First though, let's do a deep dive. So I'm gonna do a deep dive on an idea I've been thinking about. I'm calling this the feedback council idea. And I'm gonna open with an article. I don't wanna spend a lot of time on this article. It's just gonna motivate this bigger idea of feedback councils.

So I saw this article the other day, a listener sent it to me, to the interesting@calnewport.com address. So there was this article that appeared in the New York Times that was about CNN's new leadership. So this is from June 5th, as you can see here. So what has happened at CNN is there is a shakeup.

There is a new head of CNN, Chris Licht, L-I-C-H-T, who is trying to do lots of things to shake up the network, among other things, now that Donald Trump's no longer president, they're shifting away from more of a high energy adversarial style of reporting to try to be a little bit more down the center.

There's a lot of changes that Chris Licht is doing, but there was one in particular that caught my attention. That's what I wanna highlight here. So for those who are watching, you can actually see the article. For those listening at home, you just hear me talking about it. So we have right here, producers have been urged to ignore Twitter backlash from the far right and the far left.

All right, that I think is a good idea. I wanna explain why I think it's a good idea, because it will give us some ideas about how the rest of us should be thinking about living our lives in a digital world, whether or not we run a network. So to explain why I think that's a good idea, let's start with the notion of feedback more generally, and in particular, the role of feedback for human beings.

Human beings are wired, neurologically speaking, to take feedback from other human beings very seriously. We pay a lot of attention to it. It has a lot of effect on how we feel. So we're very wired for this. Now there's two good reasons for this from an evolutionary perspective. One is tribal cohesion.

So when you can watch and monitor very carefully the reaction of people around you to what you're saying, it allows you to adjust what you're saying in such a way to try to maintain social comedy, to maintain positive affect between people. You see the body language show, uh-oh, I'm going into dangerous territory here.

You pull back a little bit. This helps keeps tribal groups happy amongst themselves. Now I talk about the neuroscientific backing for how this happens a little bit in my book, "Digital Minimalism." I get into how much of our brain is actually dedicated to processing all these complex input channels that come from person-to-person interaction.

But the high-level summary there is we monitor the people around us while we are talking, and we take that feedback very seriously. It's very affecting. The other advantage of feedback from other humans is that it extends our ability to cogitate beyond just our own brains. And if there's a group of people, getting feedback from other people in the group on a plan, on an idea, on an initiative, allows you to essentially tap into the cognitive potential of these other brains, forming a larger collective brain that is more nuanced and smarter than any one brain potentially in isolation.

This was a great trick of evolution. It requires complex language to do it, but once we have this trick, it really allowed us to upgrade quickly our ability to actually think and make good decisions. Now, of course, leaving the evolutionary past and going into the more recent cultural past of human beings, we see this extended cogitation idea maybe reach its apogee with the scientific method, where now we can formally receive feedback on ideas in a very structured and formalized way that really helps aim our attention towards scientific realities away from some things that aren't.

So again, getting feedback from other people is a huge part of the human experience. All right, so we take it seriously, our brain cares about it. The issue with the social internet, and in particular, the more recent last 10 year rise of widely used social media platforms on the social internet is that it introduced into our cultural ecosystem new forms of feedback.

Feedback that we did not have access to before, feedback that is of a decidedly different character than the type of feedback that our brain has been wired to take very seriously. So there's really two things that differentiate the feedback you get from, let's say, Twitter or Instagram versus what you would get from your tribe a hundred thousand years ago.

One, it's a biased sample. So when you're getting feedback from the internet, it's not as if you are randomly sampling the population and getting a true representative sense of how people feel about what you just said. It's not as if like it is in our Paleolithic path, it's the same group of people giving you feedback that have given you feedback on everything else.

So if their opinion shifts, then that's probably represents there's something going on here you should pay attention to. Instead, the internet has these weird connectivity and virality dynamics where anyone can give feedback to anyone else, and what selects someone to wanna give feedback to you can be quite arbitrary or unusual.

