In our rapidly evolving economy, technological waves are continually forming, cresting, and crashing. You gain significant advantage by identifying and riding these waves. But you must also know when to surf them and when to bail.

Consider Kodak, which once employed 140,000 people and dominated photography for generations. Remarkably, Kodak invented the digital camera internally in 1975 but failed to embrace this emerging wave. By clinging to film while the digital tsunami approached, Kodak missed the next great wave and paid the price.

This pattern repeats throughout history. Buggy whip manufacturers were wiped out by automobiles. Video rental stores vanished in the rise of streaming services. Taxi medallions once worth millions became nearly worthless against ridesharing apps.

As Charlie Munger describes it in Poor Charlie’s Alamanack:

“When technology moves as fast as it does in a civilization like ours, you get a phenomenon that I call competitive destruction. You know, you have the finest buggy whip factory, and all of a sudden, in comes this little horseless carriage. And before too many years go by, your buggy whip business is dead. You either get into a different business or you’re dead—you’re destroyed. It happens again and again and again.

And when these new businesses come in, there are huge advantages for the early birds. When you’re an early bird, there’s a model that I call surfing—when a surfer gets up and catches the wave and just stays there, he can go a long, long time. But if he gets off the wave, he becomes mired in shallows.”

What makes this economic model fascinating isn’t merely the destruction of old industries but the disproportionate rewards for early wave-catchers. Those first to master new paradigms don’t merely succeed—they often dominate, wielding seemingly unfair advantages.

The core challenge isn’t just working harder at what we already know. It’s developing the vision to spot emerging waves early, the courage to paddle toward them before others recognize their potential, and the skill to stand up at precisely the right moment.

Those who miss these waves or dismount too early find themselves “mired in the shallows”—stuck watching from the sidelines as others ride momentum to extraordinary heights. The ability to surf economic waves isn’t just advantageous; it’s essential for sustained success.

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It is essential to take risks. Examine the life of any lucky man or woman, and you are all but certain to find that he or she was willing, at some point, to take a risk. Without that willingness, hardly anything interesting is likely to happen to you.

— Max Gunther

A lot of otherwise talented people are too pessimistic to actually do anything. They are paralyzed by risks that don’t exist and greatly exaggerate them where they do, preventing them from being one of the best.

Consider this lightly edited excerpt from a conversation between Charlie Rose and Magnus Carlsen that argues it’s better to be overly confident than pessimistic in some areas.

Magnus Carlsen: And I think it’s always better to be overly confident than pessimistic. I realize sometimes after games that, you know, I was actually way too confident here. I was way too optimistic. But if you’re not optimistic, if you’re not looking for your chances, you’re going to miss. You’re going to miss opportunities. And you know, I think there are — there are plenty of players in history who have been immensely talented, but they’re — they’re just too pessimistic. They see too many dangers that are not there and so on so they cannot perform at a very high level.

Charlie Rose: See, that’s very interesting. They see dangers that are not there.

Magnus Carlsen: Yes

Charlie Rose: So, therefore, they don’t play at the highest level.

Magnus Carlsen: I realize from time to time you know people who are not particularly strong players, but still, they are very good players. But they could be one of the best if they just had more confidence. I’m analyzing with them when I’m looking at chess, I realize, they know everything about the game, but nevertheless, they cannot play.

Charlie Rose: There is a missing thing.

Magnus Carlsen: Yes.

Charlie Rose: Yes. And to me, it’s like a winner’s edge?

Magnus Carlsen: Yes, you need to have that. You need to have that edge, you need to have that confidence, you need to have that absolute belief that you’re — you’re the best, and you’ll win every time.

Charlie Rose: Were you born with that?

Magnus Carlsen: I don’t know.

Charlie Rose: Or are you born with something so that when you’ve learned chess those two things merge? They came together. You have confidence, and once you had the skills, the confidence served your skill, and your skill served your confidence.

Magnus Carlsen: Yes but it didn’t come immediately for me so.

Charlie Rose: What age did it come?

Magnus Carlsen: I think it only came a few years ago.

Charlie Rose: Yes how old are you now?

