Rory Sutherland: uncertainty

Transcript context

…the dog would then learn to anticipate what it was doing. It has to be random, and it almost has to be unconscious because the hare cannot give away any telltale signs of what its next move might be. And so if the hare knew what the next move might be, it would actually start to reveal preparatory muscular movements, which the dog could learn to read. But there are other reasons why we need to be irrational for far less controversial or far less survival dependent reasons than this. For instance, the exercise of social intelligence. We have two very strong inbuilt. We don't utility maximize. We have two very strong inbuilt default modes in the human brain, one of which is habit, do what I've done before, and the other one is social copying, do what everybody else seems to be doing. And they make extraordinarily good sense in evolutionary terms because an organism that had to learn everything from first principles would eat a hell of a lot of poisonous berries. Rather than going, look, "I've always eaten the yellow berries. I seem to be fine. I don't have the shits. Let's just stick to the yellow berries." Well, unless there's a massive shortage of yellow berries, that's probably a pretty good idea. Or equally, if you find yourself in a new environment or new habitat and all the other primates are eating the purple berries and nobody's touching the yellow ones in that environment, it is probably a good idea to copy them because there's extra intelligence there. In other words, I can learn effectively from copying my past behavior or copying the behavior of others. Actually, it's a fairly low cost way of discovering low variance, low downside behaviors. By the way, very interestingly, actually, it was an AI which actually went into investigating what would be necessary for more people to have solar panels and more people to have heat pumps. And it is not tell them the environmental benefits. It is not tell them how much money they'd save by having a heat pump. No. The single thing that would persuade people to have more heat pumps is if three people on their street had a heat pump. Now, to an economist, that drives them practically insane because they go, "No, no, no. The behavior of your neighbors should be entirely irrelevant. You should simply do the maths and calculate how much you'd save, compare that against the return you'd get in a high interest savings account and then decide whether the heat pump is worthy of the investment." But that's not how we work. We're not prepared to be the first person with the worst solution. With electric cars, there's probably a very strong heuristic, which is every consumer's learned, whether it was computers or DVDs or cassette decks or fax machines or actually washing machines, but going back with anything electrical, it pays to wait because they get better very quickly and they get cheaper very quickly. So are people wrong, therefore, not to make that decision? Well, no. What they're doing is they're learning heuristic from past experience, which by the way, when it applies to anything with a plug, it's been pretty much proven. re, not to make that decision? Well, no. What they're doing is they're learning heuristic from past experience, which by the way, when it applies to anything with a plug, it's been pretty much proven. I have friends who bought the early flat screen televisions and they paid thousands and thousands of dollars for these things, and you go into their house, you go, "God, that's shit." So an awful lot of these things are instinctive intuition that we've just learned to experience, and we don't know what the future's going to bring, but actually it's what you might call decision-making based on a reasonable expectation of something. This episode is brought to you by Coda, and I mean that literally. I use Coda every day to help me plan each episode of this very podcast. It's where I keep my content calendar, my guest research, and also the questions that I plan to ask each guest. Also, during the recording itself, I have a Coda page up to remind myself what I want to talk about. Coda is an all-in-one platform that combines the best of documents, spreadsheets, and apps to help you and your team get more done. Now is the perfect time to get started with Coda, especially its extensive planning capabilities. With Coda, you can stay aligned and ship faster by managing your planning cycles in one location. You can set and measure OKRs with full visibility across teams and stakeholders. You can map dependencies, create progress visualizations, and identify risk areas. Plus, you can access hundreds of pressure-tested templates for everything from roadmap strategy to final decision-making to PRDs. If you want a platform that empowers your team to strategize, plan and track goals together, you can get started with Coda today for free. And if you want to see for yourself why product teams at high-growth companies like Pinterest, Sigma, Qualtrics run on Coda, take advantage of the special limited-time offer just for startups. Head over to coda.io/lenny to sign up and get $1,000 in credit. That's C-O-D-A dot I-O slash Lenny to sign up and get $1,000 in credit. Coda.io/lenny. Why is this so important? So there's many ways to try to win in business. There's like the typical approach, just let's think and brainstorm and come up with our best ideas. Your basic premise is too many of these are just very rational, logical approaches to a solution. Why is it so important to think outside the box like this?…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.