The Human Behavior Podcast
Do you ever wonder why people act the way that they do? Join human behavior experts Brian Marren and Greg Williams as they discuss all things human behavior related. Their goal is to increase your Advanced Critical Thinking ability through a better understanding of HBPR&A (Human Behavior Pattern Recognition & Analysis.) What is HBPR&A? It's a scientific (and fun) way to understand and articulate human behavior cues so that you can predict likely outcomes and it works regardless of your race, religion, political ideology or culture!
The Human Behavior Podcast
Probability & Language; The Cost of Being Certain
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In this episode, we’re talking about probabilistic thinking and why language matters more than most people realize. The central idea is simple: most bad decisions don’t come from a lack of information, they come from mislabeling information.
When we apply labels too early, we collapse probability, reduce our options, and lock ourselves into conclusions that may not be accurate. We’ll break down how this happens, why your baseline matters, and how small changes in language can dramatically improve your decision-making under pressure.
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Hello everyone and welcome to the Human Behavior Podcast. In this episode, we're talking about probabilistic thinking and why language matters more than most people realize. The central idea is simple. Most bad decisions don't come from a lack of information, they come from mislabeling information. When we apply labels too early, we collapse probability, reduce our options, and lock ourselves into conclusions that may not be accurate. Today, we'll break down how this happens, why your baseline matters, and how small changes in language can dramatically improve your decision making under pressure. Thank you so much for tuning in. We hope you enjoy the episode, and don't forget to check out our Patreon channel for additional content and subscriber-only episodes. Enjoy the podcast. Please consider leaving us a review, and more importantly, sharing it with a friend. Thank you for your time, and remember, training changes behavior. Alright, and we're recording, Greg, so we're going to go ahead and jump in after my 37 clicks here. Hello, everyone, for thanks for joining us. We got a great episode here today. So what we're going to be talking about is a few things. Actually, we're going to be talking about probabilistic thinking. We're going to be talking about language and how that impacts that. We're going to be talking about a few things and kind of why we use a specific lexicon, but really on how it frames things specifically around language and thinking probabilistically. And the general kind of I would say episode thesis, sort of, is that most bad decisions, they actually don't come from lack of information. They come from mislabeling information. So think about it as we're going through this from that. It's not necessarily a lack of information, it's mislabeling the information. And we talk about that too, Greg, we've talked about in other episodes and where you say, like, oh, someone made an error in sense making, which led to a poor decision. Well, the big thing language can really prime us for, which is why we have a very specific lexicon and why we use certain terms or don't use other certain terms. And we'll get into some examples of that in the show. But I think it's important to start out real quick, Greg, is if you could kind of give maybe a definition of what probabilistic thinking is. Because I will argue that, you know, probability in one statistics is very counterintuitive sometimes to how humans think. We sort of use it, but then at a mathematical level, we're terrible at it. And even I've seen data scientists screw this stuff up because of how human intuition is and how we want to think. And actually, statistics as a math wasn't, you know, it was like kind of the last one to come around. You know what I mean? Because I agree. I mean, it was always there. It was always there. It was just the last one to really, really be clearly defined and articulated news.
SPEAKER_01:So to that point, Brian, just as an opening volley across. So I read, you know, my only the social media is LinkedIn, and I read this morning somebody was being critical about, you know, science and police work, saying now these scientists are coming out and talking about police work. It's like, look, things can be scientific and police related for the love of God, man. You know what I'm saying? Let's not uh let's not do that. So so what is probabilistic thinking? It's what we do every day. Probabilistic thinking is nothing more than a decision-making framework that is designed specifically to evaluate a situation based on likelihood. So likelihood of potential outcomes rather than certainty. So using data, logic, reasoning, what you're doing is estimating the probability of various future scenarios, which helps you manage the uncertainty and then identify ML and MDCOA of the various encounters. That's what we do all the time. But but the the difference there is evaluation based on likelihood, okay? Because if you evaluate based on certainties, you're gonna say that depends at the end of every sentence, and you're gonna get rolled over by the steamroller. You know?
SPEAKER_00:No, and that and that's a that's a great way to look at it. And and it's important why I kind of brought up the the math part of it, right? We're because we're talking about likelihood, um, but not to a some sort of you you can't really calculate it statistically saying, you know, based on these factors, there's an X amount of percent chance that this person is going to run or this person's going to pull out a gun, or that it doesn't really work that way. It it does in a sense, but but to mathematically compute that, you can you can only do that in a sense, like after the fact. And so meaning when you're in the moment, you can say, well, what's more likely and what's you know, we we talk about the most likely, most dangerous action or course of action, but the idea is you're you're thinking, okay, based on what? Because it all comes down to based on what or compared to what. And so you you actually said something I want to hit up right up front before I jump in with this opening example, but you said you had a fear, right, of making a temporary event a permanent characteristic. Like what what let's let's because this is important to understand the problem that we're facing when we're not thinking probabilistically or we're not basing it on some known, we're just kind of coming up with solutions based on what we think. And we've already maybe we've already maybe made come up with a conclusion before we have the right information or the right way to label things.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, yeah. So so remember, if it's probabilistic, it's based on likelihood. So making a temporary event of permanent characteristic means that we're gonna knowingly create a damaged file folder, intentionally creating it. And and and whether you intentionally or unintentionally create a universal description for a whole thing or a person or an event, what you're doing is you're saying this is a thing rather than defining the behavior. So I see the behavior. So somebody says, Man, my hanky button's activated. Okay. And then they say, This guy's acting shady. Okay. Well, what you're doing now is you're creating this enormous ball of gosh damn shit around an incident rather than specifying this is above or below a baseline. This falls short of my expectations. So so we're not saying that you have to change like like some people hear us say you have to change your language. What we mean is your language to your brain, in other words, a lexicon. Give your brain a chunk of information that it can process more easily, which which decreases the complexity of the situation.
SPEAKER_00:No, and and that that's a great point. And language is how we articulate it, right? And how we label it. And so that's why in some places I'll see, okay, I get your point why you want people to use this specific language, but but you're you're kind of doing it wrong, or or that that's that's not important here, or that's not like okay, hey, they're not homeless, they're unhoused people. Like I get your intent behind that. It's a same thing when when it went from like, oh, they're inmates to a person in custody. Like I understand historically when you just refer to them, you don't want to you're trying to say it's not us versus them, it's not this, it's just this is a person, they're in our custody, because that's a vanilla term versus saying an inmate or a convict or something, right? It's not a loaded term. So it will change the way you perceive the situation. It will change the way you interpret and articulate the situation. So I get it. It just sometimes we we go too far with that.
SPEAKER_01:No, no. So let's give an example of a cognitive load. So you can increase your cognitive load past what's normal, clinically normal for your brain when it's operating. So, for example, if you give me three choices on your name card and then it's not a Mr. or a Mrs. or any of those other things, what's gonna happen is I'm gonna stumble through a normal situation. I'm doing it now, trying to be politically correct while I'm bringing up a point that anytime your brain pauses, it means it's got to go back and it's got to take a look at characteristics and then it's got to weigh them, and then it's got to say, okay, before my open I opened my mouth, I want to make sure that I have this absolutely correct. Well, if you're stuttering, that means that it's incorrect. That means that there's something wrong with it because it's not iterative and it's not intuitive. So, in other words, the least amount of language that you have to get across to open dialogue is actually better, you see, at reducing your cognitive load. So, so the less pronouns, the less horse crap that we align, that's why we argue about the biases all the time, Brian. Yeah. These have gone off the reservation.
