Arguably essential; publishing shrivels; AI-powered fraud: Newsletter 2 October 2024
Newsletter 64. Why progress requires embracing people’s right to be wrong. Plus the decline in publishing workers, Gucci vs. Lord & Taylor, three people to follow and three books to read.
The freedom to be wrong
We’ve gotten to a point where we rip people apart for being wrong, when we should be celebrating them.
Let me be clear about what I mean. I’m not talking about people who decide to ignore the evidence that, say, the earth is round or vaccines work, and make up their own facts.
I’m talking about people who make statements about the future.
Here are a few examples. Which of the following propositions will be true?
- Artificial intelligence will result in major job losses for white collar workers.
- The best way to address global warming is with a variety of non-fossil-fuel energy sources, including nuclear plants.
- Global free trade, not tariffs, represents the path to greater prosperity for everyone.
You can clearly argue either side of these propositions, and I hope you do. The point of this post is not to take a position on any of these. It is to make the case that a robust public argument is the best way find a path forward on these topics.
I want to hear the best arguments for and against these propositions. I want to smart people to make their best case, and then for those who disagree to tear that case apart and bring their own evidence. I want that all to happen in newspaper op-eds, on SubStack, on cable news, and in every other possible venue and platform. That is real debate, not the overly dramatized and televised “debates” that we are supposedly going to use to decide who our next president and vice-president will be.
What I don’t want is the demonization of people who disagree with each other. I don’t want ad hominem attacks on the spokespeople. I’d like the people who end up being wrong to still be able to contribute to the public dialogue, because the people with the courage to potentially be wrong may be exactly the smart people we need for the next challenge.
We already know how to do this.
This is how science moves forward. Somebody believes that bacteria, not stress, is the biggest contributor to stomach ulcers, so we test it. Or that there’s a massive black hole at the center of our galaxy, so we try to take a picture of it.
It’s also the way that businesspeople often make decisions. Analysts attempt to figure out the answers to the biggest unknown questions and gather evidence to support their claims. The people who claimed that Bitcoin will replace money are probably wrong. The people who claimed that mobile apps would transform the computing world were right. Analysts, technology vendors, and business people try out strategies and experiment to see if they are right — and often, they are wrong. It’s inevitable, because they are asking tricky questions when the answer is not obvious, like the AI question at the start of this post.
I was one of those analysts; I covered the television industry. I made some predictions that were very right, like the idea that the TV schedule was going to become obsolete. As with anyone making controversial predictions, that one stirred up some problems — and caused an tech CEO to try to get me fired.
I also predicted that HDTV would fail. That was pretty controversial, too, and earned me the enmity of many TV industry leaders. I was wrong about that one.
My employer, Forrester, didn’t fire me when I stirred up controversy, and didn’t fire me when I was wrong, either. Because the clients, and more generally the public, had a tolerance for people making the hard calls. They wanted to hear my thinking, whether I was right or wrong, because it helped them to think things through.
If we lose the ability to tolerate people who are earnestly seeking truth and end up wrong, that won’t just be sad. It will remove a dynamic that’s at the heart of who we are as a society, and as a nation. We need respectful debate. We need research. We need courageous people who are able to be wrong and keep our respect because we value their intellect.
Societies in which right and wrong are decided by who has power, rather than by debate and experiment, are sterile and stagnant. They cannot grow because they cut themselves off from their own best, smartest, most courageous people.
We need to embrace people who are earnestly wrong. Because once right and wrong are decide by what team you are rooting for, rather than the truth, we’ll lose the ability to make progress.
News for writers and others who think
Publishing employment has decreased by 40% in the last 30 years, according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics (Publisher’s Weekly, subscriber link). What happened? From my perspective following the industry, 1) consolidation and mergers, which always result in layoffs, 2) automation, especially in production and accounting, so you can do the same work with fewer workers, and 3) a vastly reduced commitment to editing and marketing. But with fewer people doing work with authors, authors have less and less incentive to work with traditional publishers.
Gucci is suing Lord & Taylor for $14 million for selling counterfeit Gucci products. It’s a battle of the irrelevant brands. But seriously, what sort of supply chain even allows something like this to happen?
The FTC is cracking down on AI-powered companies that don’t actually deliver what they promised, or are actively fraudulent. Like Rytr, an AI assistant for writing fake product reviews. AI makes everything more efficient — including fraud — and I doubt that the FTC will be able to keep up with the torrent.
Three people to follow
Jeff Lotman he/him CEO of Global Icons, the man who can profitably take your brand across category lines.
Mark Fortier , who’s on everybody’s short list for book publicity.
Steve Peltzman , new CEO of Feedback Now, the easy way to get people’s real-time perspective on how your brand is doing.
Three books to read
Say What They Can’t Unhear: The 9 Principles of Lasting Change by Tamsen Webster, MA, MBA (Page Two, 2024). The best ways to persuade and inspire from the world’s foremost idea whisperer.
AI Snake Oil: What Artificial Intelligence Can Do, What It Can’t, and How to Tell the Difference by @Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kapoor (Princeton University Press, 2024). Somewhere between “AI is god” and “AI is crap” lies the truth; this book will help you find it.
Think Your Way to the Top: A Nine-Time CEO’s 52-Week Journal for Getting Ahead and Staying There by Des Hague (Amplify, 2024). How to CEO, step by step.
The freedom to be wrong: Amen, brother! Those who cancel you because you were wrong about something refuse to recognize that we learn far more from failure than from success. Failure weeds out those options that don’t work, distilling down to the option that does: success!