Filters for Judgment
We perceive the world unconsciously through filters. They protect us, help us make the right decisions, or lead us astray.
Filters are not limited to the information we take in—they are omnipresent in nature, in our social relationships, and in economic life. Which filters does nature provide for us, which should we use, and which should we avoid?
Filters Need Categories
A filter is a boundary that is permeable to certain elements and impermeable to others. The art of filtering lies in focusing on the most appropriate characteristic in order to achieve a given goal. The right filters create similarity by linking categories to the real world.
In the wild, my survival depends on correctly assessing animals in their environment. I filter the animal kingdom according to predators—and only predators. The category is dictated by nature. Only one category of animal has a powerful appetite for me. Consequently, every one of my fellow humans will choose the same filter (at least those who do not wish to end up as lion food).
However, the further we move away from nature, the more pitfalls we encounter in categorisation. Categories are made similar when they are not, or they are clung to stubbornly even though the environment has changed. Properly applied, filters help us make decisions. This becomes especially clear when we consider everything we push through them every single day.
We always filter a small quantity of things that are embedded within a much larger quantity. The larger quantity represents a neutral state—something common, of little value, and of low order. It can be water, noise, or sociology graduates. The small quantity gives us advantages or satisfies our needs when we apply the right filter to locate it. Whether it’s about business ideas, criminals, or a future spouses, we thirst for information on how to distinguish the special from the ordinary, the signal from the noise, the hits from the flops, the dangerous from the harmless.
Before we can apply a filter, we must know which criteria we wish to apply to which objects. The motto is: recognise and decide. Different entities (users) employ filters, so the tools and goals of filtering vary accordingly. Filter tools protect against misuse or increase efficiency. They filter out the useless or the dangerous (e.g., a spam filter in your inbox). We also need a kind of marker that tells us when and where to apply a filter. Social behaviour in particular is highly complex and requires the appropriate selection of available filters for each situation. A marker can be a facial expression, a phrase, or membership of a professional group. As soon as the marker is recognised, the filter kicks in. For example, we filter our next statements when we register a sad expression on a friend’s face. In order not to hurt him further, we refrain from talking about things we believe would be detrimental to his mood.
So let’s have a look at the filters we use (or should use) every day. I roughly divided them into three groups: Scarcity, Skin in the Game, and Time. Filters are usually linked to one of these three categories, sometimes to two or all three.
A Filter Called Scarcity
The importance of filters really dawned on me when I read Chris Anderson’s book The Long Tail. The “long tail” refers to the never-ending tail of a revenue-per-product curve (there are huge numbers of products that sell only a few units, but taken together they form an enormous market).
Whereas the market until the mid-20th century was dominated by hits, since the 1990s products that would never have reached shops (because they did not generate concentrated demand) can be bought online—online markets have no constraints from scarce shelf space or high storage costs. The prerequisite for the long tail is efficient filters (tags, customer reviews, etc.) that enable customers to easily find the niche product they are looking for. Anderson distinguishes between two types of filters: traditional pre-filters (talent or product scouts) that try to predict the success of brands and products, and post-filters (customer reviews) that measure actual success from the mass of all offerings.And precisely because the number of offerings available to consumers is rising, filters will continue to grow in importance as a defence against this noise. Imagine you want to find songs from an exotic sub-genre in a database of two million tracks. In the past you could browse a comparatively manageable selection in a record shop—your niche could not even exist. Today it is possible to find it, provided the right filter exists and the song has been correctly tagged. The more noise (information irrelevant to the buyer) a market produces, the more in demand filters will be.
Leaving the physical world, another field opens up for filter tools: the scarcity of information. When information is scarce there is no certainty. Filters help increase certainty (outside the laboratory there is no perfect certainty). By certainty I mean the clear knowledge that a decision will bear fruit or that a certain event will occur.
Our mental resources are limited. Even if all information were available, we could not process it. Our attention is always directed at only a few aspects of reality—and that is absolutely necessary. What is important depends on the context. In social situations it is sometimes more important how someone says something, whereas in the factory hall only the content of the message matters. According to the independent researcher Luca Dell’Anna, autism filters context—that is, autists filter out, in social situations, information that would be irrelevant in a purely technical task.
