Imposter Syndrome is a Super Power

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Reading Time: 6 minutes
"But..." he stared at me in disbelief, "I mean, look, you're doing it now, quietly oozing self-confidence."

We were studying together and apparently my body language did not express what was going on in my head. I felt I was barely holding it together, so much about what we were trying to learn just didn’t make sense. I was surviving by diverting attention, I was guessing, I was parroting back passages of text without understanding them, any trick I could find to delay the inevitable day when the tutors figured out that I was a really just a bit thick and that I didn’t deserve to be on the course.

Exceededing My Limitations?

I felt like that because I was experiencing imposter syndrome. The idea that you’ve somehow lucked into the situation you’re in and that you don’t deserve to be there.

For me, at that point, I really felt like I had exceeded my limitations. Higher Education wasn’t really a thing in my family. There’d been a few college courses but nobody had ever been to university. It felt like I knew why.

I passed the course (and I got a degree).

In the world of Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths (STEM), Imposter Syndrome is common. If it’s not something you’re personally familiar with, that might sound like a big problem for us. For some, it can be. For the rest of us it’s a kind of hidden super-power.

STEM subjects need precision and expertise. They crave certainty but the reality is that it’s never there and believing that you have it is a problem. The basic principle of science is that we don’t have all the answers yet. Science, by definition, is an ongoing argument with what we thought we knew.

If we’re certain. If we don’t question ourselves, our ability, our beliefs, how are we to move forward?

The researchers, engineers, and mathematicians who do move their fields forward are not the ones who feel they’d arrived, they’rethe ones who feel they hadn’t. They’re the ones who are not comfortable.

When you feel you’re not fully up to speed you pay closer attention. You check your working. You ask the question. You don’t assume, you verify, revisit and refine. You naturally create the rigour that STEM demands.

The Dunning-Kruger Counterpoint

Let’s look at it from the opposite perspective and bring in the infamous Dunning-Kruger curve. How do you get past Mount Stupid?

You barrel into a new subject and you’re immediately conscious that you have a lot to learn. Then you start to get the hang of the basics and it doesn’t seem all that bad, actually. You’re starting to feel like you know what you’re talking about, your confidence grows.

What Dunning-Kruger observed was that people in those early phases tend to vastly overestimate the extent to which they understand the subject.

There are developers, scientists, engineers who are overconfident. They can do very well, but sooner or later they make that mistake and it all comes crashing down. Annoyingly, not always for them.

One of the problems with overconfidence in these fields is that it tends to sound good. That impresses people and it sometimes allows people who don’t know what they’re doing to win over people that do.

We once got a development leader who’d been freed up when a competitor went through a rough patch. He was interviewed by two managers. We were told he was brilliant and would transform the company.

He did appear, at first, to be very impressive. He was all across current industry fashions. He produced an impressive looking design for a project. Then someone asked him about performance and he, very confidently, stated that it wouldn’t be problem because, “as every developer should know, these days it’s more cost effective to scale hardware than waste effort performance-tuning software”.

I was pretty sure I’d spotted an exponential performance problem in his design that would kill it, but I wasn’t certain. It might have been linear, so I merely questioned it. Later, I put it to the head of engineering (non-technical) and he, essentially, ignored me because the other guy was very confident in his design and I wasn’t so confident. Basically, the other guy sounded better.

About 3 months later the project was behind schedule and was taking about 20 minutes to do a simple calculation with only a day’s worth of data. It was supposed to hold a year’s.

If we’d reversed the roles I wouldn’t have been that dismissive. “Thanks,” I would have said, “I’m pretty confident it’s linear and that we can solve it more effectively by scaling hardware than aggressively optimising software, but I’ll look in to it”. It’s an argument that I would have felt the need to prove with science and the science would have proved that the problem was, indeed, exponential and invalidated the entire design.

Imposter syndrome doesn’t stop us, there’s no reason why it wouldn’t be my design, but it does shut the door on the kind of arrogance that leads us headlong into making major mistakes.

Years later I found out that the competitor got into in trouble because they’d invested heavily in redesigning their flagship product and when they got into testing they realised that the design, basically, didn’t work. I’ll let you guess how they got there.

What Drives You?

Let’s change tack.

I know plenty of people who have, effectively, zero drive. They have no desire to achieve anything. They might be quite happy, I think some of them are, but I’m not like that. I’m constantly seeing new skills I could learn, new ways I could get better at the skills I have because nothing I ever do is, in my mind, good enough. I know I can do better.

In business, of course, you have to understand when something is good enough to fulfil the purpose, but that doesn’t stop you believing that you can make it faster, more efficiently, to a higher quality (because faults are expensive to fix).

That drive, which leads to innovation, which leads to increased efficiencies, better products, better business is just imposter syndrome rebadged.

The goal isn’t to eliminate imposter syndrome, the goal is to reframe the energy from something negative into something positive.

I know, it’s easy to say, “hey, when you find imposter syndrome biting, just remember these three simple points”. I’m sure there are other articles telling you this, because I asked Claude and it gave me these:

  • “I don’t know enough about this” becomes “I have a clear direction for what to learn next.”
  • “Everyone here is more qualified” becomes “I am surrounded by people I can learn from.”
  • “I’m going to be found out” becomes “I care enough about this to hold myself to a high standard.”

It’s not that simple. You can’t just logic away an emotion, but what you can do is to take another step forward. If I were a trite self-help podcast I’d tell you to “feel the fear and do it anyway”. There is, however, some truth to this. The feeling of discomfort doesn’t ever go away, but you do get accustomed to it.

Imagine you’re a stunt performer in a movie. Almost every stunt has never been done before, not quite the same way. Performers are scared and they’ll tell you that not being scared would be a serious cause for concern, because it’s being scared that makes them double-check, triple-check, do the extra dry run, do the dry run yet again because something didn’t go quite right.

In a similar way fear almost becomes a friend, you get to know that you do your best work when you’re a bit unsure about whether you’re actually capable of doing it at all. It becomes what drives you, you know that you can always rely on your own personality to keep you grounded. Whenever you start to feel comfortable you know you can take the next step because you know that you’re going to attack it with the utmost rigour. That next step might cancel everything you know and fundamentally change your outlook on the world but that’s OK, because you know you’ll cross every t and dot every last i in the process.

If you’re me the whole thing kind of flips round. Imposter syndrome goes from being something that causes anxiety, something to avoid, to being something that becomes inexorably part of your personality.

