Under tit for tat, a player will begin by cooperating, then in subsequent iterations will replicate whatever their opponent did last time. So if their initial cooperation is punished with defection, they will then reciprocate in kind. In games that are not iterated and only consist of a single round, defection is thought to be the best strategy.

Tit for tat was codified as a game theory strategy by mathematical psychologist Anatol Rapoport, but it builds upon our instinctual notions of reciprocity. It teaches us that our best option when dealing with other people we cannot trust entirely is to reciprocate their choices. Seeing as we can rarely place full trust in anyone, especially if they stand to gain by screwing us over, we lean toward tit for tat. In general, we view this as fair and just. If someone helps us, we’re quite happy to assist them the next time they need help. But if they ignore our plight when we need help, we’re highly unlikely to care in the inverse situation. For this reason, evolution tends to select for cooperative behavior in groups—it benefits everyone in the long run.

However, straightforward tit for tat is not as effective as the strategy known as tit for tat with forgiveness. This strategy involves occasionally cooperating in the face of defection. It is easy for two opponents to get stuck in a cycle of mutual defection from which they cannot escape unless and until one decides to cooperate. If both are using tit for tat, a cycle of mutual cooperation will then commence.

Life is an iterative and compounding game. In the words of Peter Kaufman, it pays to “go positive and go first.” Also, remember that people make mistakes. Assuming there is no maliciousness, it pays to forgive.

This article is an excerpt from the bestselling book The Great Mental Models Volume 2: Physics, Chemistry and Biology

The post Tit For Tat appeared first on Farnam Street.

Reciprocity teaches us why win-win relationships are the way to go, why waiters leave candies with the bill, why it’s a good idea to use the least force possible to secure an outcome, and why a lot of companies don’t permit their employees to accept gifts. This model demonstrates why we should view giving as being as valuable as having. It prompts us rewrite the Golden Rule to say, “Do unto others knowing that something will be done unto you.” So what exactly is reciprocity?

In physics, reciprocity is Newton’s third law, which states that for every force exerted by object A on object B, there is an equal but opposite force exerted by object B on object A. Every force involves the interaction of two objects where the force asserted by one is reciprocated with an equally powerful and directionally opposite force by the other object. Forces always occur in pairs of the same type of force, and it is not possible for one object to exert a force without experiencing a reciprocal force.

When I land on the ground after jumping, I am exerting a force on the ground. At the moment of landing, the ground is also applying a force that is equal but opposite in direction on me. The earth applies a force on me even when I am just standing. This force is gravity. But the gravitational force exerted on me by Earth is reciprocated by me through the force I am exerting on the earth.

In the natural world, this third law of Newton’s explains jet propulsion. The word propulsion comes from two Latin terms meaning “forward” and “drive”—propulsion is a force that drives an object forward.1 Jet propulsion works by forcing matter, such as gas produced by burning fuel, in one direction, leading to a corresponding movement of the vehicle in the opposite direction. This holds true for everything from fireworks and guns to huge spacecraft.

Jet propulsion only works if the forward push is stronger than the forces acting on the object, like air friction and its own weight. The greater the force in comparison to drag (the amount of force opposing the motion), the faster the object can move. Octopi and squid force water through their mantle and out through a siphon at a high speed that compensates for their weight and the viscosity of the water. As the animal asserts a force on the water, the water exerts a force on the animal, and this makes the octopus or squid move.

Consider the tackle in American football. The force that the defender puts on the receiver’s body in order to bring him to the ground is equivalent to the force felt by the defenseman’s body during the tackle. You can’t initiate force without having a force put on you. For the tackle, this is very important. If the defenseman felt nothing there would be no incentive for him to be strategic in the application of his force on the receiver. And who would actually want to be a receiver if this were the case? If the guy who initiates the force feels nothing—much better to be him.

Since this is not the case, the tackle is more about using the least amount of force required to bring the receiver to the ground. It’s better for the receiver, and it’s also better for the guy doing the tackling, because the more force you apply to others, the more damage you do to yourself. Reciprocity can be summed up like this: when you act on things, they act on you.

What we give

It would be amazing if every time you did something good for the world, you received a corresponding amount of positive effect in your life. We all know that unfortunately this is not true. Sometimes positive intentions produce negative results, or bad things happen to people who do good things for others. Although the connection between good deeds and a good life isn’t perfect, there is a documented relationship between the two. Using the model of reciprocity can help us understand why people benefit themselves when they work for what they believe is good. The life of Norman Bethune,* a Canadian surgeon, is one that can teach us a lot about the nuances of reciprocity.

Bethune was not a volunteer in the sense we often use the term now to describe activities that are an adjunct to daily life. His efforts to help others were completely integrated into his work and life. What made him a volunteer is that he did it of his own volition, at no obvious personal benefit. Therefore, his story provides an interesting example to really explore reciprocity. What do you get when you give? What kind of tensions are created when the two forces interact?

Norman Bethune grew up wanting to be a surgeon, inspired by his doctor grandfather. He completed his studies during the First World War, during which he also volunteered providing medical support on the battlefield. During the 1920s he practiced medicine in the United States and Canada, eventually settling in Montreal. He initially specialized in thoracic surgery and developed a solid reputation as a surgeon. However, he had an ongoing commitment to help people beyond what he did in his practice. This goal he pursued in a variety of ways.

During the early 1930s, while in Montreal, Bethune provided medical services free to the poor and established a free-of-charge clinic he ran once per week. He vocally advocated for universal health protection, explaining that many medical issues were created by poverty and negligent employers. In addition, and unique for the time, he used radio broadcasts to educate the public on tuberculosis. Bethune volunteered his time, energy, and intelligence to try to bring about meaningful improvements in the lives of the most impoverished.

During the 1930s he became a supporter of communism and joined the Communist Party, mostly on account of what he saw of the benefits of the Soviet socialized health care system. These political beliefs took him further afield in his efforts to improve access to and outcomes in healthcare.

In 1936 in Spain during the Spanish Civil War, Bethune designed and developed the first ever mobile blood transfusion unit. This vehicle could draw and store blood, was used to give transfusions, and most importantly, could be used on the front lines of the battlefield. It was a remarkable innovation that saved countless lives and inspired the medical approach used in World War II.

All of the work that Bethune did in Spain, and later China, was not for profit. The mobile blood unit and all his other surgical innovations and inventions did not make Bethune any money.

In 1938 Bethune went to China, desiring again to help people. China was fighting a war with the Japanese, the Sino-Japanese War, and Bethune’s belief in communism led him to deploy his efforts in support of Mao and the Communist Party of China. He was made commander of all Chinese medical forces and immediately set about modernizing the existing primitive health care in China.

Helping the Chinese in their fight, he again deployed his practice of bringing the surgeon to the battlefield, designing mobile operating equipment and improving the survival rate of the injured. He also extensively trained doctors and nurses and established hospitals in areas that had neither. In their article, “The Medical Life of Norman Bethune,” Deslauriers and Goulet write, “His courage, determination and will to fully employ his talents of ingenuity, aggressiveness and selfless response to social concerns when the time came is truly remarkable.” He accomplished so much in his 18 months in China that when he died of septicemia after operating on a soldier, Mao delivered his eulogy, describing him as “a man who is of value to the people.”

Bethune’s achievements continue to be regarded as heroic by the Chinese. The first hospital he founded still exists, and his story is mandatory learning for primary school students in China.

Bethune’s story, however, is not solely one of accolades and recognition, heaps of positive effects achieved as a result of a life spent trying to bring about good. He died at age 49 as a direct result of his efforts to improve health outcomes on the battlefield. The fact that he was a communist led him to be written out of Canadian history during the Cold War years, when communism was seen as a direct threat to Western democracy. His personal life wasn’t great, and his aggressive personality earned him enmity from many colleagues.

Normally one would talk about a life like Norman Bethune’s in terms of sacrifice. He sacrificed personal relationships, social acceptance, and ultimately his life in order to take actions in accord with his beliefs and values. But using the lens of reciprocity suggests there is another way to interpret the story.

In a paper on the health benefits of volunteering in adults, the authors explain, “The beneficial effects of volunteering on health outcomes have been well documented. Research has found that participation in voluntary services is significantly predictive of better mental and physical health, life satisfaction, self-esteem, happiness, lower depressive symptoms, psychological distress, and mortality and functional inability.”6 Multiple studies have demonstrated the positive consequences of volunteering that are conferred on the volunteer. We may volunteer for a variety of reasons, based on our interests, goals or values, but regardless, we reap health benefits when we do so.

The studies on the positive aspects of volunteering for the volunteer bring to mind the concepts we outlined above in the science of reciprocity, like how forces always occur in pairs. Although volunteering is not governed by the laws of physics, using reciprocity as a metaphor can help us understand why volunteering appeals to so many people. And consequently, why some people make the choice to help others at seemingly great cost to themselves.

The research on volunteering makes it clear that when we give, we get. We improve our physical health; we feel better about ourselves and our place in the world. We evaluate our lives as having more meaning. One way of understanding people who take the kinds of actions that Bethune did, which on their face seem to risk so much, is that they receive a benefit from the world proportional to what they put out there. It’s not a benefit that can always be measured in legacy or reward. Sometimes those things come; for Bethune, although North America struggled for decades to appreciate him as the dedicated medical innovator he was on account of his political views, China continues to go all out in its appreciation of his contributions to their country.

However, perhaps the benefit is better conceptualized as the reciprocity received by the individual in terms of the satisfaction they have regarding the choices they’ve made. The act of doing good causes an equal reaction in terms of feeling good. In reading Bethune’s story it is clear that he was not motivated by recognition, but rather a genuine desire to help people that gave him an exceptional amount of energy and drive. It is highly possible that he didn’t evaluate his life as one of sacrifice, but instead derived satisfaction from his efforts. (See tit-for-tat.)

The rise of the “win-win”

In the physical world, the law of reciprocity works 100% of the time. The harder you punch a wall, the more force pushes against your fist, the more damage is caused to both you and the wall. In the biological world, reciprocity doesn’t have the same perfect record. However, it has been discovered to work much more often than not, and thus harnessing it has significant long-term benefits.

Evolutionary biologists argue that our tendency to engage in reciprocal behavior is a natural product of evolution. You are more likely to survive if you receive help from others. And you are more likely to receive that help if you have offered assistance in the past. So the genes that encode the reciprocal instinct were more likely to be passed on. And thus the fact that the human species has made it to now is directly dependent on our building social interactions that are reliable, useful, and trustworthy.

Humans engage in two types of reciprocity with each other: direct, which is “I help you and you help me;” and indirect, which is either a pay-it-forward concept, “I help you and then you help someone else,” or more about reputation building—“I help you, building a reputation as one who helps, so that someone else helps me in the future.” Both kinds work.

While reciprocity isn’t as reliable when it comes to humans as it is with physics, the concept can help you achieve better outcomes. Sometimes we go first and go positive and get nothing back, as is the case if we smile at a stranger walking on the street. Most times they’ll smile back at you, but every once in a while, you’re met with a scowl. We tend to forget the times our smile elicited a smile in response and remember the times when we received nothing in return, and so we stop smiling. However, the small loss we occasionally experience as a result of putting ourselves out there and not having it reciprocated is more than compensated for by the gains the rest of the time. If you want to get an idea of the true value of engaging in positive reciprocal behavior, just make a list of your outcomes in any given week. Life is easier and more enjoyable when we act on starting and maintaining win-win relationships with everyone. And as we explained, reciprocity has been part of our biological makeup for a very long time.

Let’s go back to the eastern Mediterranean around 1250 BCE. The bulk of the power in the region was held by the four kings of Egypt, Hatti (a region in present day Turkey), Assyria and Babylon. They didn’t like each other much—in fact, “they deeply distrusted each other and frequently squabbled.” Demonstrating military prowess was often a way that a king achieved legitimacy in the eyes of his subjects, and there were constant conflicts, from skirmishes to full-on battles between these four areas. Fighting was the norm.

Then, one day, as Trevor Bryce chronicles in his article on “The Eternal Treaty”, 15 years after a “great military showdown” between the Egyptians and the Hittites, an interesting thing happened. The two kings decided to enter into the world’s first known peace treaty.

The treaty was not about peace in the global sense, stemming from a desire to have a world without war. It was about peace in the immediate sense; two parties trying to establish a mutually beneficial relationship. The treaty, known as the Eternal Treaty, was the laying out of a directly reciprocal relationship between two civilizations.

Egypt was led by Ramesses, whose primary goal was to build “monumental construction projects, and to build his kingdom’s wealth through trade and the exploitation of its mineral-rich regions.”10 He had other security issues, most notably the Libyans to the west. So his interest in the treaty was to give himself some space to accomplish the legacy that mattered to him. The reality is, if you’re fighting with everyone all of the time you have to spread your resources along many fronts and you likely don’t have time to do anything else. One less border to defend was an opportunity to put his efforts elsewhere.

The Hittites had a similar problem, in a growing military threat from the Assyrians. In addition, their ruler Hattusili had usurped the throne from his nephew and was badly in need of some external power to legitimize his rule. Ramesses commanded great respect in the region, and his acknowledgment of Hattusili’s leadership would go a long way to maintaining stability. In pursuing the treaty with Egypt, “his hope was that Ramesses’ endorsement of his own position, and by implication that of his lineal descendants, would provide some security against future challenges.”

The treaty contained provisions for future military support, the kind of alliance in which an attack on one is an attack on the other. Assyria, despite having both interest and a good position did not, in fact, invade Hatti during Hattusili’s reign, so “quite possibly, the Egyptian-Hittite alliance did prove an effective deterrent against such an enterprise.”

Reciprocity based on self-interest is still reciprocity. Engaging in positive behavior to then be a receiver of positive behavior is about the long game. For both Ramesses and Hattusili, the benefits of trying to develop an alliance were clear. It gave them both an opportunity to exit fighting that consumed resources and allowed them to focus those resources on long-term stability and their legacies. Over time, the likelihood of reciprocal interactions increases, and thus it’s a much better strategy to try to make them positive. The more people you help, the more people you will have willing to help you.

The post Reciprocity: Getting What You Give appeared first on Farnam Street.

***

Here’s a situation familiar to many of us: We decide to take a vacation and go somewhere exotic. We plan the trip and mark our calendars, and as the date gets closer we get increasingly excited. Before we step on the plane, the possibilities seem endless. Anything could happen! Accidental encounters and adventures could change our lives!

We go. We have a good time. We see what we wanted to and enjoy the break from work. Upon returning home, we share the pictures and recount some of our experiences with friends. We give away the souvenirs. We step back into our lives. The glow fades and we settle to planning the next round of travel in our daydreams.

In the end, it’s a little sad. That incredible experience becomes like a mirage or a dream—similar to watching a movie, but a lot more expensive.

What if it doesn’t have to be like this?

Travel without participation and reflection is entertainment. Try to notice yourself in the journey, and capture the experience and insights when you interact with all the new things you are confronted with. You can get more out of your travel by using mental models to weave yourself into the experience, and come away enriched as well as entertained and rested.

First, inspiration from the past …

Just over 200 years ago, Mary Wollstonecraft, philosopher, feminist, and author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, was going through an emotionally difficult period. Her lover—the father of her child—wasn’t interested in being with her anymore. She was devastated and frustrated. As a philosopher, she believed it was important to live according to the ideals she espoused. The realities facing a middle-class woman in 18^th-century England made that very hard. Women had essentially no rights. Having a child out of wedlock might have supported her ideas regarding how oppressive the institution of marriage was for women, but without the support of the child’s father, she knew she would struggle financially and socially. It was one of the lowest points of her life.

Wollstonecraft went to Scandinavia, mostly to recover some money for her lover and thus try to win him back. In this she failed. But she captured her journey in Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark. In doing so, she revolutionized travel writing and healed herself.

The Letters offer remarkable insight into Wollstonecraft’s lively mind. As she moves through the unfamiliar surroundings of three foreign countries, she asks herself questions and explores the ideas brought to mind. Observing the agricultural development of Norway, in many ways behind that of England at the time, she asks, “And, considering the question of human happiness, where, oh where does it reside? Has it taken up its abode with unconscious ignorance or with the high-wrought mind?”

She learns why the locals are nervous about serving coffee and how different their fashions are. She comments on the different gardening practices and the beauty of the trees. In contemplating how the Norwegians organize their social hierarchy she makes comparisons to England and infers conclusions about her native country—namely that the way things are is not necessarily how they have to be.

Most importantly, she records what effect the traveling has on her. “When a warm heart has received strong impressions, they are not to be effaced. Emotions become sentiments, and the imagination renders even transient sensations permanent by fondly retracing them. I cannot, without a thrill of delight, recollect views I have seen, which are not to be forgotten, nor looks I have felt in every nerve, which I shall never more meet.”

Here are some goals we can construct from Wollstonecraft’s approach to travel:

1. Try to actively know the place you are in. Observe the customs. Interact with the locals.
2. Learn the whys behind the observation. Explore the history. Ask questions. Try to understand the answers in relation to what you are experiencing now, setting aside any previous assumptions.
3. Notice how the journey is affecting you. What memories surface? What new insights do you have? Are your opinions and beliefs challenged?
4. Don’t plan out every detail. Explore. The map is not the territory.

So how do we put those goals into practice?

Here is where mental models can amplify the travel experience.

We all have a tendency to generalize from small samples. Our own little world becomes, without the infusion of new experiences, our frame for understanding the entire world. Travel broadens your sample set. You start to really understand the universals of the human condition versus the particulars of the area you occupy.

Travel is a great way to counter confirmation bias. Chances are, people in a different country will think differently than you. Interactions won’t reinforce your feedback loop. You will be exposed to new ideas and ways of approaching life that can remind you of the options you have when you go back home.

You can apply the power of algebraic equivalence. In algebra, as we solve abstractions such as x + y = 8, we learn that values can be equal without looking exactly the same. When you explore other cultures and ways of living, you see that there are many definitions of a good life and many ways to be happy. You begin to understand that equality of experience is different from sameness of experience. Not everyone wants what you want. This diversity in how we manifest our goals and desires accounts for differences in everything from personal philosophy to product markets.

The distance from your regular life can give you perspective. Using the terms of Galilean relativity, you get to be the fish instead of the scientist. The lens of travel can help you untangle problems back at home in many ways. The distance, both physical and psychological, also gives you the opportunity to observe yourself in your regular life without the day-to-day pressures clouding your judgment.

Try these specific tips to apply this mental models approach to travel:

1. Keep a travel journal. It doesn’t have to be complicated. Travel is full of idle moments like waiting for transportation, or museum-feet recovery at the end of the day. Reflect and capture.
2. Encourage serendipity in your experiences. Give yourself the chance to experience the unexpected. Over-planning reinforces your current biases. You can’t possibly know the best of a place before you get there.
3. Be deliberate in setting your goal. Go somewhere with the intent of gaining something out of that experience. Don’t try to recreate your life at home, with the same restaurants and television shows.
4. Be open to growth. Travel is an opportunity to choose to be different. Anticipate that you might add to the construct that is “you” when you travel. Embrace the additions to your identity so that you have new resources to draw on.

