The Danger of Simplistic Models

It's all too common for people to prefer a simpler-seeming model to one that actually works. Another way to put this is that people will typically choose a model with one less variable over one that predicts outcomes more accurately.

Every so often, there's another popular book or article on how people think. They usually try to build a blanket model that explains all people's minds as though each is cast from a single, shared mold.

These kinds of simplistic models are seductive because they feel good. They are easy to understand and easy to rationalize when some of the data don't fit.

That good feeling comes with a heavy price-tag, though.

For the same reasons they are so attractive, simplistic models run the risk of being canonized as right (about which I have previously written). As a result, people will fight to hold a broken model in place when it should be replaced and, ironically, discard a partially-broken model entirely rather than just amending it.

This means we waste a lot of time dropping bad ideas, only to find out they were good again later, then dropping the bad ideas that supplanted them, only to find out they were good, too.

We need a better way of managing this stuff.

The Risk of Being Right

Every once in a while, people decide something is right.

"Right" is a very dangerous idea; among the most dangerous we've encountered. "Wrong" is great - it's saved our butts more than a few times but "right", has not done us too many favors, historically-speaking.

The more right something is imagined to be, the more people will fight to retain it past its point of usefulness. A great example of this is the replacement of the phlogiston theory with the oxidation theory of combustion.

If we had a good track record of being right when we say something is right, maybe that would be okay. Actually, it would probably be a good thing.

We've shown we don't have that ability, though. We've also shown that positioning an idea as the truth has a more-or-less-inevitable and very costly battle associated with the uninstall process.

So what we're left with is trying to find a way to position fewer ideas as right.