Are you your own worst enemy?
Can you determine what’s true and what isn’t?
Most people (80%) get this wrong. (based on 200,000 submissions)
Jack is looking at Anne, but Anne is looking at George. Jack is married, but George is not. Is a married person looking at an unmarried person?
A: Yes
B: No
C: Cannot be determined
I’ll tell you the answer later on.
Research shows that the more intelligent or the more experienced you are, the more likely you are to be irrational and make mistakes.
You’re also more likely to become a victim of disinformation.
Disinformation is defined as “misinformation (wrong information) deliberately intended to mislead”.
Lying can be a very powerful political weapon.
It can also be a very profitable business model as well.
You’re being lied to by people who are trying to manipulate your emotions.
In some cases, it’s being done so well that you aren’t even aware of it.
This article isn’t about politics or elections.
It’s about the rising power and effect of disinformation and what you need to do to protect yourself, your family, and your business.
Keep in mind I’m not American and I don’t have a political ax to grind.
Whether or not you believe certain information, others do, and what they do in response can affect your life.
For example, they may choose not to wear masks or not to receive the vaccine.
COVID is still being called a hoax.
President Trump recently stated that the death numbers (over 350,000) in the US are “far exaggerated”.
Recently a 2nd and 3rd type of COVID strain has been discovered.
How will you respond?
Will you wear a mask? Will you take the vaccine?
According to several polls, hundreds of thousands, if not millions, will refuse the vaccine.
Huge numbers also refuse to wear masks or stay at home.
You or your kids could have been on one of the flights that had several COVID passengers.
Or you could have been walking down the street when the demonstrations at the Capitol erupted.
You have to know what others are thinking, their beliefs, and how they arrived at those beliefs.
It’s the same in the business world; you have to know what others are thinking.
You need to know how they will respond and in what direction the winds are blowing.
The more aware you are of what is going on around you, the better you can decide.
Your decisions affect your life.
However, you also need to control your emotions and biases, most of which stem from overconfidence.
“In our experience, two particular types of bias weigh heavily on the decisions of large corporations — confirmation bias and overconfidence bias”. McKinsey
These are large corporations with highly experienced and educated CEO’s and Boards of Directors.
“A remarkable aspect of your mental life is that you are rarely stumped …
The normal state of your mind is that you have intuitive feelings and opinions about almost everything that comes your way…you often have answers to questions that you do not completely understand, relying on evidence that you can neither explain nor defend.”
-Dr. D. Kahneman (Nobel Prize) Thinking Fast and Slow
Both Adolph Hitler and his Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels, knew the power of lying.
They used it to engineer the takeover of a country, a world war, and genocide.
According to Goebbels “If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it”.
If they hadn’t miscalculated at the end, who knows where we would be today.
The same applies to what’s been going on in the USA (and many other countries as well).
Again, if there hadn’t been a miscalculation, who knows where we would have been tomorrow.
In the recent election, more than 74 million people voted for Trump.
Two different polls found that over 60% of Republicans believed that the voting was rigged.
According to some polls, there are anywhere up to 50 million people that believe that the 2020 election was “stolen”.
Amongst those are several Members of Congress.
This despite statements from several state officials, 2 Supreme Court dismissals, over 50 other dismissed or dropped lawsuits for lack of evidence, and state-certified results.
Humans interpret reality based on their personal perceptions.
But, there can’t be 2 contradictory realities based on fact.
Either there was significant fraud that affected the end result, or there wasn’t.
Not one single shred of promised evidence of significant fraud has been produced.
One of the sides is lying.
Which one?
That’s your decision.
Better be sure you research it well and that you use the right process to reach a decision, not just react on gut instinct, intuition, or hearsay.
The power of lying has been expanding steadily for the last 30 years due to 3 factors:
-more rapid dissemination due to the growth of the Internet, particularly social media
-higher quality “deep fakes” due to Artificial Intelligence
-the high cost (in time and money) of fact-checking a constant barrage of disinformation
There are 2 basic methods to spread any type of information.
