We Are All Frauds
We are all frauds. We cry about objectivity, but we never practice it in the truest sense. Because there is no way to bypass your emotions and remain rational—unless you have outsourced your decision-making to a system or a preexisting framework.
Almost none of us truly believe in systematic thinking. All the talk of mental models exists only on paper or in a book. Fun to read, but never to implement. We are all looking for hacks to bypass the ordeal of figuring out the right decision. We want a magic trick that will help us make the right decisions and make progress in life.
It is natural for people to rely on their emotions rather than go beyond them. Whether you like someone or hate them doesn’t necessarily come from an objective assessment of their personality. It usually comes from their selective actions and your interpretation of those actions through the lens of your preexisting biases.
Once the hatred is established, we almost never update that belief. Ever. After that, it doesn’t matter how many good things they do; we are only waiting for the bad things they do. Because only their bad actions will justify our negative opinion of them—the aha moment that proves we were right all along. The good things are discarded and never weighed against the bad.
The preexisting bias established our hatred. Then we picked the facts that accommodated that opinion. An objective mind would constantly update its beliefs as the facts evolve. This is what we call Bayesian thinking. But in reality, we rarely work this way. That is why I say that we are all frauds.
Whatever we choose to believe is based upon a preexisting bias. If any of our beliefs haven’t been updated in a while, then we are never truly objective. We are always in a hurry to put a tag on someone—like or dislike. Hate or love. So we skip the mental evolution of a human being and focus instead on the tag we want to give them.
The only way to move towards honesty is to increase our awareness of this habit. Ask yourself: Why do you hate them? What facts would you need to change your opinion about them?
A genuine dislike will have an answer to this. An opinionated dislike or hatred will always struggle to answer it.
That is the tell of a fraud.