Magnus Carlsen: I’m 22. So I think at about age 16 or 17 I realized, you know, that I’m — I’m probably going to be the best at some point and I need to — I need to show that. I need to be more — more confident and need to take a different approach but because before that sometimes I would be — I would be too pessimistic. Like I was —

Charlie Rose: You’re describing the other them?

Magnus Carlsen: Yes. And you know at first that was — that changed in approach was a total disaster. Because I would lose several games because I would constantly overestimate my chances and so on but eventually that became a good thing because when — when my playing strength caught up to my optimism —

Charlie Rose: Yes, exactly — well said.

Magnus Carlsen: And then that was it.

The Paradox of Ignorance

The are two key lessons here for me.

First, there are two types of confidence: phony and expert.

Phony confidence, borne of ignorance, fools us into thinking we understand something when we don’t. As a result, we take risks we don’t know we’re taking.

Expert confidence, borne of deep fluency, allows us to understand the risks we are taking.

If you have to ask which type of confidence you have, it’s best to assume it’s phony. This need not prevent you from taking action. Rather, you just need to ensure you have a much bigger margin of safety than you think — for the risks you can’t see.

Second, not all risk is the same; over-estimating risk can be as costly as under-estimating it when it prevents you from moving.

When the cost of failure is low, too much pessimism prevents you from trying. When the cost of failure is high, too much optimism encourages unwarranted risk.

_{Interview Source: https://charlierose.com/videos/17112}

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No other subject is associated with such widespread fear, confusion, and even outright hatred. No other subject is so often declared by children and adults alike to be something they “can’t do” because they lack an innate aptitude for it.

Math is portrayed as something you get or you don’t. Most of us sit in class feeling like we don’t.

But what if this weren’t the fault of the subject itself, but of the manner in which we teach it? What if the standard curriculum were a gross misrepresentation of the subject? What if it were possible to teach mathematics in a manner naturally incorporating the kinds of activities that appeal to children and learners of all ages?

All of those things are true, argues Paul Lockhart, a mathematician who chose to switch from teaching at top universities to inspiring grade-schoolers. In 2002, he penned “A Mathematician’s Lament,” a 25-page essay that was later expanded into a book.

In the essay, Lockhart declares that students who say their mathematics classes are stupid and boring are correct—though the subject itself is not. The problem is that our culture does not recognize that the true nature of math is art. So we teach it in a manner that would just as easily ruin any other art.

***

To illustrate the harms of the typical mathematical curriculum, Lockhart envisions what it would look like if we treated music or painting in the same dreary, arbitrary way.

What if music education was all about notation and theory, with listening or playing only open to those who somehow persevered until college?

“Since musicians are known to set down their ideas in the form of sheet music, these curious black dots and lines must constitute the “language of music.” It is imperative that students become fluent in this language if they are to attain any degree of musical competence; indeed, it would be ludicrous to expect a child to sing a song or play an instrument without having a thorough grounding in music notation and theory.

Playing and listening to music, let alone composing an original piece, are considered very advanced topics and are generally put off until college, and more often graduate school.”

And what if art students spent years studying paints and brushes, without ever getting to unleash their imaginations on a blank canvas?

“After class I spoke with the teacher. ‘So your students don’t actually do any painting?’ I asked.

‘Well, next year they take Pre-Paint-by-Numbers. That prepares them for the main Paint-by-Numbers sequence in high school. So they’ll get to use what they’ve learned here and apply it to real-life painting situations—dipping the brush into paint, wiping it off, stuff like that. Of course we track our students by ability. The really excellent painters—the ones who know their colors and brushes backwards and forwards—they get to the actual painting a little sooner, and some of them even take the Advanced Placement classes for college credit. But mostly we’re just trying to give these kids a good foundation in what painting is all about, so when they get out there in the real world and paint their kitchen they don’t make a total mess of it.'”

As laughable as we may find these vignettes, Lockhart considers them analogous to how we teach mathematics as something devoid of expression, exploration, or discovery.

