During high school, I’ve tutored and helped a few of my friends write essays, and I’ve written a bunch of essays myself. So, I think I know something about academic writing (I may be too confident, here).
The strategy that I see most new writers use is ideas first, evidence later. Make a statement and then go find evidence to back it up. I’m guilty of it myself. I think it’s a very human thing to do. Instead of changing your beliefs to fit your perception, change your perception to fit your beliefs.
We see what we want to see. That’s bad.
Last summer, I was working in a psychology lab that was trying to get at this exact problem. Humans pay more attention to information that confirms their stereotypes than information that refutes their stereotypes.
It’s top-down control in which we go from belief to evidence rather than a bottom-up paradigm from evidence to belief. But the best, most enduring systems don’t work from the top down, they work from the bottom up.
Emergence describes the phenomena in which a system can be greater than the sum of its parts. When parts interact in a certain way, a new, more powerful whole is created. This is why systems are unpredictable. If we controlled if everything from top-down, there would be no stock market, complexity, or any prediction errors. It’s the beauty of systems working from the bottom up that creates uncertainty.
But the human mind goes straight to the top.
We don’t pay attention to the factory workers — we pay attention to Jeff Bezos. We don’t look to everyday Americans as the source of economic success or failure — we look to the President. Even the most popular religion, Christianity, doesn’t look to individuals as in control but look to a singular, higher power. If a majority stakeholder owns 1%, we don’t look to the millions who own the 99%. Humans look at the top, but action starts from the bottom.
It’s time to model our thinking style to reality.
If you want to learn more about how you can think from the bottom-up, I wrote about the most powerful tool in the 21st century here.