If I’m not scared by what I’m doing, I’m not sure I’m even alive.

Imposter syndrome isn’t negative, it’s a power to be harnessed and used.

Your Runners and Riders for Thursday’s Race

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Reading Time: 7 minutes

We’ve got local elections in the UK on Thursday and everyone’s talking about the parties, but who said what in the daily tittle-tattle is pretty much irrelevant when choosing a horse to back. Let’s look a bit deeper at the form.

Labour

Does anyone know what Sir Kier Starmer actually stands for? Labour won the 2024 General Election because the Conservatives had descended into the political equivalent of a squashed blancmange. Well over a year in, however, it seems that Starmer’s government is so focussed on not being Tories they’ve forgotten to have any actual policies.

Corbyn had policies. He was an idiot, but at least he stood for something.

To be fair to Starmer, he’s having to tread a difficult line between traditional Labour, those 1970s Socialists who have yet to figure out that it won’t work in today’s world and a new generation of smug, middle class intellectuals. The left seems to view its prime political objective not as winning elections but as winning arguments against other leftist factions. Starmer can’t say anything, because anything he does say will result in the kind of bunfight Karl Marx himself would have been proud of – and that man loved a bunfight.

That, however, is the national story. We’re talking about local elections and there are many local Labour councillors who do stand for something. The goal of the Labour movement is to level the playing field across society, to bring the poor up a bit and, yes, bring the rich down a bit. Labour councils typically try to improve local services, which benefit everyone, and invest in the most deprived neighbourhoods.

If you’re living in an urban area, if you’re living in rented accommodation, if you often find that there’s too much month left at the end of the money, Labour is one of the prime candiates.

Conservatives

Just about maintained credibility with Theresa May, then lost it completely with Truss and Johnson. Now going through some sort of mass hallucination that Badenoch could even lead a WI meeting, much less a national party. Fortunately, it seems incredibly unlikely that the party is going to win another general election, possibly ever.

Back when the political right became a thing, it basically stood for three things: traditional nationalism, social conservatism and economic liberalism. Back then, it worked.

The problem they have now is that global communications and eCommerce have removed borders from the economic liberalism. You can’t be the party of prosperity and the party of nationalism any more. In 2016 the internal party bunfight spilled over and, rather remarkably, the finance and prosperity people lost. The Conservatives became the rampant nationalist and socially conservative party. Then Boris Johnson. Shame about the billions that got syphoned out of tax revenue into the pockets of his friends and all the excess deaths due to COVID that we could have prevented if we hadn’t voted a horny Afghan hound into 10 Downing Street. Still, we had a laugh, eh?

Again, though, we’re talking about the national level. The Tory Party does also have its fair share of walruses and horny Afghan hounds at the local level, but there are also plenty of people in the party who very much believe in serving their community. I’ve worked with Conservative councillors, many of whom are hardworking, diligent and responsible people. Their focus does tend more towards local business and economic prosperity (and the services needed to support that). If that’s your world, voting Tory might be your best bet.

The Liberal Democrats

Did you know that the NHS was a Liberal idea? And that they brought in the first implementation of a national health scheme accessible by everyone?

Liberalism is the fundamental principle that underpins our democracy. The left has a bunch of dogma that it’s attached; how they believe that the best liberty is obtained through a five point plan. The right has done the same, with a different set.

Liberals try not to do that. They try to take each issue as it comes and work out what the best solution is. In theory this is great, but in reality it means they spend most of their time arguing and if they do ever actually decide on anything it’s usually overcomplicated and doesn’t work.

Just like the first attempt at a national health service: overcomplicated and ineffective. It took a Labour government to actually make it work.

If the left believe in levelling the playing field along financial lines, Liberals believe in levelling the playing field in terms of opportunity. For instance, Liberals tend to believe in strong state education, because if everyone is well educated then everyone has a reasonable chance. That is, at least, the theory.

Today’s Liberal Party is fiercely pro-European. That shows that they understand the global economic and political climate of today. I know, it’s a difficult message to deliver but when we have economies like China and India outstripping the UK, Russia wants to rebuild its empire and America has elected a horny Afghan hound as president, we need friends.

Liberals are great people to have on your team. They’re full of ideas, they question everything. If you want to make good decisions you need people like that around. There have been some successful Liberal led councils, too. If you believe in boosting local business, if you believe in trying to create an environment where anyone can succeed – and not so much in supporting people who don’t (or can’t) take advantage of the opportunities, Liberals are closer to your philosophy than Socialists.

Reform

In some ways, Farage’s person journey represents what I said earlier about the fundamental problem the political right faces here. His parents were flush, he went to a posh school and became a city trader. But he’s also a very, very enthusiastic nationalist. He switched career, from finance to politics.

At a national level it’s really difficult to work out what Reform’s policies actually are. They say things then deny they ever said them, even when presented with hard evidence that they did say them.

The Reform rhetoric is based on the notion that immigration, particularly those claiming political asylum, is the single biggest problem that the UK has to deal with today. This, of course, is hogwash, but it has traction. When people see more and more faces that don’t look like them, when they hear more and more languages that they don’t recognise, it’s unsettling. It’s easy to stoke that, turn it into a real fear and then present yourself as the only salvation from this demon that you have, basically, invented.

That’s what Reform have done and the only policies that we do seem to be able to nail down are extremely nationalistic and socially regressive. They don’t appear to have any kind of economic policy, possibly because not having one is less trouble than having one that couldn’t possibly work – and they don’t have many options for creating one that would.

At the local level, it’s been a shambles, but that is somewhat to be expected when so many of their councillors are new to the game. What we can say, however, is that they’ve failed to find any of the promised savings.

I tend to feel there’s a genuine naivety there, both in the councillors and in a lot of Reform supporters. They genuinely believe that there are pots of money going to waste on “woke” policies and that they’re going to be able to save millions. Then they get in post and find that’s just not true and that the incumbents were actually doing a pretty good job of achieving something with nothing.

Sorry, I got off track. It’s difficult to see what positive policies Reform have at a local level. They promise to reduce council tax but all evidence shows they can’t. There’s not a whole lot they can do about immigration at that level. All I can see we get from them is some rose-tinted view of wasn’t better back in the good old days. No it wasn’t and right now we need to navigate a very careful path forward. We can’t afford to get caught up in some misty-eyed nostalgia about tea on the lawn with the vicar.

