Ignore Twitter. Pay Attention To This Instead. | Deep Questions with Cal Newport

00:00:00.000 | First though, let's do a deep dive.

00:00:03.580 | So I'm gonna do a deep dive on an idea

00:00:06.300 | I've been thinking about.

00:00:07.160 | I'm calling this the feedback council idea.

00:00:11.660 | And I'm gonna open with an article.

00:00:14.120 | I don't wanna spend a lot of time on this article.

00:00:16.380 | It's just gonna motivate this bigger idea

00:00:20.660 | of feedback councils.

00:00:22.300 | So I saw this article the other day,

00:00:23.980 | a listener sent it to me,

00:00:25.360 | to the interesting@calnewport.com address.

00:00:28.700 | So there was this article that appeared in the New York Times

00:00:31.260 | that was about CNN's new leadership.

00:00:36.260 | So this is from June 5th, as you can see here.

00:00:41.380 | So what has happened at CNN is there is a shakeup.

00:00:44.100 | There is a new head of CNN, Chris Licht, L-I-C-H-T,

00:00:49.100 | who is trying to do lots of things to shake up the network,

00:00:54.140 | among other things,

00:00:54.980 | now that Donald Trump's no longer president,

00:00:56.980 | they're shifting away from more of a

00:00:59.020 | high energy adversarial style of reporting

00:01:01.660 | to try to be a little bit more down the center.

00:01:04.180 | There's a lot of changes that Chris Licht is doing,

00:01:07.220 | but there was one in particular that caught my attention.

00:01:10.860 | That's what I wanna highlight here.

00:01:12.060 | So for those who are watching,

00:01:13.460 | you can actually see the article.

00:01:14.460 | For those listening at home,

00:01:15.740 | you just hear me talking about it.

00:01:18.180 | So we have right here,

00:01:19.780 | producers have been urged to ignore Twitter backlash

00:01:24.880 | from the far right and the far left.

00:01:27.520 | All right, that I think is a good idea.

00:01:33.380 | I wanna explain why I think it's a good idea,

00:01:37.320 | because it will give us some ideas about

00:01:40.200 | how the rest of us should be thinking

00:01:41.960 | about living our lives in a digital world,

00:01:44.400 | whether or not we run a network.

00:01:46.240 | So to explain why I think that's a good idea,

00:01:49.640 | let's start with the notion of feedback more generally,

00:01:53.360 | and in particular, the role of feedback for human beings.

00:01:58.360 | Human beings are wired, neurologically speaking,

00:02:02.960 | to take feedback from other human beings very seriously.

00:02:07.560 | We pay a lot of attention to it.

00:02:08.720 | It has a lot of effect on how we feel.

00:02:12.440 | So we're very wired for this.

00:02:13.880 | Now there's two good reasons for this

00:02:15.660 | from an evolutionary perspective.

00:02:17.520 | One is tribal cohesion.

00:02:18.880 | So when you can watch and monitor very carefully

00:02:21.580 | the reaction of people around you to what you're saying,

00:02:24.640 | it allows you to adjust what you're saying

00:02:26.640 | in such a way to try to maintain social comedy,

00:02:30.280 | to maintain positive affect between people.

00:02:33.380 | You see the body language show,

00:02:35.080 | uh-oh, I'm going into dangerous territory here.

00:02:37.200 | You pull back a little bit.

00:02:38.160 | This helps keeps tribal groups happy amongst themselves.

00:02:43.160 | Now I talk about the neuroscientific backing

00:02:48.600 | for how this happens a little bit

00:02:50.000 | in my book, "Digital Minimalism."

00:02:51.780 | I get into how much of our brain is actually dedicated

00:02:53.900 | to processing all these complex input channels

00:02:55.940 | that come from person-to-person interaction.

00:02:58.960 | But the high-level summary there is

00:03:00.420 | we monitor the people around us while we are talking,

00:03:03.780 | and we take that feedback very seriously.

00:03:06.060 | It's very affecting.

00:03:07.180 | The other advantage of feedback from other humans

00:03:09.180 | is that it extends our ability to cogitate

00:03:13.260 | beyond just our own brains.

00:03:17.060 | And if there's a group of people,

00:03:19.100 | getting feedback from other people in the group

00:03:21.440 | on a plan, on an idea, on an initiative,

00:03:24.940 | allows you to essentially tap into the cognitive potential

00:03:28.560 | of these other brains, forming a larger collective brain

00:03:32.320 | that is more nuanced and smarter

00:03:34.340 | than any one brain potentially in isolation.

