Receptiveness to Feedback
A lifetime in journalism should make reporters grateful to editors (and readers) bearing feedback in good faith
"feedback-spiral" by fo.ol is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.
Regular readers might not realise this, but I always feel a little nervous at 09:45 Central European Time (CET) on a Saturday when Substack releases the essay that I have prepared beforehand. The reason is simple. Although I have always read and re-read the essay many times, I haven’t worked with an editor in getting it ready. This is scary for a career journalist.
As a result, I always keep an eye out for feedback. Friends, family members and people I know on social media will often point out small typos or issues with the text. I will always thank them and then fix it on Substack’s website the next time I’m next to my computer. There is no way of fixing the version that is emailed to subscribers - resending the email is probably too much hassle for minor typos.
This attitude of thanking people who spot mistakes is very obvious to journalists who are used to working with or as an editor. I’ve been in the game for nearly 30 years now. I remember when I was starting out as a junior news reporter in the 1990s, I got into a blazing row with an editor. A former boss of mine - who much later wrote this fine guest column - took me to one side and told me never to argue with editors. He wanted me to understand they were trying to make me look better than I really was.
My former boss said that if an editor had misunderstood my intentions and edited a mistake into my work, I could politely explain the issue and negotiate a new, improved version, rather than fighting to save my original words. It remains great advice and I am always happy when I have the chance to pass it onto reporters who are at the start of their careers.
In the first phase of my career, I worked as a full-time news reporter, eventually specialising in investigative reporting about finance. After this timely intervention from my former boss, I came to enjoy working with editors and appreciate a second (or third) pair of eyes on my words. In the middle section of my career, I gradually added more editing duties into the mix while continuing to work as an investigative reporter, which meant I had to learn how to give feedback as well as receiving it.
Last year, I was promoted to a senior editor. Although I write less in my job than I did before, I still try and publish data-backed and analytical stories pretty much every week (as well as writing a weekly essay on my personal blog); and I still enjoy watching how good editors improve my work from Monday to Friday.
I think working for a long time as a news reporter can (and should) help journalists develop an attitude of receptiveness to feedback. Unfortunately, the three-word phrase is a bit of a mouthful. We probably need a new word! How about becoming feedbackphiles? We could contrast these people with feedbackphobes for those who are susceptible to the vice that historian and journalist Barbara W. Tuchman described as “wooden-headedness” or “the refusal to benefit from experience.”
Of course, feedbackphobia is a big theme of this blog. Our brains developed in evolutionary conditions that rewarded anything that would ”keep bipedal apes alive long enough to reproduce,” as we said in last week’s column on chaos and narratives. A particularly strong link with the world outside our brains wouldn’t have given our ancestors much of an edge, so our brains evolved to be vulnerable to cognitive dissonance (an uncomfortable feeling we all get when faced with contradiction).
Cognitive dissonance can make the experience of receiving feedback difficult for all of us at times (my argument with an editor when I was a young reporter is a good example). We will always be tempted to double down on our initial take and reject the feedback, the person who gave it and the horse they rode to get there too. In fact, negative feedback is actually a chance to reconsider our whole worldview, as we discussed in the column on experience as a boundary condition. Rather more prosaically, coaches often tell us that feedback should be treated a gift. On a deeper level, we have seen that market-based economies are more successful than the alternatives because they are such a fine way of gathering feedback.
Unfortunately, a certain kind of person will react very badly to feedback. A late acquaintance of mine was a good example of a feedbackphobe. When I met him, he was involved in a pyramid scam. I politely tried to give him some information that he was lacking, but he reacted very badly. He ended up ruining his finances and taking a few friends and family members with him. He briefly became a left-wing revolutionary and we crossed swords a few times on social media before I vowed to no longer attend internet debate club. Suddenly, as if by magic, he pivoted into right-wing populism and crypto-currencies. I felt I had to stage an intervention when he joined a bleach-drinking cult, but it failed miserably. He died much too young of a heart attack. May he rest in peace!
My acquaintance’s heart was in the right place, but his hostility to feedback let him down badly. He used to throw other people’s gifts back in their faces. Even after he had come to realise that he had been led astray, he never went back and thanked anyone who had tried to help him. If there is a spectrum with feedbackphiles on the left and feedbackphobes on the right, he would have been an outlier on the extreme right. I think we should all strive to move the dial a little to the left, as reporters have to learn to do if we want to survive in the news business.
One of the themes of this blog is about the contrast between hedgehogs and foxes. Hedgehogs often have one model of reality, while foxes like to work with different models and consider which one is appropriate in which circumstances. Hedgehogs are often a little prickly when it comes to receiving feedback that contradicts their models. They often invent or adopt conspiracy theories that explain away any inconvenient facts that undermine their chosen narrative. Foxes tend to be more receptive to feedback, on the whole.