Few who have spent countless hours on the equivalent of paint-by-numbers in the typical math class could understand that “there is nothing as dreamy and poetic, nothing as radical, subversive, and psychedelic, as mathematics.” Like other arts, its objective is the creation of patterns. The material mathematical patterns are made from is not paint or musical notes, however, but ideas.

Though we may use components of mathematics in practical fields such as engineering, the objective of the field itself isn’t anything practical. Above all, mathematicians strive to present ideas in the simplest form possible, which means dwelling in the realm of the imaginary.

In mathematics, Lockhart explains, there is no reality to get in your way. You can imagine a geometric shape with perfect edges, even though such a thing could never exist in the physical, three-dimensional world. Then you can ask questions of it and discover new things through experimentation with the imaginary. That process—“asking simple and elegant questions about our imaginary creations, and crafting satisfying and beautiful explanations”—is mathematics itself. What we learn in school is merely the end product.

We don’t teach the process of creating math. We teach only the steps to repeat someone else’s creation, without exploring how they got there—or why.

Lockhart compares what we teach in math class to “saying that Michelangelo created a beautiful sculpture, without letting me see it.” It’s hard to imagine describing one of Michelangelo’s sculptures solely in terms of the technical steps he took to produce it. And it seems impossible that one could teach sculpture without revealing that there is an art to it. Yet that is what we do with math all the time.

***

If school curriculums fundamentally misrepresent math, where does that misrepresentation come from? Lockhart views it as a self-perpetuating cultural deficiency.

Unlike other arts, we generally don’t celebrate the great works of mathematics and put them on display. Nor have they become all that integrated into our collective consciousness. It’s hard to change the feedback loops at play in education because “students learn about math from their teachers, and teachers learn about it from their teachers, so this lack of understanding and appreciation for mathematics in our culture replicates itself indefinitely.”

In schools, mathematics is treated as something absolute that needs no context, a fixed body of knowledge that ascends a defined ladder of complexity. There can be no criticism, experimentation, or further developments because everything is already known. Its ideas are presented without any indication that they might even be connected to a particular person or particular time. Lockhart writes:

“What other subject is routinely taught without any mention of its history, philosophy, thematic development, aesthetic criteria, and current status? What other subject shuns its primary sources—beautiful works of art by some of the most creative minds in history—in favor of third-rate textbook bastardizations?”

Efforts to engage students with mathematics often take the form of trying to make it relevant to their everyday lives or presenting problems as saccharine narratives. Once again, Lockhart doesn’t believe this would be a problem if students got to engage in the actual creative process: “We don’t need to bend over backwards to give mathematics relevance. It has relevance in the same way that any art does: that of being a meaningful human experience.” An escape from daily life is generally more appealing than an emphasis on it. Children would have as much fun playing with symbols as they have playing with paints.

Those whose mathematics teachers told them the subject was important because “you’re not going to have a calculator in your pocket at all times as an adult” have a good reason to feel like they wasted a lot of time learning arithmetic now that we all have smartphones. But we can imagine those who learn math because it’s entertaining would go out into the world seeing beautiful math patterns all over the place, and enjoying their lives more because of it.

***

If the existing form of mathematics education is all backward, what can we do to improve it? How can we teach and learn it as an art?

Lockhart does acknowledge that the teaching methods he proposes are unrealistic within the current educational system, where teachers get little control over their work and students need to learn the same content at the same time to pass exams. However, his methods can give us ideas for exploring the topic ourselves.

An education in the art of mathematics is above all a personal process of discovery. It requires tackling the sort of problems that speak to us at that particular point in time, not according to a preordained curriculum. If a new direction seems of interest, so be it. It requires space to take our time with exploration and an openness to making judgments (why should mathematics be immune to criticism?) All of this is far from ticking boxes:

“The trouble is that math, like painting or poetry, is hard creative work. That makes it very difficult to teach. Mathematics is a slow, contemplative process. It takes time to produce a work of art, and it takes a skilled teacher to recognize one. Of course it’s easier to post a set of rules than to guide aspiring young artists, and it’s easier to write a VCR manual than to write an actual book with a point of view.“

We should probably let go of the idea that doing math is about getting the right answer. Being creative is never about getting to a destination.