00:03:37.140 | This was a great trick of evolution.

00:03:41.640 | It requires complex language to do it,

00:03:43.240 | but once we have this trick,

00:03:44.360 | it really allowed us to upgrade quickly

00:03:47.840 | our ability to actually think and make good decisions.

00:03:51.480 | Now, of course, leaving the evolutionary past

00:03:54.800 | and going into the more recent cultural past

00:03:56.760 | of human beings, we see this extended cogitation idea

00:03:59.840 | maybe reach its apogee with the scientific method,

00:04:02.320 | where now we can formally receive feedback on ideas

00:04:06.840 | in a very structured and formalized way

00:04:08.840 | that really helps aim our attention

00:04:11.880 | towards scientific realities away from some things

00:04:14.200 | that aren't.

00:04:15.800 | So again, getting feedback from other people

00:04:17.320 | is a huge part of the human experience.

00:04:20.000 | All right, so we take it seriously,

00:04:20.880 | our brain cares about it.

00:04:22.120 | The issue with the social internet,

00:04:25.500 | and in particular, the more recent last 10 year rise

00:04:28.880 | of widely used social media platforms on the social internet

00:04:33.880 | is that it introduced into our cultural ecosystem

00:04:37.440 | new forms of feedback.

00:04:39.200 | Feedback that we did not have access to before,

00:04:42.720 | feedback that is of a decidedly different character

00:04:46.640 | than the type of feedback that our brain has been wired

00:04:48.560 | to take very seriously.

00:04:50.600 | So there's really two things that differentiate

00:04:52.320 | the feedback you get from, let's say, Twitter or Instagram

00:04:56.040 | versus what you would get from your tribe

00:04:57.840 | a hundred thousand years ago.

00:04:59.080 | One, it's a biased sample.

00:05:01.980 | So when you're getting feedback from the internet,

00:05:05.400 | it's not as if you are randomly sampling the population

00:05:08.960 | and getting a true representative sense

00:05:10.640 | of how people feel about what you just said.

00:05:12.640 | It's not as if like it is in our Paleolithic path,

00:05:15.160 | it's the same group of people giving you feedback

00:05:17.200 | that have given you feedback on everything else.

00:05:18.800 | So if their opinion shifts,

00:05:21.000 | then that's probably represents

00:05:22.360 | there's something going on here you should pay attention to.

00:05:24.440 | Instead, the internet has these weird connectivity

00:05:28.080 | and virality dynamics where anyone can give feedback

00:05:30.800 | to anyone else, and what selects someone

00:05:33.080 | to wanna give feedback to you

00:05:34.080 | can be quite arbitrary or unusual.

00:05:36.320 | There could be something about what you said

00:05:38.000 | that got spread through some sort

00:05:39.160 | of viral amplification network,

00:05:40.640 | and it got to some malcontent over here,

00:05:42.520 | and then they can directly message you back

00:05:44.200 | with some feedback.

00:05:45.140 | It's not a true sample of people

00:05:47.520 | whose opinions you care about,

00:05:48.720 | it's a biased sample, it's unpredictable.

00:05:51.200 | The other issue with feedback from the social internet

00:05:53.600 | is that a lot of it is in bad faith.

00:05:56.660 | If you're talking to, let's say your sister,

00:06:02.320 | in general, they're probably trying

00:06:03.960 | to give you good feedback.

00:06:05.360 | It's what they honestly feel about it.

00:06:07.600 | Social internet-based feedback, by contrast,

00:06:11.520 | has lots of other factors going on that is driving it.

00:06:15.080 | It might not be a true representation

00:06:18.640 | about how people feel about something.

00:06:20.480 | There's all sorts of other dynamics going on.

00:06:23.380 | For example, if we isolate Twitter,

00:06:25.260 | the service that was pointed out by Chris Licht

00:06:28.400 | in the article we just looked at about CNN,

00:06:32.920 | we see that a lot of the really aggressive backlash

00:06:36.680 | or pushback on Twitter, whether it's coming

00:06:38.360 | from the far right or the far left,

00:06:39.960 | is often about enforcing tribal boundaries,

00:06:43.140 | that there is a war going on where neither side

00:06:45.720 | wants their Overton window to shift at all

00:06:47.840 | towards the other side, and there'll be intense pressure

00:06:51.480 | to try to adjust or control what is said

00:06:54.120 | and what is not said.