Restore

Led by a man who seems to believe that, in the middle of winter, people would set sail in an overcrowded dinghy from France, eschew the leafy South Coast, navigate all the way round Kent, keep going past Essex (understandable), ignore the safe and pleasant beaches of Suffolk and attempt to land in the monumental smeghole that is Great Yarmouth.

Not surprisingly, everything about Restore is consistent with this level of reasoning.

Green

We all know what the core environmental message behind The Greens is and anyone who fundamentally disagrees is either a sociopath or a bit dim.

I mean, there’s a lot of detail that’s contentious, but if you think the basic fact that, globally, we need to reduce the amount of stuff we extract from the ground and burn is contentious then I’ve got some great seaside property in Leicester you might want to invest in.

The problem with The Greens has always been that, along with the good hard science, they have come with a really unhealth slice of hippy woo-woo. It undermines the credibility of the argument when someone goes from talking about projected sea level rises to why we shouldn’t build on lay-lines. That and it’s really difficult to have a sensible conversation in a room that’s so thick with patchouli oil that you can barely see.

Caroline Lucas definitely marked a turning point for the party. She was credible and very rarely strayed into woo-woo, probably no more than any politician does.

And there’s definitely something about Polanski, isn’t there? Starmer’s more invisible than Major was, the Tories are unelectable in the their current form, Ed Davey seems to have his head screwed on but he has real trouble cutting through. Polanski, though…

We know that, locally, The Greens are going to try to do stuff. They’re going to try to use investment in renewables to get people out of fuel poverty. They’re going to invest in public transport because it’s more sustainable. Yes, they’re going to approve all the requests for solar panels and wind generation.

I guess, if you’re wanting to kick established politics in the pants then you have to decide how you view the future. If you’re only thinking about the next 20 years or so and you really want to try to live in a country that’s basically a theme park for a bygone age – and you have simple faith in their ability to achieve that despite having no credible plan then Reform are your choice.

If you believe that we have a responsibility to future generations, in many cases that means your own children and grandchildren, then we need some kind of plan to achieve that. Labour has one, but it’s very steady. The Liberals are a little more advanced, but if you are looking for something radically different then it has to be Greens.

Wrapping It Up

If you want to vote purely on principles, I admire you, but most of us want to make sure our vote counts. That involves a certain amount of reckoning. You might be a fierce environmentalist but if The Greens aren’t going to win in your area it might be more effective for you to vote Liberal.

What’s particularly interesting about this election is the destruction of the Tory Party. It’s really thrown the cat amongst the pigeons and it’s opened the door for the likes of Reform and Green, which makes the whole thing much more difficult to predict.

For most of us, it’s a case of looking at ourselves, asking what we truly believe in, taking a look at the local poll data and then sticking our finger in the air and hoping that our guesswork delivers the right result. In this election, what you think the future of your local area should look like is probably more significant than it has been in a generation.

The Prettiest Girl in School

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Reading Time: 6 minutes

It was early September 1991 and I was about to learn something I’d use for the rest of my life.

I was sat on a park bench, watching the sun go down, very much aware that the sun was setting on my supposed last summer of freedom. I didn’t mind; I’d left school to start work. That meant I’d soon be able to afford my own place; somewhere I just didn’t have to deal with all of the people all of the time.

A trio of young mothers not much older than me trundled pushchairs past where I was sat. Their voices seemed harsh to me, like rattling knives in a cutlery drawer.

The families had all but drifted home from the children’s play area. Away across the grass was an old, lonely merry-go-round where a group from my former school were sharing a bottle of cheap cider, playing the game of how long can you hold on as your friends spin it ever faster.

I knew them. A year or so back I was right with them. I had the hair mousse, baggy jeans and branded t-shirts. I could fit right in if I wanted to. But major brand sportswear and me had officially changed our relationship status to “it’s complicated” and were about to break up forever. I was starting to feel a lot more me.

A newcomer strode purposefully through the gate. The evening dress she wore cut a sharp contrast with the municipal recreation ground scene. She skipped the last step and, with no regard for said dress, plonked herself on the bench next to me. “I’ve just been at a family function,” she said, answering the question I was inevitably going to ask, “I saw you from the car”.

I smiled; it was the first time I’d heard anyone my age use the word “function” in that way. Then she delivered the first of two lines that are why I remember this scene more than 30 years later.

“I’m going to miss you”, she said.

Now, if you think I’m about to tell you a seemingly unlikely love story about the geek and prettiest girl in school, you’re wrong. She and I were friends, just friends, and I was going to miss her terribly, too.

It wasn’t always that way. We were once simply classmates thrown together at the start of high school. All of us there, different abilities, different backgrounds. Nevertheless, the groups, the cliques and the unspoken hierarchies formed along predictable lines.

There are always a few people who sneak under the radar. Sarah1 was one of them, she was quiet back then, didn’t really talk to people, didn’t answer many questions in class or excel at sport. Nobody noticed much about her at all.

My first few years at primary (elementary) school had been difficult. British schools in the 1980s were obsessed by normalness. If you were outside the centre of the bell curve, the bullies started to circle.

I was not in the centre of the bell curve.

As I got to about 8, I’d realised two things. Firstly that, through careful observation, I could easily mimic what other people did. I could pretend to be normal. Secondly, despite the assumptions people tended to make about a geek, I was naturally good at ball sports. It also turned out [long story] that I was pretty useful in a fist fight, too.

As time progressed I got better at all of the above. I came to High School very conscious of it. I created a character, basically a mimic of the average boy with biases applied for some of my genuine character traits. At age 11, it seemed pretty easy to do, and in some ways I felt more grounded for having some kind of conscious awareness of who I was (or at least, who I was pretending to be).

All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely players;
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts,

William Shakespeare / As You Like It

I’d just about got the hang of that when the boys started noticing the girls and the girls started noticing the boys (and thanks to Section 28 absolutely no boys noticed boys or girls noticed girls2). We broke up for summer and when we came back a lot of boys noticed Sarah.

The popular girls noticed Sarah, too and it wasn’t long before she’d been wrapped into their fold. That’s when I really got to know her, because I was in just about every sportsball team and when boys are noticing girls and girls are noticing boys, the boys sports teams and the popular girls get to meet a lot.

Yes, I know, but it was the late 1980s and that’s how things were.

Sarah and I naturally gravitated towards each other. She knew who every member of New Kids on the Block was, but she could also recite Kafka. I could name every member of the England Football team, but I could also recite Dostoevsky.

