Lessons from a Failed Orienteer
An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure
"Choosing the right direction" by CIFOR is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
When I was around 12, a friend of my parents was into orienteering. He persuaded us to try it a couple of times. If you have never heard of orienteering, all you need to know is that it is a very strange sport, which was invented by the Swedish army in the 19th century. It involves a race around a course with a map. Contestants are meant to stop off at control points in a specific order.
I teamed up with my brother, who is a year and half younger than me. We charged around enthusiastically but incompetently without pausing much to look at our maps. Meanwhile, our youngest brother went around the course with our parents, who strolled round the course slowly and carefully.
Needless to say, both times we had a go at orienteering my brother and I were terrible at the sport. We covered twice the distance as anyone else at twice the speed, but only ever had a very rough idea of where we were going. The boring people who spent some time looking at their maps at the beginning and at each control point did much better than us, despite walking instead of running.
After a couple of tries, my brother and I decided that we didn’t enjoy the sport and we never did it again. However, I learnt a hard lesson that has stuck with me to this day. Spending five minutes studying the map at the beginning can save you half an hour of running around in circles later. In the words of Benjamin Franklin, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.
Many years later, I noticed something similar when friends disappeared down strange internet rabbit holes. Thinking about your research methodology before you begin any research is roughly equivalent to studying a map before you get started on the fun stuff. It might be geekier than watching exciting YouTube videos or assuming that everybody who disagrees with you has malign motives, but it will give you better results.
Unfortunately, my first attempts to warn people about the dangers of internet rabbit holes were a complete failure. They triggered massive cognitive dissonance in the people I was trying to help and led to lots of toxic social media debates, which triggered cognitive dissonance in me too. It took me a long time to realize that we needed to talk much more about methodology and a lot less about our conclusions to avoid these conversations turning adversorial.
What happens when you actually talk about methodology instead of conclusions? In my experience, people who love internet rabbit holes will tell you about the fundamentals of their approach if you sit down and have a deep and non-judgemental conversation with them. More often than not, they will tell you that they are great believers in their gut feelings, just like my brother and me when we failed as orienteers.
Of course, it is possible to tell your intuitive friends about how Daniel Kahneman won a Nobel Prize for showing that we are terrible natural statisticians. Or we can tell them how con artists hack our emotions by telling us what we want to hear. Or we can talk about George W. Bush’s faith in his gut ahead of the Iraq invasion.
Unfortunately, none of this is likely to work. Our friends’ gut instincts will reinforce their faith in their intuition and reject the path of doubt and uncertainty. Running fast without a map is more fun! I’m afraid I don’t know how to overcome this hurdle, but at least knowing where it is means that we don’t have to keep crashing into it. The comments are open. See you next week!
Further reading
Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman
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[Updated on 10 March 2022] Opinions expressed on Substack and Twitter are those of Rupert Cocke as an individual and do not reflect the opinions or views of the organization where he works or its subsidiaries.