Through considering mental models and staying actively engaged, travel can jolt you awake, and show you the world in a different light.

The post A Wandering Mind: How Travel Can Change the Way You Think appeared first on Farnam Street.

***

Just a few days ago, I saw a three-year-old wandering around at 10:30 at night and wondered if he was lost or jet-lagged. The parent came over and explained that they believed in children setting their own sleep schedule.

Interesting.

The problem with this approach is that it may work, or it may not. It may work for your oldest, but not your youngest. And therein lies the problem with the majority of the parenting advice available. It’s all tactics, no principles.

Few topics provoke more unsolicited advice than parenting. The problem is, no matter how good the advice, it might not work for your child. Parenting is the ultimate “the map is not the territory“ situation. There are so many maps out there, and often when we try to use them to navigate the territory that is each individual child, we end up lost and confused. As in other situations, when the map doesn’t match the territory, better to get rid of the map and pay attention to what you are experiencing on the ground. The territory is the reality.

We’ve all dealt with the seemingly illogical behavior of children. Take trying to get your child to sleep through the night—often the first, and most important, challenge. Do you sleep beside them and slowly work your way out of the room? Do you let them “cry it out?” Do you put them in your bed? Do you feed them on demand, or not until morning? Soft music or no music? The options are endless, and each of them has a decently researched book to back it up.

When any subsequent children come along, the problem is often exacerbated. You stick to what worked the first time, because it worked, but this little one is different. Now you’re in a battle of wills, and it’s hard to change your tactics at 3:00 a.m. Parenting is often a rinse and repeat of this scenario: ideas you have about how it should be, combined with what experience is telling you that it is, overlaid with too many options and chronic exhaustion.

This is where mental models can help. As in any other area of your life, developing some principles or models that help you see how the world works will give you options for relevant and useful solutions. Mental models are amazing tools that can be applied across our lives. Here are five principle-based models you can apply to almost any family, situation, or child. These are ones I use often, but don’t let this limit you—so many more apply!

1. Adaptation

Adaptation is a concept from evolutionary biology. It describes the development of genetic traits that are successful relative to their performance in a specific environment—that is, relative to organisms’ survival in the face of competitive pressures. As Geerat Vermeij explains in Nature: An Economic History, “Adaptation is as good as it has to be; it need not be the best that could be designed. Adaptation depends on context.”

In terms of parenting, this is a big one: the model we can use to stop criticizing ourselves for our inevitable parenting mistakes, to get out of the no-point comparisons with our peers, and to give us the freedom to make changes depending on the situation we find ourselves in.

Species adapt. It is a central feature of the theory of evolution—the ability of a species to survive and thrive in the face of changing environmental conditions. So why not apply this basic biological idea to parenting? Too often we see changing as a weakness. We’re certain that if we aren’t absolutely consistent with our children, they will grow up to be entitled underachievers or something. Or we put pressure on ourselves to be perfect, and strive for an ideal that requires an insane amount of work and sacrifice that may actually be detrimental to our overall success.

We can get out of this type of thinking if we reframe ‘changing’ as ‘adapting’. It’s okay to have different rules in the home versus a public space. I am always super grateful when a parent pacifies a screaming child with a cookie, especially on an airplane or in a restaurant. They probably don’t use the same strategy at home, but they adapt to the different environment. It’s also okay to have two children in soccer, and the third in music. Adapting to their interests will offer a much better return of investment on all those lessons.

No doubt your underlying goals for your children are consistent, like the desire of an individual to survive. How you meet those goals is where the adaptability comes in. Give yourself the freedom to respond to the individual characteristics of your children—and the specific needs of the moment—by trying different behaviors to see what works. And, just as with adaptation in the biological sense, you only need to be as good as you have to be to get the outcomes that are important to you, not be the best parent that ever was.

2. Velocity

There is a difference between speed and velocity. With speed you move, but with velocity you move somewhere. You have direction.

As many have said of parenting, the days are long but the years are short. It’s hard to be focusing on your direction when homework needs to be done and dinner needs to get made before one child goes off in the carpool to soccer while you rush the other one to art class. Every day begins at a dead run and ends with you collapsing into bed only to go through it all again tomorrow. Between their activities and social lives, and your need to work and have time for yourself, there is no doubt that you move with considerable speed throughout your day.

But it’s useful to sometimes ask, ‘Where am I going?’ Take a moment to make sure it’s not all speed and no direction.

When it comes to time with your kids, what does the goal state look like? How do you move in that direction? If you are just speeding without moving then you have no frame of reference for your choices. You might ask, did I spend enough time with them today? But ten minutes or two hours isn’t going to impact your velocity if you don’t know where you are headed.

When you factor in a goal of movement, it helps you decide what to do when you have time with them. What is it you want out of it? What kind of memories do you want them to have? What kind of parent do you want to be and what kind of children do you want to raise? The answers are different for everyone, but knowing the direction you wish to go helps you evaluate the decisions you make. And it might have the added benefit of cutting out some unnecessary activity and slowing you down.

3. Algebraic Equivalence

“He got more pancakes than I did!” Complaints about fairness are common among siblings. They watch each other like hawks, counting everything from presents to hugs to make sure everyone gets the same. What can you do? You can drive yourself mad running out to buy an extra whatever, or you can teach your children the difference between ‘same’ and ‘equal’.

If you haven’t solved for x in a while, it doesn’t really matter. In algebra, symbols are used to represent unknown numbers that can be solved for given other relevant information. The general point about algebraic equivalence is that it teaches us that two things need not be the same in order to be equal.

For example, x + y = 5. Here are some of the options for the values of x and y:

3 + 2

4 + 1

2.5 + 2.5

1.8 + 3.2

And those are just the simple ones. What is useful is this idea of abstracting to see what the full scope of possibilities are. Then you can demonstrate that what is on each side of those little parallel lines doesn’t have to look the same to have equal value. When it comes to the pancakes, it’s better to focus on an equal feeling of fullness than the number of pancakes on the plate.

In a deeper way, algebraic equivalence helps us deal with one accusation that all parents get at one time or another: “You love my sibling more than me.” It’s not true, but our default usually is to say, “No, I love you both the same.” This can be confusing for children, because, after all, they are not the same as their sibling, and you likely interact with them differently, so how can the love be the same?

Using algebraic equivalence as a model shifts it. You can respond instead that you love them both equally. Even though what’s on either side of the equation is different, it is equal. Swinging the younger child up in the air is equivalent to asking the older one about her school project. Appreciating one’s sense of humor is equivalent to respecting the other’s organizational abilities. They may be different, but the love is equal.

4. Seizing the Middle

In chess, the middle is the key territory to hold. As explained on Wikipedia: “The center is the most important part of the chessboard, as pieces from the center can easily move to either flank with great speed. However, amateurs often prefer to concentrate on the king’s side of the board. This is an incorrect mindset.”

In parenting, seizing the middle means you must forget trying to control every single move. It’s impossible anyway. Instead, focus on trying to control what I think of as the middle territory. I don’t mind losing a few battles on the fringes, if I’m holding my ground in the area that will allow me to respond quickly to problems.

The other night my son and I got into perhaps our eighth fight of the week on the state of his room. The continual explosion makes it hard to walk in there, plus he loses things all the time, which is an endless source of frustration to both of us. I’ve explained that I hate buying replacements only to have them turn up in the morass months later.

So I got cranky and got on his case again, and he felt bad and cried again. When I went to the kitchen to find some calm, I realized that my strategy was all wrong. I was focused on the pawn in the far column of the chess board instead of what the pieces were doing right in front of me.

My thinking then went like this: what is the territory I want to be present in? Continuing the way I was would lead to a clean room, maybe. But by focusing on this flank I was sacrificing control of the middle. Eventually he was going to tune me out because no one wants to feel bad about their shortcomings every day. Is it worth saving a pawn if it leaves your queen vulnerable?

The middle territory with our kids is mutual respect and trust. If I want my son to come to me for help when life gets really complicated, which I do, then I need to focus on behaviors that will allow me to have that strategic influence throughout my relationship with him. Making him feel like crap every day, because his shirts are mixed in with his pants or because of all the Pokemon cards are on the floor, isn’t going to cut it. Make no mistake, seizing the middle is not about throwing out all the rules. This is about knowing which battles to fight, so you can keep the middle territory of the trust and respect of your child.

5. Inversion

Sometimes it’s not about providing solutions, but removing obstacles. Sociologist Kurt Lewin observes in his work on force field analysis^[1] that reaching any goal has two components: augmenting the forces for, and removing the forces against. When it comes to parenting, we need to ask ourselves not only what we could be doing more of, but also what we could be doing less of.

When my friend was going on month number nine of her baby waking up four times a night, she felt at her wits’ end. Out of desperation, she decided to invert the problem. She had been trying different techniques and strategies, thinking that there was something she wasn’t doing right. When nothing seemed to be working, she stopped trying to add elements like new tactics, and changed her strategy. She looked instead for obstacles to remove. Was there anything preventing the baby from sleeping through the night?

The first night she made it darker. No effect. The second night she made it warmer. Her son has slept through the night ever since. It wasn’t her parenting skills or the adherence to a particular sleep philosophy that was causing him to wake up so often. Her baby was cold. Once she removed that obstacle with a space heater the problem was resolved.

We do this all the time, trying to fix problem by throwing new parenting philosophies at the situation. What can I do better? More time, more money, more lessons, more stuff. But it can be equally valuable to look for what you could be doing less of. In so doing, you may enrich your relationships with your children immeasurably.

Parenting is inherently complex: the territory changes almost overnight. Different environments, different children—figuring out how to raise your kids plays out against a backdrop of some fast-paced evolution. Some tactics are great, and once in a while a technique fits the situation perfectly. But when your tactics fail, or your experience seems to provide no obvious direction, a principle-based mental models approach to parenting can give you the insight to find solutions as you go.

^[1] Lewin’s original work on force field analysis can be found in Lewin, Kurt. Field Theory in Social Science. New York: Harper and Row, 1951.

We created a whole course around mental models and parenting. Check it out.

The post 5 Mental Models to Remove (Some of) the Confusion from Parenting appeared first on Farnam Street.

Probabilistic thinking leads you to ask yourself, how confident am I in this prediction? What information would impact this confidence?

Bayes’ Theorem

Bayes’ theorem is an accessible way of integrating probability thinking into our lives.

Thomas Bayes was an English minister in the 18th century, whose most famous work, “An Essay toward Solving a Problem in the Doctrine of Chances,” was brought to the attention of the Royal Society in 1763—two years after his death—by his friend Richard Price. The essay did not contain the theorem as we now know it but had the seeds of the idea. It looked at how to adjust our estimates of probabilities when encountering new data that influence a situation. Later development by French scholar Pierre-Simon Laplace and others helped codify the theorem and develop it into a useful tool for thinking.

Knowing the exact math of probability calculations is not the key to understanding Bayesian thinking. More critical is your ability and desire to assign probabilities of truth and accuracy to anything you think you know, and then being willing to update those probabilities when new information comes in.

Here is a short example, found in Investing: The Last Liberal Art, of how it works:

Let’s imagine that you and a friend have spent the afternoon playing your favorite board game, and now, at the end of the game, you are chatting about this and that. Something your friend says leads you to make a friendly wager: that with one roll of the die from the game, you will get a 6. Straight odds are one in six, a 16 percent probability. But then suppose your friend rolls the die, quickly covers it with her hand, and takes a peek. “I can tell you this much,” she says; “it’s an even number.” Now you have new information and your odds change dramatically to one in three, a 33 percent probability. While you are considering whether to change your bet, your friend teasingly adds: “And it’s not a 4.” With this additional bit of information, your odds have changed again, to one in two, a 50 percent probability. With this very simple example, you have performed a Bayesian analysis. Each new piece of information affected the original probability, and that is Bayesian [updating].

Both Nate Silver and Eliezer Yudkowsky have written about Bayes’ theorem in the context of medical testing, specifically mammograms. Imagine you live in a country with 100 million women under 40. Past trends have revealed that there is a 1.4% chance of a woman under 40 in this country getting breast cancer—so roughly 1.4 million women.

Mammograms will detect breast cancer 75% of the time. They will give out false positives—say a woman has breast cancer when she actually doesn’t—about 10% of the time. At first, you might focus just on the mammogram numbers and think that a 75% success rate means that a positive is bad news. Let’s do the math.

If all the women under 40 get mammograms, then the false positive rate will give 10 million women under 40 the news that they have breast cancer. But because you know the first statistic, that only 1.4 women under 40 actually get breast cancer, you know that 8.6 million of the women who tested positive are not actually going to have breast cancer!

That’s a lot of needless worrying, which leads to a lot of needless medical care. To remedy this poor understanding and make better decisions about using mammograms, we absolutely must consider prior knowledge when we look at the results, and try to update our beliefs with that knowledge in mind.

Weigh the Evidence

Often we ignore prior information, simply called “priors” in Bayesian-speak. We can blame this habit in part on the availability heuristic—we focus on what’s readily available. In this case, we focus on the newest information, and the bigger picture gets lost. We fail to adjust the probability of old information to reflect what we have learned.

The big idea behind Bayes’ theorem is that we must continuously update our probability estimates on an as-needed basis.

In their book The Signal and the Noise, Nate Silver and Allen Lane give a contemporary example, reminding us that new information is often most useful when we put it in the larger context of what we already know:

Bayes’ theorem is an important reality check on our efforts to forecast the future. How, for instance, should we reconcile a large body of theory and evidence predicting global warming with the fact that there has been no warming trend over the last decade or so? Skeptics react with glee, while true believers dismiss the new information.

A better response is to use Bayes’ theorem: the lack of recent warming is evidence against recent global warming predictions, but it is weak evidence. This is because there is enough variability in global temperatures to make such an outcome unsurprising. The new information should reduce our confidence in our models of global warming—but only a little.

The same approach can be used in anything from an economic forecast to a hand of poker, and while Bayes’ theorem can be a formal affair, Bayesian reasoning also works as a rule of thumb. We tend to either dismiss new evidence, or embrace it as though nothing else matters. Bayesians try to weigh both the old hypothesis and the new evidence in a sensible way.

Limitations of the Bayesian

Don’t walk away thinking the Bayesian approach will enable you to predict everything! In addition to seeing the world as an ever-shifting array of probabilities, we must also remember the limitations of inductive reasoning.

A high probability of something being true is not the same as saying it is true. Consider this example from Bertrand Russell’s The Problems of Philosophy:

A horse which has been often driven along a certain road resists the attempt to drive him in a different direction. Domestic animals expect food when they see the person who usually feeds them. We know that all these rather crude expectations of uniformity are liable to be misleading. The man who has fed the chicken every day throughout its life at last wrings its neck instead, showing that more refined views as to the uniformity of nature would have been useful to the chicken.

In the final analysis, though, picking up Bayesian reasoning can change your life, as observed in this Big Think video by Julia Galef of the Center for Applied Rationality:

After you’ve been steeped in Bayes’ rule for a little while, it starts to produce some fundamental changes to your thinking. For example, you become much more aware that your beliefs are grayscale. They’re not black and white and that you have levels of confidence in your beliefs about how the world works that are less than 100 percent but greater than zero percent and even more importantly as you go through the world and encounter new ideas and new evidence, that level of confidence fluctuates, as you encounter evidence for and against your beliefs.

So much of making better decisions hinges on dealing with uncertainty. The most common thing holding people back from the right answer is holding on to previous beliefs. Instead of instinctively rejecting new information, take in what comes your way through a system of evaluating probabilities.

Bayes’ Theorem is part of the Farnam Street latticework of mental models. Still Curious? Read Bayes and Deadweight: Using Statistics to Eject the Deadweight From Your Life next. 

The post Predicting the Future with Bayes’ Theorem appeared first on Farnam Street.

***

The purpose of a thought experiment is to encourage speculation, logical thinking and to change paradigms. Thought experiments push us outside our comfort zone by forcing us to confront questions we cannot answer with ease. They demonstrate gaps in our knowledge and help us recognize the limits of what can be known.

“All truly wise thoughts have been thought already thousands of times; but to make them truly ours, we must think them over again honestly, until they take root in our personal experience.”

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Famous thought experiments

Thought experiments have a rich and complex history, stretching back to the ancient Greeks and Romans.

An early example of a thought experiment is Zeno’s narrative of Achilles and the tortoise, dating to around 430 BC. Zeno’s thought experiments aimed to deduce first principles through the elimination of untrue concepts.

In one instance, the Greek philosopher used it to ‘prove’ motion is an illusion. Known as the dichotomy paradox, it involves Achilles racing a tortoise. Out of generosity, Achilles gives the tortoise a 100m head start. Once Achilles begins running, he soon catches up on the head start. However, by that point, the tortoise has moved another 10m. By the time he catches up again, the tortoise will have moved further. Zeno claimed Achilles could never win the race as the distance between the pair would constantly increase.

Descartes conducted a thought experiment, doubting the existence of everything he could until there was nothing left he could doubt.  Descartes could doubt everything except for the fact that he could doubt. His process left us with the philosophical thought experiment of ‘a brain in a vat’.

In the 17th century, Galileo used thought experiments to affirm his theories. One example is his thought experiment involving two balls (one heavy, one light) which are dropped from the Leaning Tower of Pisa. Prior philosophers had theorized the heavy ball would land first. Galileo claimed this was untrue, as mass does not influence acceleration.

According to Galileo’s early biography (written in 1654), he dropped two objects from the Leaning Tower of Pisa to disprove the gravitational mass relation hypothesis. Both landed at the same time, ushering in a new understanding of gravity. It is unknown if Galileo performed the experiment itself, so it is regarded as a thought experiment, not a physical one.

In 1814, Pierre Laplace explored determinism through ‘Laplace’s demon.’ This is a theoretical ‘demon’ which has an acute awareness of the location and movement of every single particle in existence. Would Laplace’s demon know the future? If the answer is yes, the universe must be linear and deterministic. If no, the universe is nonlinear and free will exists.

In 1897, the German term ‘Gedankenexperiment’ passed into English and a cohesive picture of how thought experiments are used worldwide began to form.

Albert Einstein used thought experiments for some of his most important discoveries. The most famous of his thought experiments was on a beam of light, which was made into a brilliant children’s book. What would happen if you could catch up to a beam of light as it moved he asked himself? The answers led him down a different path toward time, which led to the special theory of relativity.

Natural tendencies

In On Thought Experiments, 19th-century Philosopher and physicist Ernst Mach writes that curiosity is an inherent human quality. Babies test the world around them and learn the principle of cause and effect. With time, our exploration of the world becomes more and more in depth. We reach a point where we can no longer experiment through our hands alone. At that point, we move into the realm of thought experiments.

