A rather "philosophical" approach to understanding human nature
The superpower I seek is the ability to predict human behaviour. I design software products for a living and it is on my understanding of human behaviour that I place all my bets on. To help my quest I frequently get nudged by my peers to check out psychological experiments but instead, I find myself confined in a corner reading the work of philosophers.
I have a distinct sense that the work of philosophers has been more instructive to human behaviour than much of modern science.
That last line was not composed by me but by an incredibly insightful writer: Zat Rana. When I read it, it was a moment of finding a friend in a desert of doubts.
As I was deconstructing my epiphany, I composed a statement of my own, making this a two-part essay:
Products test our assertions on human behaviour in the labs of Reality. Put another way, our understanding of human behaviour has to prove itself in the products we make.
This is the part one of two. Let’s begin.
What does the human desire
If ever I slip into the horrid mistake of confronting my dad right after he is back from work, I know what’s coming: An impulsive agitated voice aiming to shut down any conversation. My mom attributes this to hunger. “He is back after a long day. He is hungry.” And it is his intrinsic desire for food that will make him spend his remaining energy on nothing but food. Anything other than that will be ferociously pushed away. Since then, I’ve always known what to expect when someone is hungry.
Now, of course my mom’s theory is basic and applicable to only one context. But it’s the approach that has value: establishing a base context for human will and building on that logically (first principles reasoning) to arrive at varying behaviours.
“Every individual body that contains life has a will. Schopenhauer called it the will to live. Nietzsche called it the will to power.”, Zat Rana wrote. Similarly, Sigmund Frued called it the will to pleasure and Viktor D. Frankl called it the will to meaning. And unlike my mom’s, these theories attempt for a universal context to explain the dynamics of our mind.
Another is mimetic theory by philosopher Rene Girard. It builds on an assumption that all our cultural behaviors are imitative; that we derive all our desires from other people. Building on this, Peter Thiel was able to predict the virality of Facebook and became its first investor.
In his own words: ‘Facebook first spread by word of mouth, and it’s about word of mouth, so it’s doubly mimetic. Social media proved to be more important than it looked, because it’s about our natures.’
Each philosophy is true within its stated context. And keeping this context, it shows how all aspects of human behavior connect by first principles reasoning within the framework of a language.
What logic expressed in language entails are words whose meaning we, with some sensation, understand. This bakes into our intuition, and in practice, our intuition is quite effective at distinguishing across these contexts. Thiel grafted mimetic theory to the story of Facebook and while many things would’ve contributed to the virality of Facebook, mimesis could explain a lot of it for Thiel to make a bet. This is what I seek.
Contrast this with modern science
Psychological experiments compartmentalize human consciousness into patterns and prove its existence in data. But our brains are complex systems, and with such systems, the cause and effect cannot be confined to any one dimension without considering how it relates with the rest.
This is a similar shortcoming in the field of nueroscience, where one presumes to accurately describe the working of the brain by observing what happens at the neural level while completing abstracting out what happens at the molecular.
Also, the setup of such experiments can’t be abstracted out of the result as constants, all of which became clear in an attempt to replicate these experiments.
Nicholas Nassim Taleb notes this in his book Skin in the Game:
“…a recent effort to replicate the hundred psychology papers in “prestigious” journals of 2008 found that, out of a hundred, only thirty-nine replicated. Of these thirty-nine, I believe less than ten are actually robust and transfer outside the narrowness of the experiment. Similar defects have been found in medicine, (and) neuroscience.”
Human consciousness doesn’t compartmentalize in the same way modern science assume it to.
The data obviously don’t point at exact concepts like velocity, but inexact ones like biases. There can be no equations to connect these data and don’t have a logical framework to show how all of these patterns of human behaviour connect and interact with each other. This creates a concern for me as a product is an amalgamation of varying behaviors.
If not equations & data, then Time.
The human condition can’t be expressed (exactly) in numbers or equations. Mathematical theories or empirical methods cannot really capture our consciousness.
However, Nicholas Nassim Taleb, in his book Skin in the Game, makes an observation:
“while our knowledge of physics has not been available to the ancients, human nature was. So everything that holds in social science and psychology has to be Lindy*-proof, that is, have an antecedent in the classics; otherwise it will not replicate or not generalize beyond the experiment.”
(You may read about the Lindy Proof, but for the purposes of this essay, all you need to know is its implication: Robustness to Time.)
All our assertions on human behavior must be tested over time in the labs of reality, as per the Lindy effect.
When I think about products, I realize that nothing can deem a product to be truly successful other than being seamlessly integrated in the lives of it’s users over changing times.
Hence, Taleb alluded that the philosopher who wins will be the one who finishes last. They’ve been in the race for centuries.
Absorbing Multiple perspectives
From across time to across perspectives, Zat extends the underlying principle to imply that overlapping various philosophies can give us a better sensibility of human nature.
As Zat noted:
Language itself can never precisely capture the truth in words, which is why a deep affection to precise meanings is futile. But many different perspectives looking at the same thing defined in multiple ways, in different contexts, can pick out a general consistency. And it’s the sensibility gained from that consistency that is important.
In philosophy, by showing how it all connects within the said context, these theories allow a more nuanced understanding to come through. Something that cannot yet be described in exact concepts or data, but an understanding of human nature that can only be absorbed intuitively in our sensibility like the rhythmic implications of a song or poetry.
Studying works of art that have survived and been relevant for generations can give us significant insights into human nature, and might be one of the effective routes. When asked why the Beatles achieved the fame and longevity it did, Paul McCartney said, “Easy Lyrics.” This alone gives me significant insight into how consumer products must be.
Observing successful products like Facebook and old products like keyboards are significant ways to understand human nature like Marshall McLuhan has done in his philosophy on Media.
Memes that pierce through culture and stay relevant for years are something to keep an eye for. One that’s now increasingly obvious is if your business can be alluded to in a Meme, it will need significantly less marketing.
In practice
By establishing what one desires, you design a system around what incentivizes it’s participants. Charlie Munger coined the phrase “His bread I eat, whose song I sing” to remind us of how foundational incentives is to our nature. He says if you can solve for incentive design in a company, you would’ve solved half it’s problems.
I must assure you that learning about human nature is a discovery within yourself, hence your intuition is the ultimate tool in these matters. As Zat succinctly puts it:
“Philosophy shows how it all connects by first principles reasoning, which gives you a better intuitive sense than science breaking down one thing without the full context. That allows for more nuanced context to come through, and I think context is the big difference, and context is what the intuition is good at distinguishing, too, when practiced.”
Philosophy, by all means & purposes, is the landscape of human thinking. The various theories are vantage points directed towards the Truth. The discovery is done, I see no other means, but by self-awareness. A meditative indulgence in our lives.
Growing up, I had come up with various ideas for human behavior which is only valuable if it checks out in practice. I ultimately intend to test my understanding of human nature by expressing it on the canvas of a product, and my intuition must be nurtured at every step of the way.