Above all, mathematics should be something we engage with because we find it to be a fun, challenging process capable of teaching us new ways to think or allowing us to express ourselves. The less practical utility or relevance to the rest of our lives it has, the more we’re truly engaging with it as an art.

The post Why Math Class Is Boring—and What to Do About It appeared first on Farnam Street.

Accurate description requires the following:

1. Observation
2. Curiosity about what you are witnessing
3. Suspending assumptions about cause and effect

It can be difficult to stick with describing something completely and accurately. It’s hard to overcome the tendency to draw conclusions based on partial information or to leave assumptions unexplored.

***

Some systems, like the ecosystem that is the ocean, are complex. They have many moving parts that have multiple dependencies and interact in complicated ways. Trying to figure them out is daunting, and it can seem more sane to not bother trying—except that complex systems are everywhere. We live our lives as part of many of them, and addressing any global challenges involves understanding their many dimensions.

One way to begin understanding complex systems is by describing them in detail: mapping out their parts, their multiple interactions, and how they change through time. Complex systems are often complicated—that is, they have many moving parts that can be hard to identify and define. But the overriding feature of complex systems is that they cannot be managed from the top down. Complex systems display emergent properties and unpredictable adaptations that we cannot identify in advance. But far from being inaccessible, we can learn a lot about such systems by describing what we observe.

For example, Jane Jacobs’s comprehensive description of the interactions along city sidewalks in The Death and Life of Great American Cities led to insight about how cities actually work. Her work also emphasized the multidimensionality of city systems by demonstrating via description that attempting to manage a city from the top down would stifle its adaptive capabilities and negatively impact the city itself.

Another book that uses description to illuminate complicated and intricate relationships is The Sea Around Us by Rachel Carson. In it she chronicles events in the oceans, from the cycles of plankton growth to the movement of waves, in accessible, evocative descriptions. It’s no trouble to conjure up vivid images based on her words. But as the book progresses, her descriptions of the parts coalesce into an appreciation for how multidimensional the sea system is.

Carson’s descriptions come through multiple lenses. She describes the sea through the behavior of animals and volcanoes. She explores the sea by describing its vertical integration from the surface to the depths and the bottom. She looks at the oceans through the lenses of their currents and relationships to wind. In total the book describes the same entity, the seas that cover the majority of the earth’s surface, through thirteen different descriptive lenses. Although the parts are broken down into their basics, the comprehensive view that Carson employs allows the reader to easily grasp how complicated the sea system is.

None of the lenses she uses impart complete information. Trying to appreciate how interconnected the parts of the system are by looking at just her description of tides or minerals is impossible. It’s only when the lenses are combined that a complete picture of the ecosystem emerges.

The book demonstrates the value in description, even if you cannot conclude causation in the specifics you’re describing.

One noticeable omission from the book is the role of plate tectonics in the movement of the ocean floor and associated phenomena like volcanoes. Plate tectonic theory is a scientific baby and was not yet widely accepted when Carson updated her original text in 1961. But not knowing plate tectonic theory doesn’t undermine her descriptions of life at the bottom of the oceans, or the impact of volcanoes, or the changing shape of the undersea shelves that attach to the continents. Although the reader is invited to contemplate the why behind what she is describing, we are also encouraged to be in the moment, observing the ocean through Carson’s words.

***

The book is not an argument for a particular way of interacting with the sea. It doesn’t need to make one. Carson’s descriptions offer their own evidence of how trying to change or manage the sea system would be extremely difficult because they reveal the multitude of connections between various sea phenomena.

Describing the whole from so many different angles illuminates the complex. By chronicling microinteractions, such as those between areas of hot and cold water or high and low pressure, we can see how changes in one aspect produce cascading change. We also get a sense of the adaptability of the living organisms that live in the oceans, like being able to live in depths that have no light (and therefore no plants that rely on photosynthesis) and adjusting biochemistry to take advantage of seasonal variations in temperature that affect water weight and salt contents.

The reader walks away from the book appreciating the challenge in describing in detail something as complicated as the ocean ecosystem. The book is full of observations and short on judgments, an approach that encourages us to develop our own curiosity about the sea around us.