00:06:55.080 | If you look at backlash from the right or the left,

00:06:57.160 | what you often see is that it doesn't correlate

00:06:59.080 | to how far have you drifted from orthodoxy.

00:07:02.360 | Actually, the most intense pushback

00:07:05.840 | will be for people who are right at the border of orthodoxy

00:07:08.520 | 'cause that's what matters,

00:07:09.640 | is you don't want that Overton window border

00:07:11.380 | to shift a little bit in the opposite direction.

00:07:13.280 | So if you're largely on a team

00:07:15.640 | and then drift a little bit towards the other team,

00:07:18.260 | that's gonna get a lot more attention

00:07:20.240 | than let's say that you're wildly against

00:07:23.080 | what a particular team feels for.

00:07:24.760 | Whatever value judgment you wanna give to those dynamics,

00:07:27.720 | what we can say is that it's not an accurate

00:07:29.880 | representative view of how people actually feel.

00:07:34.280 | There's other dynamics going on.

00:07:37.960 | There's also retribution that happens in Twitter.

00:07:40.720 | There's also amplification of straight up crazy people.

00:07:45.040 | So bad faith information you're getting from the internet.

00:07:49.120 | Now this has a real problem.

00:07:50.960 | And the reason why, and Chris Licht is saying,

00:07:52.920 | "Stop looking at backlash from Twitter."

00:07:54.740 | The reason why the managing editor at the New York Times,

00:07:57.040 | as we covered last month, said the same thing to his writers,

00:08:00.600 | "Stop using Twitter, stop paying attention to Twitter,"

00:08:03.120 | is because let's say you're a reporter,

00:08:06.200 | you take this feedback really seriously

00:08:07.760 | because we're wired to take feedback seriously

00:08:09.480 | and it can push how you report into weird directions.

00:08:12.560 | It's actually not optimal for the information,

00:08:15.260 | but it's the hijacking of our feedback apparatus.

00:08:18.160 | The same thing can happen to the rest of us as well.

00:08:21.520 | Reporters are not.

00:08:22.960 | You get that bias sample, bad faith feedback

00:08:25.760 | from the internet and it can really affect

00:08:27.480 | the way you feel, the way you act,

00:08:29.020 | what you talk about, what you produce,

00:08:30.960 | how you live your life.

00:08:31.940 | It is the hijacking of the human feedback apparatus

00:08:36.940 | by a source of corrupted feedback

00:08:40.600 | that our brain never evolved to expect.

00:08:43.300 | So I think we need to be very careful about this.

00:08:45.520 | We all need to do a similar survey in our own lives,

00:08:48.280 | similar to what the New York Times

00:08:50.180 | or the CNN seems to be doing now

00:08:51.560 | and saying, "Let's be careful about

00:08:52.600 | what we pay attention to."

00:08:53.960 | Now a bad solution here would be to stop seeking feedback

00:08:58.480 | for our ideas and actions altogether.

00:09:00.640 | 'Cause again, we're wired for feedback.

00:09:02.500 | It serves a good purpose.

00:09:05.180 | There's a common effect that academics know about.

00:09:10.100 | I call it retired academic syndrome,

00:09:12.500 | where you get a very smart academic

00:09:14.820 | that's existing in the high energy,

00:09:20.660 | constant feedback, back and forth discussion world

00:09:23.580 | of their academic field.

00:09:24.640 | And then for whatever reason, they leave academia.

00:09:26.340 | They're very smart people, but they leave academia

00:09:29.180 | seven times out of 10, especially if they have

00:09:32.000 | some sort of public facing discussion,

00:09:33.740 | they will start to drift into increasingly extreme ideas,

00:09:38.740 | different topics, but they'll get to extremely weird ideas

00:09:41.720 | or they'll get very cantankerous or they'll get very upset.

00:09:44.400 | And part of what's happening here is they're very smart,

00:09:46.560 | but they get separated from the feedback mechanism

00:09:49.920 | that helps them push back and adjust and modify and improve

00:09:52.880 | and keep reasonable their thinking

00:09:54.440 | and they end up going crazy.

00:09:56.220 | So again, feedback is important.

00:09:57.640 | We don't want to ignore it,

00:09:58.480 | we don't want the internet to drive it.

00:10:00.960 | So the solution I wanna suggest is to create your own,

00:10:04.640 | what we can call feedback councils.

