Vivek Kaul: The market for lies

The social media erupted: Who is the better spinner? Why is India playing Washington ahead of Kuldeep? Are they so worried about their batting already? (Washington is a much better batter than Kuldeep and India had been bowled out for 46 in an innings in the test match before this match.)

Even the legendary Sunil Gavaskar was critical of this decision while commentating on the test match. As he put it: “Including Washington Sundar tells you they are worried about their batting. More than his bowling, they need his batting down the order as the cushion… I would have picked Kuldeep Yadav."

It so turned out that Washington ended up picking up seven wickets in New Zealand’s first innings, immediately leading to those who were critical of his selection, including Gavaskar, calling it an inspired selection.

Other reasons were also offered for Washington’s rather inspired selection. He is an off-spinner and the New Zealand team had five left-hand batters. (For those not well-versed with cricket, when an off-spinner bowls an off-spinning ball to a left-hander, as he is more likely to do given that he is an off-spinner, the ball goes away from the bat of a left-hander, making it a leg-spinning delivery. Anyone who is slightly well versed with cricket will tell you that the ball going away from the bat is more difficult to play than a ball coming in. Hence, the inspired choice to pick Washington.)

But the fact that Washington is an off-spinner and that the New Zealand team had five left-handers was known before the innings started. So, this logic could have been offered even before the New Zealand batters started batting. But it wasn’t. As Ed Smith, a former English cricketer, wrote in a column many years back: “The point, of course, is that causes are being manipulated to fit outcomes. They weren’t causes at all, merely things that happened before the defeat. The ancient Romans had an ironic phrase for this terrible logic – post hoc, ergo proper hoc, “after this, therefore because of this"." 

The human mind is remarkably skilled at creating narratives, allowing us to quickly explain events in ways that seem obvious in hindsight. However, we often overlook that, had the outcome been different—if, for example, Washington hadn’t bowled as well as he did—we were likely to offer an entirely different set of reasons to justify that result as well. Indeed, everything appears obvious once we know how things have panned out. 

To put it in a rather straightforward way: There is a market for lies or putting on a pretence, and it’s all around us. Let me share a personal story here to elucidate what I am trying to say. In April-May 2019, I was a part of a panel on a TV channel that was analyzing electoral trends as the multi-stage Lok Sabha election was happening.  

By the day of the final counting, this panel of so-called ‘experts’ were sure that the Bhartiya Janata Party-led National Democratic Alliance would not win as many seats as they had in 2014. As the results started coming out, it became clear that the BJP-led NDA would win more Lok Sabha seats than they had in 2014.  

Basically, the analysis and the predictions of the panel had turned out to be all wrong. But that didn’t turn out to be a problem. The same panel that was offering reasons for why the BJP wouldn’t cross the 2014 number started offering reasons on why the BJP had won as many seats as it had.  

No one batted an eyelid. Also, that was the last time I appeared on TV. The basic problem of the medium became obvious to me and I have stayed away since that big mistake. 

The funny thing is that something like this happened all over again in the 2024 Lok Sabha election as well. Many ‘experts’ built a mahaul for the BJP crossing 400 seats in the Lok Sabha, with the slogan abki baar char sau paar. Things perhaps turned out in a way where  they started believing in their rhetoric.  

Nonetheless, when the results started coming out on 4 June, it became clear that the BJP wasn’t going to win as many seats as it had in 2019. And as soon as this became clear, the experts quickly moved towards offering reasons for why the BJP hadn’t done as well as it was expected to. Well, if the reasons were so clear in their heads, why weren’t they offered before the results came out? That is a question well worth asking. Or post hoc, ergo proper hoc.

This played out again in the recently concluded Haryana assembly election. I had a written a column on this for the Mint edit page. This newsletter in a way is an expansion of that, and in which I look at other areas where a similar phenomenon plays out.  

Among those who follow politics, many were confident that the Congress would win the Haryana election—exit polls, TV experts, social media commentators, and former TV journalists now on YouTube, all shared the view. In the run-up to the election, they had offered reasons for the same. But that’s not how things turned out. And as soon as it became clear that the Congress would lose, the same experts shifted to explaining its defeat.

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So, what’s happening here? In cricket. In politics, and even in financial markets, there is a huge market for instant analysis or quick explanations. Why is there a demand for quick explanations? When something occurs, people instinctively seek a reason—a story, an explanation, a cause. This mental drive compels us to find answers, accurate or otherwise.

And when there is a demand for something, supply for it usually automatically emerges. As Nassim Nicholas Taleb writes in The Black Swan—The Impact of the Highly Improbable: “Nobody would pay one dollar to buy a series of abstract statistics reminiscent of a boring college lecture. We want to be told stories." And these stories are told. By journalists covering elections and more. By commentators covering cricket. By political experts on politics and elections. And by marketmen and marketwomen offering expert analysis on different financial markets.

Also, stories make things, as they stand, more digestible for the human mind. As Taleb puts it: “The more orderly, less random, patterned, and narratized a series of words or symbols, the easier it is to store that series in one’s mind or jot it down in a book." He further explains: “We, members of the human variety of primates, have a hunger for rules because we need to reduce the dimension of matters so they can get into our heads… The more random information is, the greater the dimensionality, and thus the more difficult to summarize. The more you summarize, the more order you put in, the less randomness. Hence the same condition that makes us simplify pushes us to think that the world is less random than it actually is." 

