the annoying black box

cognitive load and its discontent

A short while ago, I mentioned that I occasionally used to give this little speech, in situations where I felt I was being talked down to by experts:

“I have to tell you this [contract, disclosure, draft legislation etc] is not clear. I have two degrees in finance and economics, I have worked as a bank regulator and as a financial analyst, I have written an award winning financial newsletter for ten years and three books. I have read this carefully and I do not share your understanding of what it means, and I am not prepared to accept that this is mainly my fault”.

I noted at the time that although effective, this speech should only be used “if you’re not planning to meet that person again, and don’t mind coming across as kind of a wanker”. That’s been on my mind ever since; it’s an interesting and occasionally reliable rule of thumb that if something feels like you’re being rude, it’s worth analysing why that it and what it might say about unrelated errors in your thinking.

(Parenthetically, I’ve received responses from Andrew Gelman and the poll-talking-guy community, which I am still mulling over, sorry about that).

In this case, obviously, the issue is defensiveness; I get defensive when I’m faced with something that I feel ought to be a breeze for me but isn’t. I don’t think that’s particularly uncommon, but on reflection, it illustrates something about the world we live in.

To return to a recurring theme of this ‘stack, we live in a world of mental objects – the black boxes that we draw for ourselves, to make a manageable system of representations that we can hold in our heads. We then make decisions about what to do with the system of mental objects, and hope that they aren’t too disastrous when applied to reality.

The reason we do this, of course, is to avoid going insane; we have to simplify things in order to cope with reality. Looking at the thing-in-itself would be impossible. We simply don’t have enough bandwidth to cope with it.

And, coming to the point, the cognitive effort of constructing a system of black boxes is costly. It’s a big investment in making things work. Which means that when we find that our mental representation doesn’t match the world and we need to understand things in a new way, we get frustrated and defensive.

A lot of the job of marketing and sales is to smooth the path and allow the customer to progress to purchase without needing to make that sort of effort. You need to talk to the customer in language they understand, using their own cognitive language. This is part of the reason why dynamic hamburger pricing was such a diabolical idea; it made people expend mental effort in a context where they obviously didn’t want to.

So I think I understand the roots of my pissy little speech. There’s actually not really much reason why someone with my background, which is adjacent to but not really overlapping with consumer finance or contract law, should expect that insiders to those industries would have a conceptual structure that immediately matches my own. But I think it might be more reasonable to expect them to make more of an effort, to recognise that they’re asking me to do the work and that they might get a happier customer if they helped a bit more. This goes doubly and triply for tax policy, where a huge part of the burden of compliance is simply the unpleasantness of not understanding what you’re meant to do.

Stafford Beer always said that “it is not necessary to open the black box”. Perhaps he should have added that not only is in not necessary, it’s a massive pain in the ass.