Thought experiments are a structured manifestation of our natural curiosity about the world.

Mach writes:

Mach compares thought experiments to the plans and images we form in our minds before commencing an endeavor. We all do this — rehearsing a conversation before having it, planning a piece of work before starting it, figuring out every detail of a meal before cooking it. Mach views this as an integral part of our ability to engage in complex tasks and to innovate creatively.

According to Mach, the results of some thought experiments can be so certain that it is unnecessary to physically perform it. Regardless of the accuracy of the result, the desired purpose has been achieved.

“It can be seen that the basic method of the thought experiment is just like that of a physical experiment, namely, the method of variation. By varying the circumstances (continuously, if possible) the range of validity of an idea (expectation) related to these circumstances is increased.”

Ernst Mach

Thought experiments in philosophy

Thoughts experiments have been an integral part of philosophy since ancient times. This is in part due to philosophical hypotheses often being subjective and impossible to prove through empirical evidence.

Philosophers use thought experiments to convey theories in an accessible manner. With the aim of illustrating a particular concept (such as free will or mortality), philosophers explore imagined scenarios. The goal is not to uncover a ‘correct’ answer, but to spark new ideas.

An early example of a philosophical thought experiment is Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, which centers around a dialogue between Socrates and Glaucon (Plato’s brother.)

A group of people are born and live within a dark cave. Having spent their entire lives seeing nothing but shadows on the wall, they lack a conception of the world outside. Knowing nothing different, they do not even wish to leave the cave. At some point, they are led outside and see a world consisting of much more than shadows.

Plato used this thought experiment to illustrate the incomplete view of reality most of us have. Only by learning philosophy, Plato claimed, can we see more than shadows.

Upon leaving the cave, the people realize the outside world is far more interesting and fulfilling. If a solitary person left, they would want others to do the same. However, if they return to the cave, their old life will seem unsatisfactory. This discomfort would become misplaced, leading them to resent the outside world. Plato used this to convey his (almost compulsively) deep appreciation for the power of educating ourselves. To take up the mantle of your own education and begin seeking to understand the world is the first step on the way out of the cave.

Moving from caves to insects, here’s a thought experiment from 20th-century philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein.

Imagine a world where each person has a beetle in a box. In this world, the only time anyone can see a beetle is when they look in their own box. As a consequence, the conception of a beetle each individual has is based on their own. It could be that everyone has something different, or that the boxes are empty, or even that the contents are amorphous.

Wittgenstein uses the ‘Beetle in a Box’ thought experiment to convey his work on the subjective nature of pain. We can each only know what pain is to us, and we cannot feel another person’s agony. If people in the hypothetical world were to have a discussion on the topic of beetles, each would only be able to share their individual perspective. The conversation would have little purpose because each person can only convey what they see as a beetle. In the same way, it is useless for us to describe our pain using analogies (‘it feels like a red hot poker is stabbing me in the back’) or scales (‘the pain is 7/10.’)

Thought experiments in science

Although empirical evidence is usually necessary for science, thought experiments may be used to develop a hypothesis or to prepare for experimentation. Some hypotheses cannot be tested (e.g, string theory) – at least, not given our current capabilities.Theoretical scientists may turn to thought experiments to develop a provisional answer, often informed by Occam’s razor.

In a paper entitled Thought Experimentation of Presocratic Philosophy, Nicholas Rescher writes:

In a paper entitled Thought Experiments in Scientific Reasoning, Andrew D. Irvine explains that thought experiments are a key part of science. They are in the same realm as physical experiments. Thought experiments require all assumptions to be supported by empirical evidence. The context must be believable, and it must provide useful answers to complex questions. A thought experiment must have the potential to be falsified.

Irvine writes:

In Do All Rational Folks Think As We Do? Barbara D. Massey writes:

“We live not only in a world of thoughts, but also in a world of things. Words without experience are meaningless.”

Vladimir Nabokov

Biologists use thought experiments, often of the counterfactual variety. In particular, evolutionary biologists question why organisms exist as they do today. For example, why are sheep not green? As surreal as the question is, it is a valid one. A green sheep would be better camouflaged from predators. Another thought experiment involves asking: why don’t organisms (aside from certain bacteria) have wheels? Again, the question is surreal but is still a serious one. We know from our vehicles that wheels are more efficient for moving at speed than legs, so why do they not naturally exist beyond the microscopic level?

Psychology and Ethics — The Trolley Problem

Picture the scene. You are a lone passerby in a street where a tram is running along a track. The driver has lost control of it. If the tram continues along its current path, the five passengers will die in the ensuing crash. You notice a switch which would allow the tram to move to a different track, where a man is standing. The collision would kill him but would save the five passengers. Do you press the switch?

The Trolley Problem was first suggested by philosopher Phillipa Foot, and further considered extensively by philosopher Judith Jarvis Thompson. Psychologists and ethicists have also discussed the trolley problem at length, often using it in research. It raises many questions, such as:

• Is a casual observer required to intervene?
• Is there a measurable value to human life? I.e. is one life less valuable than five?
• How would the situation differ if the observer were required to actively push a man onto the tracks rather than pressing the switch?
• What if the man being pushed were a ‘villain’? Or a loved one of the observer? How would this change the ethical implications?
• Can an observer make this choice without the consent of the people involved?

Research has shown most people are far more willing to press a switch than to push someone onto the tracks. This changes if the man is a ‘villain’- people are then far more willing to push him. Likewise, they are reluctant if the person being pushed is a loved one.

The trolley problem is theoretical, but it does have real world implications. As we move towards autonomous vehicles, there may be real life instances of similar situations. Vehicles may be required to make utilitarian choices – such as swerving into a ditch and killing the driver to avoid a group of children.

The Infinite Monkey Theorem and Mathematics

“Ford!” he said, “there’s an infinite number of monkeys outside who want to talk to us about this script for Hamlet they’ve worked out.”

Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

In Fooled By Randomness, Nassim Taleb writes:

The infinite monkey theorem is intended to illustrate the idea that any issue can be solved through enough random input, in the manner a drunk person arriving home will eventually manage to fit their key in the lock even if they do it without much finesse. It also represents the nature of probability and the idea that any scenario is workable, given enough time and resources.

Still Curious? To learn more about thought experiments and other mental models, check out The Great Mental Models.

The post Thought Experiment: How Einstein Solved Difficult Problems appeared first on Farnam Street.

When we want to learn how to make rational decisions under pressure, it can be helpful to look at the techniques people use in extreme situations. If they work in the most drastic scenarios, they have a good chance of being effective in more typical ones.

Because they’re developed and tested in the relentless laboratory of conflict, military mental models have practical applications far beyond their original context. If they didn’t work, they would be quickly replaced by alternatives. Military leaders and strategists invest a great deal of time and resources into developing decision-making processes.

One such military mental model is the OODA Loop. Developed by strategist and U.S. Air Force Colonel John Boyd, the OODA Loop is a practical concept designed to function as the foundation of rational thinking in confusing or chaotic situations. “OODA” stands for “Observe, Orient, Decide, and Act.”

“What is strategy? A mental tapestry of changing intentions for harmonizing and focusing our efforts as a basis for realizing some aim or purpose in an unfolding and often unforeseen world of many bewildering events and many contending interests.” —John Boyd

***

The Four parts of the OODA Loop

Let’s break down the four parts of the OODA Loop and see how they fit together.

Don’t forget the “Loop” part. The process is intended to be repeated again and again until a conflict finishes. Each repetition provides more information to inform the next one, making it a feedback loop.

1: Observe

Step one is to observe the situation with the aim of building the most accurate and comprehensive picture of it possible.

For example, a fighter pilot might consider the following factors in a broad, fluid way:

• What is immediately affecting me?
• What is affecting my opponent?
• What could affect either of us later on?
• Can I make any predictions?
• How accurate were my prior predictions?

Information alone is insufficient. The observation stage requires converting information into an overall picture with overarching meaning that places it in context. A particularly vital skill is the capacity to identify which information is just noise and irrelevant for the current decision.

If you want to make good decisions, you need to master the art of observing your environment. For a fighter pilot, that involves factors like the weather conditions and what their opponent is doing. In your workplace, that might include factors like regulations, available resources, relationships with other people, and your current state of mind.

To give an example, consider a doctor meeting with a patient in the emergency room for the first time to identify how to treat them. Their first priority is figuring out what information they need to collect, then collecting it. They might check the patient’s records, ask other staff about the admission, ask the patient questions, check vital signs such as blood pressure, and order particular diagnostic tests. Doctors learn to pick up on subtle cues that can be telling of particular conditions, such as a patient’s speech patterns, body language, what they’ve brought with them to the hospital, and even their smell. In some cases, the absence (rather than presence) of certain cues is also important. At the same time, a doctor needs to discard irrelevant information, then put all the pieces together before they can treat the patient.

2: Orient

“Orientation isn’t just a state you’re in; it’s a process. You’re always orienting.” —John Boyd

The second stage of the OODA Loop, orient, is less intuitive than the other steps. However, it’s worth taking the effort to understand it rather than skipping it. Boyd referred to it as the schwerpunkt, meaning “the main emphasis” in German.

To orient yourself is to recognize any barriers that might interfere with the other parts of the OODA Loop.

Orientation means connecting yourself with reality and seeing the world as it really is, as free as possible from the influence of cognitive biases and shortcuts. You can give yourself an edge over the competition by making sure you always orient before making a decision, instead of just jumping in.

Boyd maintained that properly orienting yourself can be enough to overcome an initial disadvantage, such as fewer resources or less information, to outsmart an opponent. He identified the following four main barriers that impede our view of objective information:

1. Our cultural traditions – we don’t realize how much of what we consider universal behavior is actually culturally prescribed
2. Our genetic heritage – we all have certain constraints
3. Our ability to analyze and synthesize – if we haven’t practiced and developed our thinking skills, we tend to fall back on old habits
4. The influx of new information – it is hard to make sense of observations when the situation keeps changing

Prior to Charlie Munger’s popularization of the concept of building a toolbox of mental models, Boyd advocated a similar approach for pilots to help them better navigate the orient stage of the OODA Loop. He recommended a process of “deductive destruction”: paying attention to your own assumptions and biases, then finding fundamental mental models to replace them.

Similar to using a decision journal, deductive destruction ensures you always learn from past mistakes and don’t keep on repeating them. In one talk, Boyd employed a brilliant metaphor for developing a latticework of mental models. He compared it to building a snowmobile, a vehicle comprising elements of several different devices, such as the caterpillar treads of a tank, skis, the outboard motor of a boat, and the handlebars of a bike.

Individually, each of these items isn’t enough to move you around. But combined they create a functional vehicle. As Boyd put it:

A loser is someone (individual or group) who cannot build snowmobiles when facing uncertainty and unpredictable change; whereas a winner is someone (individual or group) who can build snowmobiles, and employ them in an appropriate fashion, when facing uncertainty and unpredictable change.

To orient yourself, you have to build a metaphorical snowmobile by combining practical concepts from different disciplines. (For more on mental models, we literally wrote the book on them.) Although Boyd is regarded as a military strategist, he didn’t confine himself to any particular discipline. His theories encompass ideas drawn from various disciplines, including mathematical logic, biology, psychology, thermodynamics, game theory, anthropology, and physics. Boyd described his approach as a “scheme of pulling things apart (analysis) and putting them back together (synthesis) in new combinations to find how apparently unrelated ideas and actions can be related to one another.”

3: Decide

There are no surprises here. The previous two steps provide the groundwork you need to make an informed decision. If there are multiple options at hand, you need to use your observation and orientation to select one.

Boyd cautioned against first-conclusion bias, explaining that we cannot keep making the same decision again and again. This part of the loop needs to be flexible and open to Bayesian updating. In some of his notes, Boyd described this step as the hypothesis stage. The implication is that we should test the decisions we make at this point in the loop, spotting their flaws and including any issues in future observation stages

4: Act

There’s a difference between making decisions and enacting decisions. Once you make up your mind, it’s time to take action.

By taking action, you test your decision out. The results will hopefully indicate whether it was a good one or not, providing information for when you cycle back to the first part of the OODA Loop and begin observing anew.

***

Why the OODA Loop works

“The ability to operate at a faster tempo or rhythm than an adversary enables one to fold the adversary back inside himself so that he can neither appreciate nor keep up with what is going on. He will become disoriented and confused.” —John Boyd

We’ve identified three key benefits of using the OODA Loop.

1: Deliberate speed

As we’ve established, fighter pilots have to make many decisions in fast succession. They don’t have time to list pros and cons or to consider every available avenue. Once the OODA Loop becomes part of their mental toolboxes, they should be able to cycle through it in a matter of seconds.

Speed is a crucial element of military decision-making. Using the OODA Loop in everyday life, we probably have a little more time than a fighter pilot would. But Boyd emphasized the value of being decisive, taking initiative, and staying autonomous. These are universal assets and apply to many situations.

2: Comfort with uncertainty

There’s no such thing as total certainty. If you’re making a decision at all, it’s because something is uncertain. But uncertainty does not always have to equate to risk.

A fighter pilot is in a precarious situation, one in which where there will be gaps in their knowledge. They cannot read the mind of the opponent and might have incomplete information about the weather conditions and surrounding environment. They can, however, take into account key factors such as the opponent’s type of airplane and what their maneuvers reveal about their intentions and level of training. If the opponent uses an unexpected strategy, is equipped with a new type of weapon or airplane, or behaves in an irrational way, the pilot must accept the accompanying uncertainty. However, Boyd belabored the point that uncertainty is irrelevant if we have the right filters in place.

If we can’t cope with uncertainty, we end up stuck in the observation stage. This sometimes happens when we know we need to make a decision, but we’re scared of getting it wrong. So we keep on reading books and articles, asking people for advice, listening to podcasts, and so on.

Acting under uncertainty is unavoidable. If we do have the right filters, we can factor uncertainty into the observation stage. We can leave a margin of error. We can recognize the elements that are within our control and those that are not.

In presentations, Boyd referred to three key principles to support his ideas: Gödel’s theorems, Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, and the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Of course, we’re using these principles in a different way from their initial purpose and in a simplified, non-literal form.

Gödel’s theorems indicate any mental model we have of reality will omit certain information and that Bayesian updating must be used to bring it in line with reality. For fighter pilots, their understanding of what is going on during a battle will always have gaps. Identifying this fundamental uncertainty gives it less power over us.

The second concept Boyd referred to is Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle. In its simplest form, this principle describes the limit of the precision with which pairs of physical properties can be understood. We cannot know the position and the velocity of a body at the same time. We can know either its location or its speed, but not both.

Boyd moved the concept of the Uncertainty Principle from particles to planes. If a pilot focuses too hard on where an enemy plane is, they will lose track of where it is going and vice versa. Trying harder to track the two variables will actually lead to more inaccuracy!

Finally, Boyd made use of the Second Law of Thermodynamics. In a closed system, entropy always increases and everything moves towards chaos. Energy spreads out and becomes disorganized.

Although Boyd’s notes do not specify the exact applications, his inference appears to be that a fighter pilot must be an open system or they will fail. They must draw “energy” (information) from outside themselves or the situation will become chaotic. They should also aim to cut their opponent off, forcing them to become a closed system.

3: Unpredictability

When you act fast enough, other people view you as unpredictable. They can’t figure out the logic behind your decisions.

Boyd recommended making unpredictable changes in speed and direction, writing, “We should operate at a faster tempo than our adversaries or inside our adversaries[’] time scales.…Such activity will make us appear ambiguous (non predictable) [and] thereby generate confusion and disorder among our adversaries.” He even helped design planes that were better equipped to make those unpredictable changes.

For the same reason that you can’t run the same play seventy times in a football game, rigid military strategies often become useless after a few uses, or even one iteration, as opponents learn to recognize and counter them. The OODA Loop can be endlessly used because it is a formless strategy, unconnected to any particular maneuvers.

We know that Boyd was influenced by Sun Tzu (he owned seven thoroughly annotated copies of The Art of War) and drew many ideas from the ancient strategist. Sun Tzu depicts war as a game of deception where the best strategy is that which an opponent cannot preempt.

***

Forty Second Boyd

“Let your plans be dark and impenetrable as night, and when you move, fall like a thunderbolt.” —Sun Tzu

Boyd was no armchair strategist. He developed his ideas through extensive experience as a fighter pilot. His nickname “Forty Second Boyd” speaks to his expertise: Boyd could win any aerial battle in less than forty seconds.

In a tribute written after Boyd’s death, General C.C. Krulak described him as “a towering intellect who made unsurpassed contributions to the American art of war. Indeed, he was one of the central architects of the reform of military thought.…From John Boyd we learned about competitive decision-making on the battlefield—compressing time, using time as an ally.”

Reflecting Robert Greene’s maxim that everything is material, Boyd spent his career observing people and organizations. How do they adapt to changeable environments in conflicts, business, and other situations?

Over time, he deduced that these situations are characterized by uncertainty. Dogmatic, rigid theories are unsuitable for chaotic situations. Rather than trying to rise through the military ranks, Boyd focused on using his position as a colonel to compose a theory of the universal logic of war.

Boyd was known to ask his mentees the poignant question, “Do you want to be someone, or do you want to do something?” In his own life, he certainly focused on the latter path and, as a result, left us ideas with tangible value. The OODA Loop is just one of many.

Boyd developed the OODA Loop with fighter pilots in mind, but like all good mental models, it works in other fields beyond combat. It’s used in intelligence agencies. It’s used by lawyers, doctors, businesspeople, politicians, law enforcement, marketers, athletes, coaches, and more.

If you have to work fast, you might want to learn a thing or two from fighter pilots. For them, a split-second of hesitation can cost them their lives. As anyone who has ever watched Top Gun knows, pilots have a lot of decisions and processes to juggle when they’re in dogfights (close-range aerial battles). Pilots move at high speeds and need to avoid enemies while tracking them and keeping a contextual knowledge of objectives, terrains, fuel, and other key variables.

And as any pilot who has been in one will tell you, dogfights are nasty. No one wants them to last longer than necessary because every second increases the risk of something going wrong. Pilots have to rely on their decision-making skills—they can’t just follow a schedule or to-do list to know what to do.

***

Applying the OODA Loop

“We can’t just look at our own personal experiences or use the same mental recipes over and over again; we’ve got to look at other disciplines and activities and relate or connect them to what we know from our experiences and the strategic world we live in.” —John Boyd

In sports, there is an adage that carries over to business quite well: “Speed kills.” If you are able to be nimble, assess the ever-changing environment, and adapt quickly, you’ll always carry the advantage over any opponents.

Start applying the OODA Loop to your day-to-day decisions and watch what happens. You’ll start to notice things that you would have been oblivious to before. Before jumping to your first conclusion, you’ll pause to consider your biases, take in additional information, and be more thoughtful of consequences.

As with anything you practice, if you do it right, the more you do it, the better you’ll get. You’ll start making better decisions to your full potential. You’ll see more rapid progress. And as John Boyd would prescribe, you’ll start to do something in your life, and not just be somebody.