00:10:07.720 | So this is a group of people that you trust

00:10:12.600 | that have been in your life for a while,

00:10:15.880 | that have a variety of backgrounds and expertises.

00:10:20.200 | So if you are a tech bro in Silicon Valley,

00:10:25.360 | your feedback council should not be six other Stanford grads

00:10:30.160 | who are roughly your same age and gender and what have you.

00:10:34.720 | You want a backgrounds that represent things

00:10:37.320 | that you might not be exposed to.

00:10:38.960 | And then take the opinion of this council seriously

00:10:43.400 | on decisions in your life, ideas you're writing

00:10:46.040 | or trying to put out there, just your personal understanding.

00:10:49.940 | How do I understand this big news event that's happening?

00:10:53.800 | So take that high engineered,

00:10:55.400 | high quality source of feedback very seriously,

00:10:57.320 | allow it to adjust the way you think and move.

00:10:59.920 | But then here's the key thing,

00:11:01.160 | ignore other arbitrary sources of feedback.

00:11:04.260 | Ignore if you're a public facing figure,

00:11:06.940 | random comments from Twitter, angry direct messages,

00:11:09.920 | those weird emails.

00:11:11.100 | If you have engineered a high quality feedback council,

00:11:13.520 | you're gonna get a variety of good feedback.

00:11:15.780 | If they're on board with something

00:11:17.280 | then and it feels right for you, run with it.

00:11:20.440 | If they're nervous about an idea,

00:11:22.040 | they say, I don't think that's good for you,

00:11:23.320 | take that seriously.

00:11:25.240 | If they say, hey, this thing you're writing about,

00:11:27.260 | I don't think you realize that it's gonna come across

00:11:29.200 | to people like me as being kind of dismissive or offensive,

00:11:33.400 | take that seriously.

00:11:34.580 | Now, I think companies should do the same thing

00:11:38.440 | at a much larger scale.

00:11:39.880 | They should have large representative panels of people

00:11:43.080 | that are relevant to what their company does,

00:11:44.920 | their stakeholder, their customers,

00:11:46.280 | their shareholders, et cetera.

00:11:47.800 | They should take the feedback from this very seriously.

00:11:50.080 | And the flip side is they should ignore Twitter.

00:11:53.280 | And they should ignore random emails or direct messages.

00:11:57.200 | Politicians should do the same thing.

00:11:58.840 | You should be very in touch with a representative sample

00:12:01.280 | of your constituents.

00:12:02.120 | You should be talking to your constituents.

00:12:03.840 | You should be doing town halls,

00:12:05.400 | be getting the mood of actual people out there,

00:12:08.400 | but ignore what angry 27 year olds

00:12:11.980 | with too much time on their hands

00:12:13.360 | are repeatedly tweeting at you.

00:12:15.840 | That's not real life.

00:12:16.960 | That's bias, that's bad faith.

00:12:18.440 | You need feedback.

00:12:19.720 | Your brain craves feedback, but it's gotta be good.

00:12:22.720 | So anyways, that is my idea.

00:12:25.540 | Something we don't talk enough about,

00:12:27.360 | our brains take feedback seriously.

00:12:30.200 | The social internet and a particular social media

00:12:33.040 | can pervert or corrupt those sources of feedback.

00:12:36.360 | So we have to be very careful about replacing those

00:12:39.480 | with sources of feedback that we trust.

00:12:43.420 | So there's my concept.

00:12:46.440 | - So for people with not a whole lot of diversity

00:12:49.760 | in their social console, what do you suggest?

00:12:52.320 | - Yeah, so you have to try to seek out as much as you can.

00:12:56.180 | So yeah, let's say your friend group is--

00:12:58.160 | - Kind of small.

00:12:59.000 | - Yeah, and homogenous.

00:13:01.920 | See if there's maybe through at work or through family,

00:13:06.320 | or a cousin, or you do the best you can.

00:13:09.200 | But I think you wanna mix, in a perfect world,

00:13:14.120 | there's a lot of things you wanna,

00:13:15.560 | most people aren't gonna be able to have

00:13:16.400 | this many different factors.

00:13:17.280 | But in a perfect world, the things that I think matter is,

00:13:20.000 | so professional background matters, right?

00:13:22.520 | So if you had class variety, I think that would be useful.

00:13:25.840 | So it's not just, let me talk to a bunch of other

00:13:27.920 | dual income, upper middle class, government worker families.

