blog-like substances

One of the unofficial rules for TOA is that I no longer post BLS - "blog-like substances". By this, I mean the kind of thing that pops to mind as soon as you find out someone writes their own blog (a reaction further exacerbated in my case because I can't offer anything resembling a focus, topic, or theme for TOA). One example of such a post would be the standard play-by-play account of recent life events ("I went to this thing over the weekend...") leading to some kind of epiphany ("...which made me realize that...") but of course plenty other things qualify as BLS.

Longtime readers will recall that this aversion to BLS was hardly the standard in the good old days. Who remembers the day I wrote about Ricky Rubio? I assume this detail surprises nobody. This type of writing is a natural entry point for any aspiring writer, who separates blog from personal diary by the razor-thin margin of an unregulated "publish" button. For me, the early days were always more about writing than the writing, or any notion of being a writer, so pretty much anything I finished got published. Those TOA posts were always a bit too chummy with the audience, detailing critical news such as my attendance at irrelevant local events or offering earnest "analysis" of books that no one outside the author's hostages had ever been motivated to finish. Like most bloggers, I slowly shifted away from these posts in a bid to demonstrate my increasing seriousness toward Writing. If I ever found myself wandering back toward BLS - notably with "Tales of Two Cities", also with "Proper Corona Admin" - then I built a framework I could use to connect the mundane to the significant.

And yet, why not get back to my roots every once in a while, maybe have a look around the old stomping grounds? I went to a standup show over the weekend where the comic talked about the strange realization that you could still be anonymous despite being on TV, then transitioned into a story about how he was anticipating a trip back to his hometown just for the recognition. I think we can all benefit from something like that every once in a while. They say not to forget where you came from but perhaps the better advice would be to remind yourself every once in a while. It might be especially important for those who can relate to my current state, where I am trying to write some challenging things yet finding the difficulty level discourages the consistent effort required of good writing. Over seven years ago, I posted something I wrote about tipping. If you'd told me then about some of the stuff I'd be trying to write now, I probably would have converted TOA to a podcast.

Endnotes

All that said, I suppose it's obvious by now that I'm currently working on a classic serving of BLS. Why else would I write this post now? The upcoming post, hopefully coming sometime this week to an email inbox near you, will fall neatly into the esteemed category "unnecessary analysis of recent sports news by an unqualified writer". In other words, for a day TOA will be twice as good as ESPN.

how to be a good parent

It's feasible that the best book I'll ever write was something I could have published a decade ago. I had this idea at the time to write about parenting. The book was going to have a stupid title like How to Be a Good Parent or something equally arrogant. The plan was to write one chapter with two words - "be around" - and that would be the end, no footnotes, no photos, no charts or graphs. You could probably have finished it in one sitting. It would have cost $27.99, but the paperback would have been cheaper.

In hindsight it was probably for the best that I kept the manuscript (if you will) to myself. Books promising instruction tend to suffer from a blindness to their own arrogance and this condition would undoubtedly have plagued the presumptive NYT #1 bestseller How to Be a Good Parent. If you combine this tendency with my own long-term residency at Arrogant House, you have a recipe for one of those unfortunate public reputations - the kind that pops up anytime you google someone's name. In all seriousness, the books that claim to offer some kind of recipe for success often fail to clarify that success is a mountain with many trails. For each and every one of us there is a unique route to the summit, so blindly following some nonsense published by a half-assed blogger probably is more likely than not to send us down (up?) the wrong path. Most importantly, I must also acknowledge that How to Be a Good Parent would be a major disservice to all those great parents out there who are unable to be around as much as they would like. This fact alone is enough reason for me to have no regrets about tossing my book idea into the rubbish bin.

And yet, there is something to be said for just being around. I've had a chance to see many of my friends become parents over the past few years. The one clear conclusion from watching them navigate this new life responsibility is that they have absolutely no clue what they are doing. The more subtle observation is that they are around, and just the fact of being around is more than enough to make them great parents. For me, it's like watching history repeat itself. My own parents did their best with me but that doesn't mean they were perfect. But my parents were always around, and that's why I say I had great parents.

leftovers | the business bro confirms leech therapy

There is one last connecting thread among this post's examples that might resonate better with you, dear reader - the difficulty in executing a passive rather than active intervention. This is a question that goes beyond the ultimately mundane matter of whether we are always working in the smartest possible way - it's a fundamental question of how our behavior builds into a sense of identity and whether doing (seemingly) nothing sufficiently reinforces this feeling.

