Conversion Bias

Crediting your success to the last thing you tried

I’ve been noticing that people tend to tell their success stories like Christian born-again testimony:¹ “Nothing I did was working, until the last thing I tried totally changed my life.” Setting aside the question of salvation and grace as beyond the scope of this essay, I will settle for saying that regardless of whether sudden conversions are how souls are saved, I think they’re not a great framework for explaining secular successes. Or, rather, they’re clearly a great framework for explaining secular success ,if what you want your explanation to do is get attention—we all love a road-to-Damascus moment—but they’re not a great framework if what you want your explanation to do is to help other people do what you did.

When you’re reading this kind of success story, it can be really useful to look for ways that the narrator’s deprecated pre-conversion habits set the foundation for their eventual success.

Maybe you’ve read enough weight loss/emotional healing/lifestyle change content to know exactly what I’m talking about (or maybe you’re in marketing, making this kind of content, or instructing other people on how to make it). But if you haven’t, here’s the kind of thing I’m talking about.

For the past few years, I’ve been trying to pick up the knack for various physical tricks: backbends, splits, handstands, that kind of thing,² and so I’ve read a lot of instructions & advice about it. Everybody whose writing I’m reading is someone who used to not be able to do the skill and then learned how, but their advice is diverse to the point of being contradictory. Some say that only long, static holds will do much to increase your mobility; some advocate active stretching. Some of them love yoga, some of them say yoga will never get you there. The obvious, immediate explanation for these differences is that people’s bodies are different. But I think a surprising amount of the differences of opinion are explained by people’s bodies being similar.

People teaching these skills have a tendency to start off with one paradigm and follow it for years without fully succeeding in gaining the skill in question. Then they change what they’re doing and get the skill—but they ascribe their success fully to the new stuff they’re doing, and kind of surprisingly discount the foundation of their own hard work that enables their new paradigm to work so fast. Former weightlifters think their mobility is fully due to their new yoga practice, and former yoga teachers think their mobility is fully owing to end-range strength training, & they make (& often sell!) mobility routines that over-rely on whatever their new paradigm is.

Working on mobility stuff is so visceral—the pain or enjoyment is so physically insistent, the results or lack thereof are so objective—that I couldn’t help but notice how the conversion stories didn’t work. I could almost always improve the former yoga teacher’s routine by adding yogic elements, or the formerly musclebound dude’s routine by adding strength stuff. And that primed me to notice other times when people told conversion stories that seemed causally iffy.

Like, for instance, the yoga teacher who used to be a miserably neurotic dancer, but then was saved by yoga from a horrible body image. There are a lot of people telling this story, and it’s a happy story, and I think it’s basically true. But they tend to ascribe surprisingly little of their new happy body image to the fact that years of dancing have left them objectively stunning, and that other people who have a horrible body image but aren’t objectively stunning might get less body-image help from a yoga practice.³

Or there’s the self-consciously traditional woman who used to be a girlboss, or used to be less sociosexually restricted, and is now so much happier being trad that she is urgently telling younger women “Hey, I’ve seen both sides, & modernity incentivizes the stuff I stopped doing, but you’ll be happier doing the stuff I’m doing now.” I’ve seen this from influencers and also from people I know personally, and I genuinely believe they are happier now. But I can’t help but notice how many of them met their husband at a high-powered job or elite graduate school, or in the process of being sociosexually unrestricted. They are absolutely right that there are tradeoffs between their old life and what they’re doing now, that they could have had more kids if they’d married young instead of getting a PhD, but they don’t talk as much about how their current self (and family!) depends on the ambitions and explorations of their old self. Maybe it’s really hard to keep up self discipline, even ultimately more rewarding self-discipline, if you’re okay with the in-some-sense-easier stuff you used to do? So I see why these women think like this. But if you don’t have that life yet and you want it, it’s good to remember how many of them met their provider husbands in med school.

1. Especially when they’re trying to sell you something, for money or otherwise.

2. For the record: I can do pretty solid backbends, I’ve almost reached the floor in my splits, & though I haven’t nearly got my handstand, I am closer than I used to be.

3. Or at least from the kind of self-consciously unambitious style of yoga that these teachers tend to teach. This is possibly a subject for a whole nother post.