What's sanity, Destroy company with good news, Learning happens across three worlds
Weekly I/O #116: Sanity is Performance, Osborne Effect, Three Worlds of Understanding, Artists Defy Education, Hostage by Need
Hey friends,
Here’s your weekly dose of inputs and outputs. Happy learning!
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Input
Here’s a list of what I learned this week.
1. Sanity is a performance we maintain to appear safe because social acceptance is about interaction rather than mental processes. Being seen as sane is a skill to learn which thoughts to share and which to keep private.
Book: Impro: Improvisation and the Theatre
What if the difference between sanity and insanity isn’t about what you think, but about what you show?
Theatre director Keith Johnstone argues that sanity is a pretence, a way we learn to behave. We keep this act up because we don’t want others to reject us.
Most people secretly believe they’re a little crazier than average.
They understand the energy it takes to maintain their own shields, but not what others expend. They know their own sanity is a performance, but when they meet others, they confuse the person with the role.
Sanity has nothing to do with how you think. It’s about presenting yourself as safe.
For example, an old men wander around hallucinating visibly, but no one gets upset. The same behavior in a younger, more vigorous person would get them institutionalized. A Canadian study found that communities reject someone when their behavior becomes unpredictable.
Johnstone shares a case about a man who believed he had a fish in his jaw. This fish moved around and caused discomfort. When he told people, they thought him crazy, leading to violent arguments and hospitalizations. The fish remained. Eventually, someone suggested he stop telling people. After all, it was the quarrels getting him locked up, not the delusion itself. Once he kept it secret, he lived normally.
His sanity is like ours. We may not have a fish in our jaw, but we all have its equivalent.
When Johnstone explains that sanity is about interaction rather than mental processes, students laugh hysterically. They realize they’ve been suppressing thoughts for years, classifying them as insane. This is also why originality is being obvious.
2. Osborne Effect: Announce your future product too soon, and customers stop buying your current one. The company often dies before the new product ships. Tomorrow’s promise kills today’s revenue.
Article: Too Much, Too Soon: The Osborne Effect In Tech History
How to destroy your company with good news? Announce the better product you’re building.
The Osborne Computer Corporation learned this the hard way in the 1980s. While selling the Osborne 1 computer, founder Adam Osborne announced the upcoming Osborne Executive. Customers stopped buying immediately. Why get the old model when an upgrade was coming?
Sales collapsed. Inventory piled up. The company went bankrupt before the new model could launch. This pattern has a name: the Osborne Effect.
It works through three steps. First, a premature announcement. The company reveals or leaks information about a new product before it’s ready. Second, customers react. They delay or cancel purchases, anticipating the improved version. Third, revenue collapses. The sudden sales drop creates cash-flow problems, inventory surplus, and lost investor confidence.
Apple understands this well. They carefully time iPhone announcements to avoid cannibalizing current sales. Tesla occasionally faces criticism when Elon Musk teases future models or features, causing customers to delay purchases.
The solution is discipline. You must keep upcoming products secret until near release, use gradual transitions with discounts on old stock, stagger feature rollouts, and manage expectations through careful communication.
3. Learning happens across three worlds: surface knowledge (facts), deep understanding (connecting ideas), and constructed knowledge (building theories). Each level builds on the previous, but you can’t skip surface learning to reach depth.
Paper: Constructivism, Socioculturalism, and Popper’s World 3