Although the challenges specific to a doctor, a project manager, or a marketing director may bear little resemblance to one another, there is the shared difficulty of standing by and doing nothing in an area where your interventions prove expertise or authority. What kind of doctor keeps their job if they prescribe no treatments? Who would hire a project manager with an aversion to sending follow up emails? Where can I find a marketing team actively seeking the evidence that their campaigns have the same effect as a blank space? Maybe the deepest wisdom of all is that in prescribing leech therapy yesterday's doctors revealed something armchair experts like me are too eager to forget - in an uncertain world where progress often means two steps forward and one step back, the only thing we know when we don't know is that you have to keep moving.

the business bro confirms leech therapy

A friend once described the fundamental challenge in his marketing director role as the problem of "you never know for sure if it worked". He meant this in the specific way that fields such as statistics define causation, which sets a standard for knowing the effect of an intervention on the outcome. His organization ran campaigns in a way that failed to meet the definition, so they never knew the extent to which their results were caused by their decisions, if at all. One particularly helpful example he used referenced advertising during the Olympics. If his firm wished to determine the effect of their campaign in a statistically viable way, they would have first needed to randomly divide their audience into two groups so that one would see ads while the other would not, then they could compare differences in the groups' behavior to determine the effect of the ads.

Some of you may be familiar with this process by other terms, names, or labels - a randomized control trial, for example, or A/B testing. In their respective fields these are the gold standards for determining causation, which in more conversational terms means knowing for sure that one thing did in fact lead to another. It's rare to hear anyone dismiss the power of this approach when discussed in the abstract - clearly, if you had an idea for progressing toward a goal then you would want to know whether your idea worked. But I have noticed lately that a lot of people lose this conviction when it comes time to put the concept into practice. An obvious issue is that implementing this approach may have practical obstacles. One thing my friend pointed out was that no one he worked with would have agreed to omit certain major markets, which meant the randomization necessary for clean results was no longer possible. Yet my feeling remains that in most cases understanding and implementing this style of thinking would do a great deal to make us all better in our work.

One area where I've thought more about this lately comes whenever I get follow up reminders from certain pushy colleagues. These situations often have something to do with an urgent request or an upcoming deadline, like "hey, can I get an update on this?", that sort of thing. I don't find these very useful, often just creating extra work for me in the sense of having to stop working to meet the deadline in order to send a response, but I don't have any hope that things will ever change with these colleagues. My reasoning is along the lines of the above logic. As far as I can tell, they don't have any sort of system for isolating the effect of a follow up on the outcome. Therefore, every time they follow up, there are only two potential results - either everything works out, which strengthens the belief that following up is the right idea, or it doesn't work out, which I guess leaves things open to interpretation regarding the effect of the follow up. My suspicion is that the common interpretation in the latter case is not "I wonder if following up has any effect" but rather "I should have followed up more often". It makes a strange sort of sense because they're missing a critical data point for considering another conclusion - the example where they did no follow up yet everything worked out - but the more fundamental issue is that since they likely fully believe following up is the right thing, they'll never create the conditions for collecting that missing data point which might prove them wrong.

Maybe the right concept to invoke today isn't the randomized control trial or A/B testing but rather confirmation bias, the tendency to misevaluate evidence by assigning greater weight to instances that support rather than refute your theory. The cure for confirmation bias is actually quite simple, at least in explanation - you have to look for evidence that proves you wrong. I think the challenge for most of us is that we default toward seeking proof of being right rather than ruling out the ways we could be wrong. Confirmation bias plays right into this tendency. For my friend, his marketing department never looked for instances where consumer behavior was the same regardless of whether those consumers were exposed to a campaign; my colleagues don't seem capable of tossing a coin to decide whether they should hit send on a follow up email.

Obviously, none of this is going to be solved due to a quickly scribbled TOA post. Part of the issue is that I fear we miss opportunities to learn about confirmation bias, instead learning or emphasizing different lessons from situations where I would argue for the relevance of confirmation bias. Many readers may have learned that doctors once used leeches as a way to cure sick patients, with my understanding being that the medical theory back then suggested leeches could suck out the diseased blood. This anecdote was always taught to me with the air of "oh, look at how far we've come since those days" and it's indeed true that medicine has advanced many centuries past its dependence on leeches. But this style of teaching only improves my ability to win trivia contests while failing to explore the broader lessons that might apply in the present day. The effective teaching style would point out that this is an example of how confirmation bias enabled the advancement of incompetence, then offer me a way to identify confirmation bias for myself so that I don't fall into the trap of repeating someone else's mistakes.

In the leech example the problem was that the doctors, accepting the theory regarding leeches, never realized some patients would have healed regardless of the intervention, which allowed them to view each recovery as further evidence confirming the leech theory. My colleagues, always ready to send a follow up, never know if the recipient would have completed the job regardless. My friend's firm poured endless resources into campaigns that may have had no true effect on consumer behavior. If we are to learn anything from these examples, it's that knowing whether one thing truly leads to another can be a far more complicated question than it might seem at first glance. So what's the right approach? Knowing whether something worked, for sure, is a very high bar, and perhaps it's not always realistic to aspire to such a lofty standard. But it's frighteningly easy to settle, looking strictly for evidence that our first instinct was right. Maybe the best way is to reframe the idea of what it means to be right - not accumulating evidence in our favor but instead ruling out the ways we could be wrong, methodically and consistently, until being right is the only remaining possibility.