The Superpower of Variant Perception

“It is far better to grasp the universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring” — Carl Sagan

Our perception of reality is limited by so many factors, often we aren’t even aware of our inability to see clearly. Nobel prize winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman suggests “Our comforting conviction that the world makes sense rests on a secure foundation: our almost unlimited ability to ignore our ignorance.” In other words, Kanheman says “we are also blind to our blindness”. The stoics knew this thousands of years ago, creating the term Oiêsis to describe self-deception, illusion and arrogant opinion. And we pay a heavy price, Edward de Bono revealing “Studies have shown that 90% of error in thinking is due to error in perception”. Becoming aware of what is obscuring reality means our perception can be corrected, even becoming an a competitive advantage. Billionaire investor Howard Marks describes “Variant perception” as something where “you understand things differently from the way everybody else understands them — is the key to success, assuming you’re right.”Marks says “If you understand everything just the way everybody else does, clearly you can’t outperform. That’s the death knell for a would-be professional investor. So you have to see things differently from others — that’s a necessary condition for outperformance — but you also have to see it better than others. That’s necessary too. The combination of those two is what I call second-level thinking …”.

So what is distorting our perception of reality?

· The delusion of control. Douglas Adams explains how ludicrous it is to believe that we are controlling everything — “The fact that we live at the bottom of a deep gravity well, on the surface of a gas covered planet going around a nuclear fireball 90 million miles away and think this to be normal is obviously some indication of how skewed our perspective tends to be.” David Whyte suggests that this illusion is more prevalent in our youth — “To have a temporary, isolated sense of power over all events and circumstances, is a lovely illusionary privilege and perhaps the prime and most beautifully constructed conceit of being human and especially of being youthfully human, but it is a privilege that must be surrendered with that same youth, with ill health, with accident, with the loss of loved ones who do not share our untouchable powers; powers eventually and most emphatically given up, as we approach our last breath.”

· Cognitive biases. Investor Howard Marks says “one of the most important things is to assess ourselves, understand our biases, and try to overcome them”. Scott Adams[i] explains that “The human mind is a delusion generator, not a window to truth”. To show how prevalent this is John Manoogian and Buster Benson created a “codex” of over 180 cognitive biases[ii]. Benson explained “Every single person, including myself, has many implicit associations that lead to bias that they can’t fully eradicate in themselves. It’s more effective to accept that fact, and account for it by being transparent about it, than to try to hide it. We’re susceptible to many cognitive biases and logical fallacies, because our brains require them to get any thinking done within our constraints of time and energy”. In the words of Anais Nin “We don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are”.

· Limited experience. “Your personal experiences make up maybe 0.00000001% of what’s happened in the world but maybe 80% of how you think the world works.” Morgan Hounsel cautions, “People believe what they’ve seen happen exponentially more than what they read about has happened to other people, if they read about other people at all. We’re all biased to our own personal history. Everyone. If you’ve lived through hyperinflation, or a 50% bear market, or were born to rich parents, or have been discriminated against, you both understand something that people who haven’t experienced those things never will, but you’ll also likely overestimate the prevalence of those things happening again, or happening to other people.” Anais Nin warned “There are very few human beings who receive the truth, complete and staggering, by instant illumination. Most of them acquire it fragment by fragment, on a small scale, by successive developments, cellularly, like a laborious mosaic.”.

· Geo-centricity. Astronomer Carl Sagan coined the term the geo-centric conceit when describing our tendency to think that we are the centre of the Universe. David Foster Wallace explains[iii] “Everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute center of the universe, the realest, most vivid and important person in existence”. George Saunders went further, suggesting it may be evolutionary programming — “Each of us is born with a series of built-in confusions that are probably somehow Darwinian. These are: (1) we’re central to the universe (that is, our personal story is the main and most interesting story, the only story, really); (2) we’re separate from the universe (there’s US and then, out there, all that other junk — dogs and swing-sets, and the State of Nebraska and low-hanging clouds and, you know, other people), and (3) we’re permanent (death is real, o.k., sure — for you, but not for me). Now, we don’t really believe these things — intellectually we know better — but we believe them viscerally, and live by them, and they cause us to prioritize our own needs over the needs of others, even though what we really want, in our hearts, is to be less selfish, more aware of what’s actually happening in the present moment, more open, and more loving.”

· Chrono-centrism[iv], sociologist Jib Fowles explains, is “the belief that one’s own times are paramount, that other periods pale in comparison”. Despite our lives lasting less than 100 years in a Universe that is estimated to be over 13 billion years old, we think, because it is happening to us, that it is important and unprecedented. Historian Will Durant said “Most of us spend too much time on the last twenty-four hours and too little on the last six thousand years.”

