Overthinking It

There are these two young fish swimming along, and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, “What the hell is water?”

- David Foster Wallace

When I was in high school, some things seemed more apparent to me than to those around me. I witnessed my classmates, teachers, the parents, all “brown nosing” each other as if everyone around me was giving and receiving obsequious compliments and participation awards. And I didn't get it.

Why didn't everyone else see it as I did? I wasn't going to brown nose people. And I wasn't going to be a hypocrite.

But while some things seemed overly apparent to me, other things did not. While I was pretty popular with the students and teachers, there was a cadre of folks that didn't like me. They thought I was an egoist, but I couldn't fathom why.

In my mind, I had a little quadrant describing all people. The x-axis measured how good I thought I was: the negatives of the x-axis meant I'm not so hot, whereas the positive meant I’m hot shit. The y-axis was what I thought of everyone else: negative being pretty shitty, and positive being the shit. In my view, the world was firmly in the bottom left corner. I, as well as most people around me, could fare to do quite a bit better.

Given this perception, I didn't understand how people could think that I was egotistical. I mean, how could somebody that didn’t think too much of themselves, think too much of themselves! But what I failed to recognize is that most people don't care about how you view yourself, instead they care about how you view them. I had to see the world through their eyes.

There is a curious experiment in game theory called the Keynesian Beauty Contest that exemplifies this. It’s a game where a contestant goes up on stage, and everybody in the audience writes down a number from 1 to 10 assessing how beautiful they are. Now, there’s a catch. It’s not the contestant that wins a prize, but rather the member in the audience that wrote down a number closest to *half* of the average assessment of the room.

Let's say a contestant gets up, and is perfect in every way. A ten out of ten. What should you guess if you want to win the prize? Well, you might think to yourself, “Ah, everyone's gonna think this person's a ten out of ten. I should guess one half of that.” You write down 5 on your card, you flip it over, you're ready to go. But wait! Isn't that what everyone else in the room is trying to do as well? You look around. Everyone's smiling as if they know something special. And you realize, everyone has written down 5 on their card. But then something miraculous occurs to you. You realize, that everyone else has just thought through the same thing. They're not writing 5, or 2.5, or 1.25, or anything smaller than that. They're using inductive logic, one million times, and writing down 0!

I remember reading a paper about the Keynesian Beauty Contest, where they posed it to professors, game theorists, Caltech students, and MBAs. And then they measured how many levels deep each of these groups were thinking (for example, if you wrote down 5 you would have thought one level deep and 2.5 would be two levels deep).

\( \begin{array}{|c|c|} \hline \textbf{Levels Deep} & \textbf{Average Guess} \\ \hline 0 & 10 \\ \hline 1 & 5 \\ \hline 2 & 2.5 \\ \hline 3 & 1.25 \\ \hline \end{array} \)

The results were quite frankly surprising. The Caltech students and the game theorists thought four or five levels deep. Just like how the best chess grandmasters are thinking five or six moves ahead. But take a guess which group most closely resembled an average person? The MBAs. And I suspect out of all these groups, they’d most easily relate to them too.

In my view, this little experiment epitomized what I had done throughout my early life and childhood: overthink. Sure, going five, six, seven levels deep is great for a game like chess. But when you're trying to relate to other people, thinking four or five levels deep can get you into deep water.

When I first heard David Foster Wallace’s parable about water, I empathized with the old fish - the poor guy is a misunderstood genius, and he alone understands the medium in which we all swim. But reading it again, I can't help but think that the old fish is unable to put himself in other people's shoes (or fins in this case). And I suspect this was my mental block with complementing folks when I was younger. I kept thinking others would think that I was thinking about getting something from them 😵‍💫. I was being so meta about the whole interaction that I was acting just plain weird.

So if you're anything like me or a whole host of people throughout history, that has felt both greater understanding and misunderstood, stop overthinking it.