3 Important Paradoxal Concepts to Know

Hi, ✋

If you are like me… you are always looking for the things that do not make much sense on the surface, but in some paradoxical way end up being the rule of norm that everyone is surprised at. 😝

Btw: I have other small, quick to read, and curious posts on my profile that may interest you ➡️ Miguel Parente

Actually, there are a lot of very smart people that enter this world and try to explain us how the mind works on this illogical and unconscious level.

I would recommed to look into to the work of Dan Ariely, a professor of psychology and behavioral economics at Duke University and a founding member of the Center for Advanced Hindsight. Also, author of some great books like: The Upside of Irrationality (here); Predictably Irrational (here).

And, of course, Malcolm Gladwell the author of five New York Times bestsellers: The Tipping Point (here), Blink (here), Outliers (here), What the Dog Saw (here), and David and Goliath (here). 📕 🤓

Fallacy of The Unanimous Decision

For me, the curiosity began at 10 years old when my father told me that the most efficient team always need to have someone that is not that intelligent (to be politically correct). Did not make much sense at the time to be honest, since I was used to see the best football teams to be the ones with the most skilled players… or so I thought. ⚽️

Little did I know at the time, that the phenomenon my father was trying to enlighten me with is actually present and can be observed as one of the biggest issues in our judicial and legal system for a long time.

The Paradox of Unanimity as you can see on the short TED Talks, tend to happen because much of our society relies on a majority vote and consensus, so in some way it’s natural to think that more consensus is a positive result. However, if you get closer to total agreement, the less reliable the results become.

You need to consider the overall level of uncertainty involved in the type of situation you are dealing with.

So, in cases that you expect to have some natural variance, you also should expect some varied distribution of results. 🤯

This paradox is highly connected to incorrect witness judicial cases where they wrongly accuse the “guilty” because we often overestimate our own accuracy… and we can also go back to my father’s statement and remember the number of times that we saw a team go in the wrong direction because everyone was too smart to not say “no”, in order to not to broke the actual consensus.

Even if, we tend to strive for harmony and consensus, in many situations, error and disagreement should be naturally expected.

Conjunction Fallacy

The second concept that I would like to touch, is more oriented on counterintuitive tricks on the mind. 😸

Everyone believes what each one wants… or they think they do. More often that not, the things we believe are in some way or another reliant on the context that is given to us, or attached to our background stories that we reflect on the situation.

Here, we explore the psychology of the cognitive bias known as the conjunction fallacy, where we assume specific conditions are more probable than general ones.

The idea behind this concept, it’s that we tend to believe the stories that have more context and details… because they make more sense, but even in a Mathematical level, it can be proved that actually should be the opposite way.

                      Pr(A) ≥ Pr(A ^ B)

So, when I tell you that I’m Portuguese and love sports, and then ask you which one of these options is the more likely to be true:

▶️ Option 1 — I’m living in Barcelona.

▶️ Option 2 — I’m living in Barcelona and my favourite football player is Cristiano Ronaldo (SIIIIIIIIII!!!!!).

Which one of these options would you think that is more likely to be true? 🤪

Weak Link vs Strong Link

I want to finish with my favourite concept, and of course I will also use some analogies with sports, but I promise it’s easier to understand that way (at least for me 😜).

As Malcolm Gladwell mentioned, on the domain of the actual pandemic situation, we live in a weak link world. 🌍

Btw: this theory actually comes from two economists Chris Anderson and David Sally, illustrated on their book “The Numbers Game” (here).

The big question is:

• If you are trying to improve your football team, you do it by improving your best player or by improving your worst player?

The obvious answer for most of the people would be “by improving the worst player”, and it would be the correct one. 💪

This happens because football is a “game of mistakes” to the extent that bad players make more often more mistakes than good players. Also, due to the fact that football is an interactive sport, where you always need the involvement and contribution of everyone. So, the good flow of a play can more likely be broken by a mistake of a bad player.

Football is a case of weak link sport. Your team is only as good as your weakest player. ⚽️

On the other side, there is basketball where there is less interaction (we all saw Kobe Bryant score when he wanted to score 🙏), and also is less mistake driven.

That’s why teams in the NBA spend their salary cap on two or three players and then have rotation players.

Basketball is a strong link sport. Where a team is as good as its strongest player. 🏀

In effect, this is a very insightful paradigm that we all may well apply to our daily situations and institutions that we are a part of.

For example, as Malcolm Gladwell says, if you are building a hedge fund it’s a more strong link orientation, where you are going to do as well as your best Warren Buffett. Or computing programming where a good developer can be worth 10x random hackers. 😜

However, there are also systems that are clearly weak link.

On the social level normally we live in a paradigm of weak links, where the sum of the all is as good as the weakest among us.

Unfortunately, not often we are aware of this concept and we end up leaving space for inequality and big gaps of economic wealth difference.

For instance, think about the COVID-19 situation where sometimes we focus on the few strong and good indicators to base our strategies and arguments on… and we forget the weakest among us and without whom we would not be here.

Happily ever after?

Please, do not take me too seriously because I just write for fun and I do not have the slightest idea about what am I doing.

Again, I just love to see the things that do not make much sense at a first glance and then make your head spin for a while.

Thanks! ❤

IMPORTANT: most of the images I use are from Muzli, and are used without any monetization purpose.