00:13:30.360 | Like, can I talk to someone who has a completely different

00:13:32.960 | type of job?

00:13:34.400 | Geographic diversity probably matters.

00:13:36.660 | I think people feel differently if you live in a suburb,

00:13:40.000 | in the middle of a city, in the country, that might matter.

00:13:42.680 | I would say gender and racial identity

00:13:46.880 | probably really matters.

00:13:47.920 | I mean, gender obviously is a huge one.

00:13:49.280 | Women and men think very differently about things

00:13:51.720 | and don't always understand each other.

00:13:53.680 | And then probably age.

00:13:54.980 | You know, like you have a sampling of people

00:13:58.400 | from different age.

00:13:59.600 | You're not gonna hit all of those probably, in one group.

00:14:04.000 | But having some sorts of feedback.

00:14:05.080 | Now, you know, I kind of cheat that a little bit.

00:14:07.480 | I use informally long time reader/listeners.

00:14:13.160 | You know, like this is the nice thing about my online world.

00:14:17.100 | It's been around for a long time.

00:14:18.520 | Starting with the blog and then it turned

00:14:19.840 | to an email newsletter.

00:14:20.760 | Now we have the podcast.

00:14:22.080 | But it's not huge.

00:14:23.200 | And it's not, it doesn't have a big social media presence.

00:14:26.620 | I don't interact with people on social media.

00:14:28.640 | And so the group of people who send me emails

00:14:32.060 | or comment on blog posts, and you see their messages,

00:14:35.760 | it feels close knit, you know?

00:14:38.800 | It somehow has escaped the dynamics.

00:14:41.520 | And I think, I shouldn't say somehow,

00:14:42.960 | I know exactly why.

00:14:43.780 | It's because all this interaction is happening

00:14:45.160 | in the absence of social media.

00:14:46.560 | With all of those weird incentives it has.

00:14:49.080 | If all your content's in social media,

00:14:51.080 | then you can find these weird bias samples of feedback

00:14:54.040 | where your content moves through amplification networks

00:14:56.300 | and gets to some corner of people who are upset at you.

00:14:58.720 | But when you're not on social media,

00:15:00.040 | it's a much tighter knit audience.

00:15:03.520 | And it's really interestingly diverse.

00:15:06.960 | Different countries, different backgrounds,

00:15:08.860 | different types of jobs, working class, non-working class,

00:15:11.540 | all sorts of different racial identities.

00:15:13.820 | And I get all sorts of interesting feedback from people.

00:15:16.080 | And so it's my secret weapon, I think,

00:15:18.160 | is that I have this cabal of really interesting people

00:15:21.980 | that's small enough that it's a pretty good sample.

00:15:25.420 | And I would say our crazy to normal ratio is really small.

00:15:29.080 | We occasionally get some crazies,

00:15:30.220 | but we don't get that much crazy.

00:15:31.940 | - Do you know any retired professors

00:15:33.580 | who have taken, done this?

00:15:35.380 | Did not go crazy?

00:15:36.580 | - They should.

00:15:37.420 | It really is common.

00:15:39.300 | The problem with being a professor is you're smart,

00:15:41.420 | so you can convince yourself.

00:15:42.620 | It's completely reasonable to you.

00:15:44.660 | That's why they get conspiratorial.

00:15:46.220 | It's completely reasonable to you

00:15:47.720 | that you could figure something out

00:15:48.860 | that no one else understands.

00:15:50.540 | And if you don't have that feedback saying,

00:15:52.100 | yeah, that might be true,

00:15:54.100 | but you've kind of gone off the deep end on this one.

00:15:57.460 | Without that type of feedback,

00:15:58.660 | they end up in crazy places.

00:15:59.980 | Like being smart is a problem

00:16:02.080 | when it comes to conspiratorial or weird thinking.

00:16:05.060 | They either get conspiratorial

00:16:06.860 | or they get cantankerous

00:16:08.260 | and just kind of mad at everyone.

00:16:09.900 | So if I ever retire from academia,

00:16:14.180 | once I start, if I start going on about contrails

00:16:16.580 | and radio transmissions in my fillings,

00:16:21.580 | someone's got to intervene.

00:16:22.940 | (upbeat music)

00:16:26.880 | (upbeat music)

Ignore Twitter. Pay Attention To This Instead. | Deep Questions with Cal Newport

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