Social media also cannot do without filters. One of the most important functions is probably the ability to “block” unpleasant people who harass you, contribute inappropriate content, or simply get on your nerves.
Do You Faithfully Have Skin in the Game?
Advertising expert Rory Sutherland points to two different filters that many economists can never understand (unless they are also advertising experts). Cost and effort signal two different things. Anyone who uses cost as a filter focuses on efficiency and also falls into the scarcity category. Someone who filters by cost chooses the cheapest price, the fastest process, or the most resource-efficient and safest alternative (of course without considering higher-order effects).
What the modern rationalist in business administration cannot even conceive is that effort can also serve as a useful filter, and that this is not due to some evil cognitive bias. When someone engages in “signalling,” they are telling the world that they are serious about something. That is useful information, which of course costs money without providing objective benefit—that is precisely the point. Without that information it would be impossible for others to apply this type of filter.
Initiation rituals, for example, are a filter that asks prospective members how much a club membership is really worth to them. Only when it costs something, when sacrifices have to be made, does one have Skin in the Game (SITG).
Skin-in-the-game filters are frequently found in interpersonal spheres. Reputation is the most important variable in our social relationships; it determines whom we can trust and whom we cannot. But reputation is relative—we can decide for ourselves by whom we wish to be filtered and by whom we do not. If one of our friends is publicly attacked, we can decide whether to stand by him or abandon him. From his perspective, our courage is a filter that reveals who his true friends are—those who stand by him even in difficult times. Paul Graham once tweeted that idiots and mobs who verbally attack people (offline and online) provide us with valuable information about whom we can trust. Anyone who resists them and is not influenced by them is a free-thinking natural ally who keeps his distance from the mob.
Both in love and in religion, willingness to sacrifice serves as a measure of how much a relationship or a faith is worth to someone. A mother sacrifices herself for her child; if she does not, the child will not survive long or will be taken away by social services. In religion, the following story took place in the 17th century: in 1666, the year of the revelation, the Jewish scholar Sabbatai Zevi arrived in Constantinople, the capital of the Ottoman Empire, proclaiming himself the new Messiah and gathering many followers. The Sultan did not like these activities at all and gave Zevi the choice: convert to Islam or be executed. To the astonishment of his followers, Zevi chose the former and took the name Aziz Mehmed Efendi. Nevertheless, many believers remained loyal to him (which is not surprising when one considers that many had entrusted him with their virgin daughters for a while and had readily believed in his honest intentions). Today hardly anyone remembers him. Religion demands one thing above all from its saints: willingness to sacrifice.
In business too we expect the right signals. Would you rather invest in an owner-managed company or one run by corporate managers? I assume the former. When you decide to buy a product, brands also act as filters—applied in both directions: as a positive filter (“I have to buy this”) or negative filter (“I would never buy that”). Building a brand is expensive and uncertain. It symbolically stands for those asymmetric barriers that take a great deal of time and effort to acquire but can be destroyed in a relatively short time. It is the ultimate form of signalling commitment in economic life.
When we receive information that has passed through a skin-in-the-game filter, it is more valuable to us. That is why customer reviews and comments are an important source of information for our purchasing decisions, whether books, hotels or restaurants. Since tastes differ greatly and some people’s expectations do not match the average, the statements should not be regarded as negative filters and the ratings not as positive filters. Star ratings are more of a threshold: above a certain value they become irrelevant and only serve to weed out the really bad providers. Individual comments usually refer to one specific aspect (waiting time, quality of ingredients, friendliness of service). It is up to us to combine these filters and adapt them to our own preferences.
Another aspect of filtering information is the gulf between theory and practice. Practice is the filter here. You only really understand something when you practice it. Theory alone is not enough (I never read instruction manuals). Even if every single step of a process or every aspect of a problem is written down, it doesn’t help. You have to put yourself in the situation and test the adjacent possible. Only then do you notice what is generally or specifically relevant for your own context. The manual shows one path—it is neither the best nor the worst. In exploring the adjacent possible in a (changed) environment, alternative paths can be discovered that lead to deeper understanding or an even better manual. The general feeds on the particular, and the particular on practice.