SPEAKER_00:Because now there's 37 different biases, and none of those are helpful for me to understand and articulate the situation.
SPEAKER_01:And I can't use them in the moment. I can't use them in the moment.
SPEAKER_00:And you don't, they're unconscious and you don't even know when they're affecting you. So yes. But okay, so that that's kind of we're really gonna be talking about the language and how we interpret and the problems of today. I want to give up one example of probabilistic thinking and kind of how it's counterintuitive to the way humans perceive situations. And there's a famous one, you guys can all look it up. It's called the Monty Hall problem. And I'll I'll explain it to you because you're gonna imagine you're on a game show. So I'm gonna walk you through something called the Monty Hall problem. And don't worry, this isn't about math, it's about thinking. So imagine you're on a game show and there are three doors. So behind one door is a car, and behind the other two doors are goats. So you get to pick a door. So you pick a door, and at that moment, you have a one in three chance of being right. So you got about a 33% chance of being right. So pretty decent odds, and you know, but better than you get at some casinos for some stuff, right? So now the host, uh, so you pick your you pick your door, right? The host who knows what's behind every door, before he opens up the one you pick, he opens up one of the other two doors and reveals a goat, right? So he doesn't open a random door, he deliberately opens a goat door. So now there are two doors left. It's the one that you picked and the other unopened door. And at that point, the host would ask you, do you want to stay with the one that you picked or do you want to switch? So now most people think like, oh, well, it's down to two doors. I got a 50-50 chance, right? But it's actually not. So when you first chose, there was a two and three chance that the car was behind one of the other doors. And when the host reveals the goat, that original two and three probability doesn't disappear, it just shifts to the remaining unopened door. So if you switch, your odds double. And here's the part that matters this mistake people make, it's not mathematical, it's cognitive. They look at two doors and label it, well, it's even odds. They collapse the probability too early. They assume the structure changed just because the situation looks simpler, but it didn't. Probability didn't collapse, they collapse it. And that's what we're talking about today, because in real-world decision making, most bad decisions don't come from lack of information. They come from mislabeling information. The moment we label something suspicious, shady, aggressive, under control, we reduce the complexity, which is something our brain wants to do, right? We stop updating that probability. We we literally lock the doors in our mind, we stick with what we had and our first door that we chose. And this is why language matters, right? So correct cognitive labeling, which is kind of what we have, our cock lexicon, and why we give words and terms to seemingly, you know, innocuous things, but but but that's important, and we'll get into that. That correct cognitive labeling preserves that uncertainty, even if it's just a little bit, just long enough for you to be accurate, right? And that's what's also why we so have focused so heavily on the baseline, right? So because without a baseline, without typical, without some comparison, you can't properly assign probability without discipline labeling, you know, you you'll collapse too soon. So so in the in the Monty Hall example, like without that baseline of there's three doors, two of them have goats behind it, and one has a vehicle, right? It all starts there, and then you update everything from that known baseline, right? And most people don't do that. So it's actually a really interesting one. There's some cool YouTube videos and explanation stuff you can see. I would absolutely recommend anyone checking out, just get on there and look up, you know, Monty Hall, you know, problem and you'll see it. Because actually, this was posed even in a newspaper one time, you know, and and the editors wrote out, hey, what would you do? And this one person wrote in and's like, explain kind of the way I did, this is what it is. And all of these people said, No, you're wrong. Like mathematicians, right, you know, scientists, people like, no, you're wrong. That's not right. And then eventually, like, wait a minute, we did the math here, and like, yeah, that actually makes sense. What you're saying is you you you you updated that probability to just that door. And we all of these people that wrote in were actually the ones that were wrong.
SPEAKER_01:So let's just this is yeah, let's talk about this. So, Brian and I, one and I'm not proud of it at all, but one of the drunkest we ever got was at a gosh damn uh uh cheesecake factory. Okay.
SPEAKER_00:I don't recall this, Your Honor.
SPEAKER_01:And and what happened is they handed me the menu, which is like the King James Version of the Bible. It's as thick as you've ever seen ever, with chapters and all this other stuff. So if you're thinking about probability and you're not understanding complexity, you'll collapse it too soon because what you'll think is I'm gonna open, okay, and I'm gonna see and be overwhelmed by all the complexity and the information. So I'm just gonna rip a page out of the center and say, I'm just gonna choose from that page. Well, that's not how it works. Okay. What you've done is reduced your choices, and that's absolutely backwards to how cognition works. It's absolutely backwards because now what's happened is you've said, I'm going to go for simplicity, the easier choice. And when you do that, you limit the most likely course of action and the most dangerous course of action. It's not even any longer on the playing field. So you can't do that. You can't say, I'm gonna fold this paper and not look at the complexity, therefore, it doesn't exist. You honestly have to take a look at it because we're prioritizing things, we're prioritizing our emotional uh uh response to the current situation, the recency, how quickly things happen over and over. The simplicity is much more important to me than the statistical likelihood. And you can't do that. You can't make decisions based on how you feel about the information.
SPEAKER_00:You gotta make it based on the information at hand at that time and at that place, which is admittedly very difficult to do without some form of structured observation and you know, common language, you know, and and some cognitive adaptability. So those are it it's it's difficult to do without some some practice. But once you start practicing, you kind of you start to see it everywhere, right? So, like for example, if you said, you know, what's you know, if I go back to to what you just brought up in the example of Greg and I having too many drinks, and if I were under oath, I I would say I I it happened that happened a non-zero number of times. I I don't know how many, but it was definitely a non-zero number. So, you know, but but this is uh uh what gets to the language now. So so this language can kind of accelerate that that probability collapse. Like you said, it's like the you know what, this this menu in Cheesecake Factory is a perfect example because I that menu is I get anxiety there. I can't, I can't get past the first page because there's too there's like you're giving me too many options.
SPEAKER_01:Well, we got drunk.
SPEAKER_00:We got drunk as a as a coping mechanism, Brian.
SPEAKER_01:So to improve our patients, there's too many drink options.
SPEAKER_00:Just bring me one of each. Exactly.