Back on the park bench, Sarah and I got talking about that particular summer. “I had to make a choice,” she told me. The quiet girl wasn’t her, it was just her default protection mechanism: don’t say anything; don’t do anything remarkable or unusual. Hide and try not to get noticed. But what she saw for herself, using that mask, was a future where everyone passed her by, she was never regarded, never consulted, never involved. She didn’t want that, so over the summer she (with some help from her mother) worked on a new character, someone who was much more assertive, much more engaged.

That’s when she delivered the second line.

“I saw what you were doing and I figured I could do the same.”

I nearly fell off the bench. I thought I’d perpetrated the perfect subterfuge. The idea that someone had seen right through it rocked me to my core.

Well, not really, if I’m honest. My conscious mind was pretty shocked but my subconscious very quickly told me to get over it. Being someone you’re not is exhausting. You have to pay attention to every detail, every reaction, every nuance. Your mind is screaming at you, but you have to block that out: concentrate, everything has to be perfect, the stance, the facial expression, the tone of your voice, the position of every finger. You are playing and writing a character every hour of every day whenever there’s anyone else around.

In social terms, school is a really high-pressure environment. There’s just no way I could be at the top of my game all day every day.

The popular kids didn’t notice me sneaking into the library, or more likely they didn’t care. The kids in the library – which was sometimes literally the library, often just an unused classroom somewhere – they did notice. And they noticed that I talked about Dostoevsky, not football.

In the 1980s we really didn’t understand neurodiversity. Any kid, if they could mask well enough or otherwise find a way of remaining in mainstream education, they did. The alternative was special needs, which was effectively just a wastebin for kids who society had given up on.

That might seem unfair to the many dedicated and conscientious people who worked in special needs — I don’t mean that. They couldn’t be effective because they’d been given an impossible job. They were supposed to teach people who had a whole spectrum of issues with formal education without having any functional understanding of what most of the issues were.

Sarah and I made it through, but by age 16 we were both exhausted. Neither of us could deal with another two years of full-time education – or at least not another two years of high school education.

I took up an apprenticeship to become an electronics research technician. Despite having landed the full set of top grades, Sarah became an admin assistant.

Today I see people I went to school with saying things like “we never had any autistic people or ADHD when I was at school”. I can very, very much promise that you did. You just didn’t see them; either they were pretending to be normal, potentially at a lot of personal cost, or they were shuffled away into special classes, even special schools.

I finished school broken, bitter and angry. I never wanted to step into another classroom. Aside from a handful of the freaks and geeks, I never wanted to talk to anyone from that chapter ever again.

Ultimately I went into computer science and, in particular, into developing mission critical software for emergency services control rooms and front line response. If you make an emergency call in the UK, there’s a good chance that the call taker, dispatcher or responders are using a system that I designed and engineered.

We’re now starting to see research that suggests certain types of neurodiversity are an advantage in particular professions. I kind of feel we knew that anyway.

We, as humans, did not become the dominant species on earth because we were the fastest, the strongest, the fiercest or even the most intelligent (we probably weren’t). We became dominant because of our ability to communicate and cooperate. We became dominant because of our diversity, because different humans are good at different things. We are able to take advantage of that diversity and achieve more as teams than we could individually. We were able to build a society that was stronger and more capable than any one person because we have different skills and abilities.

That is, perhaps, the one thing that The A Team got right.

Today we need that diversity as much, if not more than we ever have done before. Let’s celebrate that instead of whining about it.

Footnotes

  1. Not her real name. I have no way of contacting her so I’ve changed and omitted a few details to avoid identifying her. I’ve also taken a lot of short cuts over what is, in reality, a very complex story. ↩︎
  2. Just for the avoidance of any doubt, I’m being sarcastic. Section 28 made zero difference to who was or was not gay. It did make the lives of gay kids and anyone who had any interaction with them more difficult. ↩︎

Mange Tout, Rodney

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Reading Time: 2 minutes

What’s in a name? What if mispronouncing it were part of a secret language? Decades ago, I encountered exactly that. It didn’t end well.

Tech background: the Postgres database system was built to replace Ingres. Postgres is portmanteau of Post-Ingres. When SQL support was added, they did it again and we got PostgreSQL. Many people call it Postgress, some add the SQL part in some way.

If there is a pronunciation of PostgreSQL that’s wrong, it’s Postgree. I can understand the confusion, though, so when the management team started saying that I tried to be nice. As the company’s foremost database geek, I figured if I dropped “Postgress” into conversation a few times they’d catch on. After all, if the management of a technical business mispronounces technical words, that doesn’t promote confidence in the business – and we were all pulling in the same direction there, right?

We were not. If anything my “help” made matters worse. I even started to hear the overall technical lead call it Postgree. So I invited him out to the car park for a polite word.

“It’s a management thing,” he told me, “it’s one of the ways they distinguish if you’re one of them.”

Omitting much for the sake of brevity, A them and us culture had developed (or perhaps was deliberately fostered). It included a secret language used by the management team. They were perfectly aware that all the buzzwords they were using were ridiculous and that they were, indeed, mispronouncing PostgreSQL. It was a tool which allowed them to talk openly but still exclude people from the conversation.

It won’t surprise you to know that the business struggled, in many ways.

I met up with someone from there a year or so back, “We’re dead,” he told me, “COVID has killed us.” The company couldn’t recruit technical people, which he firmly blamed on the rise in remote working. What he had wrong was that the company couldn’t afford to pay enough.

It’s true that some people focus only on the wage slip. It was a factor. Most of us are far more complex: we want job security, job satisfaction, camaraderie, things that make the course of the day a more pleasant experience.

That company still had a toxic culture. Nobody wanted to work there, but options in that region – before COVID – were limited. Now tech people had much more choice, they were choosing not to work there.

In a market where good people are excruciatingly difficult to attract, if you want to build a successful business you have to build a positive and progressive culture, make somewhere people want to work. It’s a necessary investment that’s good for all of us.

Let’s Talk About Wednesday

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Reading Time: 6 minutes

I love a hypothesis. Even silly ones. It’s not about the outcome, it’s all about the journey. Just like Strictly Come Dancing. A while back I was trying to explain how my mind works, “basically,” I joked, “I’m Wednesday Addams”.

I am not Wednesday Addams. I’m a middle aged professional from a pleasantly leafy area of rural England. But writers rarely pluck a character out of nowhere. Even Pinky and the Brain were based on real people. Somewhere there might have been a real Wednesday…

Before I go any further I have to add a content warning. This gets really dark, really fast. Right after this kitten picture.

