lamb & Carly Rose Gillis
Questions, feedback, or story suggestions? Email us: tips@medium.com
