3 ms·

Not one person likes to be wrong about the choices we make. That's human nature. Some individuals have a need to defend these choices to death, even when face

Not one person likes to be wrong about the choices we make. That's human nature. Some individuals have a need to defend these choices to death, even when faced with greater realities that negate anything they could possibly say about their choice. I remember one guy who would show-up at these professional meetings around the time the iPhone came out. He would make it a point to go around the room and tell everyone that his Blackberry was the only professional business phone out. I was using Blackberry myself at the time and had done so for ten years. Even I thought he was beyond weird. He simply didn't want to be wrong. Never bothered to engage with him in any way. It was pointless. There's also a tribal or team-oriented element. This effect is often seen in fora such as, yes, HN. Group behavior is also a very natural human trait. Some find it hard to resist it. If you dare go against tribal dogma you become the subject of a brutal "coordinated" attack. Unless you have a thick skin these events can be emotionally draining. It is often hard to be the one thinking outside the group. People have a natural aversion to change and will resist and attack anything that goes against the direction of group thought. Either join them or deal with the punches. Just remember that all nearly all great discoveries stemmed from questioning what the majority took to be the truth, sometimes at great personal risk. The message is that, just because everyone thinks a certain way, behaves a certain way, supports a certain product it doesn't mean they are right. It just means that they are doing what "everyone else" is doing. It'd be interesting to see the range of hate-mail these tech columnists get.

crusso 14y ago
> Not one person likes to be wrong about the choices we make. The "pain" of insecurity balances over-confidence to help us find locally-optimal decision points. Like with other types of pain, the usefulness of it in some situations can get misdirected and misused pretty easily now that we're out of the jungles and not interacting with each other face-to-face. The anonymity of the Internet is so different from early human encounters that we have a lot of trouble dealing with it. > Just remember that all nearly all great discoveries stemmed from questioning what the majority took to be the truth Then again, a lot of sheep die by straying from the herd and getting picked off by predators. Like most things, cutting the balance the right way and making the best decisions at the right time is really really hard. If it were easy, lots of animals would be competing with us for dominance of the earth.
lotharbot 14y ago
I think it's more basic than not wanting to be wrong. It's not wanting to be disagreed with, even if right/wrong doesn't apply. If I decide product X is the best because of features Y and Z, and someone else decides product Q is better than X because they don't care about Y and Z, we may have both made completely correct choices based on our preferences/goals. It's not as though I was wrong about features Y and Z, or about their importance to me. But another person disagreeing about their importance can trigger psychological defenses. The hate mail in the article concedes the phone has great hardware, but complains that it's a "nerd phone", "heartless", with "no vision". Posts on car forums might concede that a car gets great mileage but complain it has "wrong wheel drive". Blackberry guy thought it was important that he had a professional business phone that was designed with that role in mind. This is where that sense of tribalism comes in: someone has decided that a particular attribute is really important, and anyone who doesn't care about that is an outsider and a weirdo. It takes a certain degree of maturity to recognize that things are good for different purposes and that it's OK if someone else's purposes don't match yours.
- robomartin 14y ago
  Sure. Of course. That's a more fundamental feeling. Interesting takes on this in Dale Carnegie's book. A very interesting read but not necessarily the easiest concepts to apply due to our aforementioned mental programming.

crusso 14y ago

> Not one person likes to be wrong about the choices we make. The "pain" of insecurity balances over-confidence to help us find locally-optimal decision points. Like with other types of pain, the usefulness of it in some situations can get misdirected and misused pretty easily now that we're out of the jungles and not interacting with each other face-to-face. The anonymity of the Internet is so different from early human encounters that we have a lot of trouble dealing with it. > Just remember that all nearly all great discoveries stemmed from questioning what the majority took to be the truth Then again, a lot of sheep die by straying from the herd and getting picked off by predators. Like most things, cutting the balance the right way and making the best decisions at the right time is really really hard. If it were easy, lots of animals would be competing with us for dominance of the earth.

lotharbot 14y ago

I think it's more basic than not wanting to be wrong. It's not wanting to be disagreed with, even if right/wrong doesn't apply. If I decide product X is the best because of features Y and Z, and someone else decides product Q is better than X because they don't care about Y and Z, we may have both made completely correct choices based on our preferences/goals. It's not as though I was wrong about features Y and Z, or about their importance to me. But another person disagreeing about their importance can trigger psychological defenses. The hate mail in the article concedes the phone has great hardware, but complains that it's a "nerd phone", "heartless", with "no vision". Posts on car forums might concede that a car gets great mileage but complain it has "wrong wheel drive". Blackberry guy thought it was important that he had a professional business phone that was designed with that role in mind. This is where that sense of tribalism comes in: someone has decided that a particular attribute is really important, and anyone who doesn't care about that is an outsider and a weirdo. It takes a certain degree of maturity to recognize that things are good for different purposes and that it's OK if someone else's purposes don't match yours.

robomartin 14y ago
Sure. Of course. That's a more fundamental feeling. Interesting takes on this in Dale Carnegie's book. A very interesting read but not necessarily the easiest concepts to apply due to our aforementioned mental programming.