Judd Antin: recommendation

Transcript context

…Yeah. What is reality? Geez, can we? Well, let's just- Okay, maybe he said that. He certainly believed that. That's what the historians say. But the reason that makes researchers so angry is because that's not research. That's not what researchers do. A researcher who's going to ask customers what they want is a bad researcher. You need a different researcher. I've never done that in my career. No one on my team has ever run a study that's like that. So that just makes researchers mad. And then the last one is about post-hoc bias. It's, "We knew this already. That was obvious." And I think a lot about this book, which I would recommend to your listeners. The author is a sociologist at UPenn named Duncan Watts, and the title is Everything is Obvious If You Already Know the Answer. And it's about hindsight bias. He makes the argument that we rely too much on intuition, heuristics, and pattern matching in a way that is inappropriate to our experience. And it's like it leads us astray. It's like a form of self gaslighting. And it happens because we end up selectively remembering things and then constructing narratives around them in a way which makes us feel like we already knew that, when we in fact did not. And he talks about this other, one of those cognitive biases called the narrative fallacy, which is the idea that people love to make convenient, simple stories about the past. If I asked you about your career, Lenny, and how you got to be this amazing podcast host, you'd be like, "Well, let me tell you about this series of events." And we do that. It's part of how we make sense of our lives and the information around us, but it would probably be a lie in the sense that we all twist the evidence we have to fit the narrative we want to be true, because it's simple, and lovely, and makes us happy. This is going to sound self-serving, but I find I'm the opposite. I'm like, "I have no idea how this all came about. Here's some things that happened, and somehow I ended up here." But maybe I'm being very modest and try to not give myself any credit.…

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