Read more

The Kids Aren’t Alright

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Reading Time: 5 minutes

“You’re brave”, I was told many years ago. Had I battled a terrorist with a narwhal tusk? Had I smuggled a Soviet dissident through Checkpoint Charlie in the boot of a Trabant?

No, I chose not to have kids. For a moment I struggled to contemplate how this could possibly be brave.

Then I remembered I was not normal.

There are two things parents commonly tell me. The first is that “I love my kids, but if I had the chance to go back, knowing what I know now, I probably wouldn’t have them.”

Those same people, moments after telling me in a quiet corner that they think they made a mistake, can often be found discussing the joys of parenthood with other parents. We live in a culture where it’s socially unacceptable to regret having children. Of course, this isn’t a simple matter, few parents would want their children to know they regretted having them. Nobody can blame a parent for maintaining the pretence justified by that alone.

The other thing parents often tell me, whether they regret having children or not, is that they’re not entirely sure why they chose to have them. The most common theme is that “it’s just what you do, isn’t it?”.

Is it?

The Herd

The herd is useful, tradition is useful. The chances are that if something is a standard or has been done a particular way for centuries then there’s a good reason for it. Many people have decided they know better, ripped up the rule book only for it to be an unmitigated disaster and before they know it things are back to pretty much how they were before, only with slightly different names to try to cover up the failure.

The herd, of course, has a plan for your life. You start by playing a few games, then do a bit of education, find a job, find a partner, raise some kids, find some hobbies then retire.

Going against that plan is the harder road. There’s safety in the herd, masses of animals all doing the same thing. Any animal that does something different is a cause for concern to the rest of the herd. It might do something that puts others in danger. It might even be a predator in disguise.

Rarely does anyone ever ask the question why someone chose to have kids. Dare not to have them and we get the nagging and the constant leading questions, “When are you two going to get round to having kids?” And the stories about the great aunt that ran out of time and always regretted it.

If you want to add a horse tranquillizing quantity of alcohol, then apparently we would have made great parents and it’s people like us who are responsible for reverse Darwinism, if that’s actually a thing.

Some people, of course, always wanted to have kids: it’s a strong part of who they are. I couldn’t be happier for them, but that’s not everybody. On the flip side, there are those people who are resolute from the start that they don’t want children.

But there are those in the middle and they’re the vulnerable ones…

Blackberry Smoke / One Horse Town

I find that an incredibly sad song, about how a society can railroad you into a career, into marriage, into parenthood before you’ve had a chance to think and whilst you’re still naive enough not to know better.

Then you’re trapped.

To work out how to escape this, I want to reverse back up to that leading question which I was asked in so many different forms over the years, “When are you two going to have kids?”. If your social group, your family, your friends, even your colleagues expect you to have children then the first thing you have to do is separate your personal, true thoughts from those of your community, your family and even those closest to you.

We are all different, it is not a duty or responsibility to have kids, you don’t owe it to your family or anyone else. This is about you and your feelings alone. It is entirely worth taking the time, alone, to work out exactly how you feel.

I can’t emphasise this enough: it is your call.

If you have a partner, of course they’re important, but don’t allow someone else to override your own feelings on this. You can never truly reverse having had children. If having kids is a deal breaker, then the deal is broken. Going your separate ways now might be painful, but it’s better than spending the rest of your life with children you don’t want.

And please don’t let anyone tell you that you’ll change your mind when you first hold the baby. It does work for some people, but it doesn’t work for everyone.

The decision not to have children is, mostly, the less permanent one. Sure, if you’re a woman the point where it pretty much becomes permanent is a lot earlier, but you don’t have to close the door forever at age 18. None of us can predict the future that well. If you don’t feel that you want kids now then that’s fine.

The problem is not you. The problem is other people…

People are Weird.

Unless you tell them differently, people tend to assume that you’re broadly the same as them. Not wanting children is such a defining aspect of life choices that it can upset people’s notion of who you are. People can get weird about that.

Sometimes people choose their perception of you over who you actually are. They start trying to mould you to their perception, not the other way around. Or to put it another way, they’ll tell you you’re making a mistake and you’ll change your mind. This, clearly, is their problem, not yours.

Some people’s own visions of their lives, particularly those who want kids, can also involve you having kids. They expect you to run parallel lives, which can mean they feel betrayed. They’re betrayed by their own assumptions, but it doesn’t always come out like that. Again, not your problem.

A common response is an overly-assertive demand to know why. That’s not always easy to answer, because the truth is often simply that you don’t feel any need or desire in that direction. That is justification enough; if anything the people who need to give the better justification are those who chose to have kids. You don’t need to explain further.

There are any number of emotional responses that can come out from people whose world you’ve just upset. The one thing I can say for sure is that you won’t lose any friends. There’s a small chance you might find that some people you thought were friends are really just acquaintances, but the earlier you find that out, the better.

The last thing to mention is that some people are pretty persistent. The in-laws who ask literally every time you see them; they exist. Some friends will also ask as often as they think it acceptable to do so. This, of course, is a type of bullying and you’re totally justified in telling them to back off, or referring them to the reply given in the matter of Arkell vs. Pressdram.

Remember, it’s a huge decision to make and it’s your decision alone. You don’t need to justify it to anyone else; “I just don’t want to” is the only response you need to make. Don’t let anyone tell you different.

Flying Wine

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Reading Time: 4 minutes

Remarkable, isn’t it, how good your local supermarket is at keeping your favourite wine on the shelves? You might assume they have a huge stock somewhere, but they don’t. They fly the wine in.

Land in the UK is expensive. Stock rooms in supermarkets are space that’s not selling goods, if they could get away with it, stores wouldn’t have stock rooms at all. And those enormous buildings by the motorways are distribution centres, not warehouses. They don’t really do any warehousing at all.

The old business model was to buy in bulk from abroad and warehouse in the UK, feeding it out to stores as required. It turns out that it’s now cheaper to leave wine with the producers around the world and then fly it in pretty much directly onto the shelves.

The key business drivers are the balance between cost and responsiveness. This is how, when some celebrity is pictured drinking “Herbert’s Herbgarden” supermarkets can ensure they have enough of it on their shelves at competitive prices. That’s important, because if they’re out of stock customers are going to go to competitors and they’ll buy more than just a bottle of wine there.

From a consumer point of view, this is a demonstration of the free market working perfectly. Competition between the major supermarkets has forced them into some of the most economically efficient and streamlined supply chains in the world. They might make big profits overall, but they’re only making a tiny percentage on each item.