***

We hope you’ve enjoyed our three week exploration of perspectives on decision making. We think there is value in juxtaposing different ideas to help us learn. Stay tuned for more topic specific series in the future.

The post The OODA Loop: How Fighter Pilots Make Fast and Accurate Decisions appeared first on Farnam Street.

We’ve all been there: you’re at a job, and you know it’s not for you anymore. You come in drained, you’re not excited on a Monday morning, and you feel like you could be using your time so much better. It’s not the people, and it’s not the organization. It’s the work. It’s become boring, unfulfilling, or redundant, and you know you want to do something different. But what?

Just deciding to change careers doesn’t get you very far because there are more areas to work in than you know about. A big change often involves some retraining. A career shift will impact your personal life. At the end of it all, you want to be happier but know there are no guarantees. How do you find a clear path forward?

No matter how ready you think you are to make a move, career changes are daunting. The stress of leaving what you’re comfortable with to venture into foreign territory stops many people from taking the first step toward something new.

It doesn’t have to be this way.

Using mental models can help you clarify the direction you want to go and plan for how to get there. They are tools that will give you more control over your career and more confidence in your decisions. When you do the work up front by examining your situation through the lens of a few mental models, you set yourself up for fewer regrets and more satisfaction down the road.

***

Get in touch with yourself

Before you can decide which change to make, you need to get in touch with yourself. No change will be the right one if it doesn’t align with what you want to get out of life.

First, do you know where you want to go? Are you moving with direction or just moving? As a mental model, velocity reminds us there is a difference between speed and direction. It’s easy to move fast without getting anywhere. We can stay busy all day without achieving our goals. Without considering our velocity, we run a huge risk of getting sidetracked by things that make us move faster (more money, a title on a business card) without that movement actually leading us where we want to end up.

As the old saying goes, we want to run to something, not from something. When you start articulating your desired direction, you give yourself clear purpose in your career. It will be easier to play the long game because you know that everything you are doing is leading somewhere you want to be.

When it comes to changing careers, there are a lot of options. Using the mental model of velocity will help you focus on and identify the best opportunities.

Once you know where you want to end up, it’s often useful to work backward to where you are now. This is known as inversion. Start at the end and carefully consider the events that get you there in reverse order.

For example, it could be something as simple as waking up happy and excited to work every day. What needs to be true in order for that to be a reality? Are you working from home, having a quiet cup of coffee as you prepare to do some creative work? Are you working on projects aligned with your values? Are you contributing to making the world a better place? Are you in an intense, collaborative team environment?

Doing an inversion exercise helps you identify the elements needed for you to achieve success. Once you identify your requirements, you can use that list to evaluate opportunities that come up.

Inversion will help you recognize critical factors, like finances or the support of your family, that will be necessary to get to where you want to go. If your dream direction requires you to learn a new skill or work at a junior level while you ramp up on the knowledge you’ll need, you might need to live off some savings in the short term. Inversion, combined with velocity, will help you create the foundation you need now to take action when the right time comes.

Finally, the last step before you start evaluating the career environment is taking stock of the skills you already have. Why do you need to do this? So you know what you can repurpose. Here, you’re using the concept of exaptation, which is part of the broader adaptation model in biology. Exaptation refers to traits that evolved for one purpose and then, through natural selection, were used for completely unrelated capabilities. For instance, feathers probably evolved for insulation. It was only much later that they turned out to be useful for flying.

History is littered with examples of technologies or tools invented for one purpose that later became the foundation for something completely different. Did you know that Play-Doh was originally created to clean coal soot off walls? And bubble wrap was originally envisioned as material for shower curtains.

Using this model is partly about getting out of the “functional fixedness” mindset. You want to look at your skills, talents, and knowledge and ask of each one: what else could this be used for?

Too often we fail to realize just how versatile the experience we’ve built up over the years is. We’re great at using forks to eat, but they can also be used to brush hair, dig in a garden, and pin things to walls. Being great at presenting the monthly status update doesn’t mean you’re good at presenting monthly status updates. Rather, it means you can articulate yourself well, parse information for a diverse audience, and build networks to get the right information. Now, what else can those skills be used for?

***

Evaluate the environment

Looking at different careers, we’re usually in a situation where the “map is not the territory.” It’s hard to know how great (or terrible) a job is until you actually do it. We often have two types of maps for the careers we wish we had: maps of the highlights, success stories, and opinions of people who love the work and maps based on how much we love the field or discipline ourselves.

The territory of the day-to-day work of these careers, however, is very different from what those two maps tell us.

In order to determine if a particular career will work for us, we need better maps. For example, the reality of being an actor isn’t just the movies and programs you see them in. It’s audition after audition, with more rejections than roles. It’s intense competition and job insecurity. Being a research scientist at a university isn’t just immersing yourself in a subject you love. It’s grant applications and teaching and navigating the bureaucracy of academia.

In order to build a more comprehensive map of your dream job, do your research on as large a sample size as possible. Talk to people doing the job you want. Talk to people who work in the organization. Talk to the ones that enjoy it. Talk to the ones who quit. Try to get an accurate picture of what the day-to-day is like.

Very few jobs are one-dimensional. They involve things like administrative tasks, networking, project management, and accountability. How much of your day will be spent doing paperwork or updating your coworkers? How much of a connection do you need to maintain with people outside the organization? How many people will you be dependent on? What are they like? And who will you be working for?

It’s not a good idea to become a writer just because you want to tell stories, open a restaurant just because you like to cook, or become a landscape designer just because you enjoy being outside. Those motivations are good places to start—because it’s equally terrible to become a lawyer just because your parents wanted you to. But you can’t stop with what you like. There isn’t a job in the world that’s pleasurable and fulfilling 100% of the time.

You give yourself a much higher chance of being satisfied with your career change if you take the time to learn as much as you can about the territory beforehand.

***

Elements of planning

You know which direction you’re heading in, and you’ve identified a great new career possibility. Now what?

Planning for change is a crucial component of switching careers. Two models, global and local maxima and activation energy, can help us identify what we need to plan.

Global and local maxima refers to the high values in a mathematical function. On a graph, it’s a wavy curve with peaks and valleys. The highest peak in a section is a local maximum. The highest peak across the entire graph is the global maximum. Activation energy comes from chemistry, and is the amount of energy needed to see a reaction through to its conclusion.

One of the things global and local maxima teaches us is that sometimes you have to go down a hill in order to climb up a new one. To move from a local maximum to a higher peak you have to go through a local minimum, a valley. Too often we just want to go higher right away, or at the very least we want to make a lateral move. We perceive going down as taking a step backward.

A common problem is when we tie our self-worth to our salary and therefore reject any opportunities that won’t pay us as much as we’re currently making. The same goes for job titles; no one wants to be a junior anything in their mid-forties. But it’s impossible to get to the next peak if we won’t walk through the valley.

If you look at your career change through the lens of global and local maxima, you will see that steps down can also be steps forward.

Activation energy is another great model to use in the planning phase because it requires you to think about the real effort required for sustained change. You need to plan not just for making a change but also for seeing it through until the new thing has time to take hold.

Do you have enough in the bank to support yourself if you need to retrain or take a pay cut? Do you have the emotional support to help you through the challenges of taking on a brand-new career?

Just like fires don’t start with one match and a giant log, you have to plan for what you need between now and your desired result. What do you need to keep that reaction going so the flame from the match leads to the log catching fire? The same kind of thinking needs to inform your planning. After you’ve taken the first step, what will you need to keep you moving in the direction you want to go?

***

After you’ve done all the work

After getting in touch with yourself, doing all your research, identifying possible paths, and planning for what you need to do to walk them to the end, it can still be hard to make a decision. You’ve uncovered so many nuances and encountered so many ideas that you feel overwhelmed. The reality is, when it comes to career change, there often is no perfect decision. You likely have more than one option, and whatever you choose, there’s going to be a lot of work involved.

One final model you can use is probabilistic thinking. In this particular situation, it can be helpful to use a Bayesian casino.

A Bayesian casino is a thought experiment where you imagine walking up to a casino game, like roulette, and quantifying how much you would bet on any particular outcome.

Let’s say when investigating your career change, you’ve narrowed it down to two options. Which one would you bet on for being the better choice one year later? And how much would you part with? If you’d bet ten dollars on black, then you probably need to take a fresh look at the research you’ve done. Maybe go talk to more people, or broaden your thinking. If you’re willing to put down thousands of dollars on red, that’s very likely the right decision for you.

It’s important in this thought experiment to fully imagine yourself making the bet. Imagine the money in your bank account. Imagine withdrawing it and physically putting it down on the table. How much you’re willing to part with regarding a particular career choice says a lot about how good that choice is likely to be for you.

Probabilistic thinking isn’t a predictor of the future. With any big career move, there are inevitably a lot of unknowns. There are no guarantees that any choice is going to be the right one. The Bayesian casino just helps you quantify your thinking based on the knowledge you have at this moment in time.

As new information comes in, return to the casino and see if your bets change.

***

Conclusion

Career changes are some of the biggest moves we will ever make, but they don’t have to be daunting. Using mental models helps us find both the direction we want to go and a path we can take to get there. The result is a change that aligns with the person we are, as well as the person we want to be.

The post Mental Models for Career Changes appeared first on Farnam Street.

Following a recipe might get you the results you want, but it doesn’t teach you anything about how cooking works at the foundational level. Or what to do when something goes wrong. Or how to come up with your own recipes when you open the fridge on a Wednesday night and realize you forgot to go grocery shopping. Or how to adapt recipes for your own dietary needs.

Adhering to recipes will only get you so far, and it certainly won’t result in you coming up with anything new or creative.

People who know how to cook understand the basic principles that make food taste, look, and smell good. They have confidence in troubleshooting and solving problems as they go—or adjusting to unexpected outcomes. They can glance at an almost barren kitchen and devise something delicious. They know how to adapt to a guest with a gluten allergy or a child who doesn’t like green food. Sure, they might consult a recipe when it makes sense to do so. But they’re not dependent on it, and they can change it up based on their particular circumstances.

There’s a reason many cooking competition shows feature a segment where contestants need to design their own recipe from a limited assortment of ingredients. Effective improvisation shows the judges that someone can actually cook, not just follow recipes.

We can draw a strong parallel from cooking to thinking. If you want to learn how to think for yourself, you can’t just follow what someone else came up with. You need to understand first principles if you want to be able to solve complex problems or think in a unique, creative fashion. First principles are the building blocks of knowledge, the foundational understanding acquired from breaking something down into its most essential concepts.

One person who exemplifies first principles thinking is Julia Child, an American educator who charmed audiences with her classes, books, and TV shows. First principles thinking enabled Julia to both master her own struggles with cooking and then teach the world to do the same. In Something from the Oven, Laura Shapiro tells the charming story of how she did it. Here’s what we can learn about better thinking from the “French Chef.”

***

Gustave Flaubert wrote that “talent is a long patience, ” something which was all too true for Julia. She wasn’t born with an innate skill for or even love of cooking. Her starting point was falling in love with her future husband, Paul Child, in Ceylon in 1944 when both were working for the Office of Strategic Services. Paul adored food, and his delight in it inspired Julia. When they each returned to their separate homes after the war, she decided she would learn to cook. Things got off to a bad start, as Shapiro explains:

“At first she tried to teach herself at home, but it was frustrating to bushwhack her way through one dish after another. She never knew whether she would find success or failure when she opened the oven door, and worst of all, she didn’t know why this recipe worked and that one didn’t.”

Seeking expert guidance, Julia started taking cooking classes three times a week at a Beverly Hills cooking school. Even that didn’t help much, however, and after she married Paul a year later, her experiments in their Washington, DC kitchen continued to go awry. Only when the couple moved to Paris did an epiphany strike. Julia’s encounters with French cooking instilled in her an understanding of the need for first principles thinking. Trying to follow recipes without comprehending their logic wasn’t going to produce delicious results. She needed to learn how food actually worked.

In 1949, at the age of 37, she enrolled in classes at the famous Cordon Bleu school of cooking. It changed her forever:

“Learning to cook at the Cordon Bleu meant breaking down every dish into its smallest individual steps and doing each laborious and exhausting procedure by hand. In time Child could bone a duck while leaving the skin intact, extract the guts of a chicken through a hole she made in the neck, make a ham mousse by pounding the ham to a pulp with a mortar and pestle, and turn out a swath of elaborate dishes from choucroute garnie to vol-au-vent financière. None of this came effortlessly but she could do it. She had the brains, the considerable physical strength it demanded, and her vast determination. Most important, she could understand for the first time the principles governing how and why a recipe worked as it did.”

Julia had found her calling. After six months of Cordon Bleu classes, she continued studying independently for a year. She immersed herself in French cooking, filled her home with equipment, and befriended two women who shared her passion, Simone Beck and Louisette Bertholle. In the early 1950s, they opened a tiny school together, with a couple of students working out of Julia’s kitchen. She was “adamant that the recipes used in class be absolutely reliable, and she tested every one of them for what she called ‘scientific workability.’” By this, Julia meant that the recipes needed to make sense per her understanding of the science of cooking. If they didn’t agree with the first principles she knew, they were out.

***

When Paul transferred to Marseille, Julia was sad to leave her school. But she and her friends continued their collaboration, working at a distance on a French cookery book aimed at Americans. For what would become Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Julia focused on teaching first principles in a logical order, not copying down mere recipes.

She’d grown frustrated at opening recipe books to see instructions she knew couldn’t work because they contradicted the science of cooking—for example, recipes calling for temperatures she knew would burn a particular ingredient, or omitting key ingredients like baking soda, without which a particular effect would be impossible. It was clear no one had bothered to test anything before they wrote it down, and she was determined not to make the same mistake.

Mastering the Art of French Cooking came out in 1961. Shapiro writes, “The reviews were excellent, there was a gratifying burst of publicity all across the country, and the professional food world acknowledged a new star in Julia Child. What nobody knew for sure was whether everyday homemakers in the nation that invented the TV dinner would buy the book.” Though the book was far from a flop, it was the TV show it inspired that catapulted Julia and her approach to cooking to stardom.

The French Chef first aired in 1963 and was an enormous success from the start. Viewers adored how Julia explained why she did what she did and how it worked. They also loved her spontaneous capacity to adapt to unanticipated outcomes. It was usually only possible to shoot one take so Julia needed to keep going no matter what happened.

Her show appealed to every kind of person because it could make anyone a better cook—or at least help them understand the process better. Not only was Julia “a striking image of unaffected good nature,” the way she taught really worked. Viewers and readers who followed her guidance discovered a way of cooking that made them feel in control.

Julia “believed anybody could cook with distinction from scratch and that’s what she was out to prove.” Many of the people who watched The French Chef were women who needed a new way to think about cooking. As gender roles were being redefined and more women entered the workforce, it no longer seemed like something they were obligated by birth to do. At the same time, treating it as an undesirable chore was no more pleasant than treating it as a duty. Julia taught them another way. Cooking could be an intellectual, creative, enjoyable activity. Once you understood how it actually worked, you could learn from mistakes instead of repeating them again and again.

Shapiro explains that “Child was certainly not the first TV chef. The genre was almost as old as TV itself. But she was the first to make it her own and have an enduring societal impact.”

***

If you can master the first principles within a domain, you can see much further than those who are just following recipes. That’s what Julia managed to do, and it’s part of why she stood out from the other TV chefs of her time—and still stands out today. By mastering first principles, you can find better ways of doing things, instead of having to stick to conventions. If Julia thought a modern piece of equipment worked better than a traditional one or that part of a technique was a pointless custom, she didn’t hesitate to make changes as she saw fit. Once you know the why of something, it is easy to modify the how to achieve your desired result.

The lessons of first principles in cooking are the same for the first principles in any domain. Looking for first principles is just a way of thinking. It’s a commitment to understanding the foundation that something is built on and giving yourself the freedom to adapt, develop, and create. Once you know the first principles, you can keep learning more advanced concepts as well as innovating for yourself.

The post How Julia Child Used First Principles Thinking appeared first on Farnam Street.

In one chapter of The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy, David Graeber describes his experience of learning Malagasy, the national language of Madagascar. While the language’s writing system came about in the fifteenth century, it wasn’t until the early nineteenth century that missionaries documented the rules of Malagasy grammar for the purpose of translating scripture.

Of course, the “rules” of Malagasy the missionaries recorded weren’t rules at all. They were reflections of how people spoke at that point in time, as far as outside observers could tell. Languages don’t usually come into existence when someone invents the rules for them. Instead, languages evolve and change over time as speakers make modifications or respond to new needs.

However, those early nineteenth-century records remained in place as the supposed “official” version of Malagasy. Children learned the old form of grammar in school, even as they spoke a somewhat different version of the language at home. For Graeber, learning to speak the version of Malagasy people actually understood in conversation was a challenge. Native speakers he hired would instruct him on the nineteenth-century grammatical principles, then turn and speak to each other in a whole other fashion.

When asked why they couldn’t teach him the version of the language they spoke, Graeber’s Malagasy teachers responded that they were just using slang. Asked why no one seemed to speak the official version, they said people were too lazy. Graeber writes, “Clearly the problem was that the entire population had failed to memorize their lessons properly. But what they were actually denying was the legitimacy of collective creativity, the free play of the system. ” While the official rules stayed the same over the decades, the language itself kept evolving. People assumed the fault of not speaking “proper” Malagasy lay with them, not with the outdated dictionary and grammar. They confused a description for a prescription. He writes:

It never seems to occur to anyone—until you point it out—that had the missionaries came and written their books two hundred years later, current usages would be considered the correct ones, and anyone speaking as they had two hundred years ago would themselves be assumed to be in error.

Graeber sees the same phenomenon playing out in other languages for which grammars and dictionaries only came into existence a century or two ago. Often, such languages were mostly spoken and, like Malagasy, no one made formal records until the need arose for people from elsewhere to make translations. Instead of treating those records as descriptive and outdated, those teaching the language treat them as prescriptive—despite knowing they’re not practical for everyday use.

***

Why don’t people talk “proper”?

So why can’t people just speak a language per the official rules? If someone has gone to all the effort of identifying and recording the rules and people received instruction on them in school, why not follow them? Why keep changing things up?

If languages didn’t evolve, it would make life a lot easier for historians looking at texts from the past. It would also simplify matters for people learning the language, for those coming from different areas, and even for speakers across generations. Yet all languages change all the time.

Graeber suggests the reason for this is because people like to play. We find it dull to speak according to the official rules of our language. We seek out novelty in our everyday lives and do whatever it takes to avoid boredom. Even if each person only plays a little bit once in a while, the results compound. Graeber explains that “this playing around will have cumulative effects.”