One method is “trickle down” where information is published in mainstream media and it spreads as more people read or hear it.
For example, newspapers, radio, television etc.
Unfortunately, there are many examples of media bias.
Whereas news sites should be relaying facts, too often articles become editorials.
When you look through the websites of some of the largest newspapers, you can easily spot that bias by the language they use.
This recent headline was written in huge bold red letters on the front page of a large and respected international news website.
“Disastrous end to Trump’s shocking presidency”
That headline is intended to evoke emotions.
It doesn’t take much imagination to see what side they’re on.
The problem is that you can see bias in most, if not all, major news sites.
That’s always been the case, but during the past several months, it’s become more blatant.
It’s not a surprise then that people don’t trust the media.
Keep in mind that people tend to go to sources they trust and thus tend to question their information less.
Once trust is broken, communication of anything, even proven facts, becomes impossible.
The other method of spreading disinformation is to target special interest groups.
Humans need to belong to groups and communities that think alike and have common values.
We feel safer when surrounded by people that look and think like us.
Anyone else is an untrustworthy stranger.
That’s the basis for all types of racism.
That’s why social media “influencers” are so popular.
They’re speaking to like-minded members of a group that are already tuned to hear the message.
Influences filter all the noise and tell their followers what they want to hear.
Their followers don’t have to think as much.
They can concentrate on their own lives, knowing that someone they trust is explaining the world to them.
Disinformation is most effective when tied to an emotional narrative and aimed at those specific groups.
It then spreads much faster as people relay it to one another.
The strategy is to continue nursing their grievances, to maximize their sense of frustration.
That makes them blind to any information unless it supports what they already believe.
It begins with a polemic against a subject that elicits an emotional response.
For example, “immigrants are taking away our jobs”.
Or “The other side” doesn’t care about you. All they want is to take over your world.”
“It’s them or us!”.
“The art of tribal politics is that it shapes reality. Lies become truth and explain everything in simple terms. Political struggles become a war between good and evil that demands unconditional support for the leader of the tribe. If you talk against your own camp you betray it and get expelled from the tribe. Tribalism is a natural form of politics: Democracy is a deviation.” Peter Kreko
“Unlimited control of people’s minds depends on not only the ability to feed them your own propaganda but also to see that no other fellow feeds them any of his.”
(George Kennan, counselor U.S. embassy in Moscow-during Stalin’s rule)
Niccolo Machiavelli (The Prince) once said: “one who deceives will always find those who allow themselves to be deceived.”
Machiavelli recognized that politics have always been played with “deception, treachery, and crime”.
That was over 500 years ago.
Nothing has changed, except for the method of delivery; technology has made it much easier.
Not only is it easier to create “deep fake” videos, but it’s also possible to use bots to spread disinformation.
This keeps the target audience flooded and “updated”.
Apart from politics, attacks on businesses and individual reputations are on the rise as well.
As much as 20% of businesses have been affected by fake news.
Tesla and Starbucks and BlackRock are just 3 examples.
Fake News can be a very profitable business model as well.
When it comes to your life, the principles are the same.
The same concepts apply to making decisions, whether personal or business.
Don’t be your own worst enemy.
The world is evolving more rapidly and becoming more complicated than ever before.
Everything has changed; nothing stays the same.
Don’t rely completely on intuition, intelligence and experience.
You need to think critically-at all times, and you need to follow a process when you want to make important decisions.
You can’t be fooled or lied to unless you intentionally want that, consciously or sub-consciously.
It’s natural to want to hear information that confirms your beliefs, not that contradicts them.
It gives you confidence.
But, analyze your information carefully.
Check that the source is reliable and that it is fact, not opinion.
Look for information that contradicts what you’re thinking-not only for information that supports it.
I once had a friend who said, “when all the facts are in, the decision makes itself”.
Gathering facts is time-consuming and difficult.
Follow a process such as “The Decision System”.
It’s a complete Decision-Making model; it’s available to download for free here.