The free market is a hugely useful tool, but it’s worth saying this twice; it naturally finds what is economically most effective. It doesn’t care at all about people or the planet. In particularly, the free market is extremely effective at finding ways to use more energy. Right now, because less than 20% of our energy comes from renewable resources[1], that’s a very bad idea.

If we want to make the free market beneficial to society we need to twist it, we need to tip the playing field in our favour, make the free market do things that secure our future rather than wreck it.

Herein I have a problem: I’m an engineer, not an economist. I don’t know how to do that. One thing is very clear, however.

What I’ll do, then, is I’ll put an idea to you and you can tell me if it’s silly, OK?

Let’s start with three pertinent facts:

  • Wine doesn’t perish quickly. I’m told that mass production wine should be drunk within 2 years of bottling.
  • Local wine shortages are not critical or even particularly damaging to society or humanity. If Tunbridge Wells is short of wine for a week, it will cause nothing more than moaning. And there’s a lot of moaning in Tunbridge Wells already.
  • Europe produces a lot of wine that can be shipped overland very efficiently.

So, why can’t we substantially increase tax on shipping wine and other similar luxury non-perishables by air?

Then we could use that extra revenue to fund sustainable shipping methods? Surely someone is going to give me a really good reason why we can’t, why we haven’t?

That would give supermarkets and consumers the choice. If they want to keep their entire range in stock all the time, they could warehouse wine from more distant regions. They could choose to fly the wine anyway, at additional cost. Or they could choose to cover any gaps by shipping alternatives overland from within Europe.

Moreover this is all really just a symptom of something I hinted at further up; our view of energy usage is seriously skewed:

  • We’re very conscious about our direct, personal energy use and largely ignorant about our indirect energy use. We diligently recycle, then impulse-buy a t-shirt from China completely unaware of the enormous amount of energy it takes to make just 1 piece of clothing and ship it across the world.
  • We get our focus drawn into clean energy and forget that – right now – reducing the total energy we consume (mostly indirectly) is more effective.

The Climate Emergency is in the public consciousness, we know that things need to be done. So far we – as Western society – have been very good at telling people what they can do directly, but there is very little awareness of our indirect effect.

We need to tackle consumerism, we need to tackle throw-away culture, artificially short design life, etc. We’re fighting an uphill battle here; the Free Market is ever so good at selling us things to reduce our energy usage, but to get anything done it relies on profitability. The messages we need to convey aren’t profitable except in relatively niche ways.

What we need to do is keep the conversation moving. Point out that supermarkets fly wine and how ridiculous that is, how idiotic fast fashion is. Write blog articles, social media posts about indirect emissions / carbon / energy. The point here isn’t to get people to take personal responsibility – although everyone that does is a bonus – the point is to shove this issue up the political agenda so that politicians actually have to start thinking about how to restructure the economy to reduce our indirect energy consumption and our indirect emissions.

[1] Somewhere North of 30% of the UK’s electricity is renewable, but we do burn a lot of fossil fuel directly, so our overall energy percentage is much lower.

Government and Personal Accounts Don’t Mix

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Reading Time: 6 minutes

The UK Minister for Food recently made a gaffe about using a personal phone. He might not realise how big a gaffe it was, however. His comments were part of a wider debate about the UK’s Home Secretary having admitted to using her personal email account for government business. Whilst government business should be carried out using government (approved) equipment and services, there’s a big difference between making a phone call and sending an email.

The TL;DR, phone calls are pretty secure but email absolutely is not. Read on, I’ll explain, as succinctly as I can.

On the surface of it, using one type of communication device or technology might seem much like another. In reality the technology underneath and the security of them varies drastically.

Telephone Calls are Reasonably Safe

Your common or garden telephone in the UK is considered pretty secure. Your land line is connected to an actual cable that goes to a cabinet in the street. That cabinet is connected via real cables (or optical fibre) to the telephone exchange. You call is then routed from there around a network owned and operated by BT[1], eventually working its way to the destination. It’s pretty difficult for a rogue actor to get access to that pipeline. They either need to tap the wire at one end or they need to get into BT’s secure network.

Mobile phones are a little more vulnerable. It is possible for a snooper who’s physically near either end to listen in to the radio signals between the phone and the mast and hear the call audio. Also, as more organisations get involved in anything so the risk of a compromise within one of them grows. A call routed from Vodafone through BT to EE is more vulnerable simply because there are three organisations involved.

There have been incidents where large telephone networks have been hacked, but it is relatively unlikely that unfriendly foreign organisations are listening in to telephone calls in the UK.

Naturally, government business should be conducted on government (approved) devices. There are many reasons for this, but let me give you just three:

  • People tend not to encrypt or adequately access protect their phones. Both can be enforced by policy with a government phone.
  • Although it’s difficult to intercept an actual telephone call, some smart phones have been hacked to record audio and even video and relay that to rogue actors. Again, organisations can set policies to try to reduce this risk.
  • If a government phone is lost it can be remotely disabled immediately.

Email is Horrendously Insecure, End of Story

The basic protocol the internet uses for email is now more than 40 years old. It was developed when The Internet was a very different animal to what it is today. There have been a number of security updates since then, but there are still some big holes.

One obvious problem is data at rest. Email is a store and forward system, when you send an email from your phone or computer it goes to an email server which then tries to work out what to do with it. That email server stores your email. Because email is not an end-to-end encrypted protocol, the mail server has access to the contents of your email, as does anyone who was sufficient rights (whether legitimate or hacked). I once demonstrated this to an unbelieving manager by changing emails that he sent.

What’s more, when data is written to storage it has a funny habit of hanging around. There are systems to try to make sure that deleted data is really deleted but not everybody uses them, the result being that it’s sometimes possible for a hacker to retrieve emails that passed through the server a long time ago.

Now let me take another angle, if you can receive emails, that means you have an email server somewhere that’s acting on your behalf. That email server is open to The Internet. If you’re foo@bar.com I could connect to the email server at bar.com, say “Hi, I’ve got a message for foo” and under the original protocol your mail server wouldn’t even check who I was. Almost all do now check, but the checks aren’t 100% fool proof and it’s still possible to send emails that appear to be from people they’re not.

As sender and receiver, we also have no control over the path that the email takes. The vast majority are simple, I’ll send my email to the mail server at tomfosdick.com which will look up your server at bar.com and directly transfer the email. As long as both email servers are uncompromised and the link between them uses an up-to-date strong encryption that’s relatively secure.