Languages still need conventions so people can understand each other. The higher the similarity between the versions of a language different people speak, the more they can communicate. At the same time, they cannot remain rigid. Trying to follow an unyielding set of strict rules will inevitably curtail the usefulness of a language and prevent it from developing in interesting and necessary ways. Languages need a balance: enough guidance to help everyone understand each other and provide an entry point for learners, and enough flexibility to keep updating the rules as actual usage changes.

As a result, languages call into question our idea of freedom: “It’s worth thinking about language for a moment, because one thing it reveals, probably better than any other example, is that there is a basic paradox in our very idea of freedom. On the one hand, rules are by their nature constraining. Speech codes, rules of etiquette, and grammatical rules, all have the effect of limiting what we can and cannot say. ” On the other hand, no rules whatsoever mean no one can understand each other.

Languages need frameworks, but no amount of grammar classes or official dictionaries will prevent people from playing and having fun with their speech.

***

The dictionary is not the language

“The map is not the territory” means that any representation of reality has to be a simplification that may contain errors, become outdated, or reflect biases. Maps remove details that aren’t necessary for their intended use. Representations of complex systems may show expected behavior or ideal behavior. For example, the London Underground map doesn’t reflect the distances between stations because this information isn’t important to most commuters. If a map represented its territory without reducing anything, it would be identical to the territory and therefore would be useless. In fact, the simplest maps can be the most useful because they’re the easiest to understand and remember.

Sometimes maps are descriptive, and sometimes they’re prescriptive; often they’re a bit of both. We run into problems when we confuse one type for another and try to navigate an idealized territory or make the real territory fit an idealized image.

A language’s grammar and dictionary are a sort of map. They take a complex system—a language spoken by what could be tens of millions of people—and aim to represent it with something which is, by comparison, simple. The official rules are not the language itself, but they provide guidance for navigating it. Much like a map of a city needs periodic updates as parts are torn down, built up, renamed, destroyed, added, and so on, the official rules need updating as the language changes. Trying to learn Malagasy using grammar rules written two hundred years ago is like trying to navigate Antananarivo using a street map made two hundred years ago.

A map of a complex system, like a language, is meant to help us find our way by giving us a sense of how things looked at one point in time—it’s usually descriptive. It doesn’t necessarily tell us how that system should look, and we may run into problems if we try to make it conform to the map, ignoring the system’s own adaptive properties. Even if the cartographer never intended this, we can end up treating a map as a prescription. We try to make reality conform to the map. This is what occurs with languages. Graeber calls this the “grammar-book effect”:

People do not invent languages by writing grammars, they write grammars—at least, the first grammars to be written for any given language—by observing the tacit, largely unconscious rules that people seem to be employing when they speak. Yet once a book exists, and especially once it is employed in schoolrooms, people feel that the rules are not just descriptions of how people do talk, but prescriptions for how they should talk.

As we’ve seen, one reason the map is not the territory with language is because people feel compelled to play and experiment. When we encounter representations of systems involving people, we should keep in mind that while we may need rules for the sake of working together and understanding each other, we’re always pushing up against and reshaping those rules. We find it boring to follow a rigid prescription.

For instance, imagine some of the documents you might receive upon starting a role at a new company. Process documents showing step by step how to do the main tasks you’ll be expected to perform. But when the person you’re replacing shows you how to do those same tasks, you notice they don’t follow the listed steps at all. When you ask why, they explain that the process documents were written before they started actually carrying out those tasks, meaning they discovered more efficient ways afterward.

Why keep the process documents, then? Because for someone filling in or starting out, it might make sense to follow them. It’s the most defensible option. Once you truly know the territory and won’t change something without considering why it was there in the first place, you can play with the rules. Those documents might be useful as a description, but they’re unlikely to remain a prescription for long.

The same is true for laws. Sometimes aspects of them are just descriptive of how things are at one point in time, but we end up having to keep following them to the letter because they haven’t been updated. A law might have been written at a time when documents needed sending by letter, meaning certain delays for shipping. Now they can be sent by email. If the law hasn’t been updated, those delay allowances turn from descriptions into prescriptions. Or a law might reflect what people were permitted to do at the time, but now we assume people should have the right to do that thing even if we have new evidence it’s not the best idea. We are less likely to change laws if we persist in viewing them as prescriptive.

***

Conclusion

Descriptions of reality are practical for helping us navigate it, while also giving us room to change things. Prescriptions are helpful for giving us ways of understanding each other and providing enough structure for shared conventions, but they can also become outdated or end up limiting flexibility. When you encounter a representation of something, it’s useful to consider which parts are descriptive and which parts are prescriptive. Remember that both prescriptions and descriptions can and should change over time.

***

The FS team were saddened to hear of David Graeber’s passing, shortly after we completed this article. We hope his books will continue to inspire and educate new readers for many years to come.

The post Descriptions Aren’t Prescriptions appeared first on Farnam Street.

When asked what the deadliest shark is to humans, most people will say the great white. The lasting influence of the movie Jaws, reinforced by dozens of pop culture references and news reports, keeps that species of shark at the top of the mind when one considers the world’s most fearsome predators. While it is true that great white sharks do attack humans (rarely), they also leave a lot of survivors. And they’re not after humans in particular. They usually just mistake us for seals, one of their key food sources.

We must be careful to not let a volume of survivors in one area blind us to the stories of a small number of survivors elsewhere. Most importantly, we need to ask ourselves what stories are not being told because no one is around to tell them. The experiences of the dead are necessary if we want an accurate understanding of the world.

***

Before we drill down into some interesting statistics, it’s important to understand that great whites are one member of a class of sharks with many common characteristics. Great whites are closely related to tiger and bull sharks. They all have similar habitats, physiology, and instincts. They are also all large, with an average size over ten feet long.

Tiger and bull sharks rarely attack humans, and to someone being bit by one of these huge creatures, there isn’t all that much difference between them. The Florida Museum’s International Shark Attack file explains that “positive identification of attacking sharks is very difficult since victims rarely make adequate observations of the attacker during the ‘heat’ of the interaction. Tooth remains are seldom found in wounds and diagnostic characters for many requiem sharks [of which the great white is one] are difficult to discern even by trained professionals.”

The fatality rate in known attacks is 21.5% for the bull shark, 16% for the great white, and 26% for the tiger shark. But in sheer volume, attacks attributed to great whites outnumber the other two species three to one. So there are three times as many survivors to tell the story of their great white attack.

***

When it comes to our picture of reality of the most dangerous shark, there are other blind spots. Not all sharks have the same behaviors as those three, such as swimming close to shore and being around enough prey to develop a preference for fat seals versus bony humans. Pelagic sharks live in the water desert that is the open ocean and have to eat pretty much whatever they can find. The oceanic white tip is a pelagic shark that is probably far more dangerous to humans—we just don’t come into contact with them as often.

There are only fifteen documented attacks by an oceanic white tip, with three of those being fatal. But since most attacks occur in the open ocean in more isolated situations (e.g., a couple of people on a boat versus five hundred people swimming at a beach), we really have no idea how dangerous oceanic white tips are. There could be hundreds of undocumented attacks that left behind no survivors to tell the tale.

One famous survivor story gives us a glimpse of how dangerous oceanic white tips might be. In 1945, a Japanese submarine shot down the USS Indianapolis. For a multitude of reasons, partly due to the fact that the Indianapolis was on a top secret mission and partly due to tragic incompetence, a rescue ship was not sent for four days. Those who survived the ship’s sinking had to then try to survive in the open ocean with little gear until rescue arrived. The water was full of sharks.

In Indianapolis: The True Story of the Worst Sea Disaster in US Naval History and the Fifty-Year Fight to Exonerate an Innocent Man, Lynn Vincent and Sara Vladic quote Boatswain’s Mate Second Class Eugene Morgan as he described part of his experience: “All the time, the sharks never let up. We had a cargo net that had Styrofoam things attached to keep it afloat. There were about fifteen sailors on this, and suddenly, ten sharks hit it and there was nothing left. This went on and on.” These sharks are believed to have been oceanic white tips. It’s unknown how many men died from shark attacks. Many also perished due to exposure, dehydration, injury, and exhaustion. Of the 1,195 crewmen originally aboard the ship, only 316 survived. It represents the single biggest loss of life from a single ship in US naval history.

Because humans are rarely in the open ocean in large numbers, not only are attacks by this shark less common, there are also fewer survivor stories. The story of the USS Indianapolis is a rare, brutal case that provides a unique picture.

***

Our estimation of the shark that could do us the most harm is often formed by survivorship bias. We develop an inaccurate picture based on the stories of those who live to tell the tale of their shark attack. We don’t ask ourselves who didn’t survive, and so we miss out on the information we need to build an accurate picture of reality.

The point is not to shift our fear to oceanic white tips, which are, in fact, critically endangered. Our fear of sharks seems to make us indifferent to what happens to them, even though they are an essential part of the ocean ecosystem. We are also much more of a danger to sharks than they are to us. We kill them by the millions every year. Neither should we shift our fear to other, more lethal animals, which will likely result in the same indifference to their role in the ecosystem.

The point is rather to consider how well you make decisions when you only factor in the stories of the survivors. For instance, if you were to try to reduce instances of shark attacks or try to limit their severity, you will not likely get the results you are after if you only pay attention to the survivor stories. You need to ask who didn’t make it and try to figure out their stories as well. If you try to implement measures aimed only at great whites near beaches, your measures might not be effective against other predatory sharks. And if you conclude that swimmers are better off in the open ocean because sharks seem to only attack near beaches, you’d be completely wrong.

***

Survivorship bias crops up all over our lives and impedes us from accurately assessing danger. Replace “dangerous sharks” with “dangerous cities” or “dangerous vacation spots” and you can easily see how your picture of a certain location might be skewed based on the experiences of survivors. We can’t be afraid of a tale if no one lives to tell it. More survivors can make something seem more dangerous rather than less dangerous because the volume of stories makes them more memorable.

If fewer people survived shark attacks we wouldn’t have survivor stories influencing our perception about how dangerous sharks are. In all likelihood we would attribute some of the ocean deaths to other causes, like drowning, because it wouldn’t occur to us that sharks could be responsible.

Understanding survivorship bias prompts us to look for the stories of those who weren’t successful. A lack of visible survivors with memorable stories might mean we view other fields as far safer and easier than they are.

For example, a field of business where people who experience failures go on to do other things might seem riskier than one where people who fail are too ashamed to talk about it. The failure of tech start-ups sometimes feels like daily news. We don’t often, however, hear about the real estate agent who has trouble making sales or who keeps getting outbid on offers. Nor do we hear much about architects who design terrible houses or construction companies who don’t complete projects.

Survivorship bias prompts us to associate more risk with industries that exhibit more public failures. But the failures from industries or businesses that aren’t shared are equally important. If we focus only on the survivor stories, we might think that being a real estate agent or an architect is safer than starting a technology company. It might be, but we can’t only base our understanding on which career option is the best bet on the widely shared stories of failure.

If we don’t factor survivorship bias into our thinking we end up in a classic map is not the territory problem. The survivor stories become a poor navigational tool for the terrain.

Most of us know that we shouldn’t become a writer based on the results achieved by J.K Rowling and John Grisham. But even if we go out and talk to other writers, or learn about their careers, or attend writing seminars given by published authors, we are still only talking to the survivors.

Yes, it’s super inspiring to know Stephen King got so many rejections early in his career that the stack of them was enough to pull a nail out of the wall. But what about the writers who got just as many rejections and never published anything? Not only can we learn a lot from them about the publishing industry, we need to consider their experiences if we want to anticipate and understand the challenges involved in being a writer.

***

Not recognizing survivorship bias can lead to faulty decision making. We don’t see the big picture and end up optimizing for a small slice of reality. We can’t completely overcome survivorship bias. The best we can do is acknowledge it, and when the stakes are high or the result important, stop and look for the stories of those who were unsuccessful. They have just as much, if not more, to teach us.

The next time you’re assessing risk, ask yourself: am I paying too much attention to the great white sharks and not enough to the oceanic white tips?

The post What Sharks Can Teach Us About Survivorship Bias appeared first on Farnam Street.

***

It feels overwhelming when the world changes rapidly, abruptly, and extensively. The changes come so fast it can be hard to keep up—and the future, which a few months ago seemed reliable, now has so many unknown dimensions. In the face of such uncertainty, mental models are valuable tools for helping you think through significant disruptions such as a pandemic.

A mental model is simply a representation of how something works. They are how we simplify complexity, why we consider some things more relevant than others, and how we reason. Using them increases your clarity of understanding, providing direction for the choices you need to make and the options you want to keep open.

Models for ourselves

During a pandemic, a useful model is “the map is not the territory.” In rapidly changing situations like a global health crisis, any reporting is an incomplete snapshot in time. Our maps are going to be inaccurate for many reasons: limited testing availability, poor reporting, ineffective information sharing, lack of expertise in analyzing the available information. The list goes on.

If past reporting hasn’t been completely accurate, then why would you assume current reporting is? You have to be careful when interpreting the information you receive, using it as a marker to scope out a range of what is happening in the territory.

In our current pandemic, we can easily spot our map issues. There aren’t enough tests available in most countries. Because COVID-19 isn’t fatal for the majority of people who contract it, there are likely many people who get it but don’t meet the testing criteria. Therefore, we don’t know how many people have it.

When we look at country-level reporting, we can also see not all countries are reporting to the same standard. Sometimes this isn’t a matter of “better” or “worse”; there are just different ways of collating the numbers. Some countries don’t have the infrastructure for widespread data collection and sharing. Different countries also have different standards for what counts as a death caused by COVID-19.

In other nations, incentives affect reporting. Some countries downplay their infection rate so as to not create panic. Some governments avoid reporting because it undermines their political interests. Others are more worried about the information on the economic map than the health one.

Although it is important to be realistic about our maps, it doesn’t mean we shouldn’t seek to improve their quality. Paying attention to information from experts and ignoring unverified soundbites is one step to increasing the accuracy of our maps. The more accurate we can get them, the more likely it is that we’ll be able to unlock new possibilities that help us deal with the crisis and plan for the future.

There are two models that we can use to improve the effectiveness of the maps we do have: “compounding” and “probabilistic thinking.”

Compounding is exponential growth, something a lot of us tend to have a poor intuitive grasp on. We see the immediate linear relationships in the situation, like how one test diagnoses one person, while not understanding the compounding effects of that relationship. Increased testing can lead to an exponential decrease in virus transmission because each infected person usually passes the virus onto more than just one other person.

One of the clearest stories to illustrate exponential growth is the story of the man who asked to be paid in rice. In this story, a servant is to be rewarded for his service. When asked how he wanted to be paid, he asks to be paid in rice, using a chessboard to determine the final amount. Starting with one grain, the amount of rice is to be doubled for each square. One grain on the first square looks pathetic. But halfway through the chessboard, the servant is making a good yearly living. And after doubling the rice sixty-four times, the servant is owed more rice than the whole world can produce.

Improving our ability to think exponentially helps us understand how more testing can lead to both an exponential decrease in testing prices and an exponential increase in the production of those tests. It also makes clear just how far-reaching the impact of our actions can be if we don’t take precautions with the assumption that we could be infected.

Probabilistic thinking is also invaluable in helping us make decisions based on the incomplete information we have. In the absence of enough testing, for example, we need to use probabilistic thinking to make decisions on what actions to pursue. We ask ourselves questions like: Do I have COVID-19? If there’s a 1% chance I have it, is it worth visiting my grandparents?

Being able to evaluate reasonable probability has huge impacts on how we approach physical distancing. Combining the models of probabilistic thinking and map is not the territory suggests our actions need to be guided by infection numbers much higher than the ones we have. We are likely to make significantly different social decisions if we estimate the probability of infection as being three people out of ten instead of one person out of one thousand.

Bayesian updating can also help clarify the physical distancing actions you should take. There’s a small probability of being part of a horrendous chain of events that might not just have poor direct consequences but also follow you for the rest of your life. Evaluating how responsible you are being in terms of limiting transmission, would you bet a loved one’s life on it?

Which leads us to Hanlon’s Razor. It’s hard not to get angry at reports of beach parties during spring break or at the guy four doors down who has his friends over to hang out every night. For your own sanity, try using Hanlon’s Razor to evaluate their behavior. They are not being malicious and trying to kill people. They are just exceptionally and tragically ignorant.

Finally, on a day-to-day basis, trying to make small decisions with incomplete information, you can use inversion. You can look at the problem backwards. When the best way forward is far from clear, you ask yourself what you could do to make things worse, and then avoid doing those things.

Models for society

Applying mental models aids in the understanding the dynamics of the large-scale social response.

Currently we are seeing the counterintuitive measures with first-order negatives (closing businesses) but second- and third-order positives (reduced transmission, less stress on the healthcare system). Second-order thinking is an invaluable tool at all times, including during a pandemic. It’s so important that we encourage the thinking, analysis, and decision-making that factors in the effects of the effects of the decisions we make.

In order to improve the maps that our leaders have to make decisions, we need to sort through the feedback loops providing the content. If we can improve not only the feedback but also the pace of iterations, we have a better chance of making good decisions.

For example, if we improve the rate of testing and the speed of the results, it would be a major game-changer. Imagine if knowing whether you had the virus or not was a $0.01 test that gave you a result in less than a minute. In that case, we could make different decisions about social openness, even in the absence of a vaccine (however, this may have invasive privacy implications, as tracking this would be quite difficult otherwise).

As we watch the pandemic and its consequences unfold, it becomes clear that leadership and authority are not the same thing. Our hierarchical instincts emerge strongly in times of crisis. Leadership vacuums, then, are devastating, and disasters expose the cracks in our hierarchies. However, we also see that people can display strong leadership without needing any authority. A pandemic provides opportunities for such leadership to emerge at community and local levels, providing alternate pathways for meeting the needs of many.

One critical model we can use to look at society during a pandemic is Ecosystems. When we think about ecosystems, we might imagine a variety of organisms interacting in a forest or the ocean. But our cities are also ecosystems, as is the earth as a whole. Understanding system dynamics can give us a lot of insight into what is happening in our societies, both at the micro and macro level.

One property of ecosystems that is useful to contemplate in situations like a pandemic is resilience—the speed at which an ecosystem recovers after a disturbance. There are many factors that contribute to resilience, such as diversity and adaptability. Looking at our global situation, one factor threatening to undermine our collective resilience is that our economy has rewarded razor-thin efficiency in the recent past. The problem with thin margins is they offer no buffer in the face of disruption. Therefore, ecosystems with thin margins are not at all resilient. Small disturbances can bring them down completely. And a pandemic is not a small disturbance.

Some argue that what we are facing now is a Black Swan: an unpredictable event beyond normal expectations with severe consequences. Most businesses are not ready to face one. You could argue that an economic recession is not a black swan, but the particular shape of this pandemic is testing the resiliency of our social and economic ecosystems regardless. The closing of shops and business, causing huge disruption, has exposed fragile supply chains. We just don’t see these types of events often enough, even if we know they’re theoretically possible. So we don’t prepare for them. We don’t or can’t create big enough personal and social margins of safety. Individuals and businesses don’t have enough money in the bank. We don’t have enough medical facilities and supplies. Instead, we have optimized for a narrow range of possibilities, compromising the resilience of systems we rely on.

