Why “Seeing the Mountain”?

A newsletter about the mystery of human behavior

“Climb the mountain not to plant your flag, but to embrace the challenge, enjoy the air and behold the view. Climb it so you can see the world, not so the world can see you.”

David McCullough Jr.

Photo by Bayu Syaits

Welcome!

The ‘mountain’ is a metaphor about the complexity of human behavior and interaction. This issue, along with the next few, will lay the foundation for future discussion topics.

We barely understand ourselves and we understand others less. Our brains formed with prebuilt ‘programs’, encoded in the DNA, that directs our operations without the involvement of conscious thought. To better understand these processes, each week the newsletter will pull research and conjecture from a wide variety of academic disciplines, social commentary, and storytelling.

Research in the fields of behavioral genetics, biology, evolutionary biology, and evolutionary psychology (most of it relatively recent) is uncovering hidden drives that help explain the humanity’s seeming randomness. Psychology, sociology, anthropology, and history builds our narrative of humanity’s actions across cultures and time. The arts and philosophy help us see that patterns within the bewildering complexity of humanity. Economic, marketing, and behavioral research teaches us how our combined behaviors manifest themselves in our society. Each field contains building blocks of knowledge from which we can construct our framework of why the world operates as it does.

So what does this mean for you?

Understanding what drives us, and why it drives us, lights the path for where we want to take our lives and our relationships . As little as we understand ourselves, we understand others less. With knowledge comes patience and grace for ourselves and for others.

Having insight into the puzzling behavior of our coworkers and employees opens up new-to-us tools for improving productivity, cooperation, and the organizational culture. These benefits extend into our relationships with our family and peer groups; where the public masks slip and the veneer of competence slips away. In these personal relationships we can find a deeper understanding of each other.

What this newsletter means to me

“He who climbs upon the highest mountains laughs at all tragedies, real or imaginary.”

Friedrich Nietzsche

In the last nearly two decades, I’ve seen society splinter and detach from each other. Technology and social media have allowed us to step back into our caves causing us to understand each other just a little less as each year goes by. This newsletter is my attempt to repair a small bit of that damage.

The Mountain

“The only way to fully know the soul of a mountain is to live it’s all seasons and it’s all heights and the same thing is valid for people as well!”
― Mehmet Murat ildan

When we are standing on a mountain we see just a small part of it. We don’t see whats around the next corner, on the other side, or under the ground. Perhaps we’ve climbed the mountain many times, but the botanist understands the plant life and why it has thrived. A geologist understands how the mountain was formed and how it changed over time. A rock climber can tell you where the best handholds are and what should be the best or more interesting path to the top. A historian can tell you how the various civilizations over the centuries have interacted and understood the mountain. The poet can put into words the sense of awe we feel when we experience a mountain and an artist can describe how the light changes what we see and feel.

We can never see all of the mountain but we can see more of it when we recognize our limits of understanding and compensate by folding in the perspectives of other mountain gazers with their own unique experiences and vantage points.

Asymmetric Information

When we don’t have access to other’s unique knowledge, their view of the mountain, it creates an asymmetry of information that distorts relationships and the economy. George Akerlof was one of three economists in 2001 that won a Nobel Prize for their work on asymmetric information. His 1970 paper, The Market for Lemons, highlighted how the used car market was distorted by dealers who knew the quality issues with their cars better than the consumer. This created a profit incentive for dealers to resell lower quality cars and producing a higher profit margin. Conversely, dealers who sold higher quality cars saw their margins shrink as buyers favored lower priced and (unrecognized) lower quality vehicles. This created a ‘race to the bottom’ within the industry.

Fourteen years after The Market for Lemons was published, the company Carfax was born. Carfax fills that knowledge gaps by providing buyers a history of the car’s maintenance, repairs, and accidents. Today, the company grosses $500 million a year. They solved the information asymmetry problem, giving consumers a chance for a better deal and giving car dealers with higher quality cars better margins.

Other companies that developed products to address the problem of asymmetric information include Glassdoor, which grosses over $300 million by providing information about employers and salaries, and RateMyProfessors.com which grosses over $10 million by providing information to college students about their professor’s classes.

Asymmetric information doesn’t just affect business relationships, it also impacts personal relationships. Trust issues fester when partners don’t share their problems or concerns, leaving each partner to make false assumptions and to catastrophize what they don’t understand. Often this leads to one partner attempting to correct the asymmetry by snooping in their partner’s phone or tracking their location.

Pluralistic ignorance

Another example where we don’t always hear about other’s view of the mountain is in group settings. Within groups, members often don’t share their opinion or perspective in order to maintain their reputation within the group. One reason committees sometimes come to disastrous conclusions, despite the seemingly beneficial aggregation of knowledge and experience, is a phenomena called pluralistic ignorance (or collective illusion). Humans are notoriously inaccurate at estimating what the opinions of a group may be. As a result, members of the group shape their input to fit what they believe the group members want to hear. The resulting consensus then leads to bad outcomes such as failed product launches, ineffective policy changes, or shareholder/employee revolts.

The plot of Dead Poets Society is based around this behavior. The 1989 film is set in a boys boarding school in 1959. An English professor, played by Robin Williams, uses poetry to teach the students to embrace their individuality and not submerse their uniqueness in favor of conforming to their perceived group’s beliefs. (Which leads ultimately to clashes with authority figures who prefer conformity to individuality.)

Finale

This is an introduction to how we are impacted by not seeing all of the mountain before us. In future newsletters, we’ll go into more depth about these topics as well as how we interpolate knowledge to adjust for what we don’t see and how we do (and don’t) adjust for errors in our beliefs.

“Mountains know secrets we need to learn. That it might take time, it might be hard, but if you just hold on long enough, you will find the strength to rise up.” 

Tyler Knott

Housekeeping

Upcoming foundational topics include how we subconsciously overestimate our knowledge, overestimate our risk, and how our ancient programming for reputation management trips us up today.

This newsletter will be pulling data and opinion from a wide variety of sources. This breadth necessarily reduces depth. Breadth helps paint a more complex picture of a complex topic, but depth suffers in the process. If there is a subject that particularly interests you please follow the links to the authoritative sources for more depth. You can also ask for additional sources in the comments below. Mistakes will be made by me and others. I will attempt to fix errors that are identified in previous newsletters. If you spot an error please post about it in the comments with a source that has more correct information. Just be kind in your words should you disagree with a point I or others make. We are on this journey together. We all benefit if we share and learn together.

This weeks exercise

To be done when you are in a non-distracting environment.

• Identify what you uniquely know about a real mountain.

• Identify someone in your life who knows something unique about that mountain that you don’t know.

• Identify what you uniquely know about your workplace behavior (or, alternatively, social group) that others there don’t know.

• Identify someone in your life who you believe knows something unique about the group behavior that you don’t know.

In closing

Thank you for visiting today. If you found this newsletter interesting, subscribe by clicking the button below. We are a small newsletter, if you have any friends or family who might find this content interesting please recommend this letter to them.

Your friend,

DJ