Humans lived through most of their history in an environment that rewarded those who prioritised the downside of risk.
Moments of inattention frequently led to the death of the inattentive. Those who didn’t stop to analyse a ‘rustle in the grass’ but took to their heels immediately, were more likely to survive.
We therefore evolved a bias against potentially negative information and outcomes. We find bad news and negative experiences to be far more compelling than good news and positive experiences. While this is understandable it is not necessarily rational today.
Nassim Taleb, of The Black Swan fame, popularised the notion of the ‘precaution principle’. His reasoning is that the impact of some events, like earthquakes, fires and stock market crashes, follow a power law distribution rather than a bell curve. That means catastrophic events are way more common than the bell curve measure of risk suggests.
For that reason, Taleb argues we should err on the side of not exposing ourselves to potential extinction events. His ‘precaution principle’ is simply an abstraction of our innate negativity bias.
Some of our better-known myths embody the principle – such as, for example, Prometheus stealing fire from the gods and Eve eating from the tree of knowledge.
We remember the punishments suffered by Prometheus and Adam and Eve, but we forget the benefits. Yet how many of us would return to the state of innocence, or voluntarily enter ‘the matrix’, if we could? In truth, probably many.
After all, the major global religions promise salvation, security or avoidance of suffering, to those who try. Their message is that the ultimate sin is to strive to become gods in our own right. The right thing to do is to remain dependent on, and subservient to, a particular deity. The ultimate piety is to die, to be a martyr for that cause.
As I said earlier, evolution baked negativity and safety into us. Like Taleb, we like to think our negativity is, as Adrian Gore recently described it, “rational and sophisticated” and that, in this way, we are wisely confronting uncertainty and complexity.
Thrill of curiosity
The vast majority of people would rather have a nice secure job than start their own business. They prioritise political and technological stability, even if it means they will remain living in squalor. They prefer the comfort of not having to think for themselves to the thrill of curiosity or solving a problem. In fact, psychology research revealed that some people would literally rather die than think for themselves.
But here is the thing, submitting to this negativity bias comes at an enormous cost.
Outsized positive outcomes also follow a power law and are more common than we think. While some things can wipe us out, likely events can equally lift us to undreamed of heights.
A less extreme way of putting it is that the bias attaches too much weight to what Gore called the “downside risks” and narrows “the set of possibilities we are willing to consider”.
“Negative signals propagate quickly,” he argues, “undermining the execution of ideas and sound decisions. As a result, what once helped us survive increasingly constrains not only what we attempt and pursue, but how we execute in modern organisations and societies.”
Baseball legend Babe Ruth held the home-run record for a very long time, until someone filled to the gills with steroids finally surpassed it. Ruth also had more strikeouts – or failed more – than anyone else. His achievements came in part because he ignored the ‘precaution principle’ in order to strive for its opposite – let’s call it the ‘achievement principle.’
The same applies to creative geniuses. They too churn out vast amounts of forgettable work for every piece that ends up changing the world. According to his biography, the success of Elon Musk is primarily based on his obsessive and radical questioning of every negative bias. Most of the investments of venture capitalists, around 95-98%, are complete failures. However, the returns from the successes are so large they dwarf all the losses.
Existential risk
These gains are in large part due to risking disastrous failure, but the trade-off is rational because the net long-term outcomes are hugely positive. I have heard people mount a sort of Pascal’s wager that no amount of potential benefit justifies any degree of existential risk.
Really? The same people willingly risk their lives driving for fairly trivial gains, such as getting to shops conveniently.
There is more to favouring the achievement principle over the precaution principle than material welfare. There are moral, psychological and spiritual advantages too. Being a net contributor to the human world is a moral, psychological and spiritual plus. Where an exchange is unequal, morality lies entirely on the side of the net giver.
Recent research (of primary beliefs) shows the belief that your existence makes a positive difference to the world, that is, that the world needs you, drives happiness, life satisfaction and a sense of meaning. The only way to get this is to be the source of a product or service that meets another’s important need, that is, to secure or create something, rather than sit around playing it safe. It helps if it is something that you created rather than something you were born with, like beauty.
Nietzsche has a lot to say about the spiritual aspects of achievement versus playing it safe. He did not oppose religion per se. His opposition to Christianity as a form of religion and culture, or as a provider of guiding myths, was that it was utterly anti-achievement, anti-life and anti-man, in the world in which we live.
He stood for virtue ethics, for striving after glory like the ancient Greeks or Vikings, for taking, building, creating and expanding rather than begging, preserving and defending. He thought that if there was any possibility of making life meaningful, or justifying it, then increasing one’s power over it through creation was the only way.
Fire and pointed sticks
The psychologist David McCleland researched Need for Achievement and found that the degree to which peoples thrived depended on the typical level of that need in their society. One way of promoting that outlook is to uphold a Nietzschean ideology/religion and to give people the freedom to play with fire and pointed sticks in every area of life.
Positive psychology is beginning to develop techniques to produce that attitude. In addition to more effective power supplies and medicine, we really could do with more ambition and the can-do attitude these things rely on.
[Image: by seventyfourimages]
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR.
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