Naming these weekly newsletters is hard

Unexpected correspondence around the Netsafe issue; and how to fight through personal biases and make a tough decision

My last post about the relationship between Netsafe and Meta caused a flurry of attention for a newsletter whose previous best performing post was a Taco taste test.

I got lots of positive messages, some juicy tips, a shout out from Bryce Edwards, a tranche of secret documents (!) and 25,000 views on my Linked In post about the topic. Amongst all of this I received two negative comments and it was these my brain dwelled on as I biked around the city in the days following. How could these people be so wrong? Why didn’t they understand what an analogy is? What should I reply that would let them know I was a nice guy but that I had also, definitely, won the argument?

It reminded me of the bad old days of Twitter - arguing with a stranger or, worse, an industry acquaintance. Posting my devastating reply, putting my burning phone into my pocket then immediately getting it out again to see if they’d bitten back. Bitching to my wife, my friends, anyone who’d listen about how stupid this guy in my mentions was being. Walking around with my blood boiling, thinking about it in bed. It is the most colossally pathetic way to spend one’s energy, and no amount of being right makes up for the moronic decision to keep caring.

So, there may be more to say on last week’s story at some point but I feel much better for not climbing straight back into it. You can’t make an omelette without breaking a few eggs, etc, but who wants to eat an omelette every day?

In the mean time hopefully my fears of an internet safety community compromised by big tech sponsorship are unfounded. I look forward to a robust discussion of this and other issues at the upcoming Digital Safety Summit in Wellington

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I felt better a few days later when I chanced upon a live presentation by Stefan Hajkowicz, an Australian thinker who was here speaking to a local conference about decision-making theory.

To understand where we go wrong with decisions, it’s useful to recognise the various biases that trip us up along the way. These include negativity bias - a tendency to hate bad things much more than we love good things. Winning $100 is cool; losing $100 is a devastating tragedy. I thought of those internet comments and realised that having 100 people tell me I was on the right track might have been nice, but having two people tell me I’d got it wrong was infuriating.

Stefan explored some other common biases, including recency bias (you overvalue information you’ve just heard) and self-serving bias (we give ourselves credit for our successes, but blame others or external causes when we fail). He didn’t go into another one I’ve heard of, the halo effect, which notes that if someone is good-looking, we are more likely to think that they are funnier, kinder and smarter. Perhaps he didn’t want to undermine his own presentation given that he was fairly handsome himself.

Finally he shared a grid that, when used properly, brings some rationality to the decision making process. I don’t have his one to hand but I found an equivalent online, called a Weighted Decision Matrix Analysis:

hyggo.io

While it was designed to help professionals in a complex business environment, it works pretty well for personal decisions too.

“My wife recently had a career decision to make,” Stefan said, “so I bought out the grid. We went through both options, comparing each against a set of pre-selected values - what she was looking for in a job. It was a close call but ultimately one option scored slightly higher.”

Did she take the grid’s advice?

“No, she actually did the opposite,” Stefan admitted. “But she said the grid was helpful, which made me feel better.”