Being right is overrated

Why? Because almost nothing exists in a vacuum.

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Two weeks ago I had dinner with a friend of mine who is a mostly retired architect. Per usual, we came to discuss his life’s work, which is his invention of a revolutionary new design and construction technique for spherical buildings. There are of course tons of advantages to spheres. First of all, they encompass the most volume for a particular surface area.  Second, because of the way gravitational forces follow the curvature of the sphere, the building does not need a lot of supporting structure. My friend developed a technique for building a spherical building from an inflated balloon that then gets coated with a viscous material that hardens to become as tough as concrete. Because of that technique, building spherical buildings can be significantly cheaper. Over time he improved his design in many ways, for instance with an efficient way of heating the sphere using water tanks in the (sizable) basement.

My friend is also interested in space travel and specifically in colonizing Mars.

Fans of the German pulp science fiction series Perry Rhodan will know that spheres also make amazing spaceships.

Whenever we meet he explains at length how his spherical designs would work phenomenally well on Mars and how it would cost next to nothing to transport the required materials there (because of  the inflating balloon technique). He also researched using his designs and methods for habitats in space that would, according to him, be much easier and way cheaper to build than whatever NASA is looking into these days.

Our discussions always end the same way, with him trying to convince me that his designs and techniques are cheaper and better than traditional approaches and me trying to convince him that it doesn’t matter.

Q: Why doesn’t it matter?
A: Because, with the possible exception of modern right-wing populist thinking, nothing exists in a vacuum. 

I absolutely believe that my friend is right in his assessment that his designs and techniques are superior to traditional techniques. But here is the thing: There are a lot of people around with a vested interest in building buildings that look like boxes. It’s what architects learn to do in school. It’s what construction companies are set up to build. It’s what Home Depot has all the materials for. It’s what city planners know how to deal with. It’s what building inspectors know how to inspect. It’s what literally millions of people in the business of building houses and offices know how to do and expect to do and what billions of people expect to buy.

When I explain this to my friend, he says: “But you don’t understand, my methods are much cheaper for the construction companies!” To which I then respond: “That doesn’t matter because the construction companies can transfer all of their costs to the buyers.” It is of little interest what the building costs are because a lot of building is done on a cost-plus basis and the buyers often find themselves in a situation of having to pay whatever it takes.

Our discussions never go anywhere because my friend puts a lot of stock in being right. I meet a lot of engineers like that. It is of course important for an engineer to be right because reality is quite unforgiving: If you are not right then your thing crumbles or doesn’t work. Being right is not unimportant, but it is only a tiny bit of what makes you successful.

At the start of the Internet era I was consulting with a bank and for whatever dumb reason they were paying a lot of good money for bad web server software. I tried to convince them to switch to Apache because it was better and cheaper. I was totally right, but got little traction. Part of the reason for this was that there were all sorts of myths going around, such as: “We cannot use Apache because Apache supports only twelve concurrent requests.” God knows where they got that from, but they believed it.

Of course my opponents also brought up the support fallacy: Who do we call if things break? They ended up buying IBM’s web server instead, which is Apache compiled by IBM, but with “support”. When the first problem happened they called on me to fix it, not IBM.

This story explains in a nutshell one of the reasons why being right isn’t all that important: Being right requires a lot of knowledge, insight, and experience, but only the people who have at least as much knowledge, insight, and experience can actually know that you are right. Everyone else has to take it on faith. If you don’t know anything about anything and you hear two different takes on something, you have to believe someone. And who are you going to believe? Surely not the young consultant who is saying something wildly different than the received wisdom.

This happens also to me in the sanctity of my own home. In the early 2000s I thought I might be interested in a career change and I got myself a law degree. Consequently I know something about the theory and practice of law. Unfortunately, my wife pretty much never believes anything I saw about the law, especially not when I make a surprising proclamation on how a particular piece of the law works. She does not have a legal background, so whenever I say something that just sounds implausible, she has to either accept the implausible thing I say because she believes that I am right or she can stick with the thing that sounds more plausible and that she probably believed to be right all of her life because other people said so.