SPEAKER_01:Start at the bottom, go to the right.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, um but but so so uh this gets into why we use and and go back to kind of the uh uh uh the the the baseline development, right? And you're already talking about uh uh how our brain chooses recency, uh simplicity, uh, you know, heuristics, it uses selected priors, it loses you know, these different knowns, these things I've seen that are cognitively close enough. It's constantly trying to do the cognitively close enough, right? We we give the the the great example of you know my the little guy, right? I got the little terrorist gnomes too, right? We have a dog, so he's always playing with the dog, right? I take him to a petting zoo, right? And then he goes running over and he's going dog, dog, and he's petting a dog. Well, it's got four legs, it's got hair, it's got floppy ears, and it's licking its hand. It's a goat, but it's but to him, it's a dog, it's a dog. And you know what? He's absolutely right. That is a completely logical way to see that situation based on his level of education, his level of training, his level of experience as a two-year-old. His brain went, okay, I've seen this before. It's a dog. Look at the dog. It's going exhibiting all the same behaviors, and it's just, but it's he's wrong. So so if I don't ever have to, then I have to teach him and go, all right, well, Max, like that this is not a dog. This is called a goat. Listen to the sound it makes. Oh, yeah, that's different than a dog. So now he has a category of a dog. Or even if you just say a dog, like, okay, a dog could mean everything from you know, the the little tiny yapper that you're gonna accidentally trip over to you ever see those dogs, the Leon burgers, they're like 175 pounds, they like live in the snow. I mean, those are all into the same category of dog. And and that's kind of what we're getting to by this cognitive labeling. We don't, in in, in, in a complex situation that's time compressed, that has a danger element to it, I don't, as long as I'm getting those things correct in the sense of the larger labeling, right? I I may not need to get into details or don't have time to get into details, but sometimes that can be important. Does that make sense?
SPEAKER_01:It's it's more important. It's more important. And and so let's go back in in the classroom, we're constantly referring to and carrying around uh Jack in the Box in a Hoberman sphere. Why? Because those help us understand that if we're too cognitively rigid, if we promote cognitive rigidity and only believe those things that we know that we've studied and only rely on our own file folders, what's going to happen is that collapse is gonna come much more quickly. So I got to be cognitively flexible. The stubborn, unwilling ability for me to see items as how they might be used avoids me from seeing something as a street tool. All of a sudden, that box cutter takes over a plane. All of a sudden, that Phillips head screwdriver becomes an edged weapon because we didn't consider all of those factors. And you're going, yes, but considering too many factors is going to cognitively overwhelm me. No, it's not. That's not how your brain is set up. Your brain is set up to categorize those things, and your viewpoint matters less than what category it falls into. So the idea is if you build robust baselines, then what happens is your brain triggers on that, and then all of a sudden it says, Hey, I'm witnessing these things. I have to fully appreciate other things. Like the goat example. There's a different smell for a goat than a dog. Uh a dog will eat uh almost anything, but not goat food. A goat will eat anything. What about the way that it runs? What about the way that it lays down and gets up? What's happening now is those, and they're finite, it's not infinite, but those finite nuances are what exemplifies goat from dog. So when you're making the observation and you're trying to share that observation with somebody else, that gives them robust, fidelity-filled information for their baseline. So so you're actually reducing complexity by increasing cognitive choices.
SPEAKER_00:And it's like the in those, so now instead of goat versus dog, it's you know wallet versus gun. It's it you it's oh their affurtive gesture well or a 45-degree arm bend, yeah, to get the wallet out. No, it's how you get a gun out. Okay, but you have to do it.
SPEAKER_01:It makes sense. At first blush, listen, this is the difference of science. At first blush, when somebody gives that to you and they're a street scientist, right? You look at it and you go, wow, that that makes sense. That makes sense to me. I could see that happening, but the problem is then it goes to peer review because I just said I endorse your opinion, and now we can't get off that gosh damn opinion. And and the idea is without structured practice, without rehearsal, without tests and and retesting the information, then then you're not relying on statistics or analysis. You're just coming up with shit. And and that shit happens to fit today.
SPEAKER_00:So so let me give you some some real like simple examples of what we mean, like about probability collapse in real life, like and how it kind of goes wrong versus you know, this is real life, not the Monty Hall game show, which is a great and any of those games are obviously we talk about this a lot, but those are great to understand how humans make decisions, game not just game theory, but literally watching certain games and how people do that under pressure and time constraints. Is it's it's it's just a great, it's a uh very antiseptic almost uh way to look at things like like you're in a lab, but that is different than the real world. That is different than the street. I don't care if it's the reality show that you watch, you know, the real housewives of whatever. Yes, those people might not be the greatest humans of the face of the earth, but they're also kind of create these situations that allow for these behaviors that they likely otherwise wouldn't exhibit, you know, in in real life, but now they're on camera, now they're on a show, now it's primed for it. So some examples of how those things kind of go wrong. Like, all right, the dog hits, there's dope in there. Someone's being compliant, meaning, okay, the situation's under control. Oh, they have a calm tone, they're not dangerous. They have an emotional tone, oh, they're escalating the situation. Once we try to once we we assume those things, it's very, very, very hard to walk back just simply because how our brain's wired. It's like, look, cognitive close enough, it's a goat. I don't need to know anything else. I can now enjoy my time and play with this goat, right? So it's the same thing. It's like it's laziness. It's your brain wants the simplest answer in the shortest amount of time that makes the most sense. But it's gonna it can be wrong even when you're trying hard to be right, even when you're trying to say, or you know, really think through it. So how how does this, you know, we kind of started talking about this language can accelerate this probability, you know, collapse. But how how does that, how does that work then, Greg? Or do you have uh a real life example from your site?
SPEAKER_01:I do have a real life example, but look, you gotta remember, everybody that's listened, remember there's a vast, uncertain reality in the high-dimensional space. Our brain is constantly trying to knock that down to just a few items to save energy, to to store calories. So when we do have an emergency, we can jump to it. But the problem with that is that the other side of the issue is that we limit ourselves with comparisons. So therefore, the fewer choices, the more efficient it seems, but that's actually the mistake that we make. We we run towards an unreasonable conclusion because we didn't look at all the possible options. So I just got out of the gym. When I when I Say I visited the gym. I literally go by the gym in the hotel and look in and go, Hey, you got a fucking gym. You know what I'm trying to say? So I'm done with the gym. I'm wiping up and I go, Holy shit, a buffet breakfast between the gym and my room. Obviously, I'm gonna stop. So if you've ever, ever, ever, ever been with me ever in a hotel, you'll know I do things in two. I got two orange juices, two plates. Uh, you know, one's got the fruit. I don't want my fruit touching the gosh damn vegetable, all that other stuff. And what I do is I make like 19 trips and I set it up. Everything's got to be perpendicular. And then I'm just setting my jacket down. I'm very anal about that. Back to the cheesecake factory. Here we go. So the idea is that I'm getting set up and Maren comes in. We're in Detroit, and Marin comes in and he walks over and he goes, Holy shit, how many people are eating here? And and what he meant was completely unbiased and unfiltered. It was just he was laughing at how many pairs of things that I had out there. I immediately got butthurt and I thought, oh fuck, he's talking about me eating too much. And I do, okay, so that would have been a fair statement, but I immediately opened the emotional file folder. And when I did, I limited my options. And by doing that, instantaneously, I reached the wrong conclusion. And then that that conclusion I reached, I failed to come off of it. An hour later, even after I came down to do the real thought of it.
SPEAKER_00:No, this is a good one because let me give it to you from my perspective. As I'm walking out, you know, I got to walk past that area. I see you sitting at the table, but I see, you know, both sides of the table, a plate, both sides of the table, a cup of coffee or two cups. I see. Then I see both sides. So I'm like looking around, like, who the hell are you eating breakfast with here? Who did you meet? Like, how many people are joining the table? Is there not enough room? And you just got inside voice, baby.