I think that populism can be explained in a similar way. Populists (anti-pluralists) often have one hedgehog-like model of society. They believe that anyone who disagrees or provides feedback to improve the model is acting in bad faith. As we have seen many times in this blog, this means that when populist leaders gain power, they often strive to remove the brakes on the executive branch, for example, by cracking down on the press, the judiciary and the opposition. These anti-democratic attitudes are a logical consequence of being an extreme feedbackphile.
One of the ways we can sidestep these issues is by striving to separate our values from our worldview. If we do this, we can make appreciating feedback a core part of the way that we see the world. This simple step can cut populism off at the root.
An emphasis on feedback might seem a little obscure to some. Far from it! One of the reasons that this year’s US Presidential election is so compelling is that the current iterations of the two main parties differ so much when it comes to appreciating feedback and changing course as a result.
Top Democrats reacted decisively to President Joe Biden’s poor debate performance; and then united around Vice President Kamala Harris. The party’s convention in Chicago was built by feedback. Left-wing apologists for Palestinian nationalism, whose views about destroying the state of Israel are seen as toxic in much of Middle America, were sidelined. Progressive themes were packaged using emotionally engaging language and images, including words like “freedom” and multiple American flags, rather than with “woke” language that can raise hackles in some quarters. When Harris proposed a populist pricing policy, her team was quick to walk it back when faced by universal outrage from economists.
On the other side, though, former President Donald Trump refuses to accept any feedback at all. He insists on running a relentlessly negative campaign, despite focus groups saying that they hate it. Another small example comes from his suggestion that Harris uses artificial intelligence (AI) tools to inflate her crowd sizes. Rather than grappling with uncomfortable truths, such as people leaving his rallies early as he rambles incoherently for hours, he deploys conspiracy theories to act as the bodyguards to his narcissistic worldview. SAD!
Am I a hypocrite?
Of course, I normally turn the comments off when I discuss populism. Alert readers might accuse me of being a feedbackphile when I do this. In fact, I think that the populists who attack those of us who provide them with feedback on the failures of their ideology are often acting in bad faith, as I discuss in my essay on cybernats.
Why are toxic commentators always so quick to change the subject when they start losing an argument? If you want to give feedback to others, you have to be able to take it too. There is a clear difference between people helping each other and being a heckler! In reality, the hecklers are deep in cognitive dissonance and are trying to protect their worldview. They are not trying to help their critics install the updates to their own views.
Also, this blog is a busman’s holiday for a working journalist. I work on the essays by myself in my free time and release them completely for free. I really don’t want to spend my weekends battling with angry populists in the comments section. Sorry! If you are utterly convinced that my whole worldview is wrong, it would be much healthier to set up your own blog and write structured arguments starting from first principles rather than just sniping in the comments. I would read it!
Finally, while researching this article, I found out that the word feedback was coined in the 1920s as a technical term used by engineers developing radio technology. I realise that the combination of English with Greek in feedbackphiles and feedbackphobes is a little ugly. Do you have any better suggestions? The comments are open. I will engage with the sensible ones. Also, I’ll see you next week!
Previously on Sharpen Your Axe
Experience as a boundary condition
Foxes, hedgehogs and switching costs
Separate your values from your worldview
Further Reading
Cognitive Dissonance: 50 Years of a Classic Theory by Joel M. Cooper
What Is Populism? by Jan-Werner Müller
How Democracy Ends by David Runciman
The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam by Barbara W. Tuchman
Virtues of the Mind: An Inquiry into the Nature of Virtue and the Ethical Foundations of Knowledge by Linda Trinkaus Zagzebski
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My experience with feedback comes in the context of software engineering. Any competent software engineering team requires code reviews for anything going into their product - whether completely new code or trivial modifications. One or more software engineers other than the code author look over the code, pointing out any issues of potential issues they see. These can range from trivial typos to major security risks, from outright bugs to ways to make the code just a wee bit less failure prone. I believe just about any other engineering discipline has similar practices.
It's not much fun receiving this kind of feedback, particularly at first when you probably don't know all the tricks of the trade. You figure "my code works - it passed all my tests - why are they badgering me to make stylistic changes?" You come up with excuses for why the problem some pedantic reviewer noticed doesn't matter . And you feel miserable and somewhat scared while waiting for feedback. But you are highly motivated to control this reaction, lest your colleagues look down on you.
I nonetheless came eventually to love this feedback, seek out the best and most thorough reviewers, and put considerable effort into improving my own reviewing skills. It's so much cheaper to fix a problem before it's been shipped to customers. and while it may be embarrassing to have a senior colleague point out a mistake you made, it's much less embarrassing than being the idiot that brought down half the airlines in North America (Hello, Crowdstrike ;-() or half the phone switches manufactured by AT&T. Or ....
As a side effect of learning and using this process, I'm perhaps a wee bit more willing to accept negative feedback outside my professional life. And sometimes that sort of feedback is by far the most important.