Ideas From The Void

Beware the human tendency to attend to salient, attention-grabbing, negative events

Quick: What’s not happening right now?

The bottom has not fallen out of the domestic stock market. It might feel that way given recent volatility. But no, markets aren’t panicked. They haven’t cratered in over 15 years, even during COVID. Before 2007-2009, they hadn’t cratered in 70 years.

The IRS, everyone’s beloved federal agency, estimates from random audits that less than 15% of citizens fail to pay the taxes they owe. That is, over 85% of filers do not cheat.

On any given day, less than 5% of people miss scheduled work. That is, >95% are not ditching.

No accidental and calamitous (taking more than 200 souls) fires in densely populated urban areas have occurred, particularly in high-rises, in 75 years. I’m not ignoring the 9/11 terrorist attack or other acts of war, nor am I minimizing deadly smaller fires in many other places (more recently, in Grenfell Tower, Santa Monica, and Lahaina). Unplanned fires are happening more often, but they are killing fewer people.

Fraud rates in U.S. federal and state elections are almost infinitesimally small. They are estimated in various places to be less than 0.00001. That is, even with historical strong bipolarization of the electorate, 99,999 of 100,000 people follow voting laws. Even in Chicago.

No cases of or deaths from polio have been reported anywhere in the world in the last 25 years.

And, despite scientists searching continually for decades, there has been no known contact from life outside Earth. Sorry, Mulder. Bonus: the Cylons haven’t invaded either.

I’m not listing these streaks to be macabre. Nor am I trying to convince you to be happier about how things are. Instead, I’m highlighting our human and scholarly tendency to attend to salient, attention-grabbing, negative events. We construct elaborate theories about these low base-rate, dreadful occurrences. In many cases though, it’s the absence of horrific episodes that might be more shocking. I am gobsmacked that some howling, misanthropic nutter has not poisoned the water supply of a metro area, despite how trivially easy that would be.

So, what’s the Big Idea^tm here? The everyday banality of what doesn’t happen is important to theorize about and study. If we try to explain the absence of things, sometimes entirely distinct causal mechanisms come to mind other than opposing ends of the continua we use to explain why and when these things do happen. For instance, I might suggest that crucial features of organizational prevention systems are working remarkably well. Maybe aspects of first-responder training have become particularly effective. Cultural or social norms about what bad behaviors to avoid could be getting internalized. Perhaps internal moral compasses are frequently and firmly guiding people to do more of the right thing. All of these ideas can be pursued in business school research.

All of that makes sense except for the Cylons. A few of us know that superhuman versions of them are already here and hiding in plain sight, even better than the Skrulls. We just don’t know where. I’m betting one of them is Yannis Stamatopoulos, who is insanely productive and must never sleep. He tells us about a recent stream of his prodigious and impactful research below.