· Unrealistic optimism. David Whyte[v] explains “… three abiding illusions that the rest of humanity has shared with you since the beginning of time. And the first illusion is that you can somehow construct a life in which you are not vulnerable. You can somehow be immune to all of the difficulties and ill health and losses that humanity has been subject to since the beginning of time. If we look out at the natural world, there’s no part of that world that doesn’t go through cycles of, first, incipience, or hiddenness, but then growth, fullness, but then a beautiful, to begin with, disappearance, and then a very austere, full disappearance. We look at that, we say, “That’s beautiful, but can I just have the first half of the equation, please? And when the disappearance is happening, I’ll close my eyes and wait for the new cycle to come around.” Which means most human beings are at war with reality 50 percent of the time. The mature identity is able to live in the full cycle.“

· Naïve realism. Brian Resnick[vi] says that “When confronted with ambiguity … our brains fill in the ambiguity using whatever we’re most familiar with.” Resnick suggests “We have this naive realism that the way we see the world is the way that it really is … Naive realism is the feeling that our perception of the world reflects the truth.” Investor Charlie Munger agreed, writing “Man’s imperfect, limited-capacity brain easily drifts into working with what’s easily available to it. And the brain can’t use what it can’t remember or when it’s blocked from recognizing because it’s heavily influenced by one or more psychological tendencies bearing strongly on it …”.

· The fog of war describes the cognitive saturation and uncertainty that occurs during complex and stressful situations. It can happen to even the sharpest mind, Oliver Wendell Holmes pointing out that “Insanity is often the logic of an accurate mind overtasked”.

How can we correct for these distortions ?

1. Be honest. “Self-delusion in humans is very, very common.” Physicist Richard Hamming said, “There are enumerable ways of you changing a thing and kidding yourself and making it look some other way … to yourself try to be honest.”
2. Remain vigilant. It’s been said that “eternal vigilance is the price we pay for liberty”. Mark Manson wrote “understanding cognitive bias is a type of mental freedom that must be earned through continuous effort”.
3. Seek out other (including divergent) views. Remain humble enough to realise that we may not have a clear and complete picture. Resnick suggests “it should nudge us to be more intellectually humble and to cultivate a habit of seeking out perspectives that are not our own”. “If there is any one secret of success” Henry Ford revealed, “it lies in the ability to get the other person’s point of view and see things from that person’s angle as well as from your own.”
4. Change vantage points. When we find ourselves confounded by a situation it can be helpful to change perspective. Victoria Moran wrote that “we all live with blinders on. They come with having a personal vantage point”. In the words of Astro Teller “a change in perspective is sometimes more powerful than being smart”.
5. Suspend judgement. Philosopher Jiddu Krishnamurti wrote “The ability to observe without evaluating is the highest form of intelligence.” Bill Bullard said “Opinion is really the lowest form of human knowledge. It requires no accountability, no understanding. The highest form of knowledge… is empathy, for it requires us to suspend our egos and live in another’s world. It requires profound purpose larger than the self kind of understanding.
6. Maintain a loose grip. In “Ideas that Have Harmed Mankind”, Bertrand Russell wrote that “Most of the greatest evils that man has inflicted upon man have come through people feeling quite certain about something which, in fact, was false.” Russell advised “It’s a healthy thing to hang a question mark on the things you have long taken for granted.”
7. Be compassionate. Michael Lerner says “Reality is much more complex than any judgment of right and wrong encourages you to believe. When you really understand the ethical, spiritual, social, economic, and psychological forces that shape individuals, you will see that people’s choices are not based on a desire to hurt. Instead, they are in accord with what they know and what world views are available to them. Most are doing the best they can, given what information they’ve received and what problems they are facing.”
8. Keep learning. “The most fatal illusion is the settled point of view.” Brooks Atkinson argues, “Since life is growth and motion, a fixed point of view kills anybody who has one.”

It’s been said that when we change the way we look at things, the things we look at change. Seeing more clearly is a journey[vii]. “My destination is no longer a place, Marcel Proust wrote, “rather a new way of seeing”.

[i] God’s Debris: A Thought Experiment, Scott Adams 2011

[ii] https://busterbenson.com/piles/cognitive-biases/ and https://medium.com/better-humans/cognitive-bias-cheat-sheet-55a472476b18

[iii] This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life, David Foster Wallace 2005

[iv] If you have any doubt about this one, read the introduction from the book The Next 100 Years by George Friedman. It describes what someone in 1900 would have experienced over the ensuing decades.

[v] A lyrical bridge between past, present and future, David Whyte TED 2017

[vi] “Reality” is constructed by your brain. Here’s what that means, and why it matters, Brian Resnick, VOX June 22, 2020

[vii] For further exploration of self-delusion check out youarenotsosmart.com and lesswrong.com