Part 2/2 : Playing with the Bias in My Intuition

This is a two part essay deconstructing these two statements:

I have a distinct sense that the work of philosophers has been more instructive to human behaviour than much of modern science.
– Zat Rana

Products test our assertions on human behavior in the labs of Reality. Put another way, our understanding of human behavior has to prove itself in the products we make.
– Yours sincerely

If you’ve not checked out the Part 1, I strongly recommend you to check it out first.

In an email, Zat pointed out to me that a philosopher’s deep understanding of his own psychology is what allows him to be great. A philosopher puts language to his intuition and creating an understanding for human nature, baking into the instincts of the reader.

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But so much bias in my intuition

Philosophy feeds into my intuition but our intuition is conditioned, far from the absolute Truth. We only see reality through our own filters.

This is especially concerning as my job revolves around baking a user experience into products that must appeal to the entire target demographic for it to succeed. And hence, an objective truth must ideally be abstracted out of my intuition for it to be applicable to a broader mass.

A philosophy is only true within its own context but perhaps, overlapping these philosophies can reveal commonalities that can get us closer.

As Zat once noted, “when two different contexts (parts) come into conflict, we have to merge them (into a whole) and then evaluate what is most true relative to this new context, and this can go on and go on towards infinity.”

Philosophy has many tools for that. Most notably, what studying philosophy equips me with is the ability to express my intuitive understanding in first principles reasoning, which as Paul Rosania (who has worked on Slack and Twitter) described can be a really effective way of arriving at a fairly objective thesis for a product.

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First Principles reasoning

First principles reasoning is about building your body of knowledge from the ground up.

First principles reasoning could’ve anticipated Facebook’s eventual decline in usage as well. Let’s look at the core of what makes Facebook: the Network. While connecting with our friends sounds great, the question remains: what really defines who is a friend and who is not. Everybody has a different meaning for it and the implication of a friend spreads across a spectrum. Hence, our feeds were bound to get messy as we lost track of who we were sharing with and who are sharing with us.

Just like a philosopher, I can break down my understanding into a logical tree of design decisions (nodes) and see how the decisions guide the customer experience into various directions (branches). This is what Paul calls the hypothesis tree. Paul presents his colleagues this tree at which they can  more precisely direct their arguments.

If you’ve to prove the whole thesis wrong, you’ll have to prove the base assumption doesn’t hold true. Philosophy is self-critical. You know what has to be proven wrong, for it to be wrong. This provides ammunition against biases.

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What do we wish to be

One can break down complex problems or scattered observations to its bare essentials and logically assemble it bottom-up to uncover the ideas embedded in our subjective understanding.

Laying out ideas like this also allows us to see all the possible directions we can move, all the possible points new branches can grow out of, all the possible places we didn’t land up in our own experiences, but others can and will.

What follows then is a world of possibilities.

With first principles reasoning, an email product by Basecamp called HEY arrived at a UX that eliminates the need for AI to manage our emails, which was otherwise assumed essential by GMail.

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I’ve given a first principles breakdown of HEY in the following essay: Link. It starts by re-building email with the base question “How must a person A send information to person B in the digital age?”

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Running one of the most important blogs on the Internet for decision making, Shane Parrish, in his essay First Principles : The Building Blocks to True Knowledge, explains:

The gulf between what people currently see because their thinking is framed by someone else and what is physically possible is filled by the people who use first principles to think through problems.

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The idea of biases is itself biased

In practice, one can direct their arguments at specific junctures or the root assumption of the hypothesis tree and collaboratively arrive at a close-to objective understanding.

However, in the entirety of our knowledge, absolute objectivity in the matters of human nature still eludes us. And this fact itself is the flaw in the idea of cognitive biases.

Pointing out a bias only goes so far to establish that our thinking is deluded. That an idea must be wrong as it is a result of a deluded behaviour. But none of us has access to true objective Reality and hence we’re inherently deluded and all our ideas are  wrong or incomplete to some degree. Hence, while explaining why an idea is wrong, cognitive biases prove the obvious and can only be a means and not the end.

Zat Rana neatly captures this:

“The idea of cognitive biases is flawed because our entire perception of reality is flawed. And that’s fine. There is often a deeper wisdom to it. True, there are some patterns embedded in our evolutionary history that lead us astray in the modern world, but even so, neatly categorizing them into a list of biases itself is something that biases us. It’s a start, but it’s not an end. There are ways to think and to be attentive, which surpass the need for easy categorizations like that. I have a distinct sense that the work of philosophers has been more instructive to human behaviour than much of modern science.”

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Seeking the Superpower

What studying works of psychology can provide is new terminology as it attempts to describe various phenomena in our natures. Reading about cognitive biases in D. Kahneman’s Thinking Fast and Slow, my favourite part is the section at the end of each chapter where he gives the user a few sample statements to practice talking about our behavioral patterns.

One must not mistake this article to evangelize abandoning all works of psychology or such sciences. Although, this is a byproduct :

“Most of what is good about psychology can be found elsewhere.”
– NNTaleb

When you can explain something from bottom-up, you stay within the confines of the Truth. Integrating your learnings through first-principles, creating your tree of understanding, allows you to branch out to new possibilities.

In product design, there’s a common debate around whether we should be designing for existing behaviours or creating new behaviours and I think philosophy reconciles the two in a very “human” way.

The philosophical investigation can encapsulate not only how we behave but also what we wish to be. There’s a compassionate spirit to this that I want to carry as I create products that become an inseparable part of people’s lives. For when seeking an understanding of human condition, one must ask not only how humans are, but also what humans yearn to be.

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Links :

1. An example first principles breakdown of a product: HEY, Let’s (re)build e-mail from ground-up
2. Paul Rosania talking about the Hypothesis Tree
3. Shane Parrish explaining First Principles Thinking
4. NNTaleb describing the Lindy Effect
5. Begin your investigation into human nature with Zat Rana

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