Finally, as we look at the role national borders are playing during this pandemic, we can use the Thermodynamics model to gain insight into how to manage flows of people during and after restrictions. Insulation requires a lot of work, as we are seeing with our borders and the subsequent effect on our economies. It’s unsustainable for long periods of time. Just like how two objects of different temperatures that come into contact with each other eventually reach thermal equilibrium, people will mix with each other. All borders have openings of some sort. It’s important to extend planning to incorporate the realistic tendencies of reintegration.

Some final thoughts about the future

As we look for opportunities about how to move forward both as individuals and societies, Cooperation provides a useful lens. Possibly more critical to evolution than competition, cooperation is a powerful force. It’s rampant throughout the biological world; even bacteria cooperate. As a species, we have been cooperating with each other for a long time. All of us have given up some independence for access to resources provided by others.

Pandemics are intensified because of connection. But we can use that same connectivity to mitigate some negative effects by leveraging our community networks to create cooperative interactions that fill gaps in the government response. We can also use the cooperation lens to create more resilient connections in the future.

Finally, we need to ask ourselves how we can improve our antifragility. How can we get to a place where we grow stronger through change and challenge? It’s not about getting “back to normal.” The normal that was our world in 2019 has proven to be fragile. We shouldn’t want to get back to a time when we were unprepared and vulnerable.

Existential threats are a reality of life on earth. One of the best lessons we can learn is to open our eyes and integrate planning for massive change into how we approach our lives. This will not be the last pandemic, no matter how careful we are. The goal now should not be about assigning blame or succumbing to hindsight bias to try to implement rules designed to prevent a similar situation in the future. We will be better off if we make changes aimed at increasing our resilience and embracing the benefits of challenge.

Still curious? Learn more by reading The Great Mental Models.

The post Mental Models For a Pandemic appeared first on Farnam Street.

***

Mental models can sometimes come off as an abstract concept. They are, however, actual tools you can use to navigate through challenging or confusing situations. In this article, we are going to apply our mental models to a common situation: a meeting with conflict.

A recent meeting with the school gave us an opportunity to use our latticework. Anyone with school-age kids has dealt with the bureaucracy of a school system and the other parents who interact with it. Call it what you will, all school environments usually have some formal interface between parents and the school administration that is aimed at progressing issues and ideas of importance to the school community.

The particular meeting was an intense one. At issue was the school’s communication around a potentially harmful leak in the heating system. Some parents felt the school had communicated reasonably about the problem and the potential consequences. Others felt their child’s life had been put in danger due to potential exposure to mold and asbestos. Some parents felt the school could have done a better job of soliciting feedback from students about their experiences during the previous week, and others felt the school administration had done a poor job about communicating potential risks to parents.

The first thing you’ll notice if you’re in a meeting like this is that emotions on all sides run high. After some discussion you might also notice a few more things, like how many people do the following:

• Confuse correlation with causation in determining why certain things happened
• Extrapolate from too small a sample size when providing “evidence” to prove their point
• Don’t recognize hindsight bias when suggesting what should have been done
• Don’t pay attention to base rates when assessing the severity of events
• Assume maliciousness on the part of decision-makers

Any of these occurrences, when you hear them via statements from people around the table, are a great indication that using a few mental models might improve the dynamics of the situation.

The first mental model that is invaluable in situations like this is Hanlon’s Razor: don’t attribute to maliciousness that which is more easily explained by incompetence. (Hanlon’s Razor is one of the 9 general thinking concepts in The Great Mental Models Volume One.) When people feel victimized, they can get angry and lash out in an attempt to fight back against a perceived threat. When people feel accused of serious wrongdoing, they can get defensive and withhold information to protect themselves. Neither of these reactions is useful in a situation like this. Yes, sometimes people intentionally do bad things. But more often than not, bad things are the result of incompetence. In a school meeting situation, it’s safe to assume everyone at the table has the best interests of the students at heart. School staff and administrators usually go into teaching motivated by a deep love of education. They genuinely want their schools to be amazing places of learning, and they devote time and attention to improving the lives of their students.

It makes no sense to assume a school’s administration would deliberately withhold harmful information. Yes, it could happen. But, in either case, you are going to obtain more valuable information if you assume poor decisions were the result of incompetence versus maliciousness.

When we feel people are malicious toward us, we instinctively become a negatively coiled spring, waiting for the right moment to take them down a notch or two. Removing malice from the equation, you give yourself emotional breathing room to work toward better solutions and apply more models.

The next helpful model is relativity, adapted from the laws of physics. This model is about remembering that everyone’s perspective is different from yours. Understanding how others see the same situation can help you move toward a more meaningful dialogue with the people in the meeting. You can do this by looking around the room and asking yourself what is influencing people’s approaches to the situation.

In our school meeting, we see some people are afraid for their child’s health. Others are influenced by past dealings with the school administration. Authorities are worried about closing the school. Teachers are concerned about how missed time might impact their students’ learning. Administrators are trying to balance the needs of parents with their responsibility to follow the necessary procedures. Some parents are stressed because they don’t have care for their children when the school closes. There is a lot going on, and relativity gives us a lens to try to identify the dynamics impacting communication.

After understanding the different perspectives, it becomes easier to incorporate them into your thinking. You can diffuse conflict by identifying what it is you think you hear. Often, just the feeling of being heard will help people start to listen and engage more objectively.

Now you can dive into some of the details. First up is probabilistic thinking. Before we worry about mold levels or sick children, let’s try to identify the base rates. What is the mold content in the air outside? How many children are typically absent due to sickness at this time of year? Reminding people that severity has to be evaluated against something in a situation like this can really help diffuse stress and concern. If 10% of the student population is absent on any given day, and in the week leading up to these events 12% to 13% of the population was absent, then it turns out we are not actually dealing with a huge statistical anomaly.

Then you can evaluate the anecdotes with the model of the Law of Large Numbers in mind. Small sample sizes can be misleading. The larger your group for evaluation, the more relevant the conclusions. In a situation such as our school council meeting, small sample sizes only serve to ratchet up the emotion by implying they are the causal outcomes of recent events.

In reality, any one-off occurrence can often be explained in multiple ways. One or two children coming home with hives? There are a dozen reasonable explanations for that: allergies, dry skin, reaction to skin cream, symptom of an illness unrelated to the school environment, and so on. However, the more children that develop hives, the more it is statistically possible the cause relates to the only common denominator between all children: the school environment.

Even then, correlation does not equal causation. It might not be a recent leaky steam pipe; is it exam time? Are there other stressors in the culture? Other contaminants in the environment? The larger your sample size, the more likely you will obtain relevant information.

Finally, you can practice systems thinking and contribute to the discussion by identifying the other components in the system you are all dealing with. After all, a school council is just one part of a much larger system involving governments, school boards, legislators, administrators, teachers, students, parents, and the community. When you put your meeting into the bigger context of the entire system, you can identify the feedback loops: Who is responding to what information, and how quickly does their behavior change? When you do this, you can start to suggest some possible steps and solutions to remedy the situation and improve interactions going forward.

How is the information flowing? How fast does it move? How much time does each recipient have to adjust before receiving more information? Chances are, you aren’t going to know all this at the meeting. So you can ask questions. Does the principal have to get approval from the school board before sending out communications involving risk to students? Can teachers communicate directly with parents? What are the conditions for communicating possible risk? Will speculation increase the speed of a self-reinforcing feedback loop causing panic? What do parents need to know to make an informed decision about the welfare of their child? What does the school need to know to make an informed decision about the welfare of their students?

In meetings like the one described here, there is no doubt that communication is important. Using the meeting to discuss and debate ways of improving communication so that outcomes are generally better in the future is a valuable use of time.

A school meeting is one practical example of how having a latticework of mental models can be useful. Using mental models can help you diffuse some of the emotions that create an unproductive dynamic. They can also help you bring forward valuable, relevant information to assist the different parties in improving their decision-making process going forward.

At the very least, you will walk away from the meeting with a much better understanding of how the world works, and you will have gained some strategies you can implement in the future to leverage this knowledge instead of fighting against it.

The post Using Models to Stay Calm in Charged Situations appeared first on Farnam Street.

***

What does it take to make people cooperate with each other when the incentives to act primarily out of self-interest are often so strong?

The Prisoner’s Dilemma is a thought experiment originating from game theory. Designed to analyze the ways in which we cooperate, it strips away the variations between specific situations where people are called to overcome the urge to be selfish. Political scientist Robert Axelrod lays down its foundations in The Evolution of Cooperation:

Under what conditions will cooperation emerge in a world of egoists without a central authority? This question has intrigued people for a long time. And for good reason. We all know that people are not angels and that they tend to look after themselves and their own first. Yet we also know that cooperation does occur and that our civilization is based on it. But in situations where each individual has an incentive to be selfish, how can cooperation ever develop?

…To make headway in understanding the vast array of specific situations which have this property, a way is needed to represent what is common to these situations without becoming bogged down in the details unique to each…the famous Prisoner’s Dilemma game.

The thought experiment goes as such: two criminals are in separate cells, unable to communicate, accused of a crime they both participated in. The police do not have enough evidence to sentence both without further evidence, though they are certain enough to wish to ensure they both spend time in prison. So they offer the prisoners a deal. They can accuse each other of the crime, with the following conditions:

• If both prisoners say the other did it, each will serve two years in prison.
• If one prisoner says the other did it and the other stays silent, the accused will serve three years and the accuser zero.
• If both prisoners stay silent, each will serve one year in prison.

In game theory, the altruistic behavior (staying silent) is called “cooperating,” while accusing the other is called “defecting.”

What should they do?

If they were able to communicate and they trusted each other, the rational choice is to stay silent; that way each serves less time in prison than they would otherwise. But how can each know the other won’t accuse them? After all, people tend to act out of self-interest. The cost of being the one to stay silent is too high. The expected outcome when the game is played is that both accuse the other and serve two years. (In the real world, we doubt it would. After they served their time, it’s not hard to imagine each of them still being upset. Two years is a lot of time for a spring to coil in a negative way. Perhaps they spend the rest of their lives sabatoging each other.)

The Iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma

A more complex form of the thought experiment is the iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma, in which we imagine the same two prisoners being in the same situation multiple times. In this version of the experiment, they are able to adjust their strategy based on the previous outcome.

If we repeat the scenario, it may seem as if the prisoners will begin to cooperate. But this doesn’t make sense in game theory terms. When they know how many times the game will repeat, both have an incentive to accuse on the final round, seeing as there can be no retaliation. Knowing the other will surely accuse on the final round, both have an incentive to accuse on the penultimate round—and so on, back to the start.

Gregory Mankiw summarizes how difficult it is to model cooperation in Business Economics as follows:

To see how difficult it is to maintain cooperation, imagine that, before the police captured . . . the two criminals, [they] had made a pact not to confess. Clearly, this agreement would make them both better off if they both live up to it, because they would each spend only one year in jail. But would the two criminals in fact remain silent, simply because they had agreed to? Once they are being questioned separately, the logic of self-interest takes over and leads them to confess. Cooperation between the two prisoners is difficult to maintain because cooperation is individually irrational.

However, cooperative strategies can evolve if we model the game as having random or infinite iterations. If each prisoner knows they will likely interact with each other in the future, with no knowledge or expectation their relationship will have a definite end, the cooperation becomes significantly more likely. If we imagine that the prisoners will go to the same jail or will run in the same circles once released, we can understand how the incentive for cooperation might increase. If you’re a defector, running into the person you defected on is awkward at best, and leaves you sleeping with the fishes at worst.

Real-world Prisoner’s Dilemmas

We can use the Prisoner’s Dilemma as a means of understanding many real-world situations based on cooperation and trust. As individuals, being selfish tends to benefit us, at least in the short term. But when everyone is selfish, everyone suffers.

In The Prisoner’s Dilemma, Martin Peterson asks readers to imagine two car manufacturers, Row Cars and Col Motors. As the only two actors in their market, the price each sells cars at has a direct connection to the price the other sells cars at. If one opts to sell at a higher price than the other, they will sell fewer cars as customers transfer. If one sells at a lower price, they will sell more cars at a lower profit margin, gaining customers from the other. In Peterson’s example, if both set their prices high, both will make $100 million per year. Should one decide to set their prices lower, they will make $150 million while the other makes nothing. If both set low prices, both make $20 million. Peterson writes:

Imagine that you serve on the board of Row Cars. In a board meeting, you point out that irrespective of what Col Motors decides to do, it will be better for your company to opt for low prices. This is because if Col Motors sets its price low, then a profit of $20 million is better than $0, and if Col Motors sets its price high, then a profit of $150 million is better than $100 million.

Gregory Mankiw gives another real-world example in Microeconomics, detailed here:

Consider an oligopoly with two members, called Iran and Saudi Arabia. Both countries sell crude oil. After prolonged negotiation, the countries agree to keep oil production low in order to keep the world price of oil high. After they agree on production levels, each country must decide whether to cooperate and live up to this agreement or to ignore it and produce at a higher level. The following image shows how the profits of the two countries depend on the strategies they choose.

Suppose you are the leader of Saudi Arabia. You might reason as follows:

I could keep production low as we agreed, or I could raise my production and sell more oil on world markets. If Iran lives up to the agreement and keeps its production low, then my country ears profit of $60 billion with high production and $50 billion with low production. In this case, Saudi Arabia is better off with high production. If Iran fails to live up to the agreement and produces at a high level, then my country earns $40 billion with high production and $30 billion with low production. Once again, Saudi Arabia is better off with high production. So, regardless of what Iran chooses to do, my country is better off reneging on our agreement and producing at a high level.

Producing at a high level is a dominant strategy for Saudi Arabia. Of course, Iran reasons in exactly the same way, and so both countries produce at a high level. The result is the inferior outcome (from both Iran and Saudi Arabia’s standpoint) with low profits in each country. This example illustrates why oligopolies have trouble maintaining monopoly profits. The monopoly outcome is jointly rational for the oligopoly, but each oligopolist has an incentive to cheat. Just as self-interest drives the prisoners in the prisoners’ dilemma to confess, self-interest makes it difficult for the oligopoly to maintain the cooperative outcome with low production, high prices and monopoly prices.

Other examples of prisoners’ dilemmas include arms races, advertising, and common resources (see The Tragedy of the Commons). Understanding the Prisoner’s Dilemma is an important component of the dynamics of cooperation, an extremely useful mental model.

Thinking of life as an iterative game changes how you play. Positioning yourself for the future carries more weight than “winning” in the moment.

The post Prisoner’s Dilemma: What Game Are you Playing? appeared first on Farnam Street.

There are thousands, even tens of thousands of failures for every big success in the world. But stories of failure are not as sexy as stories of triumph, so they rarely get covered and shared. As we consume one story of success after another, we forget the base rates and overestimate the odds of real success.

“See,” says he, “you who deny a providence, how many have been saved by their prayers to the Gods.”

“Ay,” says Diagoras, “I see those who were saved, but where are those painted who were shipwrecked?”

— Cicero

The Basics

A college dropout becomes a billionaire. Batuli Lamichhane, a chain-smoker, lives to the age of 118. Four young men are rejected by record labels and told “guitar groups are on the way out,” then go on to become the most successful band in history.

Bill Gates, Batuli Lamichhane, and the Beatles are oft-cited examples of people who broke the rules without the expected consequences. We like to focus on people like them—the result of a cognitive shortcut known as survivorship bias.

When we only pay attention to those who survive, we fail to account for base rates and end up misunderstanding how selection processes actually work. The base rate is the probability of a given result we can expect from a sample, expressed as a percentage. If you play roulette, for example, you can be expected to win one out of 38 games, or 2.63%, which is the base rate. The problem arises when we mistake the winners for the rule and not the exception. People like Gates, Lamichhane, and the Beatles are anomalies at one end of a distribution curve. While there is much to learn from them, it would be a mistake to expect the same results from doing the same things.

A stupid decision that works out well becomes a brilliant decision in hindsight.

— Daniel Kahneman

Cause and Effect

Can we achieve anything if we try hard enough? Not necessarily. Survivorship bias leads to an erroneous understanding of cause and effect. People see correlation in mere coincidence. We all love to hear stories of those who beat the odds and became successful, holding them up as proof that the impossible is possible. We ignore failures in pursuit of a coherent narrative about success.

Few would think to write the biography of a business person who goes bankrupt and spends their entire life in debt. Or a musician who tried again and again to get signed and was ignored by record labels. Or of someone who dreams of becoming an actor, moves to LA, and ends up returning a year later, defeated and broke. After all, who wants to hear that? We want the encouragement survivorship bias provides, and the subsequent belief in our own capabilities. The result is an inflated idea of how many people become successful.

The discouraging fact is that success is never guaranteed. Most businesses fail. Most people do not become rich or famous. Most leaps of faith go wrong. It does not mean we should not try, just that we should be realistic with our understanding of reality.

Beware of advice from the successful.

— Barnaby James

Survivorship Bias in Business

Survivorship bias is particularly common in the world of business. Companies which fail early on are ignored, while the rare successes are lauded for decades. Studies of market performance often exclude companies which collapse. This can distort statistics and make success seem more probable than it truly is. Just as history is written by the winners, so is much of our knowledge about business. Those who end up broke and chastened lack a real voice. They may be blamed for their failures by those who ignore the role coincidence plays in the upward trajectories of the successful.

Nassim Taleb writes of our tendency to ignore the failures: “We favor the visible, the embedded, the personal, the narrated, and the tangible; we scorn the abstract.” Business books laud the rule-breakers who ignore conventional advice and still create profitable enterprises. For most entrepreneurs, taking excessive risks and eschewing all norms is an ill-advised gamble. Many of the misfit billionaires who are widely celebrated succeeded in spite of their unusual choices, not because of them. We also ignore the role of timing, luck, connections and socio-economic background. A person from a prosperous family, with valuable connections, who founds a business at a lucrative time has a greater chance of survival, even if they drop out of college or do something unconventional. Someone with a different background, acting at an inopportune time, will have less of a chance.

In No Startup Hipsters: Build Scalable Technology Companies, Samir Rath and Teodora Georgieva write:

Almost every single generic presentation for startups starts with “Ninety Five percent of all startups fail”, but very rarely do we pause for a moment and think “what does this really mean?” We nod our heads in somber acknowledgement and with great enthusiasm turn to the heroes who “made it” — Zuckerberg, Gates, etc. to absorb pearls of wisdom and find the Holy Grail of building successful companies. Learning from the successful is a much deeper problem and can reduce the probability of success more than we might imagine.

Examining the lives of successful entrepreneurs teaches us very little. We would do far better to analyze the causes of failure, then act accordingly. Even better would be learning from both failures and successes.