Most people get their knowledge of how the law works from television. Folks, that is not how the law works. Here is something to help you believe that: You probably know something about computers, but when is the last time you saw a movie or television show that covered computers in the way they actually work?

The last discussion my wife and I had on a legal topic involved the fact that, in the US, a single criminal act can be prosecuted by both the State and by the Federal government (if the act fulfills both a State and a Federal criminal statute). This means that some people have to go to court twice for the same crime and so can get convicted twice. This sounds really implausible, especially if you have ever heard about something called double jeopardy. Unfortunately, there is also something called the Separate Sovereignty Doctrine which does allow a person to be tried in the courts of different “sovereigns” for the same crime without encroaching on the constitutional protections against double jeopardy.

In this discussion, I was right, but it doesn’t matter because people who are not knowledgeable in the topic have to make a choice who to believe and that is a contest that you might not win for reasons that have nothing to do with the depth of your knowledge and understanding.

The choice who to believe is influenced by many factors. Popularity plays an important role, both the popularity of the statement under consideration and the popularity of the person bringing the message. Right now the US Presidential elections are heating up and apparently Taylor Swift’s endorsement of Kamala Harris could play a significant role in the outcome of the election. That is of course the dumbest thing imaginable. I am by no means a “Swiftie”, but I will gladly accept that she is a phenomenal entertainer and a very good musician. I have however no indication that her understanding of economics or other important topics warrant giving her endorsement any weight.

Truly, anyone who lets their vote be informed by Taylor Swift or Billie Eilish but who never reads a newspaper should realize that they are part of the ongoing demise of democracy.

Another contender for influencing the battle of belief is vested interests. I mentioned this before, but here is another story where it works the other way around: Years ago, at the same bank by the way, we were wondering which application server we should use. Some people were recommending one solution, some another. So, the bank asked Oracle to investigate and make a recommendation. After careful consideration, Oracle came back and said that the right solution for us was …. 🥁🥁🥁 … The Oracle Application Server. At the time I didn’t know enough about application server to contest the choice, but here their recommendation was obviously tainted by the fact that they had a huge vested interest in pushing more Oracle product. They might have been right, but we (the engineers) didn’t believe them.

The third thing to consider is risk. Let’s go back to the spherical buildings. Regardless of whether you are an individual, a double-income family, or a Fortune 500 company: If you are going to buy a building for your needs, it is going to be a sizable investment and you want to control the risks involved. If you buy a box building, you know what you are going to get because we got thousands of years of experience building boxes. Everyone you know has a box. Your contractor will have built hundreds of boxes. Your insurance company understands boxes. Boxes are the norm. It might be cheaper to build and run a spherical building, but once you factor in the risk, the future expected value of that decision is probably much higher than that of building and running a box. Only true believers are going to take that risk, assuming they can get the permits figured out for a building technique that is completely novel and mostly undemonstrated.

The last thing I want to mention is the hidden energy that powers the universe: Inertia.

You can see inertia at work in Europe in the attempts to get governments to use (more) open source software. It is of course a complete disaster that European governments and quasi-governmental organizations (like the Dutch Internet Domain Name Authority) are completely dependent on Microsoft, Apple, and American cloud providers. Despite years of efforts, open source enthusiasts have been unsuccessful in making inroads in this, even though they are clearly right: It is cheaper to use open source software, you have more control, it is more secure, you have less exposure to foreign intelligence services, you support your local economy and whatnot. But, as I have argued, it doesn’t matter that they are right because the people who they need to convince know just enough about computers to use about 10% of the features of their iPhone and inertia does the rest.

If you want to make a significant change, being right is just the first step. Without being right, you have no hope in hell of succeeding, but it is not nearly enough. You cannot expect to tell people you are right and then sit back and let events unfold in your preferred direction. Being right is a necessary but hopelessly insufficient condition; it is the 1% inspiration that might motivate you to get going, but you better also be ready to put in the 99% perspiration to drive your idea all of the way.