The Sea Around Us is the Farnam Street book club’s summer selection. Members get additional resource materials to help get the most out of this fascinating book. Learn more or join in.

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From your spot in line, you can see her seated in a red dress. Across the table from her, people sit; some for mere moments, others for long stretches. You later learn that there is no limit on the length of time you can sit at the table across from her, but you are not allowed to touch or talk to her. As you are waiting in line, the experience is like looking at a living painting.

When it’s your turn and you take your seat across from her, your experience transforms and becomes part of the art itself.

Marina Abramovic performed The Artist is Present, sitting eight hours a day for three months in 2010. She trained for months to build the physical stamina to perform the piece, and in her memoir Walk Through Walls she comments on how the performance demonstrated the profound need for people to connect.

Originally from Belgrade, Abramovic began her art career in the 1960s, starting with traditional painting, before moving into performance pieces in the early 1970s. Many of her pieces are iconic, and she continues to work all over the world.

Here are some of her insights from her memoir that transcend performance art and speak to how we can move through life to achieve our goals.

On fear

“It is incredible how fear is built into you, by your parents and others surrounding you.”

“Human beings are afraid of very simple things: we fear suffering, we fear mortality. What I was doing in Rhythm 0—as in all my other performances—was staging these fears for the audience: using their energy to push my body as far as possible. In the process, I liberated myself from my fears. And as this happened, I became a mirror for the audience—if I could do it, they could do it too.”

The relationship we have with fear can be one of the defining relationships of our life. Finding a way to accept and process our fears is an ongoing task that can be mastered by willingly exploring them.

“For the first three months, I place each student at a table with a thousand pieces of white paper and a trash can underneath. Every day they have to sit at the table for several hours and write ideas. They put the ideas they like on the right side of the table; the ones they don’t like, they put in the trash. But we don’t throw out the trash. After three months, I only take the ideas from the trash can. I don’t even look at the ideas they liked. Because the trash can is a treasure trove of things they’re afraid to do.”

Part of dealing with fear is acknowledging it. Hiding fear in the garbage bin does us no good. When we confront what we are afraid to do, we find immense opportunities to develop and grow because we increase our options and adaptability. We both remove limits and teach ourselves how to handle a wider spectrum of fear-inducing situations in the future.

On finding your place

“All at once it occurred to me—why paint? Why should I limit myself to two dimensions when I could make out from anything at all: fire, water, the human body? Anything! There was something like a click in my mind—I realized that being an artist meant having immense freedom.”

We need to explore until we find our “clicks.” Limiting ourselves to convention might not be satisfactory. As Abramovic began to develop her performance art pieces, her physical self was at the center of her work. In most of her pieces, the audience was confronted with the idea of art as a living thing: not a painting on a wall, but a physical body.

“The essence of performance is that the audience and the performer make the piece together.”

In one of her pieces, people entered the gallery while she stood completely still, dressed in a blouse and pants. On a table in front of her were dozens of objects—things like cards, lipstick, pins, and even a gun. Over the next hours, the audience was invited to use any object to do whatever they wanted to Abramovic. Slowly at first, but with increasing momentum, they began to interact with her body. They moved her arms, put lipstick on her, put cards in her hand. One person stuck a pin into her. Only at the end of the night did security intervene when someone picked up the gun and prepared to shoot her.

It must have been an incredible experience.

The notion that an audience can participate in the creation of art as it is happening has been an important aspect of many of Abramovic’s performances. In the dynamic nature of performance art, Abramovic has found her medium to explore the nature of art itself.

“I had experienced absolute freedom—I had felt that my body was without boundaries, limitless; that pain didn’t matter, that nothing mattered at all—and it intoxicated me. I was drunk from the overwhelming energy that I’d received. That was the moment I knew that I had found my medium.”

Paying attention to our moments as we experience them helps us find our place. Abramovic writes often in her memoir about the success that came with being fully committed to her performances while they were happening. Her ability to move through physical pain in pursuit of artistic expression, and to communicate with her audience, stems in part from her knowing she was creating from a place of authenticity.