There could be something about what you said that got spread through some sort of viral amplification network, and it got to some malcontent over here, and then they can directly message you back with some feedback. It's not a true sample of people whose opinions you care about, it's a biased sample, it's unpredictable.

The other issue with feedback from the social internet is that a lot of it is in bad faith. If you're talking to, let's say your sister, in general, they're probably trying to give you good feedback. It's what they honestly feel about it. Social internet-based feedback, by contrast, has lots of other factors going on that is driving it.

It might not be a true representation about how people feel about something. There's all sorts of other dynamics going on. For example, if we isolate Twitter, the service that was pointed out by Chris Licht in the article we just looked at about CNN, we see that a lot of the really aggressive backlash or pushback on Twitter, whether it's coming from the far right or the far left, is often about enforcing tribal boundaries, that there is a war going on where neither side wants their Overton window to shift at all towards the other side, and there'll be intense pressure to try to adjust or control what is said and what is not said.

If you look at backlash from the right or the left, what you often see is that it doesn't correlate to how far have you drifted from orthodoxy. Actually, the most intense pushback will be for people who are right at the border of orthodoxy 'cause that's what matters, is you don't want that Overton window border to shift a little bit in the opposite direction.

So if you're largely on a team and then drift a little bit towards the other team, that's gonna get a lot more attention than let's say that you're wildly against what a particular team feels for. Whatever value judgment you wanna give to those dynamics, what we can say is that it's not an accurate representative view of how people actually feel.

There's other dynamics going on. There's also retribution that happens in Twitter. There's also amplification of straight up crazy people. So bad faith information you're getting from the internet. Now this has a real problem. And the reason why, and Chris Licht is saying, "Stop looking at backlash from Twitter." The reason why the managing editor at the New York Times, as we covered last month, said the same thing to his writers, "Stop using Twitter, stop paying attention to Twitter," is because let's say you're a reporter, you take this feedback really seriously because we're wired to take feedback seriously and it can push how you report into weird directions.

It's actually not optimal for the information, but it's the hijacking of our feedback apparatus. The same thing can happen to the rest of us as well. Reporters are not. You get that bias sample, bad faith feedback from the internet and it can really affect the way you feel, the way you act, what you talk about, what you produce, how you live your life.

It is the hijacking of the human feedback apparatus by a source of corrupted feedback that our brain never evolved to expect. So I think we need to be very careful about this. We all need to do a similar survey in our own lives, similar to what the New York Times or the CNN seems to be doing now and saying, "Let's be careful about what we pay attention to." Now a bad solution here would be to stop seeking feedback for our ideas and actions altogether.

'Cause again, we're wired for feedback. It serves a good purpose. There's a common effect that academics know about. I call it retired academic syndrome, where you get a very smart academic that's existing in the high energy, constant feedback, back and forth discussion world of their academic field. And then for whatever reason, they leave academia.

They're very smart people, but they leave academia seven times out of 10, especially if they have some sort of public facing discussion, they will start to drift into increasingly extreme ideas, different topics, but they'll get to extremely weird ideas or they'll get very cantankerous or they'll get very upset.

And part of what's happening here is they're very smart, but they get separated from the feedback mechanism that helps them push back and adjust and modify and improve and keep reasonable their thinking and they end up going crazy. So again, feedback is important. We don't want to ignore it, we don't want the internet to drive it.

So the solution I wanna suggest is to create your own, what we can call feedback councils. So this is a group of people that you trust that have been in your life for a while, that have a variety of backgrounds and expertises. So if you are a tech bro in Silicon Valley, your feedback council should not be six other Stanford grads who are roughly your same age and gender and what have you.

You want a backgrounds that represent things that you might not be exposed to. And then take the opinion of this council seriously on decisions in your life, ideas you're writing or trying to put out there, just your personal understanding. How do I understand this big news event that's happening?

So take that high engineered, high quality source of feedback very seriously, allow it to adjust the way you think and move. But then here's the key thing, ignore other arbitrary sources of feedback. Ignore if you're a public facing figure, random comments from Twitter, angry direct messages, those weird emails.

