A Short January 2025 Side Bar

Why most human narratives, even when all dressed up in fancy AI party gowns or other mantles of apparent authority, are limited and limiting

When humans find themselves uncomfortable and just can’t easily figure out what’s bothering them, this is what they nearly always tend to do:

Man seeking easy answers (in popular social and/or mainstream media, e.g.). Source

Called the Drunkard’s Search in the West, and Nasreddin’s Ring in parts of the Near East, people much prefer looking for things where it’s easiest for them to do so – and not at all necessarily where that missing object is most likely to be found.

Cast as the Drunkard’s Search, the explanatory joke goes:

“A policeman sees a drunk man searching for something under a streetlight and asks what the drunk has lost. He says he lost his keys and they both look under the streetlight together. After a few minutes the policeman asks if he is sure he lost them here, and the drunk replies, no, and that he lost them in the park. The policeman asks why he is searching here, and the drunk replies, "this is where the light is".”

The point is, most human discourse and associated decision-making under conditions of solution-seeking stress gets stuck in the muddy ruts of authoritative opinion, flashy fashion, comfortable personal or group biases, or the otherwise already familiar (and easy to dance to).

Among other things, the dominance of this risk-averse and sloppy tendency – and the numerical dominance of those who follow this tendency – is a major reason for the decline of the innovation rate in places like the US, and why human history so dependably repeats itself.

(A corollary to this basic pattern of human behavior is ILTy’s Maxim,[1] “If everybody thinks something is so, it’s usually a sign that it is not so.”)

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[1] Locally named after my father who I first heard using it. Note that he was speaking probabilistically, not absolutely.