Focusing on successful outliers does not account for base rates. As Rath and Georgieva go on to write:

After any process that picks winners, the non-survivors are often destroyed or hidden or removed from public view. The huge failure rate for start-ups is a classic example; if failures become invisible, not only do we fail to recognise that missing instances hold important information, but we may also fail to acknowledge that there is any missing information at all.

They describe how this leads us to base our choices on inaccurate assumptions:

Often, as we revel in stories of start-up founders who struggled their way through on cups of ramen before the tide finally turned on viral product launches, high team performance or strategic partnerships, we forget how many other founders did the same thing, in the same industry and perished…The problem we mention is compounded by biographical or autobiographical narratives. The human brain is obsessed with building a cause and effect narrative. The problem arises when this cognitive machinery misfires and finds patterns where there are none.

These success narratives are created both by those within successful companies and those outside. Looking back on their ramen days, founders may believe they had a plan all along. They always knew everything would work out. In truth, they may lack an idea of the cause and effect relationships underlying their progress. When external observers hear their stories, they may, in a quasi-superstitious manner, spot “signs” of the success to come. As Daniel Kahneman has written, the only true similarity is luck.

Consider What You Don’t See

When we read about survivorship bias, we usually come across the archetypical story of Abraham Wald, a statistician studying World War II airplanes. His research group at Columbia University was asked to figure out how to better protect airplanes from damage. The initial approach to the problem was to look at the planes coming back, seeing where they were hit the worst, then reinforcing that area.

However, Wald realized there was a missing, yet valuable, source of evidence: Planes that were hit that did not make it back. Planes that went down, that weren’t surviving, had much better information to provide on areas that were most important to reinforce. Wald’s approach is an example of how to overcome survivorship bias. Don’t look just at what you can see. Consider all the things that started on the same path but didn’t make it. Try to figure out their story, as there is as much, if not more, to be learned from failure.

Considering survivorship bias when presented with examples of success is difficult. It is not instinctive to pause, reflect, and think through what the base rate odds of success are and whether you’re looking at an outlier or the expected outcome. And yet if you don’t know the real odds, if you don’t know if what you’re looking at is an example of survivorship bias, then you’ve got a blind spot.

Whenever you read about a success story in the media, think of all the people who tried to do what that person did and failed. Of course, understanding survivorship bias isn’t an excuse for not taking action, but rather an essential tool to help you cut through the noise and understand the world. If you’re going to do something, do it fully informed.

To learn more, consider reading Fooled By Randomness, or The Art of Thinking Clearly.

The post Survivorship Bias: The Tale of Forgotten Failures appeared first on Farnam Street.

***

“A wonderful fact to reflect upon, that every human creature is constituted to be that profound secret and mystery to every other.” ― Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities

When we experience strong emotions, we tend to think it’s obvious to other people, especially those who know us well. When we’re angry or tired or nervous or miserable, we may assume that anyone who looks at our face can spot it straight away.

That’s not true. Most of the time, other people can’t correctly guess what we’re thinking or feeling. Our emotions are not written all over our face all the time. The gap between our subjective experience and what other people pick up on is known as the illusion of transparency. It’s a fallacy that leads us to overestimate how easily we convey our emotions and thoughts.

For example, you arrive at the office exhausted after a night with too little sleep. You drift around all day, chugging espressos, feeling sluggish and unfocused. Everything you do seems to go wrong. At the end of the day, you sheepishly apologize to a coworker for being “useless all day.”

They look at you, slightly confused. ‘Oh,’ they say. ‘You seemed fine to me.’ Clearly, they’re just being polite. There’s no way your many minor mistakes during the day could have escaped their notice. It must be extra apparent considering your coworkers all show up looking fresh as a daisy every single day.

Or imagine that you have to give a talk in front of a big crowd and you’re terrified. As you step on stage, your hands shake, your voice keeps catching in your throat, you’re sweating and flushed. Afterward, you chat to someone from the audience and remark: ‘So that’s what a slow-motion panic attack looks like.’

‘Well, you seemed like a confident speaker,’ they say. ‘You didn’t look nervous at all. I wish I could be as good at public speaking.’ Evidently, they were sitting at the back or they have bad eyesight. Your shaking hands and nervous pauses were far too apparent. Especially compared to the two wonderful speakers who came after you.

No one cares

“Words are the source of misunderstandings.” ― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince

The reality is that other people pay much less attention to you than you think. They’re often far too absorbed in their own subjective experiences to pick up on subtle cues related to the feelings of others. If you’re annoyed at your partner, they’re probably too busy thinking about what they need to do at work tomorrow or what they’re planning to cook for dinner to scrutinize your facial expressions. They’re not deliberately ignoring you, they’re just thinking about other things. While you’re having a bad day at work, your coworkers are probably distracted by their own deadlines and personal problems. You could fall asleep sitting up and many of them wouldn’t even notice. And when you give a talk in front of people, most of them are worrying about the next time they have to do any public speaking or when they can get a coffee.

In your own subjective experience, you’re in the eye of the storm. But what other people have to go on are things like your tone of voice, facial expressions, and body language. The clues these provide can be hard to read. Unless someone is trying their best to figure out what you’re thinking or feeling, they’re not going to be particularly focused on your body language. If you make even the slightest effort to conceal your inner state, you’re quite able to hide it altogether from everyone.

Our tendency to overestimate how much attention people are paying to us is a result of seeing our own perspective as the only perspective. If we’re feeling a strong emotion, we assume other people care about how we feel as much as we do. This egocentric bias leads to the spotlight effect—in social situations, we feel like there’s a spotlight shining on us. It’s not self-obsession, it’s natural. But overall, this internal self-focus is what makes you think other people can tell what you’re thinking.

Take the case of lying. Even if we try to err on the side of honesty, we all face situations where we feel we have no option except to tell a lie. Setting aside the ethics of the matter, most of us probably don’t feel good about lying. It makes us uncomfortable. It’s normal to worry that whoever you’re lying to will easily be able to tell. Again, unless you’re being very obvious, the chances of someone else picking up on it are smaller than you think. In one study, participants asked to lie to other participants estimated they’d be caught about half the time. In fact, people only guessed they were lying about a quarter of the time—a rate low enough for random chance to account for it.

Tactics

“Even if one is neither vain nor self-obsessed, it is so extraordinary to be oneself—exactly oneself and no one else—and so unique, that it seems natural that one should also be unique for someone else.” ― Simone de Beauvoir

Understanding how the illusion of transparency works can help you navigate otherwise challenging situations with ease.

Start with accepting that other people don’t usually know what you’re thinking and feeling. If you want someone to know your mental state, you need to tell them in the clearest terms possible. You can’t make assumptions. Being subtle about your feelings is not the best idea, especially in high-stakes situations. Err on the side of caution whenever possible by communicating plainly in words about your feelings or views.

Likewise, if you think you know how someone else feels, you should ask them to confirm. You shouldn’t assume you’ve got it right—you probably haven’t. If it’s important, you need to double check. The person who seems calm on the surface might be frenzied underneath. Some of us just appear unhappy to others all the time, no matter how we’re feeling. If you can’t pick up on someone’s mental state, they might not be vocalizing it because they think it’s obvious. So ask.

As Dylan Evans writes in Risk Intelligence: How To Live With Uncertainty,

The first and most basic remedy is simply to treat all your hunches about the thoughts and feelings of other people with a pinch of salt and to be similarly skeptical about their ability to read your mind. It can be hard to resist the feeling that someone is lying to you, or that your own honesty will shine through, but with practice it can be done.

The illusion of transparency doesn’t go away just because you know someone well. Even partners, family members and close friends have difficulty reading each other’s mental states. The problem compounds when we think they should be able to do this. We can easily become annoyed when they can’t. If you’re upset or angry and someone close to you doesn’t make any attempt to make you feel better, they are not necessarily ignoring you. They just haven’t noticed anything is wrong, or they may not know how you want them to respond. As Hanlon’s razor teaches us, it’s best not to assume malicious intent. Understanding this can help avoid arguments that spring up based on thinking we’re communicating clearly when we’re not.

“Much unhappiness has come into the world because of bewilderment and things left unsaid.” ― Fyodor Dostoevsky

Set yourself free

Knowing about the illusion of transparency can be liberating. Guess what? No one really cares. Or almost no one. If you’ve got food stuck between your teeth or you stutter during a speech or you’re exhausted at work, you might as well assume no one has noticed. Most of the time, they haven’t.

Back to public speaking: We get it all wrong when we think people can tell we’re nervous about giving a talk. In a study entitled “The illusion of transparency and the alleviation of speech anxiety,” Kenneth Savitskya and Thomas Gilovich tested how knowing about the effect could help people feel less scared about public speaking.¹ When participants were asked to give a speech, their self-reported levels of nervousness were well above what audience members guessed they were experiencing. Inside, they felt like a nervous wreck. On the outside, they looked calm and collected.

But when speakers learned about the illusion of transparency beforehand, they were less concerned about audience perceptions and therefore less nervous. They ended up giving better speeches, according to both their own and audience assessments. It’s a lot easier to focus on what you’re saying if you’re not so worried about what everyone else is thinking.

The sun revolves around me, doesn’t it?

In psychology, anchoring refers to our tendency to make an estimated guess by selecting whatever information is easily available as our “anchor,” then adjusting from that point. Often, the adjustments are insufficient. This is exactly what happens when you try to guess the mental state of others. If we try to estimate how a friend feels, we take how we feel as our starting point, then adjust our guess from there.

According to the authors of a paper entitled “The Illusion of Transparency: Biased Assessments of Other’s Ability to Read One’s Emotional States,”

People are typically quite aware of their own internal states and tend to focus on them rather intently when they are strong. To be sure, people recognize that others are not privy to the same information as they are, and they attempt to adjust for this fact when trying to anticipate another’s perspective. Nevertheless, it can be hard to get beyond one’s own perspective even when one knows that.

This is similar to hindsight bias, where things seem obvious in retrospect, even if they weren’t beforehand. When you look back on an event, it’s hard to disentangle what you knew then from what you know now. You can only use your current position as an anchor, a perspective which is inevitably skewed.

If you’re trying to hide your mental state, you’re probably doing better than you think. Unless you’re talking to, say, a trained police interrogator or professional poker player, other people are easy to fool. They’re not looking that hard, so a mild effort to hide your emotions is likely to work well. People can’t read your mind, whether you’re trying to pretend you don’t hate the taste of a trendy new beer, or trying to conceal your true standing in a negotiation to gain more leverage.

The illusion of transparency explains why, even once you’re no longer a teenager, it still seems like few people understand you. It’s not that other people are ambivalent or confused. Your feelings just aren’t as clear as you think. Often you can’t see beyond the confines of your own head and neither can anyone else. It’s best to make allowances for that.

The post Illusion of Transparency: Your Poker Face is Better Than You Think appeared first on Farnam Street.

***

Occam’s razor (also known as the “law of parsimony”) is a problem-solving principle which serves as a useful mental model. A philosophical razor is a tool used to eliminate improbable options in a given situation. Occam’s is the best-known example.

Occam’s razor can be summarized as follows:

Among competing hypotheses, the one with the fewest assumptions should be selected.

The Basics

In simpler language, Occam’s razor states that the simplest explanation is preferable to one that is more complex. Simple theories are easier to verify. Simple solutions are easier to execute.

In other words, we should avoid looking for excessively complex solutions to a problem, and focus on what works given the circumstances. Occam’s razor can be used in a wide range of situations, as a means of making rapid decisions and establishing truths without empirical evidence. It works best as a mental model for making initial conclusions before the full scope of information can be obtained.

Science and math offer interesting lessons that demonstrate the value of simplicity. For example, the principle of minimum energy supports Occam’s razor. This facet of the second law of thermodynamics states that wherever possible, the use of energy is minimized. Physicists use Occam’s razor in the knowledge that they can rely on everything to use the minimum energy necessary to function. A ball at the top of a hill will roll down in order to be at the point of minimum potential energy. The same principle is present in biology. If a person repeats the same action on a regular basis in response to the same cue and reward, it will become a habit as the corresponding neural pathway is formed. From then on, their brain will use less energy to complete the same action.

The History of Occam’s Razor

The concept of Occam’s razor is credited to William of Ockham, a 14th-century friar, philosopher, and theologian. While he did not coin the term, his characteristic way of making deductions inspired other writers to develop the heuristic. Indeed, the concept of Occam’s razor is an ancient one. Aristotle produced the oldest known statement of the concept, saying, “We may assume the superiority, other things being equal, of the demonstration which derives from fewer postulates or hypotheses.”

Robert Grosseteste expanded on Aristotle’s writing in the 1200s, declaring

That is better and more valuable which requires fewer, other circumstances being equal…. For if one thing were demonstrated from many and another thing from fewer equally known premises, clearly that is better which is from fewer because it makes us know quickly, just as a universal demonstration is better than particular because it produces knowledge from fewer premises. Similarly, in natural science, in moral science, and in metaphysics the best is that which needs no premises and the better that which needs the fewer, other circumstances being equal.

Nowadays, Occam’s razor is an established mental model which can form a useful part of a latticework of knowledge.

Examples of the Use of Occam’s Razor

The Development of Scientific Theories

Occam’s razor is frequently used by scientists, in particular for theoretical matters. The simpler a hypothesis is, the more easily it can be proven or falsified. A complex explanation for a phenomenon involves many factors which can be difficult to test or lead to issues with the repeatability of an experiment. As a consequence, the simplest solution which is consistent with the existing data is preferred. However, it is common for new data to allow hypotheses to become more complex over time. Scientists choose to opt for the simplest solution as the current data permits, while remaining open to the possibility of future research allowing for greater complexity.

The version used by scientists can best be summarized as:

When you have two competing theories that make exactly the same predictions, the simpler one is better.

The use of Occam’s razor in science is also a matter of practicality. Obtaining funding for simpler hypotheses tends to be easier, as they are often cheaper to prove.

Albert Einstein referred to Occam’s razor when developing his theory of special relativity. He formulated his own version: “It can scarcely be denied that the supreme goal of all theory is to make the irreducible basic elements as simple and as few as possible without having to surrender the adequate representation of a single datum of experience.” Or, “Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.”

The physicist Stephen Hawking advocates for Occam’s razor in A Brief History of Time:

We could still imagine that there is a set of laws that determines events completely for some supernatural being, who could observe the present state of the universe without disturbing it. However, such models of the universe are not of much interest to us mortals. It seems better to employ the principle known as Occam’s razor and cut out all the features of the theory that cannot be observed.

Isaac Newton used Occam’s razor too when developing his theories. Newton stated: “We are to admit no more causes of natural things than such as are both true and sufficient to explain their appearances.” He sought to make his theories, including the three laws of motion, as simple as possible, with only the necessary minimum of underlying assumptions.

Medicine

Modern doctors use a version of Occam’s razor, stating that they should look for the fewest possible causes to explain their patient’s multiple symptoms, and give preference to the most likely causes. A doctor we know often repeats the aphorism that “common things are common.” Interns are instructed, “when you hear hoofbeats, think horses, not zebras.” For example, a person displaying influenza-like symptoms during an epidemic would be considered more likely to be suffering from influenza than an alternative, rarer disease. Making minimal diagnoses reduces the risk of over-treating a patient, causing panic, or causing dangerous interactions between different treatments. This is of particular importance within the current medical model, where patients are likely to see numerous health specialists and communication between them can be poor.

Prison Abolition and Fair Punishment

Occam’s razor has long played a role in attitudes towards the punishment of crimes. In this context, it refers to the idea that people should be given the least punishment necessary for their crimes. This is to avoid the excessive penal practices which were popular in the past. For example, a 19^th-century English convict could receive five years of hard labor for stealing a piece of food.

The concept of penal parsimony was pioneered by Jeremy Bentham, the founder of utilitarianism. He held that punishments should not cause more pain than they prevent. Life imprisonment for murder could be seen as justified in that it might prevent a great deal of potential pain, should the perpetrator offend again. On the other hand, long-term imprisonment of an impoverished person for stealing food causes substantial suffering without preventing any.

Bentham’s writings on the application of Occam’s razor to punishment led to the prison abolition movement and many modern ideas related to rehabilitation.

Exceptions and Issues

It is important to note that, like any mental model, Occam’s razor is not foolproof. Use it with care, lest you cut yourself. This is especially crucial when it comes to important or risky decisions. There are exceptions to any rule, and we should never blindly follow the results of applying a mental model which logic, experience, or empirical evidence contradict. When you hear hoofbeats behind you, in most cases you should think horses, not zebras—unless you are out on the African savannah.

Furthermore, simple is as simple does. A conclusion can’t rely just on its simplicity. It must be backed by empirical evidence. And when using Occam’s razor to make deductions, we must avoid falling prey to confirmation bias. In the case of the NASA moon landing conspiracy theory, for example, some people consider it simpler for the moon landing to have been faked, others for it to have been real. Lisa Randall best expressed the issues with the narrow application of Occam’s razor in her book, Dark Matter and the Dinosaurs: The Astounding Interconnectedness of the Universe:

Another concern about Occam’s Razor is just a matter of fact. The world is more complicated than any of us would have been likely to conceive. Some particles and properties don’t seem necessary to any physical processes that matter—at least according to what we’ve deduced so far. Yet they exist. Sometimes the simplest model just isn’t the correct one.

This is why it’s important to remember that opting for simpler explanations still requires work. They may be easier to falsify, but still require effort. And that the simpler explanation, although having a higher chance of being correct, is not always true.

Occam’s razor is not intended to be a substitute for critical thinking. It is merely a tool to help make that thinking more efficient. Harlan Coben has disputed many criticisms of Occam’s razor by stating that people fail to understand its exact purpose:

Most people oversimplify Occam’s razor to mean the simplest answer is usually correct. But the real meaning, what the Franciscan friar William of Ockham really wanted to emphasize, is that you shouldn’t complicate, that you shouldn’t “stack” a theory if a simpler explanation was at the ready. Pare it down. Prune the excess.

Remember, Occam’s razor is complemented by other mental models, including fundamental error distribution, Hanlon’s razor, confirmation bias, availability heuristic and hindsight bias. The nature of mental models is that they tend to all interlock and work best in conjunction.

The post How to Use Occam’s Razor Without Getting Cut appeared first on Farnam Street.

Hold the door open for others, and they will open doors for you.

We are far more interdependent than we would like to admit. We biologically need to connect. “Limbic resonance” is a term used by Thomas Lewis, Fari Amini, and Richard Lannon in their book, A General Theory of Love, to express the ability to share deep emotional states. The name comes from the limbic system, the set of structures in our brains which appear to be responsible for our emotions, among other things.

Resonance is not only a mammalian capacity but an outright necessity. Our infants will die if not provided with the warmth of connection with another being, despite being provided with all their physiological needs. This has been illustrated in inhumane 13th-century human ‘experiments’ by Frederick the Great depriving babies of human connection, and more recently by Harry Harlow in rhesus monkeys. Baby monkeys choose to spend 17 hours a day with a soft cloth mother figure that does not provide food compared to only one hour a day with a wire mother figure that actually provides milk. Connection is a far superior sustenance.

