Be Interesting

As a student I was consistently vexed by the tutors' proximity to really interesting ideas, and yet their refusal to come out with the controversial, and perhaps most interesting view, in favour of slavish devotion to the truth. I wanted to quote Jeremy from Peep Show and ask if they had to "live so relentlessly in the real world". It is partly this which made me the author of many essays which were both uniquely interesting, and wildly wrong.

Richard Huntington often remarks that it is better to be interesting than to be right, and it recently occurred to me that this was, ironically, perhaps "right". The argument that being interesting is more important than being right is of course the perfect blog post as it justifies its own existence. The graph above is demonstrably not "right" (TED alone disproves it), despite fundamentalist Christians, Ian Wright, Rory Sutherland and my professor of Geography fitting into it very well. But it certainly seems to be an interesting idea that sometimes there is a choice to be made between the two. I suppose part of the reason is that advertising works best when it is creative and emotional, rather than rational: and this creativity is perhaps more likely to emerge from interesting thinking than from quantitative data. I have not yet heard a story of great strategy which came from logical progression from research and first principles, but have heard plenty of genius plucked from stimulus and then justified.

It might also be attributable to the theory de jour; behavioral economics. This consistently shows that modelling of human behaviour often misjudges our inherent irrationality. A strategy may seem "right" if it is logical and rational, while in reality a more oblique approach might better meet the needs of complex, unpredictable humans.

This is explained in a far more "right", and at the same time "interesting" way, by John Kay, who I was lucky enough to hear speak at the IPA recently. The tag line of his latest book is "why our goals are best achieved obliquely", and it based on John's considerable experience as an economist and business analyst. John argues that not only are we best when we are pursuing multiple goals which probably don't revolve around profit and statistics, but that even when we believe we have arrived at a decision through relentless logic, it is probably a post-rationalization of a decision we had already made.


Lots to disagree with here (there should almost definitely be a Venn diagram somewhere), but then again it sort of makes sense that this post would opt for interesting over right.