SPEAKER_02:I was so pissed.
SPEAKER_00:You got so pissed. But that that's a but that I mean that that's that's a great example of how we do that. So so though, and and then again, we back to kind of what you're saying is the words can do a few things. They compress the complexity, right? So they make it more simple so my brain can understand it. They start to signal certainty, and and you know, I always do the nothing is certain. Well, what death and taxes, right? That's what my old man taught me. There's two things that are certain. Like one day you will die, and you're always gonna have to pay taxes, right? But the big thing is it reduces alternative hypotheses. So even you like having that reaction to to my reaction to the situation, right? You're already going, well, that you're speaking internally. You're on you're on internal Greg, you know, going that internal baseline of, oh, you son of a bitch, you know, you think I eat too much, blah, blah, blah.
SPEAKER_01:You know, like so what that does, okay, cognitive labeling is a method to make sure that we're appreciating the complexity and allowing the options, okay? Because I have to be able to describe my thoughts and emotions and data points in a manner that my future attention will focus on the relevant information and anchor those memories rather than reducing my cognitive load in a bad way. And you're going, well, how can you reduce your cognitive load in a bad way? Look, if you filter it so exactly that you take away stuff like error accumulation, then guess what? The ambiguity can't be used as a comparison. So now I only have one file folder that I go to. It doesn't mean it's the best file folder. So by reducing my mental fatigue, I think that I'm increasing my chance of being right. The two have nothing to do with each other. The idea is that I have to be wrong once in a while, or my brain doesn't understand what right looks like. I have to accumulate some scar tissue, or I don't understand what a corrupt file folder feels like when I get to it.
SPEAKER_00:But, but and oh, I would say almost daily. Like there's always a little bit like, oh, okay, I didn't know that part, or oh, I didn't, and it could be something small and a little bit. Like I try to do that even with the kids or with what Matt, like, you know, kid, you know, especially with the little guy, right? He's he's two, two and a half years old now, right? So they're so regimented and we're we're both good. Me, me and the wife are good about like keeping a specific schedule. We do these things before it's bath time, so he knows, you know, we do these things before bedtime, so it's that very, very routine focus because they they need that, right? And it's it's helpful. And then now they're kind of just going along with it, even when they don't want to, where like he'll start to throw a fit, and I'm like, okay, but like what do we have to do now?
SPEAKER_01:And he's crying, going, get dressed for school.
SPEAKER_00:And he's like, and so it's it's awesome. But but then when you see things, it's funny because I watch how my wife reacts with versus me, was like, oh, well, he didn't do this or he didn't do that. You know, I think he's sick, or I think he's allergic to this. I'm like, hey, hang on. Like before we exactly we're both we're both seeing anomalies, but she immediately wants to have a conclusion for it, or she immediately wants to have a causal relationship where I'm like, okay, that that might be, but we need some sustained observation, or it could be these other things. And then we go back and forth, and I just I just say, Yeah, you're right and I'm wrong. But but that's a different thing.
SPEAKER_01:What you jump to, what you jump to is is two things. One, the reduction of alternative hypotheses, and the second is the signal certainty. So when signals get shorter, we think they're more robust. And in that instance, what what your son did is your son did with my my we were lucky enough to to watch the grand. So baby Z was here. And so Baby Z decided things that she doesn't like are oui, okay? And we said that's not good enough. You have to say, I don't like that. So then you walk around all day Sunday saying, I don't like that, I don't like that. And but she was misapplying it, yeah. Okay, that's what we're talking about. She's testing the environment, okay? So so what happens is the higher demand environments allow us with correct labeling and not mislabeling things, that allows us to reduce the mental effort to interpret the information, okay? So that's why Brian and I, because we travel together all the time speed in such short bursts that Dan has said, wait a minute, what did you just say? What was that? Because what's happening is it comes out in chunks. And and so we do that in emails and memos, and we always talk about signal brevity. Higher functioning teams can resort to signal brevity because they understand that the reduction in complexity doesn't mean reducing cognitive load. It actually increases it. So what you have to do is do better cognitive labeling. I stop and then say, wait a minute, that's not exactly what I meant, Brian. I meant this.
SPEAKER_00:So so let's let I want to give some simple examples to kind of get your your reaction to it. You know, that's why we we don't use a term like, oh, that's suspicious. We go, that's interesting, because interesting can mean all kinds of things. It's just, hey, it's interesting, it caught my attention. It's worthy of interest, right? So so that's one. Then there's things like aggressive versus elevated. This is why we don't call it threat, right? We call it a pre-event indicator. It's like when you say a pre-attack or a threat indicator, you've you've taken out any other option and you've already jammed your you you've already come to the conclusion before you have enough evidence to. So that's why we don't use those terms. And even things like I want to work, like someone who's compliant versus, well, currently they're cooperative. Okay, that's a great term. When I hear those things, well, well, right now, here's what we know. Well, this is what we saw. And I go, okay, that's great. Because what you're doing is when you're transmitting the information that way, you're allowing me to keep an open mind about it and and and think about alternative hypotheses. So I want to throw those out there and kind of get your your thoughts about that because sometimes that changes in a high demand environment, right?
SPEAKER_01:You said earlier, most bad decisions don't come from lack of information, they come from mislabeling information. So the threat of mislabeling information is you can't find it when you need it. And in a game of nanoseconds, imagine that. You're saying listen, in that almost everything drawer, everybody in the kitchen has an almost everything drawer. It's got some tools, some matches, you get what I'm saying? It's got that piece to some gosh damn thing we don't remember.
SPEAKER_00:Random random coupons from that are expired a year ago. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:Well, whatever though. Okay. And what happens is that each time that your uh focus changes and you use one of those words, and suspicious is the first one. I'll I'll just uh throw that out there. When you say something suspicious, all of a sudden my attention narrows and I can't get off of suspicious. I'm not updating a baseline because I already found the bad guy. Okay. I I don't look at ML and MDCOA because you've just given me the MDCOA. And imagine driving with me. If I go, hey, do a flip. What do you got? I got something suspicious. Okay, you're going to violate traffic laws and maybe get us injured or killed to get back over there because you're thinking already what I'm thinking. So you can't do that. You say out loud, that's interesting. Okay, what do we say when we call 911? You and I have been together so many times and and we've had some shit happen right in front of us and we've had a call one 911. And when we call, we always say the same opening line. Listen, this is probably nothing.
SPEAKER_00:This might be this might not be anything.
SPEAKER_01:Okay, but we always start there and then we give our probable cause or a reasonable suspicion and let them decide. Because if we don't, then the hypotheses that you should be considering in that situation are gone. They're null, they're void. And therefore, you're not conducting an experiment anymore with reality. You're not seeing reality as it actually is.