Whenever something happens, expected or unexpected, there is always a reason being offered for it. As Taleb writes: “It happens all the time: a cause is proposed to make you swallow the news and make matters more concrete. After a candidate’s defeat in an election, you will be supplied with the “cause" of the voters’ disgruntlement. Any conceivable cause can do."

Basically, there is a large set of people who are ready to be lied to because there is only so much that a human brain can comprehend. There is another set of people who are ready to lie and make money from this, and find meaning in what they are doing with their lives. 

In fact, sometimes they may not even know that they are in the business of lying. Also, real explanations are not always easy to offer, especially for a system as complex as an election. The same stands true for their audience. Many do not really realise that they want to be lied to. 

But that’s how any successful market works: The demand and supply match. The broader point being that if there is an incentive for doing something, irrespective of whether it is right or wrong, or socially useful or not, a market for it will emerge.  

There is perhaps another factor at work. When the results don’t turn out as expected, one can’t say on live TV or a YouTube channel or other social media that they were wrong. Take what happened with Washington Sundar. When it was revealed that he would be playing instead of Kuldeep Yadav on the morning the test match, the experts came down hard on this decision. By the end of New Zealand’s first innings, Washington had taken seven wickets, and the situation changed. But no one would say on live TV that they were wrong. So they came with explanations in the hope that by then people listening to them and who wanted to be lied to would have forgotten what had been said earlier. 

(The interesting thing is that at the end of the second day of the test match, when India’s team for the tour to Australia was announced, Kuldeep wasn’t on it because of an injury. Maybe he didn’t play this match simply because he was already carrying an injury. How about that? But then this information was not available to experts at the end of the first innings of New Zealand’s batting and hence couldn’t be offered on the Washington-Kuldeep debate.)  

A similar thing happens when an unexpected election result comes in. Take the case of Haryana, where everyone and their aunt thought that the Congress party would win, but it didn’t. In the immediacy of the event there was only one reason that could have been offered for the Congress’ defeat, and it was that the BJP’s candidates got the most votes in the seats that the party won. That’s how a first-past-the-post electoral system works. The candidate getting the most votes wins, even though a bulk of the votes may have been against them. Of course, this is something that cannot be said on live TV or a YouTube channel.

And you can’t make the viewer wait by saying something like, “We don’t know why the Congress lost the election but please give us two days more. It will allow us to dig a little more and offer a plausible explanation". Because that’s not how it works: two days later the viewer would have moved on to other issues that they may want an explanation on. Also, there are no guarantees that two days later there will be an explanation. So, an explanation has to be offered then and there. And that’s how the market for lying thrives. 
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Cricket telecasts and election results are not the only areas fuelling demand for quick explanations and incentivising a market for lying. Analysis around the financial markets thrives on this as well.

TV channels offer an almost minute-by-minute analysis on how stock prices are playing out on any given day. As John Allen Paulos writes in A Mathematician Reads the Newspaper: “Almost never does a stock pundit say that market’s or a particular stock’s activity for the day or the week or the month was largely a result of random fluctuations."  

Random fluctuations can never really be an explanation. Some serious-sounding explanation has to be offered. And how does this happen? Stock market activity generates a huge number of figures almost on a daily basis and using these numbers something that sounds intelligent can always be said.  

As Paulos puts it: “The business pages, companies’ annual reports, sales records, and other widely available statistics provide such a wealth of data from which to fashion sales pitches that it’s not difficult for a [stock market expert] to put on a good face… All that’s necessary is a little filtering of the sea of numbers that washes over us." 

Let’s take the example of an explanation being offered these days for the stock market falling from the highest levels it touched in late September: The market has been falling because foreign institutional investors (FIIs) have been selling. But the fact of the matter is that FIIs can only sell when someone else is buying. Right? How else do they sell? So why has the stock market been falling then?

In October, FIIs sold 1.2% of what they had owned at the end of September. So how did a 1.2% sale lead to the market falling as much as it did? And aren’t retail investors, both direct and indirect, buying up what FIIs are selling? So why are stock prices still falling? Now, these questions don’t lend themselves well to simple explanations that the human mind can easily comprehend, and which is why they are not being answered.  

In fact, what was just limited business TV during stock market hours now happens on social media 24/7. The trouble is that an anchor on business TV or for that matter a financial influencer has to offer reasons on why things turned out the way they did on any given day. As Taleb writes in Fooled by Randomness: “To be competent, a journalist should… play down the value of the information he is providing, such as by saying: “Today the market went up, but this information is not too relevant as it emanates mostly from noise"." But if anyone does that, they are likely to lose their job.  

The market for explanation does not work like that. There are people out there who want to be actively lied to. And they need to be lied to then and there, at that exact moment when any news breaks. That’s the incentive that has been created.  

To conclude, as Jason Zweig of the Wall Street Journal puts it, there are three ways to get paid to write: “Lie to people who want to be lied to, and you’ll get rich. Tell the truth to those who want the truth, and you’ll make a living. Tell the truth to those who want to be lied to, and you’ll go broke." 

I fall somewhere in the fourth category: trying to make a living by writing what I think is the truth, at least on most days, and going broke in the process. Okay, that was a joke, but I hope, dear reader, you get the drift.