But there’s no guarantee that will be the route that gets taken. It could end up going through an email server in Russia. It could go between two servers that aren’t using strong encryption or even any encryption at all.

There’s a whole library of different techniques and different ways that email can be compromised, intercepted, altered and faked. If it’s done well, as an end user it can be impossible to tell if it’s been compromised. Even experts can’t absolutely tell if a message has been observed by a rogue actor on its journey, or if it’s been left on an insecure server somewhere for a hacker to pick up at a later date.

A final note here, one of the reasons that it’s important that government officials (including Ministers) to only conduct government business using government (approved) devices using government accounts is because they’re monitored and logged. This is a completely separate reason why a government official using a personal account is a serious issue; it opens the person up to the allegation that they were deliberately avoiding scrutiny. There are times when Ministers need to do secret things, but there are protocols for that. Avoiding scrutiny is a pretty good sign that a government official is working in their best interests, not ours.

WhatsApp et al are Comparatively Secure

A lot of newer messaging apps are comparatively secure compared to email. This is because they’re end-to-end encrypted. Your phone (or web client) encrypts the message and only your intended recipient has the key to decrypt it. It doesn’t matter how many servers or other pieces of network equipment it passes through, they could all be compromised, it wouldn’t matter because they don’t have the decryption key, they can’t view the message contents.

Having said this, there is information in the metadata; an attacker who did manage to compromise the network might be able to see who the message was from, to, when it was sent, when it arrived, how big it was etc. This kind of information can be extremely useful, but unless a hacker can crack the encryption, they can’t view the message itself.

Of course today’s strong encryption can be cracked by tomorrow’s mobile phone, so just consider that if your data does get stored, someone in the future might be able to crack it.

Do be very aware that not every messaging service is end-to-end encrypted. Twitter direct messages, for instance, are not. Their contents are also stored by Twitter indefinitely. Not only could the Twitter organisation exploit the contents of your direct messages, a data leak could easily expose your direct messages to threat. If you’re a government official there’s a reasonable risk your entire twitter DM history could end up on Wikileaks.

Wrapping It Up

For the vast majority of business and government needs, the good old telephone is plenty secure enough, but make sure that you comply with your organisations usage policies and don’t bleed your professional communications across into your personal accounts.

For the majority of business, email is fine. The reality is that millions of emails are flying around all the time and only a handful have anything interesting or valuable to a hacker. Emails are also, generally, pretty secure within the organisation itself. If you’re sending an email from your professional account to the professional account of someone else in the same organisation, that should be relatively safe.

Do be aware that if you’re sending information to people outside your organisation there’s a chance that email might be compromised. There’s a small risk that anything bad will happen, but it is there nonetheless.
A top tip is to remember that the telephone is comparatively secure. If you receive an email message that you are in any way concerned about, or you suspect anything not entirely straightforward, call the person.

Again, do not bleed professional stuff into your personal accounts. That’s a big no-no. Don’t, for instance, send a document to your personal email because you can read it better on your phone that way.

Newer messaging apps can be more secure, but check that they’re end-to-end encrypted and using a encryption technique that’s currently considered secure. You might be surprised how insecure some of the common platforms are.

[1] Yes, there will be people reading this and the words “well, technically, it’s not that simple…” will be on the tips of their tongues. I know; there is always a balance to strike between being technically accurate and boring the vast majority of readers into a stupor. You might consider T-REC-H.248.1 a little light reading before bed, but you’re a very, very niche minority.

Motor Sport: The New Bastion of Bigotry?

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Reading Time: 5 minutes

If there’s one industry that’s pale, male and stale, it’s the automotive industry. That’s why I was impressed to see Gareth Thomas at the Ford Motors stand at Goodwood Festival of Speed talking about the prejudices that still exist in the industry and how it can move forward.

Sure, there may be an element of rainbow capitalism going on with Ford and the #verygayraptor, but the fact that Ford is pushing this message into the pick-up market is an indication that we really are making progress.

In motor sport however, we seem to be going backwards. In the past few weeks we’ve had a driver using homophobic and grossly racist terminology on a game stream, a former driver being racially derogative about a current one and spectators at the Austrian and Hungarian Grands Prix being reported for homophobic, misogynistic and racist behaviour.

In the past few years, Formula 1 and motor sport in general has spoken strong words, but it’s now starting to sound like it’s all talk.

Just before Festival of Speed, Formula 2 driver Jüri Vips had his contract with Red Bull suspended (and later terminated) after he used racist and homophobic language in a live game stream.

With someone whose first language isn’t English there are always some who leap to the defence that the person may not have understood the impact of their words. Sure, when the term itself is considered offensive, but there’s more to it than that. It doesn’t matter that much how offensive the terms are, it’s the fact that you are using race and sexual preference in a derogatory context that are the real problem.

It also emerged, over that same weekend, that former F1 driver Nelson Piquet (Snr) had been racially derogatory toward Lewis Hamilton. In response Piquet issued a statement which essentially said that the word he used isn’t considered offensive in Portuguese, so we should all get over it and move on.

Again this misses the point. Let me make 3 statements:

  1. Paul Smith is an overly aggressive racing driver.
  2. Paul Smith is a white racing driver.
  3. Paul Smith is an overly aggressive white racing driver.

Spot the problem?

There are plenty of contexts where it would be valid to talk about his driving style or his race. The contexts where it would be valid to bring both to the fore at the same time are very limited. So why has someone deliberately chosen to mention Smith’s race, in what is clearly a criticism of his driving style?

It might seem pernickety, but this is something people of colour have to deal with all the time. Positive contexts rarely include their race, whereas negative ones do. It’s racist propaganda, but because nothing offensive or incorrect is said the significance of the bias can be easily missed.

It’s even a tactic explicitly used by racist groups, deliberately trying to associate negative images and negative stories with particular races. A few years ago there was a rash of new “news” web sites and social media pages which largely carried celebrity gossip and negative stories about people of colour.

Because nothing directly derogatory is ever said about someone’s race, the operators claim they’re not racist. The reality is that they’re operating at a more subtle level, applying a bias to what they choose to report in order to portray people of colour in a negative light.

This is why Piquet’s defence plain doesn’t work and why Vips is in such deep water. Regardless of the language used, they both demonstrated prejudices.

Hamilton’s response is as it generally is these days; he’s a mature, thoughtful and eloquent man.

