Unconvinced

I'm fascinated by how I can agree with someone's argument all the way through—including the data, the premise, and even the conclusion—without actually being convinced.

I had this experience recently. The late philosopher Dan Dennett spoke at the Dent Conference we hosted last September in Santa Fe. In his talk, he laid out a series of arguments about "feral AI" that, step by step, I couldn't really argue with. Basically, his argument was that AI will reproduce in the wild, meaning we can't control it, which leads to a future where we can't distinguish humans from AI, ultimately dooming us. But I found myself unmoved by the conclusion.

After the talk, I brought this up to Dan. He said that this is very common. It's almost unavoidable in philosophy, and when it happens between philosophy professors, they just shrug and accept the fact that you remain unconvinced.

This reminds me of the metaphor from Jonathan Haidt's book The Happiness Hypothesis: the elephant and the rider. According to the metaphor, our subconscious mind is like an elephant and our rational mind is like a rider perched on top. The elephant does what it wants to do, and the rider's job is to explain why the elephant is doing what it's doing. Occasionally, with great effort, the rider can coax the elephant into doing something different. But most of the time, the rider is just justifying the elephant's behavior.

Failing to be convinced by an argument you can't argue with is therefore what happens when the elephant remains unconvinced.

I think this happens in startups as well. As an investor, I’ve seen pitches where I can’t argue with the logic, but I don’t buy the vision and I don’t buy the opportunity. For whatever reason! This has to be massively frustrating to the entrepreneur because it means you can be right about everything and still be unconvincing. But unlike philosophy, fundraising is not a search for truth, so it's OK to change your argument to make it more convincing.

Sometimes it happens because the entrepreneur is lost in the details instead of the vision. One of our portfolio companies at Alsop Louie is in the middle of fundraising a later-stage round after closing a complex but significant commercial partnership. The founder has been immersed in the language and landscape of the partners he’s been selling to.

So when he built the presentation for fundraising, it was a mess. It was more than thirty slides, filled with industry jargon, and failed to mention the actual product! Logically, it was fine. The numbers were there, the partners were listed, the roadmap was laid out. But it was uninspiring and therefore unconvincing.

It took some work, but the pitch is now down to six powerful slides that set the vision and the product front and center. It's emotionally compelling, which is the most important kind of compelling.

I’ve never seen an investor make an investment because they got argued into it. But I have seen investors make an investment despite being argued out of it.

Kind of puts a fine point on the idea that all decisions are ultimately emotional decisions.

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