Contextualizing What We Read

There is so much to learn from reading or listening to smart people on the internet. And yet the accumulation of their ideas and perspectives might actually be leading us astray.

What do I mean? Well, I know that the way my brain works is that I like to consume a lot of different perspectives (opinion pieces, podcasts, blog posts etc.) to form some sort of “average” or “benchmark” understanding.

I’m doubting the usefulness of that approach these days though.

And in some ways this is old news. Why am I even writing about it!? What we read and consume out there in the wild world of the internet is for a million reasons unreliable. No duh.

But for a long time, I thought that if I gathered enough info, read enough sources, applied my skepticism enough, I’d still be able to get to a reasonable perspective on a topic.

Lately though, I’m starting to recognize the systemic bias built into this “content” game. The people writing articles, going on podcasts, etc. do not represent the whole universe of perspectives on a topic.

There is a whole GIANT group of people who can’t be bothered to “sell” their ideas and if we think that taking an average of the people who are out there selling their ideas is a representative sample, we are way off base.

Here’s an example: Many of my clients are startup founders. As a founder, you want to learn from the brightest minds in startup land to improve your chances of success. And so, you go and listen to a podcast or follow some start up folks on Twitter. And inevitably what you end up hearing is a Venture Capitalist. If you’ve paid attention to the startup ecosystem for long enough, you start to see the same sorts of VC folks putting out guides and think pieces.

And there is a reason for that. They are selling! They are selling their money. It’s literally their job to keep their name top of mind. So they are out there telling their story and sharing their perspectives. And, when they do that - they are bringing just that - the VC perspective on the startup world. And so that means their “wisdom” is often based on a narrowly defined view of what start up success looks like.

So even if you amalgamated 10 or 100 of these different perspectives - you’d still have a completely skewed view of what startup success looks like. You’d be missing out on the perspectives of founders with their heads down building their companies or founders who would rather hang with their kid than go on a podcast.

And of course - this is true across all disciplines. The expert you hear or read on your favorite subject is the kind of person who by definition seeks out the chance to get in front of you.  And so even a cross section of wise opinions from people who are trying to sell you something is bound to be an extremely biased sample of opinions.

Or is that just the opinion of someone trying to sell you something!? Ha!

What do you think about the systematic biases in what we are reading online? How do you account for that?