SPEAKER_00:Well, and you brought up a good one with the uh the everything drawer. So one of the things I do is always it's it's interesting to me, like how, you know, because one, we got the little guys, so this is great if you got kids for understanding all of this to see how they interpret things, where they put their stuff, when they're cleaning up, like, all right, Max, time to pick up the trucks and where he does it. It's it's interesting to me because he's got his little methods that he uses and he likes little areas. Same thing my wife putting away. Well, one, when she she packs the dishwasher like a fucking raccoon on meth or something like that. It's just there's no, there's no, it's just chaos. But then putting certain things away in the kitchen, and I'm like, okay, and then I'll ask her, but hey, where's this? Like, well, it's over here, and I have to be like, Well, why did you put it there? Now she thinks I'm trying to argue with her or something. I was like, but I'm I'm genuinely just going, like, well, why did you put that there? And she goes, Well, it's with those other things right there. I was like, Okay, but I put it over here because it's a tool that's going to be used right here and for proximity and this, but I get it. You match this item with those other similar items, and thought that, okay, it's like that stuff's fascinating to me, but but it's a great if you're listening. You got someone you live with, spouse, boyfriend, girlfriend, for a whole situation, whatever you got.
SPEAKER_01:Like, you know, just the root of all arguments, though. It's small things like that. What you're just talking about is cognitive labeling. And because your cognitive labeling differs, you're trying to force a baseline. And and instead of assimilating a baseline, you can't do that. You're you're literally going binary. You're saying it's this or it's not. Okay. We're doing it my way or we're not. But that's how relationships are. And relationships are based on what? Perception. So the perception of that event, that item in the drawer, those things are more important than the reality of the situation around.
SPEAKER_00:It isn't, and I I crack the code on kind of what it comes from is where, like, for my wife, it's more about like the aesthetic or the look where I'm all about functionality. Like, where is the most useful? How are we going to use this? So it's funny when we got the house here and we moved here over the summer. Like, I was like, hey, let me let me put everything away in here and let me explain why. And she was like, she looked at me like I, you know, I spent hours in the kitchen and putting the stuff away and unpacking and this. And I explained to her the whole work. She's like, What is wrong with you? I'm like, I go, but this is how I think because this is how we're going to use this area. So I want this to be in terms of how we use it and organize the fridge. And she's like, Exactly. Why do you put so much thought into that?
SPEAKER_01:But but listen, listen, what we're talking about today. Let's go back to preparing soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marine for war. I was going into a very rigid environment because I knew how to find things and I was really good at it. And then the military handed me a thing like an RPG or an AK and said, Yeah, but you know, when we're doing sensitive site exploitation, they have to understand myriad uh versions of AK, AK 74, AK 47. AKMS, AKS, AK that's like. I was like, no, no, they don't, because it's called match. And I said, I'll show you how easily I can throw you off kilter. And we had an RPG setting up against the wall. So I went over and I took about a six-inch piece of reflective tape out of my gear bag and I put it from the nose cone to towards the piezoelectric cell. And then on the AK that was next to it, I had a balloon. So I blew up the balloon and I tied the balloon and I tied it towards towards the forehand, you know, stuck it in between the little uh cleaning rod looking thing there in the front. And so I said, okay, so let those Marines walk by and take a look at the courtyard and just have them keep going. So we're doing sort of a makeshift, limited objective experiment. And the Marines walked by the Zubers platoon, and I come back and I go, what was in the courtyard? They go, a balloon, there was something flapping in the breeze that looked like a piece of electric tape. I go, okay, so what did they focus on, Brian? They focused on the file folders that they were most familiar with and the item that was attached to it they never thought. And I said, think hard. They couldn't think hard. And then we walked over there, and guess what? The scales falled from their eyes because the idea is it was mislabeled. So mislabeling is more dangerous. Look, misinformation is accidental, disinformation is deliberate. So I engaged in disinformation to fool their brains, and all I did is interrupt their processing. So can you imagine why the wallet becomes a gun? Can you imagine how how you'll fall on the wrong file folder and you're gonna run with it? So you can't. That's why we take such great expense in the classroom. We take the extra time to make sure that you clearly understand the gosh damn lexicon. Because if you don't understand the lexicon, you're gonna come up with a corrupt file folder and draw your inferences from that from the and and so let's let's let's jump into that.
SPEAKER_00:Well, kind of why we use that specific Lexiclown in HPPRNA. And I know people have been listening to the show for a while know it, a lot of it, what we do, and we define it as we go. And then if you've been in class, it's very specific. And we're like, no, but there's a difference here. And then once people get it and they they practice and they click and they go, oh, okay, like I see it. Like, you know, it and and I'll give an example like when we talk about access, right? You can gain like very simple for a crime, I gotta bring you to the crime or the crime to you, right? So there's an element of access. Well, there's tools that give me access, like a ladder gives me access, an example of, well, if I need to get access into this facility, maybe I have to hide in plain sight. So I'll use some urban masking and social camouflage, I'll put on the orange vest and a hard head that that gives me access. And so when you think about it in a broad theme, it actually allows you to make more of these connections about different possibilities or potential hypotheses versus just, oh, you need a blowtorch to get in there. It's like, or you need a card reader to get in there, right? So I'll pass you, but I just want to real quick hit like we don't all right, you don't use certain words because they prematurely close probability. So HP, our language is descriptive, it's conditional, it's context aware, it's behavior-based, and it's in what I would say like probability preserving, meaning it's it's it's meant to be open to interpretation because it's meant to be used in a number of situations, whatever that is. So it has to preserve probability, meaning there isn't certainty in everything that we do. There's always an element of uncertainty, sometimes more, sometimes less. And it's up to you to become, you know, make it more certain, but you're never going to be a hundred, you're never gonna know if you're 100% right until after the fact, right? And that that's the whole, that's the hard part, right? So we emphasize this corrective, this correct cognitive labeling because it doesn't eliminate uncertainty. It acknowledges it. So we were we're saying there is an element of likelihood here. So that's why we're gonna use this terminology and these phrases and these descriptive language to talk about it because that allows the end user to use that not in a deterministic fashion, not to draw a conclusion, you know, or not to go in with the conclusion and then find the evidence that supports it. It's the exact opposite. Go ahead.
SPEAKER_01:No, no, and and what you're talking about is cognitive maturity. You're talking about the ability to choose based on a number of choices rather than being in a reductionist mode when you come in. Probabilistic opens, it's up and out rather than the down and in. There's another term that we use in the lexicon over and over, but guess what? It's context dependent and it's conditional. So why do we use those? Because if, and I'm gonna show how old I am. If you've ever ever in your life played a pinball machine or seen a pinball machine, if we just had the ball and the plunger and two paddles and the hole, it wouldn't be a lot of fun because the ball would go out, it would come down and fall into half the hole. Okay, so so you may or may not hit it with the paddle. But the idea is that all of a sudden now there's other bumpers and those bumpers light up and they make a difference. That's life. And what's happening is if we restrict them and say, yeah, but it's gonna be easier to get to 100 if I only restrict it to the 100 and take away these detractors and take away this thousand that I'm never gonna get. So by limiting your choices, you're thinking that you're limiting complexity. No. And you said it great. When you said, hey, I want to talk about this episode. You sent me a Brian quote accuracy increases when certainty decreases appropriately. You didn't say proportionally, you said appropriately. So what does that mean? So what it means is that you're gonna produce more correct results, you're gonna be accurate more by acknowledging the limitation and reducing the confidence, in other words, having lower certainty when you're faced with ambiguity or a lack of information. What that means is being almost right is always better than being absolutely wrong. And that's what we teach in class. You can't be absolutely right all the time, but you're gonna be cognitively close enough if you look at all of the panacea of potential decisions. If you don't, you're gonna be absolutely wrong. You're gonna run on information that's already broken. And if you do, everything you touch from that point is gonna be tainted. It's like not getting a search warrant or lying about a search warrant. And the exclusionary rule is gonna take all of that potential evidence and limit it from you. So, so cognitive labeling doesn't eliminate uncertainty, okay? It acknowledges that there is uncertainty, and the uncertainty is absolutely essential to figure out probability through comparison.