On art

“What is art? I feel that if we see art as something isolated, something holy and separate from everything, that means it’s not life. Art must be a part of life. Art has to belong to everybody.”

Another famous piece of hers was done in a gallery space, where she lived in front of the audience in three open rooms. Each room was a square box with one side removed. One was a living room, another one was a bedroom, and the final one was a bathroom. Abramovic did everything in front of the crowds who came into the gallery—sleep, meditate, shower, and use the toilet. One interpretation of the work is that by inviting the audience to watch her doing some of the mundane daily tasks that we all do, she provided a way for them to find the art in their own lives.

“This is a rule of performance: once you enter into this mental-physical construct you’ve devised, the rules are set, and that’s that—you’re the last one who can change them.”

Part of Abramovic’s success has stemmed from her fearlessness in using performance art to explore basic questions of humanity, as well as from her total respect for the medium. Her pieces are thoughtful, and no doubt leave a lasting impression on those who are able to watch and engage with them.

On the business of art

“It’s interesting with art. Some people have the ability—and the energy—not just to make the work, but to make sure it’s put in exactly the right place, at the right moment. Some artists realize they have to spend as much time as it took them to get an idea in finding the way to show it, and the infrastructure to support it. And some artists just don’t have that energy, and have to be taken care of, by art lovers or collectors or the gallery system.”

The business of creating and the business of selling one’s creations require different skills and temperaments that are not always found in the same person. When we know our capabilities, we can try to set ourselves up for success by knowing how and where to ask for help. All of us want our outputs to be recognized in some way. What we don’t often realize is that we have a part to play in getting that recognition to happen. We can’t expect everything to magically fall into place.

“From the mid-1970s to the end of the decade, performance art caught on. . . . The originators of the medium were no longer young, and this work was very hard on the body. And the market, and art dealers especially, were putting increasing pressure on artists to make something to sell, because, after all, performance produced nothing marketable.”

Choices close some doors and open others. Having a personal definition of success is critical. We have to make sacrifices to achieve our goals, so we must be confident we are working toward our own idea of success and not someone else’s. Abramovic continues to do performance art, but she also became an art teacher and has partnered on numerous other art projects, including films. From her memoir, we learn that an insightful way of measuring our achievements is against what we believe gives life meaning.

The post Mirror Your Audience: Four Life Lessons From Performance Artist Marina Abramović appeared first on Farnam Street.

While there is no single definition, it typically refers to acting to prevent harm by not doing anything that could have negative consequences, even if the possibility of those consequences is uncertain.

In this article, we will explore how the Precautionary Principle works, its strengths and drawbacks, the best way to use it, and how we can apply it in our own lives.

Guilty until proven innocent

Whenever we make even the smallest change within a complex system, we risk dramatic unintended consequences.

The interconnections and dependencies within systems make it almost impossible to predict outcomes—and seeing as they often require a reasonably precise set of conditions to function, our interventions can wreak havoc.

The Precautionary Principle reflects the reality of working with and within complex systems. It shifts the burden of proof from proving something was dangerous after the fact to proving it is safe before taking chances. It emphasizes waiting for more complete information before risking causing damage, especially if some of the possible impacts would be irreversible, hard to contain, or would affect people who didn’t choose to be involved.

The possibility of harm does not need to be specific to that particular circumstance; sometimes we can judge a category of actions as one that always requires precaution because we know it has a high risk of unintended consequences.

For example, invasive species (plants or animals that cause harm after being introduced into a new environment by humans) have repeatedly caused native species to become extinct. So it’s reasonable to exercise precaution and not introduce living things into new places without strong evidence it will be harmless.

Preventing risks and protecting resources

Best known for its use as a regulatory guideline in environmental law and public health, the Precautionary Principle originated with the German term “Vorsorgeprinzip” applied to regulations for preventing air pollution. Konrad Von Moltke, director of the Institute for European Environmental Policy, later translated it into English.

Seeing as the natural world is a highly complex system we have repeatedly disrupted in serious, permanent ways, the Precautionary Principle has become a guiding part of environmental policy in many countries.