If you have engineered a high quality feedback council, you're gonna get a variety of good feedback. If they're on board with something then and it feels right for you, run with it. If they're nervous about an idea, they say, I don't think that's good for you, take that seriously.

If they say, hey, this thing you're writing about, I don't think you realize that it's gonna come across to people like me as being kind of dismissive or offensive, take that seriously. Now, I think companies should do the same thing at a much larger scale. They should have large representative panels of people that are relevant to what their company does, their stakeholder, their customers, their shareholders, et cetera.

They should take the feedback from this very seriously. And the flip side is they should ignore Twitter. And they should ignore random emails or direct messages. Politicians should do the same thing. You should be very in touch with a representative sample of your constituents. You should be talking to your constituents.

You should be doing town halls, be getting the mood of actual people out there, but ignore what angry 27 year olds with too much time on their hands are repeatedly tweeting at you. That's not real life. That's bias, that's bad faith. You need feedback. Your brain craves feedback, but it's gotta be good.

So anyways, that is my idea. Something we don't talk enough about, our brains take feedback seriously. The social internet and a particular social media can pervert or corrupt those sources of feedback. So we have to be very careful about replacing those with sources of feedback that we trust. So there's my concept.

- So for people with not a whole lot of diversity in their social console, what do you suggest? - Yeah, so you have to try to seek out as much as you can. So yeah, let's say your friend group is-- - Kind of small. - Yeah, and homogenous. See if there's maybe through at work or through family, or a cousin, or you do the best you can.

But I think you wanna mix, in a perfect world, there's a lot of things you wanna, most people aren't gonna be able to have this many different factors. But in a perfect world, the things that I think matter is, so professional background matters, right? So if you had class variety, I think that would be useful.

So it's not just, let me talk to a bunch of other dual income, upper middle class, government worker families. Like, can I talk to someone who has a completely different type of job? Geographic diversity probably matters. I think people feel differently if you live in a suburb, in the middle of a city, in the country, that might matter.

I would say gender and racial identity probably really matters. I mean, gender obviously is a huge one. Women and men think very differently about things and don't always understand each other. And then probably age. You know, like you have a sampling of people from different age. You're not gonna hit all of those probably, in one group.

But having some sorts of feedback. Now, you know, I kind of cheat that a little bit. I use informally long time reader/listeners. You know, like this is the nice thing about my online world. It's been around for a long time. Starting with the blog and then it turned to an email newsletter.

Now we have the podcast. But it's not huge. And it's not, it doesn't have a big social media presence. I don't interact with people on social media. And so the group of people who send me emails or comment on blog posts, and you see their messages, it feels close knit, you know?

It somehow has escaped the dynamics. And I think, I shouldn't say somehow, I know exactly why. It's because all this interaction is happening in the absence of social media. With all of those weird incentives it has. If all your content's in social media, then you can find these weird bias samples of feedback where your content moves through amplification networks and gets to some corner of people who are upset at you.

But when you're not on social media, it's a much tighter knit audience. And it's really interestingly diverse. Different countries, different backgrounds, different types of jobs, working class, non-working class, all sorts of different racial identities. And I get all sorts of interesting feedback from people. And so it's my secret weapon, I think, is that I have this cabal of really interesting people that's small enough that it's a pretty good sample.

And I would say our crazy to normal ratio is really small. We occasionally get some crazies, but we don't get that much crazy. - Do you know any retired professors who have taken, done this? Did not go crazy? - They should. It really is common. The problem with being a professor is you're smart, so you can convince yourself.

It's completely reasonable to you. That's why they get conspiratorial. It's completely reasonable to you that you could figure something out that no one else understands. And if you don't have that feedback saying, yeah, that might be true, but you've kind of gone off the deep end on this one.

Without that type of feedback, they end up in crazy places. Like being smart is a problem when it comes to conspiratorial or weird thinking. They either get conspiratorial or they get cantankerous and just kind of mad at everyone. So if I ever retire from academia, once I start, if I start going on about contrails and radio transmissions in my fillings, someone's got to intervene.

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