SPEAKER_00:So you you said something being being almost right is better than being absolutely wrong. Yes. What can you can you go into that like a little bit deeper, or maybe maybe explain kind of what what you what you mean by that when we're taught because that's the thing is all these podcast episodes and everything we do in class is it's one big sense-making exercise, right? It's it's how to make sense based on the contextual cues, based on the relevance of your observations, how to compare and contrast those, how to use probabilistic thinking, and label it so that I can make better, more informed decisions faster, sooner, at a greater distance, you know, without over, you know, as without overreacting or underreacting, whatever the cognitive limitations are, right? It's supposed to be this cognitive operating system that is in use all the frickin' time, and you got to practice it at first, but eventually it becomes the intuitive, iterative skill skill set you get better at, right? But exactly. But I that but that's a that's a big concept because especially like you know, you're talking about you know, especially with your background in law enforcement, like you know, you're gonna go and you're gonna you got these situations that escalate out of seemingly out of nowhere. Now we'd argue whether or not it did, but but but you know, it can go from something simple to now it's a chaotic event and it's a multi-state you know pursuit and all this stuff's happening, and it started as a simple, oh, the guy didn't signal when he turned, and now I'm gonna go over. Like you, you know, it's seemingly highly complex and volatile. But but you said being almost right is better than being absolutely wrong, where a lot of people would say, Well, we have to be right all the time, and the bad guy only has to be right once.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, it's like you know you know what that is? That's called justification because I have to sleep at night and I feel shitty because I did something bad. And and so those things can exist in the same universe. Everybody that watches cartoons or reads comic books knows how different things cross-pollinate the universe. Well, life isn't that easy, okay. So I'll give you an example. You've got every every police agency I've ever seen, worked with, audited, did a ride along with, taught at, has what they call a version of a heavy car. Okay, that's a car where there's a couple extra coppers that are in it, or a couple extra people in a in a in a van ready to jump out, they put them in a high crime area and they literally prowl looking for a series of events to coalesce, and then they jump out and say Yahtzee, and and now it's off to the races. Okay, while I understand why you do that, without the proper training, that can go right into the trick back because now what you've got is everybody primed to just look for this information. Okay. So, so uh we're in an ambiguous environment. We're only looking for felonies, and guess what? That makes me look at everything is a potential felony. So this is less of a felony than that. Now, all of a sudden we see a person standing in an area in a high crime zone and they're outside of a door, and I say, Hey, maybe that's one of those felons we're actually looking for. As we close in, the person starts doing what? Their behavior changes because there's four of us and we're armed and we just jumped out of a car and we're moving rapidly at night towards them. So what's happening is we're creating this self licking ice cream cone of likelihood rather than having an off ramp that says, let common sense prevail. And what is common sense? That's my baseline. My baseline says, look, there's a lot of people out on the porch. Why? Because it's a hot night. And where do people spend their night in this area? Out on the porch. Do you see what I'm saying? So the reasonability uh uh uh metric here, the meter that's going back from reasonability, if it's stuck to one of the extremes, I'm probably seeing the situation as I want it to be. And if I see it as I want it to be, I've automatically limited my options on a comparison to what's most likely actually happening. So most likely and most dangerous can be there, but that doesn't lower my my my uncertainty. It doesn't eliminate it. It acknowledges that there's uncertainty, and that's what makes me more careful. So I'm actually more careful rather than just shooting first and figuring it out later. I'm going, what else could this be? What else are they showing me? You know, we we named that so many years ago as the gift. And the gift is the gift of time and distance, the gift of seeing things as they really are, the gift of not getting too close before uh the situation unfolds past my ability to to draw reason from the artifacts and evidence.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, and and I I think there's a couple examples of this where, you know, well well, one, like we we get people that that reach out to us or we discuss certain cases or or or they ask us questions and like you know, they're they're talking, they come to us almost like asking for advice, and I'm like, which is one I'm I'm I'm honored by and I appreciate. But you know, I'm sitting there listening to them explain it, and I'm like, they they they have they have the answer. They they know this already, but they're talking it through. And then we've had different cases where they end up then going, oh wow, I didn't look at it that way. And then, oh hey, we got that. Remember that one we won't say along the border, we're like, hey, we got that search warrant, and we we'll be we'll be in late to class on Friday.
SPEAKER_01:But because of the class, informed by what they learned in the class.
SPEAKER_00:All it was was restructuring that in that cognitive labeling, like saying, Oh, so you're saying this, oh, so you're saying this, like, yeah, but it's kind of circumstantial. I go, well, what's the likelihood that that person is true? Oh, it's got this, and it's good. They're going through okay. Well, what's the likelihood that it was anyone else but that person? They're like, Well, it couldn't have been, and it's like, oh, okay, so you're calling it this, you're calling it that, and they're like, Oh, I get it. And all this is, because this ties into this kind of next part about understanding the baseline, because you're bringing it up, is that when we everyone wants that list of things or the the missing piece in the Kellner case, or they want that one thing, or can you take a look at this and and see something else that maybe I didn't see? And I'm like, there is no way. Like, one, like you're really good at your job. You've been doing this a long time, and I've never worked on a case like this before, or been a criminal investigator like that before. So I'm guessing you know a hell of a lot more than me. So, what did I really help? What did I really help do? It's just to frame it differently or or look at it, you know, using these lenses or that correct cognitive labeling for them to go, okay, wait a minute, because it all goes back to this baseline. And and and we keep hitting on that so hard because especially if you're in that profession, right? Like your baseline for what you think is normal or typical, it's gonna shift over time. And and especially like is law enforcement best because it's like it, you know, when I you ask a normal people normal person on the street, they're like, Oh, yeah, most people are good and most people want to do well. You ask a cop, they're like, most people are terrible human. And you're like, Yo, you you just deal with the bottom 5% or 1% of the population that no one else wants to deal with, or so your baseline is shifted. So this is why we what we we we keep going back to that. So anomaly, an anomaly without a baseline is you're you're just imagining things. It's it's nothing, it's meaningless. There's no relevance without some sort of context. So if you don't know what normal expected behavior is, what the environmental pattern is, the anomaly is like like almost a projection. It's like a psychological projection. So this is where we get to.
