Hunch

We’re not very good at guessing, we humans. We’re confident when we shouldn’t be and have no inherent statistical sense. We make up stories instead of leaving room for skepticism. And we think ourselves prescient.

There’s no way to defeat this problem permanently, though there are some tactics you can employ. One way I’ve thought to try to defeat the ever-present hunch is to limit my exposure to the (useless) information that gives me hunches.

Here’s an example: job interviews are worthless. Everyone – everyone – will argue with me here, but the science isn’t even close to controversial on this: there is absolutely zero correlation between performance in a job interview and performance on the job. Even if “job interview skills” translated into “job skills,” humans simply can’t make effective judgments of those skills in an interview setting. In practice, a job interview is a total hunch farm. If you whittle down a candidate list to a top 5 based on things like their resume, credentials, and/or trial projects, then you might as well pick one of those 5 at random. You have as good (if not better) of a chance of picking the top candidate as you do by interviewing them and deciding, and it’s faster and cheaper.

Of course, no CEO will take this information and use it to make cheaper, faster, and better decisions about hiring by eliminating job interviews at their company. Because even if it were true, that would be scary in its own right. People don’t like knowing the truth, which is that virtually no one can predict things well – stock picks are voodoo, political punditry is street theater, and job interviews are people flexing for the future ability to claim great business savvy when they’re accidentally right once in a while.

So for me, I’d rather just not get the hunch-producing information in the first place. In the surprisingly frequent circumstance where additional information just causes me to think I know more than I do, why bother?

There’s an old Robert Heinlein book that I love called Tunnel In The Sky. There’s a scene where a young man about to go on a classic “big space adventure” asks his older sister, a veteran Big Space Adventurer, what kind of gun he should bring. She tells him: none. Most space monsters, she says, can’t be killed by guns at all – but a gun gives you false confidence and you get killed because of it. But if you have no gun at all you’ll be terrified all the time, and that will keep you alive.

This feels like that – I don’t want something giving me false confidence. I want to be confused and uncertain when I should be, which is most of the time. Because then I’ll have to think as critically as I can just to make it through the day.

I would rather be uncertain than wrong, as long as I can be.