In this sense, skin in the game is a filter that, as Nassim Taleb says, “keeps contact with the ground.” That is also the purpose of a constitution—to not lose contact with the ground. Hence constitutions, with their separation of powers, create organised distrust (checks and balances)—the most important skin-in-the-game filter at the societal level.
The King of All Filters
When I am reading and writing a book, a filter is active with regard to the topics that currently occupy me, and I see what I read through my current lens. It is advisable to read the same good books several times—new aspects always emerge that you did not notice the first time.
Books fall into the “Lindy” category. Lindy refers to timeless things that are not subject to natural decay: books, ideas, religions, certain foods. It is not the physical matter that counts, but its intellectual or functional representation. Thus a “Lindy book” means the content, not the printed paper. Food is Lindy if it has been consumed for a long time—olive oil, for example—as opposed to modern industrial inventions like gummy bears.
According to the Lindy rule, something that has already existed for ten years will probably exist for at least another ten. If it is a hundred years old, it will probably survive another five hundred. Lindy is based on the filter of time. Something only becomes Lindy if it has proven itself in evolution. That is why religious traditions endure—they represent inscrutable filters that have emerged from centuries or millennia of experience. Time is usually right.
The filter of time eliminates all randomness in nature. People of average ability can have above-average career success. Speeders or other reckless people often get away with it. In the short and medium term they are all “lucky.” In the long term, however, there is no luck—only the filtered and the unfiltered.
Back to books. You don’t want to waste your time reading lousy books? Lindy books will still be relevant in twenty years. They are written either by highly erudite authors or by practitioners with skin in the game. Nassim Taleb explains that the Lindy effect arises because of distance from an absorbing barrier. Applied to books, these barriers are the author and the subject matter. There are timeless topics and topics that attract attention in the short term but become irrelevant in the long term. Moreover, an author’s insights can become obsolete if he or she has no skin in the game or no erudition.
To decide whether a book is Lindy, we can look at certain attributes of its content. Here are some indicators of an absorbing barrier:
Heavy use of buzzwords
References to weak sources (especially in psychology, sociology or economics)
Highly predictable table of contents
Weak topic oriented toward current trends
Other Filters
A tip for anyone who creates categories, breaks down costs, or does anything similar: always include the item “Other/Miscellaneous.” That protects you from nit-pickers and you can always assure your boss that you really have thought of everything.
When I think of further filters, those of social coexistence come to mind in particular. We have to assess our fellow human beings and evaluate our relationships with them—not in ten years, but now.
The first thing that catches the eye when you meet someone is their “style.” Even if it is frowned upon as prejudice, the first impression, the style someone cultivates is a useful filter. After all, people consciously decide whether to walk around in a shiny green-blue jacket or casually in a T-shirt. They express something, reveal something about themselves. Style as a filter includes not only clothing but overall appearance, aura, and behaviour.
Other social filters are less immediately obvious—they only appear in certain situations. Humour is one such filter. Someone who has no sense of humour and takes everything literally is not pleasant company. Imagine going to a restaurant with a group of humourless people and having to think ten times before every joke whether something offensive could be read into it. Not a pleasant prospect for an enjoyable evening. Humourless people, on the other hand, like to surround themselves with other humourless people—they seem to use the humour filter in the opposite direction: anyone who shows even the slightest hint of wit is undesirable.
Natural Antennae
Filters are not always conscious processes. They often come automatically—like smells that tell you something is fishy or that you should keep your distance from a person.
These are reflexes and gut feelings that appear without our wanting them to, and we must take them seriously. When we feel bored doing an activity, it is not due to lack of discipline—it is simply a signal that something needs to change. Boredom filters tasks and reveals the true interests we unconsciously harbour.
When you fall in love, you do not perform an analysis of the characteristics of possible candidates; you filter your future partner by gut feeling. Without that flutter in the stomach, an emerging relationship does not have a particularly long life expectancy.
Design as a Filter
Knowledge is also conveyed through forms and functions. The design of objects communicates how they are supposed to be used. You cannot sit on a chair in infinitely many ways—the structure pre-filters nonsensical uses.
