Non-Obvious 2018 Edition. Rohit Bhargava

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СКАЧАТЬ experiences that had been “engineered.”

      My research led me to a recently published Harvard study showing why social media had become so addictive for so many, and then later to a body of research from a noted MIT anthropologist Natasha Dow Schüll, who spent more than fifteen years doing field research on slot machine design in Las Vegas.⁴

      Her book, Addiction by Design, exposed the many ways that casinos use the experience and design of slot machines to encourage addictive behavior.

       Together, these were the final elements of proof that would help me tell this story completely.

      Engineered Addiction made my 2015 Non-Obvious Trend Report, and, ultimately, it became one of the most talked about trends that year.

      Avoiding Future Babble

      Now that we have gone through the process for curating trends, I want to share a final caution: the dangerous potential for much of trend forecasting to sink into nonsense.

      Despite my love of trends and belief that any of us can learn to curate them, the fact remains that we live in a world frustrated with predictions, and for good reason.

      Economists fail to predict activities that lead to global recessions. Television meteorologists predict rain that never comes. And business trend forecasters are perhaps the worst offenders, sharing glassy-eyed predictions that seem either glaringly obvious or naively impossible.

      In 2011 journalist Dan Gardner wrote about this mistake-ridden obsession with the future in his insightful book Future Babble. Gardner illuminated the many ways that so-called experts and pundits have led us down mistaken paths and caused more harm than good.

      He builds his argument based on the widely known but rarely heeded research of psychologist Philip Tetlock, who spent more than twenty years interviewing all types of experts and collected of their 27,450 predictions and ideas about the future. Tetlock then analyzed these predictions against verifiable data and found that the experts’ predictions were no more accurate than random guesses.⁵

      When Tetlock confronted some of these experts on how flawed their predictions had been, he found that the experts who had fared worst were the ones who struggled with uncertainty. These “hedgehogs,” as Tetlock describes them, were overconfident, described their mistaken predictions often as being “almost right,” and generally had an unchanging worldview.

      “At least 50% of pundits seem wrong all the time.

       It’s just hard to tell which 50%.”

       Dan Gardner (from Future Babble)

      On the other side were experts who didn’t follow a set path. They were comfortable with being uncertain and accepted that some of their predictions could be wrong. These experts are “foxes” and their defining characteristics included modesty about their ability to predict the future and a willingness to express doubt about their predictions.

      How can you tell which predictions to trust and which to discount? And how can you improve the accuracy of your own predictions?

      The Art of Getting Trends Right (and Wrong)

      I shared Dan Gardner’s caution about the dangers of false certainty and skepticism about future predictions for a reason. If you are going to build your ability to curate trends, you must also embrace the idea that sometimes you will be wrong.

      In Part IV, you will see a summary of previous trends along with a corresponding letter grade and a retrospective analysis of its longevity.

      Some of them are embarrassingly off the mark.

      The reason I share them candidly anyway is partly to illustrate Gardner’s point. I want to be as honest with you as I try to be with myself and my team after each year’s report. Foxes, after all, are comfortable with uncertainty and know they may sometimes be wrong. I know I’m sometimes wrong, and I guarantee that you will be, too.

      Why write a book about predicting the trends and describe the entire process if we both might be wrong at the end of it? A fear of failure should not hold you back from applying your best thinking and exploring big ideas. More important, the Haystack Method may be a way to curate trends, but it’s also

       a way to think about the world that involves finding more intersections and avoiding narrow-minded thinking.

      Learning to predict the future, in other words, has a valuable side effect: it can make you more curious, observant, and understanding of the world around you. It’s this mental shift that may ultimately be the greatest benefit of learning to see and curate trends.

      Oscar Wilde wrote that “to expect the unexpected shows a thoroughly modern intellect.”⁶ Non-Obvious is about helping you to build this type of modern intellect through noticing the things that others miss, thinking differently, and curating ideas to describe the accelerating present in new and unique ways.

      Now that we’ve achieved that, let’s turn our attention to the trends for this year.

      4

      TRUTHING

      What’s the Trend?

      As a consequence of eroding trust in media and institutions, people are engaging in a personal quest for the truth based on direct observation and face-to-face interaction.

      I remember once browsing the Internet I encountered a headline that seemed too ridiculous to be true: “Harry Potter Books Spark Rise In Satanism Among Children.” Indeed it turned out to be a joke – and it was one of the first times that I read The Onion, a comedy news site that takes modern stories and creates intentionally hilarious twists on them designed to entertain. At the time that story was quickly uncovered to be a work of satire. Today the line between truth, lies, satire and fiction has become much harder to distinguish.

      The truth has a media problem.

      The term fake news, which had no meaning two years ago, has become one of the most popular accusations traded back and forth between politicians and media personalities alike. We are surrounded by routine sensationalism peddled by 24-hour news channels desperate to invent a perpetual stream of “breaking news.” Lost in the midst of all this televised finger wagging is a shared sense of reality. Thankfully, that hasn’t stopped one underappreciated group of truth seekers.

      On July 5, 2017, a dedicated group of 190 top fact-checkers from 54 countries attended the Poynter Institute’s fourth annual Global Fact-Checking Summit (Global Fact). Their mission never felt more urgent. In the time since they had last met, Donald Trump had taken office, fake news had become an everyday term, and casual indifference toward the truth seemed to be growing.

      Only a month earlier, a widely shared study found that around 59 percent of links shared on social media had never been clicked, including links that went viral and were shared thousands of times.¹

      The conclusion: People were actively sharing stories based on headlines alone, without reading the article. But even a headline can mislead a large group of people, СКАЧАТЬ