The Pursuit of Folly
Self-deception and foolishness abound around every corner of life if we allow it
Each month, we tackle a different theme on how to live what the ancient philosophers called the “good life”—a life in the pursuit of becoming the best version of oneself.
For the month of February, we’ve been focusing on the themes of reason and rationality. You can find links to the series at the bottom of this article.
This Week at a Glance:
Wrapping up our February theme of reason and rationality, this week we perform a deep dive into the issue of foolishness and self-deception and how they destroy our ability to reason correctly.
By the time you finish this meditation, you’ll learn:
🍭 That deception works at both the individual and organization level, and, if goes unchecked, can destroy the host;
🍬 How the confirmation bias plays a critical role in the game of deceit and why;
🍫 Different tactics on how to combat self-deception in everyday life.
“We are not provided with wisdom, we must discover it for ourselves, after a journey through the wilderness which no one else can take for us.”1
Marcel Proust
We’re all prone to deception. Deception from our friends, our colleagues, our family. But perhaps worse than all of these is the deception we are prone to within ourselves.
Self-deception is the act of lying to oneself. We don’t always do it on purpose. It often goes unseen by our own consciousness. We take in so much stimulus in a day that it is natural that somewhere along the way, we deceive ourselves about what is true.
But just because it is a natural occurrence doesn’t mean it is harmless. On the contrary, history is littered with the failures of individuals and collectives who allowed deception to run rampant.
Personal:
When we tell everyone we’re open to feedback and then reject or “rationalize” our own behavior when the feedback is presented;
When we tell ourselves we don’t have time to do the important thing on our to-do list but somehow find time to be on social media for several hours a day.
Business:
When the company Theranos (detailed in Bad Blood) had claimed to revolutionize blood testing but had in fact resorted to standard testing methods;
When Blockbuster refused to read the landscape about the future of video rentals and turned down buying Netflix for $50 million dollars (you will always have my childhood BB… this one still hurts).
The evolutionary biologist Robert Trivers has proposed that we deceive ourselves because it provides us an advantage ultimately in deceiving others:
“To fool others, we may be tempted to reorganize information internally in all sorts of improbable ways and to do so largely unconsciously. From the simple premise that the primary function of self-deception is offensive—measured as the ability to fool others…”2
One of the leading causes of self-deception comes from the confirmation bias which essentially means we have an innate bias to find evidence that supports one of our existing beliefs. It also, unfortunately, kicks in when we are presented with evidence that contradicts or disproves one of our already held beliefs.
But how far can deception be pushed and to what scale? One need not look much further than the 1986 Challenger spaceship disaster.
The Challenger Disaster
Since landing on the moon in the 1960s, NASA had steadily built itself into a top-tier organization that had been advancing in performance and results.
But now, in an effort to maximize dollars, NASA had begun to change.
On January 28, 1986, the Challenger spaceship took off from Cape Canaveral in Florida. Within 73 seconds, it had blown up and America lost the lives of all seven astronauts.3
But what went wrong?
The famed physicist Richard Feynman who was part of an investigatory committee discovered from a technological standpoint, the primary and secondary O-ring seals which formed the connection in the rocket booster had deteriorated due to cold weather conditions. The result was hot gas being burned and ultimately making its way to the fuel tank.
The secondary cause of the disaster, Feynman discovered, was bureaucracy. As Adam Grant once detailed:
“NASA had long been a prime example of a performance culture: excellence of execution was the paramount value. Although NASA accomplished extraordinary things, they soon became victims of overconfidence cycles. As people took pride in their standard operating procedures, gained conviction in their routines, and saw their decisions validated through their results, they missed opportunities for rethinking.”4
They also allowed for bureaucracy to breed a culture of mistrust, deception, and lies.
The ship, which was made up of different parts of other ships and rockets, had taken previous flights in which “seven of the twenty-three Challenger flights had shown O-ring damage.”5
How does something that showed damage 30% of the time be allowed to move forward? According to Trivers:
“To prevent themselves—or others—from seeing this, the safety unit performed the following mental operation. They said sixteen flights showed no damage and were thus irrelevant and could be excluded from further analysis.”6
Built into the NASA culture at the time was opportunity for deception—deception of the self, of other groups working on the project, of the stories being told to the public. In actuality, the team did not trust one another, management pressured groups to achieve results quicker, and they cut corners.
They also used statistics in a way that today is used as prime example of how not use the mathematical tool.
Because the damage which occurred during the previous attempts were during high temperature takeoffs, and the successes were under cooler temperature takeoffs, the data was excluded from the comparison model for day of launch.
In other words, the seven damaged tests were excluded due to being outside the parameters expected for the day of takeoff, thus positioning the data as 16 successful flights without issue.
However, the lowest previous temperature for a takeoff was 54 degrees. The day the Challenger exploded the temperature was below freezing, “more than 20 degrees below the previous lowest takeoff temperature.”7
In other words, the previous successful 16 takeoffs where also now outside the expectations for takeoff. The 12 engineers on the safety team all voted against allowing the flight.
Higher-ups gave the go ahead for launch anyways.