The Ecological Rationality of Filters
From Sam Harris to Steven Pinker, many modern authors have tried to create an image of rationality based on strict scientific explanations. Nassim Taleb has asked why having good-sounding explanations for everything is so important to our society. His view is that only what secures survival is rational. Survival is far more important than providing explanations. Accordingly, modern rationality overlooks the positive effects of seemingly “irrational” religious dogmas such as monogamy or fasting. One can say that they do not describe a positive outcome but a (possibly disadvantageous) process. It overlooks the limits of its visible possibility space.
Herbert Simon argued that gathering all information on an issue and weighing all possible alternatives is impossible. In the real world the task is too complex and time too short. Hence he spoke of bounded rationality in human decision-making, where less information often leads to better decisions. There is no filter that makes sense in all possible worlds. The respective environment decides what is rational. Sometimes you have to act quickly and efficiently, sometimes social aspects are more important. In some cases we cannot even determine the required information and need a different approach.
Filtering via Proxies
A few years ago, while on holiday in Spain with friends, we wanted a cheap beer one afternoon. All the bars we passed had price lists posted outside. We found them relatively expensive until we stopped at one without any price information. It looked—there’s no other way to describe it—“cheap.” Old plastic chairs and backyard atmosphere made us think the beer would be cheaper. In reality they served one of the most expensive beers in town (and it didn’t even taste like expensive beer).
This negative surprise illustrates filtering via proxies and how it can lead us astray. Our actual filter was price. Since price information was missing, we estimated it via the furnishings. Our expectation flowed into the proxy—we assumed that a place with cheap plastic chairs also served cheap beer. The link between the proxy and our filter category was simply too weak.
There are, however, much more robust proxies. A good proxy for assessing a person, for example, is the books they read: “Tell me what you read and I’ll tell you who you are.” Choosing a handful of books out of millions says something about a person.
Someone who reads Seneca, de Maistre and Taleb certainly does not want to converse with someone who reads Yuval Noah Harari, Robin DiAngelo and Steven Pinker.
Bullshit – the Anti-Filter
A lie can take many forms: self-deception, white lie, or criminal lie. It appears as deception, secrecy, certainty, or repression. One form of lying that is not strictly a lie is spreading bullshit. Harry Frankfurt addressed the topic in his famous essay. Lying is a craft that pursues specific purposes and goals and must therefore be carefully worked out. Bullshit does not need that. It is far more general, vague, and leaves a lot of room for interpretation. Someone who produces bullshit throws out half-baked stuff. What characterises it: he does not even try to be right. He doesn’t care whether his statement is true or false, and he gets away with it because society tolerates bullshit more than outright lies.
It is precisely this vagueness that makes us discuss bullshit here. Liars and truth-seekers play the same game. The bullshitter does not play—he prefers to bask in the abstract. Bullshit takes everything as a proxy and is therefore the anti-filter par excellence.
The Erudition Filter
The big problem with bullshit is captured in Brandolini’s Law: it takes more energy to refute bullshit than to produce it (for a layperson). An ordinary person does not have enough time and mental resources to delve deeply into every subject. You cannot become an expert everywhere yet still have to make decisions. History, medicine, statistics—we are confronted with all these things in everyday life but have neither the time to study the literature in sufficient depth nor to gather our own experience. In such a situation we have to decide whom to trust.
You have to be able to recognise who is an erudite scholar (a “polymath” or “erudite”) and who is not. The scholar functions as a bullshit filter. You do not have to agree with all his ideas and conclusions, but thanks to his broad knowledge he immediately recognises when someone is talking bullshit. Once you have identified scholars, they help you find other scholars. Do not confuse the scholar with the expert—the expert is appointed by others; there are good and bad experts. The scholar is a discoverer.
Filters Need Training
Once you have discovered a filter for yourself and chosen the right starting conditions, the filter becomes better and better the more noise it is exposed to. According to Nassim Taleb, stressors train filters—this follows from his concept of antifragility. The consequence is this: extreme situations reveal not only a person’s true character, but also the quality of a filter. Financial professionals would put it this way: “The truth lies in the tails.”
That is why it is important not to pretend or hide who you are. The filters that other people apply to you reveal who they really are. The risk of being “filtered out” by the wrong people is no reason to stop living your life the way you want to live it. It is impossible for everyone to love you. You have to decide who is allowed to hate you. That is the right question: From which type of person am I willing to risk being hated?