SPEAKER_01:If you're looking for a specific anomaly, Brian, okay, so the projection, go back to that. But if you're looking for a specific anomaly, then guess what you're doing? You're looking at a stack of needles and you're saying, I want to get the needle out of that stack. You're not doing the the needle in a haystack anymore. What you're doing is you're so specific that your brain is now fixated on that specific anomaly, and you're not going to look at how patterns work. Patterns suggest things. Then it takes you looking at the information and making it intelligence. So an anomaly alone is meaningless in an environment. Anomaly against a good robust baseline. Now I can start searching. Okay, what else is going on? Well, I have this, I have that. Hey, if those two are together and that third one comes into play, we might be in a shit sandwich. You cannot do that if you're looking and searching for an anomaly, or if you don't understand what an anomaly is in that region or in that that that's like going, okay, you go to the doctor and you tell the doctor nothing about your symptoms. And the doctor goes, okay, does it have to do with your foot? Does it have to do with your eye? Can you imagine that? That's what it's there. It would take it, yeah. So a robust baseline allows me to get right at it, to get right to the situation. Listen, I've been in a thousand interviews. This is somehow different. Well, how is it different? What are those factors that that came up to you in that interview?
SPEAKER_00:You see it? And and and what do we and what do I always go back to people? It's like, okay, well, tell me, they're like, well, hey, I want to run a few things past you because I saw something that was interesting. And I go, stop before you tell me what you think is interesting. I want you to tell me what you normally see when you deal with this case. Go go on, keep going. And I just like keep pulling stuff out. Then there's just, oh, then typically see this, then I typically see this. I go, okay, so what was the interesting part? And now the light bulb goes out, they're like, holy shit, it's so obvious. Like, I never mind. I don't understand anymore. I don't I don't even need to ask you about it because I got it. You know, and that's why even when we go back to like, I how many times have I brought up the parking lot principles on here? Like, okay, where where do typically people do? Well, there's a million reasons why someone could park off to the side over there. No, there's not. There's maybe three, four, five. Maybe it's single digits, but but there aren't a million reasons. So there's only a few reasons why. So now it's up to you. So it it's really, really going back to that. And the the one thing I I did want to hit on, and I I want to hit on this because it's something that we could we we talk about a little bit more in class, and I think it's a it's a big part of conversation out there, and I think a lot of people kind of get it wrong, but it's well-intentioned when they talk because this goes back to that sort of Monty Hall example of the beginning where we talk about humility and uncertainty, is is that humans, we we are primed. We have an ego system, we are the most important world, you know, thing in our environment, in our world, and so that's important for survival that every person has. And so when I use the term ego, I don't mean it in a negative way, like, oh, that person's got a big ego. It just means we all have an ego. And so, you know, you we there's this element where we feel like we need to be in control of things. And if you can get past this idea of I have to be in control of the situation, it's like, no, you have to be in control of yourself and how you perceive things. You don't have to be in control of any situation that you're in, right? Because you don't control the structure. And if you misunderstand the structure, you assume some sort of symmetry where it doesn't exist. And so that's literally that, yeah, that's literally our ego. That's we, we, we, we, we do, we are uncomfortable admitting that we're wrong. And and this is why, like, I even have how I always talk about like, look, man, like, I don't know, a knuckle-dragging dumb marine. I type with my fists, I turn my computer on by head butting it. Like, I don't know shit. I literally have that because I'm more likely to see something that way. I'm less likely to jump to an unreasonable conclusion where I walk into a room and I assume everyone in there knows way more than me. They're smarter than me, they're stronger than me, they're better than me. And I'll let people, I let people show me whether that's true or not, right? And so, so there is this way of like, you know, un admitting that I'm not sure, like feels weak. We're like, how many times do we say, like, I don't know. I I don't know. My first experience, have you ever heard of this guy? I don't think so. And then a minute later, I'm like, oh yeah, that's right. I have heard of him. It's like, no, because I I don't need to know everything.
SPEAKER_01:Exactly. Exactly.
SPEAKER_00:And and but that what what what that ties into that sort of language ties into that like probabilistic thinking, right? It it allows me to to to leave some uncertainty to inform my baseline, to continue to gather more information. So having that way of not looking at it as I need to be in control or I need to have this, like it, it actually opens up the potential for other hypotheses. It opens up the potential for other avenues of approach. Like it just it keeps that that little bit in there. So it's it's something that like we don't really get into because we look at it as like a functional thing, not like I don't care what you think about yourself or others or whatever. It's like, hey, this is a structured process. If you follow that structured process, like you're like you said, you're gonna be right more than you're wrong, or you're gonna be close to being absolutely right than then absolutely wrong. And that's all I care about. Like if you want to talk about your feelings and your ego and your thoughts about the world, hey, that's great, but that's not practical, that's not functional. That's not something that's gonna help me in the moment. That doesn't help me right now go, what's going on here? How do I predict what's likely gonna happen next? In fact, that kind of stuff may get in the way, right? It may go, well, you know, we're all, you know, I I I don't don't want to get too much into that, but but that's what we mean by the language of it.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, yeah. And so let me let me further refine your thoughts by giving you a street example. I'm always good with that because I I you know I I read a lot, I watch a lot of gosh damn films on the planes and everything. And there was one uh uh, gosh, if I can think of it, Alice Eve in the film, and she's out of your league. The the kid from How to Train Your Dragon, there's this beautiful woman. He works as a TSA agent, and one of the subplots is that they've got a friend named Stainer. And you can imagine why the kid, since you know, junior high school is called Stainer and he lives up to it and he owns it, and it's a part of the funny things that are going on. Well, guess what? The the mislabel led to a future cognitive distortion that now that person can't get away from. Okay, so that specific temporary behavior that you witness becomes that permanent trait. And I've been in there's detectives all around, and somebody goes, Hey, the the Waldorf got hit, and they go, That's Jimmy Jack. You know, he loves them high-rises or whatever else. Shut the F up. What happens is what we do is we think what we're doing is we think that that this complex environment, we're gonna make it better. Okay. Cognitive load shapes our performance. So the information has to rely on our predictions. We go on predictive analysis. So what do I have to do? Do I have to to take a look at every single thing in my baseline, or can I chunk the information? Well, if I chunk it, I have to chunk it right. So that's where the labeling comes in. Okay, the labeling actually allows me to take a look at the information as it is. And now I'm reducing cognitive load, increasing efficient performance by using time and distance. Because if I don't do that, Brian, what I'm doing is I'm just learning from bad examples, and then the corrupt file folders are going to continue to come up. And that's why you see marriages where I marry the same person over and over. You see coppers that are more likely to escalate force over and over. You get what I'm trying to say? You see certain events that happen out on the street that coppers respond to. It's the same thing uh early Iraq when kinetic Iraq was going on, military-age male. That screwed everybody. Okay. So those are the types of things that we're trying to talk about. You can learn to operate in an environment where you've never been before just by using the appropriate cognitive labels and then applying them in a series because you're going to become more efficient. You go, that's wrong. This is right. Now let me update my baseline. This is correct. Okay, these two things work together. This is wrong. It doesn't fit. Let me update my baseline. And we're doing that in nanoseconds. Don't think it's laborious because your brain already wants to do the pattern recognition.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, it no that that's the that's the the the biggest point out of all this is you just said it is your brain wants to do the pattern recognition. So if you do the pattern recognition correctly with the correct cognitive labeling, then you're you're just going to iteratively get better. Right. I mean, I mean that that that's the whole thing with each exposure to a new environment, a new situation. You go, oh, okay, I I get to update my my file folders and and I get to update my experiences and I get to update what I'm drawing from and what I'll recall in the next moment, right? I I I I won't be forced back down into that abyss of just fear and uncertainty and anxiety. Like I'll actually be able to assimilate or adapt to a new novel situation that I have not been in for because I'm drawing from all of these past experiences. And then and and you, you know, you to going back to the language part of it is that you know, that's like, okay, instead of this person's aggressive, it's well, their behavior is elevated, you know, relative to the situation or relative to the baseline. Like it's it's incongruent with what I typically see in this environment. Oh, okay. Well, now you can figure out why or what else there is, but but it but it's it's not it's not saying you can't challenge that, buddy.
