I don't know what that meant.
I'm Angela Duckworth. I'm Mike Mon.
And you're listening to No Stupid Questions.
Today on the show, why do we settle for suboptimal situations?
We're bringing George's final prank on the US West.
You guys take the imperial system.
Angela, we have a fascinating question today from John from Fallon, Nevada.
Okay. Fallon, Nevada, go.
He says, why do we entrench in the suboptimal?
One would think that the best stuff rises to the top, but not so.
We often get stuck with things that are not that good.
Think he says of the QWERTY keyboard.
I mean, that's just what it's called because the letters, right?
Q-W-E-R-T-Y at the beginning.
Yeah. Think of the QWERTY keyboard.
We still use it even though we know it's suboptimal.
Fahrenheit makes less sense than Celsius, but the US stayed with Fahrenheit.
And two liter bottles of soda use a different measurement than the rest of the US measurement system.
Why doesn't the cream always rise to the top?
You know, John from Fallon, Nevada, I just Googled Fallon, Nevada.
According to Wikipedia, there are only 9,326 people other than John who live in Fallon, Nevada.
Wait, can I just say quickly, I have been to Fallon, Nevada?
What? Yes. I went to Fallon, Nevada.
I went to help a friend's grandmother re-roof her trailer.
Oh, okay. It was the most random trip of my entire life.
I actually didn't know what I was doing.
I got a phone call from a different friend named Jason and Jason said, hey, our buddy needs help.
We're leaving tomorrow morning.
Just drop what you have.
We've got to go help his grandma.
And I remember being like, I don't know if I have time for this.
That was why like frequently used keys are annoyingly in the top row, right?
It's like, come on, put the E down here.
And then who wants K? Why is K under my right third finger?
I'll give you some background.
I got this from the MIT Technology Review.
The QWERTY keyboard has been around for 150 years.
Obviously, now it's so ubiquitous it would be hard to change.
But they said the early typewriters had all kinds of different creative layouts.
But the QWERTY keyboard was developed by this Wisconsin journalist and inventor named Christopher Latham Scholes.
And according to the MIT Technology Review, no one knows how Scholes came up with the arrangement of letters, but it was in an E-Mianmar formerly known as Burma.
Oh, there is no way you were going to get that one.
So it did originally come from King George and then England moved on to a higher max?
Yeah. So let me give you a bit of background on this.
Civil War ends in 1865. And by then, most of Europe had adopted a metric-ish system.
Now in the Constitution of the United States, it says Congress has the power to coin money and fix the standard of weights and measures.
So why don't we have it? Yeah, exactly.
In 1971, the US National Bureau of Standards.
The eldest of us, who was my brother, who was about eight years older than I was.
And I know today it's taboo, but it wasn't then.
And I do think there are things where you can make a moral mistake by saying, we've always hit our children.
Going back generations and generations.
My grandpa hit my dad and my dad hit me.
So it's a really deep question.
And I don't think Hume, other than saying it was a mistake, did a lot to unpack why we keep making that mistake.
Well, Angela and I would love to hear your thoughts on why sometimes we entrench in less than ideal conditions, when it's totally possible to improve your situation, and maybe how you have broken out.
And a knee-jerk reaction is like, well, that's dumb.
You shouldn't have the status quo bias.
But if you were an animal and you knew that if you made your nest in a certain way, your eggs would be okay.
Would you say, tomorrow I'm just not going to brood these eggs?
I mean, who knows? Maybe they don't need to be sat on to keep warm.
Maybe I'll row them off a cliff.
See how that goes. And you can imagine that the possibility space is full of stupider solutions.
So maybe you're at a local max, but you're also not falling off a cliff.
Exactly. So one of the, I think, best studies that's been done on status quo bias is shockingly recent.
It was done. And when they followed up with people, what they find is that people who got heads by chance, who were encouraged to make a change, were actually happier.
And also that they did report making that life decision more often.
And that is evidence for status quo bias, putting you in a suboptimal position.
So what's your reaction to heads or to, I was like blown away.
Here's what I actually thought of initially.
I'm sure you know Ellen Langer.
Yeah. Harvard psychologist.
Okay. So I don't know Ellen at all.
In fact, I just have seen this one clip of her on a podcast and she basically says, rather than spending so much time trying to make the right decision, just make the decisions.
There's a lot of benefit to moving on and trying something different.
So from cutting off the ends of hands, which does not seem to be that big of a deal or the Korty keyboard, which we can all live with to like maybe more serious things like the ridiculous imperial system we have for measuring, right to like more profound things like sticking with where you live and you should move.
I think John from Fallon, Nevada and also David Hume have asked a very good question.
Coming up after the break, a fact check of today's episode and stories from our NSQ listeners.
Episode on AI companionship.
Hey, Angela and Mike. When your discussion of AI replacing human connection, I think a key point was missed.
True connection is reciprocal.
A connection with AI is a one way connection.
The people I'm most connected with are the ones who not only listened to me when I'm processing hard things, but I listen to them as they deal with hard things.
Having an AI conversation seems to reinforce the isolation that so many already feel in our world today.
It's a connection that seems self absorbed and self centered.
We need the empathy and compassion that comes when we're pulled out of our...
As I don't want to increase the energy consumption and the potential ramifications for our planet.
Hi NSQ team. My name is Krish and I work in the data science space.
I'm fairly close to the large language model world and I have to say the latest NSQ episode on AI has made it to one of my favorite episodes of the show.
Navigating social interactions is like tiptoeing through a minefield.
Each step cautiously measured dodging the hidden triggers of awkward pauses and misread cues.
That said, I still wouldn't trade that clumsy dance, missteps and all, for anything else.
There's something oddly satisfying about stumbling through it along with everybody else.
It was respectively Luan Young, Robin Brennan and Krish Arun Asalam.
Thanks to them and everyone who shared their stories with us.
And remember we'd love to hear your thoughts about status quo bias.
Send a voice memo to nsq at Freakonomics.com and you might hear your voice on the show.
Coming up next week on No Stupid Questions, how important is having a good sense of humor?