An oft-quoted study by psychologist John Gottman suggests a partner’s ability to answer “emotional bids” to be strongly predictive of divorce. The divorce rate is higher in couples where partners do not resonate or fail to engage and respond to requests for attention. Those who divorced after a six-year follow-up were observed to have turned towards the other on only 30% of occasions a bid was made, whilst couples who were still together averaged closer to 90%. Furthermore, in A General Theory of Love, the authors convincingly argue that what we are actually doing is synchronising ourselves with one another, with deep impacts on our emotional and physical health.

This would be in keeping with the results of the well-known Harvard Study of Adult Development, which followed a large cohort of people over a lifetime. These types of studies are rare because they’re expensive and hard to carry out. This study was well worth investing in, with one clear overall conclusion: good relationships keep us happier and healthier. Its director, psychiatrist Robert Waldinger, states:

Well, the lessons aren’t about wealth or fame or working harder and harder. The clearest message that we get from this 75-year study is this: Good relationships keep us happier and healthier. Period.

We’ve learned three big lessons about relationships. The first is that social connections are really good for us, and that loneliness kills. It turns out that people who are more socially connected to family, to friends, to community, are happier, they’re physically healthier, and they live longer than people who are less well connected. And the experience of loneliness turns out to be toxic. People who are more isolated than they want to be from others find that they are less happy, their health declines earlier in midlife, their brain functioning declines sooner and they live shorter lives than people who are not lonely.

So what now? Where does that leave us?

People feel connected when they are understood and appreciated. My friend’s aunt taught her this when they walked together down a busy road. Her aunt stopped to talk to a homeless man. With no money to give him, she started asking questions about his dog, chatting to him about her own dog. The interaction took 30 seconds. The man’s eyes shone back bright, engaged. As they walked away, my friend’s aunt whispered, “People want to be recognized. It reminds them they exist. Never take that away from anyone.” Lesson learned.

Listen, Summarize, Show

I work hard to live that lesson through the following: listen, summarize, show. True, sustained listening is one of the hardest skills to achieve. I’ve met only a handful of people with the ability. A simple way to focus your attention is to listen with the intention of summarizing the other person’s point of view. This stops you from using your mental energy to work out your reply, and helps store the other’s words in your memory as well as identify any gaps in your understanding so you can ask questions to clarify.

The nature of these questions in themselves will show to the other person that they are heard and effort is being made to take them seriously. Just as it is not enough to know, when it comes to human relationships, it is not enough to understand. What is crucial is to show you understand. If empathy is recognizing another’s perspective, consideration for the other needs to be externalized from you for it to exist and build rapport.

Summarizing and asking questions is a way of feeding back your resonance. Cutting short the conversation, stating opinions, value judgements, your own solutions, or even a lazy “I see” or “interesting” does not demonstrate resonance. In fact, you can use “I understand” as a red flag for someone who does not understand. Often, this is followed by an action that shows a thorough lack of comprehension.

Connect Where It Matters

To resonate with others, we need to connect when it matters. This nurtures both us and others, and also earns trust. Just as in cooking, timing is everything.

This is where the metaphorical doors come in. How do you feel when someone holds the door open for you—especially when you’ve got your hands full? When would you hold open a door for another person?

We may kindly open a door, to find the person has no intention of walking through it and continues down the stairwell because they’re heading to the floor below. In this case, we did not understand their needs. We may even find ourselves bending over backwards for another, without consequence. This is the equivalent of opening doors willy-nilly down a long corridor without anyone walking through them.

At worst, we might inadvertently (or dare I say, even intentionally) slam a door in someone’s face. That will hurt—even more so if we had offered to hold it for them and they were counting on it to be open. Holding a door open at the right time represents tending to a perceived need and meeting expectations.

All people want to be understood and appreciated. By connecting in this way, they trust you understand them and are actually looking out for their interests. You are attentive and willing to open doors for them. The power of resonance will keep you happy and healthy and open doors for you.

The post Resonance: How to Open Doors For Other People appeared first on Farnam Street.

Picture your bedroom. Neat and organized? That’s low entropy. But leave it alone, and chaos creeps in – clothes on the floor, papers everywhere. That’s entropy increasing.

This tendency towards disorder is a fundamental law of physics. It’s why:

• Ice cubes melt in your drink
• Hot things cool down
• The universe slowly evens out its energy

Here’s the kicker: Disorder is not a mistake; it is the default. Order is always artificial and temporary. Disorder happens naturally, while order takes energy. Left on its own, the universe tends toward chaos. Your house doesn’t clean itself—it takes energy and effort to maintain order. Stars burn out, structures crumble, and ice melts.

In The Great Mental Models, volume two, we write, “Entropy is the universe’s tax on time. The constant battle against entropy is the driving force behind much of what we do. The constant struggle between order and disorder is the source of change and progress.”

Look around. You’ll see entropy everywhere.

Still Curious?

The second law of thermodynamics states that “as one goes forward in time, the net entropy (degree of disorder) of any isolated or closed system will always increase (or at least stay the same).”^[1]

Entropy is a measure of disorder and affects all aspects of our daily lives. You can think of it as nature’s tax.^[2]

Entropy naturally increases over time. Problems arise: your house gets messy, your garden gets weeds, and the heat from your coffee spreads out. Businesses fail, crimes and revolutions occur, and relationships end. In the long run, everything naturally decays, and disorder always increases.

Discovery of Entropy

The identification of entropy is attributed to Rudolf Clausius (1822–1888), a German mathematician and physicist.

Clausius studied the conversion of heat into work. He recognized that heat from a body at a high temperature would flow to one at a lower temperature. This is how your coffee cools down the longer it’s left out — the heat from the coffee flows into the room. This happens naturally. But if you want to heat cold water to make the coffee, you need to do work — you need a power source to heat the water.

From this idea comes Clausius’s statement of the second law of thermodynamics: “Heat does not pass from a body at low temperature to one at high temperature without an accompanying change elsewhere.”

Clausius also observed something curious: Only a percentage of energy is converted into actual work. Nature was exerting a tax.

Perplexed, scientists asked, where did the rest of the heat go and why?

Clausius solved the riddle by observing a steam engine and calculating that energy spread out and left the system. In The Mechanical Theory of Heat, Clausius explains his findings:

… the quantities of heat which must be imparted to, or withdrawn from a changeable body are not the same, when these changes occur in a non-reversible manner, as they are when the same changes occur reversibly. In the second place, with each non-reversible change is associated an uncompensated transformation…

… I propose to call the magnitude S the entropy of the body… I have intentionally formed the word entropy so as to be as similar as possible to the word energy….

The second fundamental theorem [the second law of thermodynamics], in the form which I have given to it, asserts that all transformations occurring in nature may take place in a certain direction, which I have assumed as positive, by themselves, that is, without compensation… [T]he entire condition of the universe must always continue to change in that first direction, and the universe must consequently approach incessantly a limiting condition.

… For every body two magnitudes have thereby presented themselves—the transformation value of its thermal content [the amount of inputted energy that is converted to “work”], and its disgregation [separation or disintegration]; the sum of which constitutes its entropy.

Clausius summarized the concept of entropy in simple terms: “The energy of the universe is constant. The entropy of the universe tends to a maximum.”

Entropy and Time

Entropy is one of the few concepts that provide evidence for the existence of time. The “Arrow of Time” is a name given to the idea that time is asymmetrical and flows in only one direction: forward. It is a non-reversible process wherein entropy increases.

Astronomer Arthur Eddington pioneered the concept of the Arrow of Time in 1927, writing:

Let us draw an arrow arbitrarily. If as we follow the arrow[,] we find more and more of the random element in the state of the world, then the arrow is pointing towards the future; if the random element decreases[,] the arrow points towards the past. That is the only distinction known to physics.

In a segment of Wonders of the Universe, produced for BBC Two, physicist Brian Cox explains:

The Arrow of Time dictates that as each moment passes, things change, and once these changes have happened, they are never undone. Permanent change is a fundamental part of what it means to be human. We all age as the years pass by — people are born, they live, and they die. I suppose it’s part of the joy and tragedy of our lives, but out there in the universe, those grand and epic cycles appear eternal and unchanging. But that’s an illusion. See, in the life of the universe, just as in our lives, everything is irreversibly changing.

In his play Arcadia, Tom Stoppard uses a novel metaphor for the non-reversible nature of entropy:

When you stir your rice pudding, Septimus, the spoonful of jam spreads itself round making red trails like the picture of a meteor in my astronomical atlas. But if you stir backwards, the jam will not come together again. Indeed, the pudding does not notice and continues to turn pink just as before. Do you think this is odd?

Entropy in Business and Economics

Entropy is fundamentally a probabilistic idea: For every possible “usefully ordered” state of molecules, there are many more possible “disordered” states.

Just as energy tends towards a less useful, more disordered state, so do businesses and organizations. Rearranging the molecules — or business systems and people — into an “ordered” state requires constant energy expenditure.

Let’s imagine that we start a company by sticking 20 people in an office with an ill-defined but ambitious goal and no further leadership. We tell them we’ll pay them as long as they’re there, working. We come back two months later to find that five have quit, five are sleeping with each other, and the other ten have no idea how to solve the litany of problems that have arisen. The employees are certainly not much closer to the goal laid out for them. Left to its own devices, the whole enterprise falls apart.

In physics, entropy is a law; in social systems, it’s a mere tendency — though a strong one, to be sure.

Entropy occurs in every aspect of a business. Employees may forget training, lose enthusiasm, cut corners, and ignore rules. Equipment may break down, become inefficient, or be subject to improper use. Products may become outdated or be in less demand. Even the best of intentions cannot prevent an entropic slide towards chaos.

Successful businesses invest time and money to minimize entropy. For example, they provide regular staff training, good reporting of issues, inspections, detailed files, and monitoring reports of successes and failures. They ruthlessly seek out and eliminate the sediment of bureaucracy. Anything less will mean almost inevitable problems and loss of potential revenue. Without the necessary effort, a business expands into bankruptcy.

Entropy sows the seeds of destruction.

Fortunately, unlike thermodynamic systems, a business can reverse the impact of entropy. A balance must be struck between creativity and control, though. Too little autonomy for employees results in disinterest, while too much leads to poor decisions.

Entropy in Everyday Life

We have all observed entropy in our everyday lives. Everything tends towards disorder. Life always seems to get more complicated. Once-tidy rooms become cluttered and dusty. Strong relationships grow fractured and end. We grow old. Complex skills are forgotten. Buildings degrade as brickwork cracks, paint chips, and tiles loosen.

Disorder is not a mistake; it is the default. Order is always artificial and temporary.

Just because entropy is the natural tendency of things, that doesn’t mean you can’t fight back. You can clean a messy house, pull weeds out of the garden, and practice your skills. You can maintain your relationship, go to the gym, and even put up a fresh coat of paint.

Combatting entropy requires energy. When you clean a messy house, you use energy to return the house to a previous, simpler, tidier state. This is why entropy is nature’s tax. You need to expend energy just to maintain the current state. Failing to pay nature’s tax means things get more complicated, disorganized, and messier.

We cannot expect anything to stay the way we leave it. To maintain our health, relationships, careers, skills, knowledge, societies, and possessions requires never-ending effort and vigilance.

Now you understand why one of the hardest things in life is keeping it simple.

Disorder is not a mistake; it is our default. Order is always artificial and temporary.

Does that seem sad or pointless? It’s not. Imagine a world with no entropy — everything stays the way we leave it, no one ages or gets ill, nothing breaks or fails, everything remains pristine. Arguably, that would also be a world without innovation, creativity, urgency, or need for progress.

In The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood, James Gleick writes,

Organisms organize. … We sort the mail, build sand castles, solve jigsaw puzzles, separate wheat from chaff, rearrange chess pieces, collect stamps, alphabetize books, create symmetry, compose sonnets and sonatas, and put our rooms in order… We propagate structure (not just we humans but we who are alive). We disturb the tendency toward equilibrium. It would be absurd to attempt a thermodynamic accounting for such processes, but it is not absurd to say we are reducing entropy, piece by piece. Bit by bit … Not only do living things lessen the disorder in their environments; they are in themselves, their skeletons and their flesh, vesicles and membranes, shells, and carapaces, leaves, and blossoms, circulatory systems and metabolic pathways—miracles of pattern and structure. It sometimes seems as if curbing entropy is our quixotic purpose in the universe.

The question is not whether we can prevent entropy (we can’t) but how we can curb, control, work with, and understand it. Entropy is all around us.

The tiny individual decisions we make (or don’t make) to combat entropy in our daily lives create massively different results. Consider focus. The number of projects we are involved in only seems to grow. Those of us who expend energy to maintain focus on only one or two get a lot more done than those who naturally let things expand. Focus requires effort.

Using Entropy to Gain an Advantage

Whether you’re starting a business or trying to change your organization, understanding the abstraction of entropy as a mental model will help you accomplish your goals more effectively. Because things naturally move to disorder over time, we can position ourselves to create stability.

There are two types of stability: active and passive. Consider a ship, which, if designed well, should be able to sail through a storm without intervention. This is passive stability. A fighter jet, in contrast, requires active stability. The plane can’t fly for more than a few seconds without having to adjust its wings. This adjustment happens so fast that it’s controlled by software. There is no inherent stability here: if you cut the power, the plane crashes.^[3]

People get in trouble when they confuse the two types of stability.

Relationships, for example, require attention and care. If you assume your relationship is passively stable, you’ll wake up one day to divorce papers. Your house is also not passively stable. If not cleaned regularly, it will continue to get messier and messier.

Organizations require stability, as well. If you’re a company that relies on debt, you’re not passively stable but actively stable. Factoring in a margin of safety, this means that the people giving you the credit should be passively stable. If you’re both actively stable, then when the power gets cut, you’re likely to be in a position of weakness, not strength.

With active stability, you’re applying energy to a system to bring about some advantage (keeping the plane from crashing, your relationship going, the house clean, etc.), If we move a little further down the rabbit hole, we can see how applying the same amount of energy can yield totally different results.

Let’s use the analogy of coughing.^[4] Coughing is the transfer of energy as heat. If you cough in a quiet coffee shop, which you can think of as a system with low entropy, you cause a big change. Your cough is disruptive. On the other hand, if you cough in Times Square, a system with a lot of entropy, that same cough will have no impact. While you change the entropy in both cases, the impact you have with the same cough is proportional to the existing entropy.

Now think of this example in relation to your organization. You’re applying energy to get something done. The higher the entropy in the system, the less efficient the energy you apply will be. The same person applying 20 units of energy in a big bureaucracy is going to see less impact than someone applying the same 20 units in a small startup.

You can think about this idea in a competitive sense, too. If you’re starting a business and you’re competing against very effective and efficient people, a lot of effort will get absorbed. It’s not going to be very efficient. If, on the other hand, you compete against less efficient and effective people, the same amount of energy will be more efficient in its conversion.

For a change to occur, you must apply more energy to the system than is extracted by the system.

Resources:

[1] http://www.exactlywhatistime.com/physics-of-time/the-arrow-of-time/

^[2] Peter Atkins

^[3] Based on the work of Tom Tombrello

^[4] Derived from the work of Peter Atkins in The Laws of Thermodynamics: A Very Short Introduction

The post Entropy: The Hidden Force Making Life Complicated appeared first on Farnam Street.

There is an old saying that I think of often, passed to me by my friend Peter Kaufman, “If you do what everyone else is doing, you shouldn’t be surprised to get the same results everyone else is getting.” Unless you’re lucky, doing what everyone else does ensures average results. The problem is we don’t want the same outcomes as everyone else. We want different outcomes. Different outcomes come from doing different things or doing things differently.

It’s easy to overestimate the importance of luck in success and underestimate the importance of investing in success every single day. Too often, we convince ourselves that success is just luck.

We tell ourselves the school teacher that left millions was just lucky. No. She wasn’t. She was playing a different game than you were. She was playing the long game.

Here’s the thing about the long game: It’s simpler to win than the short game. Simple but not easy. It requires repeatedly doing hard things today that make tomorrow easier.

We play the short game because we lack patience. Everyone wants to win, but there is a difference between trying to win the moment and trying to win the decade. As I’ve said before, a lack of patience changes the outcome.

The most successful people in any field all play the long game. The long game isn’t particularly notable. It doesn’t attract a lot of attention. In fact, from the outside, the long game looks boring. The tiny advantages that accrue aren’t noticed until success becomes too obvious to ignore.

The short game is intermittent. It’s as if Sisyphus pushes his huge boulder halfway up a steep hill, gets tired, lets it roll down the hill, and says to himself, “I’ll come back and do this tomorrow.” This is the human condition.

The Short Game

Immediate and visible benefits seduce you into the short game. You win today but lose tomorrow. The short game is taking advantage of your counterparties. The short game is spending more than you earn. The short game is not sleeping as much as you need to. The short game is not investing in your relationships when you don’t need them.

The longer you play the short game, the harder things get.

Just as the accumulation of tiny advantages makes the future easier, the accumulation of tiny disadvantages makes the future harder.

If you take advantage of people, they won’t want to work with you. If you follow a get-rich-quick scheme, you end up back at zero. If you over-charge your customers, they will leave. If you don’t invest in your relationship, you will come home to an empty house.

I like to explain it to my kids like this: Think of playing pool. Your goal is to run the table. The short game sinks the first shot but doesn’t care where the ball goes next. You have the illusion of winning, but when you go to line up the next shot, you realize it’s harder than it needs to be.

Only when the costs become too large to ignore do people realize they played the wrong game.

The Long Game

The long game is the opposite of the short game. You have to think about where the ball ends up next.

From the outside, the long game looks pretty boring:

• Leaving the party early to make sure you get some sleep
• Eating healthy when everyone else is eating junk
• Investing your relationships every day so you have a foundation when something happens
• Going for a walk rather than watching Netflix
• Spending less than you make

… and countless other examples.

The long game isn’t really debatable. Everyone knows; to get rich, we should spend less than we make and invest the difference and wait a long time. The formula isn’t debatable. It just requires patience. The lack of patience changes the outcome.

The first step in the long game is the hardest. You have to be willing to suffer a little today in order to make tomorrow just a little bit easier. And you have to be smart enough to know that just because you can’t see the tiny advantage you created doesn’t mean it’s not there.

Conclusion

Every action is a step toward the short game or the long game. You can’t opt out, and you can’t play a long-term game in everything. You need to pick what matters to you. But in everything you do, time amplifies the difference between strategies that work in the short term and ones that work in the long term.

The long game allows you to compound results. The longer you play, the bigger the rewards. The question to think about is when and where to play a long-term game. A good place to start is with things that compound: knowledge, relationships, and finances.

This article is an expansion of something I originally touched on here. 

The post The Surprising Power of The Long Game appeared first on Farnam Street.