SPEAKER_01:A defense attorney can challenge. Uh so they were aggressive. Oh, they were aggressive. Are you a master of aggression? Are you a subject matter expert on that? What level would you give it on a one to ten? You see how that opens that to the wrong interpretation. So, so you don't want to collapse that. What you want to do is not eliminate the uncertainty. You want to navigate it. You want to make sure that you fully understand that that uncertainty has boundaries. And if I can organize my information better and more accurately, then guess what? I'm improving retrieval. Memory degradation goes away. I'm now comparing knowns and unknowns at a level that's higher than you are because I have a better basis for comparison. The better the baseline, the better the comparison.
SPEAKER_00:And and and that goes right into then the intervention strategy, right? Because I it's like, okay, this guy's tossing tables at the fast food restaurant because they got his burger order wrong. Okay, well, that's completely unreasonable, right? That that's that's not no, that's that's unacceptable behavior. But you know, it's also to go rather than go, well, this is unacceptable. I'm gonna have to, you know, pounce this dude. It's like, hey man, what happened? They got my effing order wrong. It's like, damn, that sucks. I hate when that happens. That pisses me off. I know what that feels like. Now I'm like, okay, I I get that, and I don't like that after a long day, and I get some hungry as hell, and you screw up my favorite order. Like, now I'm not gonna start flipping tables, but what am I doing with the guy now? Now we're talking, right? It's it informs everything, is how you label the situation, right? As so, you know, it's and it all goes back to to to updating the baseline and and avoiding those emotionally loaded terms like every politician loves to do, but that that's a especially now.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, yeah, yeah. So let me give you just a another street one, okay? First of all, I told you people that don't like shaking hands. Okay, one instance a long time ago, or one instructor soured you on that, and that's a form of human communication. So if you're not going to shake hands with me in this situation and you don't have a damn good reason for it, what you're doing. Yeah, you're a germapobe or something.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. Yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_01:Or, you know, the guy, hey, the last three guys that shook hands with them got teeth knocked out. I get it. Okay. So it's but that's different. That's updating your baseline with the knowns or your unknowns. So I had one DTI instructor a long time ago at an academy, and he said, I always carry this with me. And I had this big mouthpiece that he put in, it was multicolored. You couldn't miss it, trust me. And he said, just before he went hands-on with somebody, he would show them that and he would go, okay, hold on. And they put it in and go, Oh, I'm ready. Okay, wait, wait a minute. Can you imagine taking that apart on the stand? Oh, I I get what you're saying. So it's gonna be a scrum. Okay, de-escalation and and and the whole process is a labeling exercise. Okay. So if you're gonna use an emotionally loaded term, you know, in that moment, understand that the behavior is gonna change because of it. And so therefore, you look, what do we keep referring to Hippocrates for? First do no harm, Brian. And this is a perfect example of label it right the first time. You're gonna retrieve it better, you're gonna have a cleaner sample with which to compare it against, and you're gonna end up being more efficient. Hey, you might not reduce the complexity to the level you think, but you're gonna be more accurate in your decision making. Yeah, and I think that's important.
SPEAKER_00:But that's a win over time, especially. Like that's the thing is that you're not looking at everyone wants, well, what's the right solution? It's like, well, you're not gonna know that one, until after the fact, and you can analyze it really, but you're not gonna know that until the situation presents itself. So you you just need a you need a framework to sense make to understand it so that you make the the best decision possible with with the information, as little amount of information that you have, right? At the furthest observable distance with the most time that you can, right? I mean, that that's that's the whole that's the goal. People go, well, that's kind of a nebulous goal. It's like, well, no, it's not, because if you have that as a strategy, then then over time, you know, individually, your team, the organization is gonna get exponentially better at this. And so that that's the whole thing is that that it takes time.
SPEAKER_01:So if you're thinking probable probabilistically, then you are thinking the right way because the most likely, most dangerous course of actions are gonna come up no matter what the encounter, and the more you do it, the better you're gonna get at it. If you're looking for absolute certainty that that's good, death and taxes. Exactly. But you are paying your accuracy on your predictive analysis. You are. There's no question that you're gonna do that, and and that's gonna make you more efficient. And what what does efficiency mean on the battle space? Safer, harder to kill. I I mean, those are all wins too.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. So big, big kind of takeaway is the the whole, again, I'd I'd recommend checking out the the Monty Hall problem, but it's it's not a math problem. It's it's a cognitive problem. Most bad decisions don't come from lack of information, they come from mislabeling information. And and that language is how we can kind of either either lock doors in our mind or open more doors in our mind, right? With using that right language. So, you know, again, this isn't the the the correct cognitive labeling doesn't make you certain, it makes you accurate, right? And and the the goal isn't to eliminate uncertainty, it's to navigate it without collapsing it. It's just to make it through to make, like you said, you know, a good enough decision right now based on what we know. So being almost right.
SPEAKER_01:I think with that.
SPEAKER_00:We'll we'll uh we we we'll we'll do some more on Patreon and and give some examples and and kind of some cognitive labeling exercise and and of course the episode cliff notes for everyone who's a Patreon subscriber, and we appreciate those who are. So, Greg, Greg, any uh any kind of uh kind of final thoughts on this one?
SPEAKER_01:No, I I I I like one of your quotes. Again, I'll bring it up. You can't identify anomalies accurately if your language is distort in the baseline. It's as if you were looking at at one baseline for apples and oranges, and somebody hands you a lawn chair and says, where does this fit? So correct your cognitive labeling, do it early, do it often, and incorporate it in your training. Incorporate it in your virtual reality training. You'll be happy that you did.
SPEAKER_00:Okay. I think that's I think that's good. We appreciate everyone for listening. Please, if you enjoy it, uh share it with your friends. We got some good guests coming up actually, too, in future episodes here. It's going to be some good conversations. And we we you know, we thank you all for for for sharing. For those of you who are sharing the episodes, we do appreciate it. That really helps get the message out there. Um, if you enjoyed it, always reach out to us. There's more on Patreon. You can always hit us up on email or or connect with Greg and I on LinkedIn as well. It's actually a great one. It's it's Greg's only social media, so so definitely if you want to get a hold of him. It was illegal to say that by design. How come these other things don't work on my phone? Oh, no, no, they don't they don't work on your model phone, Greg. Sorry. Uh, you can't go on there. Uh, but we appreciate everyone tuning in.
unknown:Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:I'm not I'm not saying in the most in the in the area of the country with more cameras and more security and more law enforcement than anywhere else in the world. But anyway, thanks everyone for tuning in. And don't forget that training changes behavior.