For too many years there has been a kind of standard procedure in motor sport; if you’re caught saying something bigoted, you issue an apology, state that your “unfortunate” choice of words doesn’t represent your true values… blah, blah, blah and everyone nods quietly and moves on.

But we’ve been giving the message long enough now and loudly enough that nobody can pretend they haven’t heard it. So when, if not now, are we going to move from “that’s naughty don’t do it again” to “here’s a 5 year ban from attending any F1 event in any capacity”?

In Piquet’s case it’s hardly his first offence. He knew exactly what he was doing, appealing to a certain demographic who might have a racially based preference, in particular, for the driver who is current dating his daughter.

Vips is a little different. Young people do say stupid things, things they know are stupid, things which genuinely don’t represent their principles, for a variety of reasons. I’m open minded on this; his language (sadly) wasn’t atypical of Call of Duty streams in general, so I could believe that he meant nothing other than to vent frustration. However, other drivers also play Call of Duty and they’ve avoided crossing the line.

This means the burden of proof now has to fall to Vips. In his cut-and-paste, obviously written by someone in marketing statement he assures us that the sentiments he expressed do not represent his true values. Fine, if that’s the case then he’ll understand the seriousness of the issue and be prepared to take meaningful steps to demonstrate what his true values are. He has the platform to do that. In fact he has a great opportunity to take ownership of the issue and to demonstrate real leadership on it. However, right now it looks like he’s just trying to keep his head down and is hoping it’ll all blow over. We just can’t continue allowing people to do that. We have to face these issues, not let people keep sweeping them under the carpet.

Just as I was doing what was supposed to be the final edit of this article, ugly events were reported at the Austrian Grand Prix. It was good to hear Naomi Schiff, in this weekend’s pre-race show, call it out directly for what it was, racism, misogyny and homophobia. We need more people prepared to tackle these issues head on and not just talk in general terms about “unfortunate behaviour” and sweep it under the carpet again.

It now transpires that there has been another clutch of incidents reported at the Hungarian Grand Prix and senior figures are reporting a sharp rise in online bigotry – and there does seem to be a pattern forming. It does seem to all be centred around one particular team and coming from the supporters of one particular driver.

Yes, it’s good to see Mercedes and Hamilton take such a positive lead, but when they’re the ultimate target of most of the bigotry we can’t expect that to be effective. Most of the teams and many of the drivers have, in fact, issued strong statements. The response from some has been notably weak, which doesn’t help.

Yes, it’s good to see media organisations like Sky TV being stronger than they previously have.

Yes, it’s good to see the new “Drive it Out” campaign from the FIA and F1 management.

Words do have a lot of power, but they only get you so far.

It looks like we’re facing a new wave of bigotry in motor sport. We need to put it down immediately; we cannot afford for it to take hold. That means more than just words. As Hamilton says “Time has come for action”.

The Truthiness Horizon

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Reading Time: 3 minutes

Truthiness is a concept most of us heard about associated with Trump’s first presidential campaign.

Stephen Colbert uses “truthiness” on the debut episode of The Colbert Report

The concept is simple, whether you tell the truth doesn’t actually matter that much; what matters is how believable what you say is. People in general don’t check facts, especially when those facts confirm their pre-existing biases.

This forces us to face up to something rather uncomfortable: in a debate, telling the truth only matters if your audience is well informed. If the audience is not well informed, it’s often possible to construct a false narrative that sounds more convincing than the actual truth.

We know this, we’ve seen it in action.

I want to introduce a new concept: the truthiness horizon.

It’s when someone is faced with a level of detail on a subject that’s so far removed from their own knowledge that they can’t even tell if it’s plausible, let alone true – so they reject it.

Sounds crazy, right? It is, but if the person has a pre-existing bias it can happen really easily.

Nobody Knows How a Smartphone Works

One example from personal experience: a friend of a friend asserted that nobody understood how a smartphone worked. I’ve worked in digital electronics, optoelectronics, radio and software so I do know, reasonably well.

“Go on then”, he asked, “how does the display work?” I started explaining how an AMOLED display worked. He asked some very odd questions. After a while he just folded his arms and said “Nah, you’re making it up, nobody knows this stuff”.

At first I thought he was joking, but he got quite angry and abusive, maintaining the theme that I didn’t really know and I was just making stuff up to sound clever. This is an extreme (and irrational) example, but it demonstrates the point very well.

People get emotionally invested in their opinions, when you make a challenge you’re starting on the back foot. People’s first reaction is to preserve ego, to look for ways they can discount your challenge. We all do this, but we hope that professional people override that initial emotional reaction and consider the wider argument objectively. Not everyone is professional, however.

The person here started with the premise that nobody knew how a smartphone worked and was always looking to maintain that state. The questions he asked weren’t intended to get more information, they were intended to find gaps in my knowledge and prove that I didn’t know how a smartphone works.

His problem was that I do.

My problem was that at some point I crossed the truthiness horizon. I sounded too authoritative to be credible and an alternative narrative popped into his head. He reasoned that the chances of meeting a friend of a friend who genuinely had such in-depth knowledge were vanishingly small, therefore he could safely conclude that I was making it all up to try to sound impressive.

There was only one teensie-tiny problem with this line of reasoning: it was bollocks.

At the time I didn’t really understand it, I just laughed it off and told him that one day not listening to people who knew what they were talking about would get him into trouble.

On reflection, however, I don’t think this is really all that rare.

Bullshit Baffles Brains

There’s an old army saying, “bullshit baffles brains”, or to put it another way, if you need to convince someone of something but you don’t have a good argument, just make up a load of complex stuff that you know they won’t understand. There’s a good chance they won’t want to lose face by admitting they don’t know what you’re talking about, they’re not in a position to argue against it, so their only option is to go along with it.

Data overload is another, related technique. You dump a huge load of correct raw facts on someone you know hasn’t the time or the expertise to interpret them. Then you tell them it means something it doesn’t. They’re in full possession of the facts, they presume that you wouldn’t lie to them because they could find out the truth – if they tried.

My proposal of a truthiness horizon is based on the hypothesis that these and similar techniques are now so engrained in our society that people are basically wary of any situation that appears opaquely complex. Such a stance might well help them in daily life, not being sucked in by bogus investment schemes, etc. A side effect, however, is to make them vulnerable to manipulation through truthiness.

There’s a balance to be found here and I don’t believe we’ve found it.

Right now, if you are an expert or significantly knowledgeable in a particular area it’s good to keep this in the back of your mind: people might disengage not because they don’t understand, but because they don’t believe.