3 Tips to Find Our Way Out of the Labyrinth of Imperfect Information

In this week's episode, Ricardo reflects on how our experiences, the media, and the different voices of society affect our perception of risks.

We often increase, decrease or disregard the relevance of different threats and opportunities due to imperfect and biased information we receive every day.

Ricardo also shares three simple tips you should always keep in mind to analyze future risk scenarios in the best possible way.

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Episode transcript

The transcript is generated automatically by Podscribe, Sonix, Otter and other electronic transcription services.

Ricardo (4s):
Hello, everyone. Welcome to the five Minutes Podcast. Today I like to talk to you about how our experiences, how the influx of the news, the media, our group of friends, how they affect our real perception of risks and why I'm doing that. Because today with the coronavirus pandemic, we are facing this pretty much every day, probably just Today, you receive it at 10 news saying that, Oh, vaccines do not work. 'cause people are getting contaminated. People are dying, more dying. Last business were recover next month. Next year in five years, you know, and we receive these new rules that are up and downs many, many times a day.

Ricardo (49s):
And imagine now you have a business or you are doing an initiative or developing a product and you need to make all decisions are based on the risk of COVID-19 pandemic and its impact. And please I'm using the COVID just as an example for us to understand. Many times when you see the new rules, you need to understand first, what does the difference between a fact and an opinion? So what is the effect effect is supported by research is supported by science and it's supported by numbers. Okay? Effect it's a 10% of the population of a city.

Ricardo (1m 29s):
X is contaminated. This is a fact or opinion is when someone take a look on that fact and make conclusions and say, Oh, this is a very high number. Or this is a very low number. So why its important because every time we translate facts into our opinion, when I say women, the media, every single one, its impossible to prepare and convert data or facts in Information or in opinions without using our own experience as a framework. So for example, if you talk about hunger, of course, if you faced hunger, you may have a different perception of the feeling of being hungry.

Ricardo (2m 13s):
If you compare with someone that never faced it, right? So you have different experiences in life. For example, if you got COVID and you felt very sick and you recovered, you may think, Oh, this is extremely serious order. People may not even notice. And they think, no, this is nothing who is right. Who's wrong. So what do you need to do? You need to remove this perception and go to the data and see what the data show us. And then you make your decisions. You make, say, okay, COVID is a very bad for this kind of business you need to say, okay, what is the fact that supports that? Okay, 10% of the restaurants closed in the city of Manhattan past month.

Ricardo (2m 59s):
Is this a source of information? So this is a fact, okay, this is a fact. So this is why it's so important. Because many times we are just, you know, we are just affected by this general perception that things are good or things are bad. And we compare and make decisions many times that are not fact-based. And then of course, I'm not telling that you can have information for everything I enact or data for everything, but you need, because these will remove this sentiment and this cognitive bias from your equation. The second advice I wanted to give on that, I used to use a little bit of historical information and I will share with you.

Ricardo (3m 44s):
I saw recently the interview that you've all had, it gave to the financial times and it's on YouTube. If you want to watch it, it's about half an hour. And he was talking about the historical perspective have COVID and he sat and that in the short run. So we are all thinking that we are live in the most impactful moment of our lives. And he said, okay, maybe if you look in a horizon of 10 years or maybe a couple of decades, maybe its right. But if you look a little bit more broader and in a historical perspective, it may sound very different because for those who live at the war, they have a different feeling for those <inaudible>.

Ricardo (4m 27s):
For example, that massive tragedy is in the best of human history. They may face it differently. And please, I'm not telling it at all that COVID is not relevant locates. Absolutely. The most impactful thing I had in my professional life. Okay. But I just want to give all of you the perspective, because otherwise we become so affected by our experience that we become blind, folded to make reasonable decisions. And he said to me, one thing that I was really surprised it by what you've always said, he said, look, if we go historically, we can see that the SARS that we had about a hundred years, that informally people call it the Spanish flu killed much more people than the first world war.

Ricardo (5m 15s):
But you see far more movies about the war than the Spanish flu. So why is that? Because this sentence of commotion and massive destruction and impactful, and the human made the destruction has a bigger an appeal. And this is, is how human beings R in why it's so important because you need to start comparing. For example, if you ask me when the word we will cover from COVID or the first thing I need to see it's okay. What happened in the past, in events of this magnitude? Okay. Let's try to put it in perspective. So how many years did a word spend to recover from the Spanish flu?

Ricardo (5m 55s):
Okay. And you may say, Oh, it's a hundred years ago. Okay. Then let's start to combine in and try to analyze, Okay. How many years did I say the word recover from the second world war? And then you try to make an informed, because what I can hear today, if I go on this source of strategic scenarios and scenario planning, you know, you may see that by the end of this year, everything will be good. And some people are saying that COVID will stay for the next day, Kate around us. So how do you we'll make reasonable decisions on that? So you need to check, okay, what happened? I'm not telling also that you will have all the information as a historic Information you may have.

Ricardo (6m 38s):
And the third and final one that I want to give you is to look for different sources of information. Do you know every single media Neal's every single one and every single friend you have advisers, you have, they have their own cognitive bias. They have something. They believe they have something they don't believe. So if you only listen or only watched the one kind of source, you will become biased. If that source says that everything is bad, you will be contaminated. If another source tells that this is nothing, you will be contaminated. This is why.

Ricardo (7m 18s):
For example, every single morning I spend around 20 to 30 minutes, every single day, going to a very different sources of needles. So I go to the main news from the us, from Brazil, my home country, from Europe, from Portugal, from the UK, trying to understand this same information through different kinds of lenses, to help me to make an informed decision. Instead of just looking, seeing my world and my planet and taking my decisions to a single, as a lens of their financial market or a lens of the humanitarian or a lens of the political landscape, you need to be far more complete in your analysis.

Ricardo (8m 1s):
This is what our projects need. So when you have these impactful moments, remember the facts, historical information in different sources of information can help you. It will not solve because this is not that I don't have a crystal ball to help everybody, but this will decrease your chances to make a completely wrong assumption. I hope you enjoyed this podcast until next week with another 5 Minutes Podcast.

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