“In short, in service of the larger institutional deceit and self-deception, the safety unit was thoroughly corrupted to serve propaganda ends, that is, to create the appearance of safety where none existed. This must have aided top management in their self-deception: less conscious of safety problems, less internal conflict while selling the story.”8
Whether at an organizational level or an individualistic level, deceit lurks around every corner waiting for opportunities. We persist in folly when we allow it in.
“There is thus a close-analogy between self-deception within an individual and self-deception within an organization—both serving to deceive others.”9
As Feynman so astutely observed:
“You must not fool yourself--and you are the easiest person to fool.”10
When deceit is allowed to breed, it does so like an infection, destroying its host from the inside out—rejecting any sense of logic or rationality.
And while this can be incredibly destructive as we just witnessed with the Challenger disaster, there are ways to fight it.
Avoiding Folly and Deception
While deception and pursuits of folly are innate within each of us, we can make conscious efforts to work against these tendencies and instead pursue true wisdom and reason as our guiding lights.
Reflect Nightly
Self-deception is partially due to a lack of self-awareness of one’s own thoughts and actions. When we are not aware of how and why we’re thinking a certain way, then we are bound to continually fall prey to deceptive tactics, both within ourselves and others.
The Stoic philosopher Seneca advised his brother of his nightly routine to help him become better at managing his own thoughts and emotions. At the end of each day, he would review his day in its entirety.
“I become an inspector and reexamine the course of my day, my deeds and words; I hide nothing from myself. I omit nothing. There’s no reason my mistakes should give me cause to fear, as long as I can say: “See that you don’t do that any more, but this time I forgive you… next time consider not the truth of what you say but whether the one you say it to can endure hearing the truth; good folk are glad to be chastised, but the worst sort find their preceptor very grating.”11
If we’re able to be honest with ourselves during periods of self-reflection, then we can begin to see patterns of deception in our lives and thoughts.
Look for accountability, and truth
“If anyone can refute me—show me I’m making a mistake or looking at things from the wrong perspective—I’ll gladly change. It’s the truth I’m after, and the truth never harmed anyone. What harms us is to persist in self-deceit and ignorance.”12
As Trivers points out, we hold the power to decide whether we choose to indulge our own self-deception or fight back against it. Deception is so powerful in general, because, as Trivers points out, “It [deception] always takes the lead in life, while detection of deception plays catch-up.”
In other words, deception flourishes because it has first mover advantage, setting the tone and rules of the game, thus forcing the others who participate to try to catch-up and outdo.
By having a friend, colleague, or mentor hold us accountable, we are better able to avoid the thinking that leads ourselves to deception. Having an honest check-in with this person, allowing them to call bullshit when necessary not only provides us valid feedback, but it allows us to quickly see how our thinking and actions can lead to deceit.
When we readily have this information, we can update our approaches. If we seek truth and wisdom, we will find a way for a trusted voice to penetrate and get hold of us.
Live life and truly learn to experience it
Wisdom is not found in a vacuum, it is not found solely in books or school. Wisdom is the combination of knowledge and experience, information and application.
In order to learn to avoid deception, both within the self and the deception of others, one must, like it or not, live life and suffer at the hands of deception.
Charlie Munger, the famed investor and right-hand man to Warren Buffet who helped build Berkshire Hathaway into what it is once stated:
“You get good judgment gradually over time partly by making bad judgments and having them work out poorly.”13
Or as Proust stated, we gain our wisdom by walking through the wilderness.
We require exposure in life, we require being deceived, both by others and ourselves in order to properly learn from the experience.
We can learn all about the concept of deception from books but it is not until we experience it firsthand (a friend deceiving us, we purposely ignoring a fact or habit about ourselves, etc.) that we can experience the truth in deception, how it came about, and how we can navigate and plan against it in the future.
3-Bullet Summary:
Self-deception is innate within each and every one of us and can attack at both the individual and organizational levels;
When we avoid taking in new information, when we refuse to alter our beliefs when facts are presented (confirmation bias), we allow deception a door in;
We can attempt to mitigate self-deception through:
Nightly reflection
Seek and receiving honest feedback from an accountability partner;
Living life and learning deception the hard way.
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Each month, we tackle a different theme on how to live what the ancients called the “good life”—a life in the pursuit of becoming the best version of oneself.
For the month of February, we’ve been focusing on the themes of reason and rationality through our Monday Meditations (MM), Wednesday Wisdoms (WW), and Friday Sweet Bites (SB).
Here are the topics covered so far if you wish to catch up:
If this or any of my other work has resonated, please consider upgrading to a paid membership (it’s less than a cup of coffee per week, and sweeter).
Until next week,
D.A. DiGerolamo
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Marcel Proust, The Daily Laws (By Robert Greene)
Robert Trivers, The Folly of Fools
In honor of their sacrifice, I list their names here for references: Francis R. "Dick" Scobee, Michael J. Smith, Judith A. Resnik, Ronald E. McNair, Ellison S. Onizuka, Gregory B. Jarvis, and Christa McAuliffe.
Adam Grant, Think Again
Robert Trivers, The Folly of Fools
Richard Feynman, Think Again (By Adam Grant)
Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 6.21