For example, the Umweltbundesamt (German Environmental Protection Agency) explains that the Precautionary Principle has two core components in German environmental law today: preventing risks and protecting resources.

Preventing risks means legislators shouldn’t take actions where our knowledge of the potential for environmental damage is incomplete or uncertain but there is cause for concern. The burden of proof is on proving lack of harm, not on proving harm. Protecting resources means preserving things like water and soil in a form future generations can use.

To give another example, some countries evoke versions of the Precautionary Principle to justify bans on genetically modified foods—in some cases for good, in others until evidence of their safety is considered stronger. It is left to legislators to interpret and apply the Precautionary Principle within specific situations.

The flexibility of the Precautionary Principle is both a source of strength and a source of weakness. We live in a fast-moving world where regulation does not always keep up with innovation, meaning guidelines (as opposed to rules) can often prove useful.

Another reason the Precautionary Principle can be a practical addition to legislation is that science doesn’t necessarily move fast enough to protect us from potential risks, especially ones that shift harm elsewhere or take a long time to show up. For example, thousands of human-made substances are present in the food we eat, ranging from medications given to livestock to materials used in packaging. Proving that a new additive has health risks once it’s in the food supply could take decades because it’s incredibly difficult to isolate causative factors. So some regulators, including the Food and Drug Administration in America, require manufacturers to prove something is safe before it goes to market. This approach isn’t perfect, but it’s far safer than waiting to discover harm after we start eating something.

The Precautionary Principle forces us to ask a lot of difficult questions about the nature of risk, uncertainty, probability, the role of government, and ethics. It can also prompt us to question our intuitions surrounding the right decisions to make in certain situations.

When and how to use the Precautionary Principle

When handling risks, it is important to be aware of what we don’t or can’t know for sure. The Precautionary Principle is not intended to be a stifling justification for banning things—it’s a tool for handling particular kinds of uncertainty. Heuristics can guide us in making important decisions, but we still need to be flexible and treat each case as unique.

So how should we use the Precautionary Principle? Sven Ove Hansson suggests two requirements in How Extreme Is the Precautionary Principle? First, if there are competing priorities (beyond avoidance of harm), it should be combined with other decision-making principles. For example, the idea of “explore versus exploit” teaches us that we need to balance doubling down on existing options with trying out new ones. Second, the decision to take precautionary action should be based on the most up-to-date science, and there should be plans in place for how to update that decision if the science changes. That includes planning how often to revaluate the evidence and how to assess its quality.

When is it a good idea to use the Precautionary Principle? There are a few types of situations where it’s better to be safe rather than sorry if things are uncertain.

When the costs of waiting are low. As we’ve already seen, the Precautionary Principle is intended as a tool for handling uncertainty, rather than a justification for arbitrary bans. This means that if the safety of something is uncertain but the costs of waiting to learn more are low, it’s a good idea to use precaution.

When preserving optionality is a priority. The Precautionary Principle is most often evoked for potential risks that would cause irreversible, far-reaching, uncontainable harm. Seeing as we don’t know what the future holds, keeping our options open by avoiding limiting choices gives us the most flexibility later on. The Precautionary Principle preserves optionality by ensuring we don’t restrict the resources we have available further down the line or leave messes for our future selves to clean up.

When the potential costs of a risk are far greater than the cost of preventative action. If a potential risk would be devastating or even ruinous, and it’s possible to protect against it, precautionary action is key. Sometimes winning is just staying in the game—and sometimes staying in the game boils down to not letting anything wipe you out.

For example, in 1963 the Swiss government pledged to provide bunker spaces to all citizens in the event of a nuclear attack or disaster. The country still maintains a national system of thousands of warning sirens and distributes potassium iodide tablets (used to reduce the effects of radiation) to people living near nuclear plants in case of an accident. Given the potential effects of an incident on Switzerland (regardless of how likely it is), these precautionary actions are considered worthwhile.

When alternatives are available. If there are alternative courses of action we know to be safe, it’s a good idea to wait for more information before adopting a new risky one.

When not to use the Precautionary Principle

As the third criteria for using the Precautionary Principle usefully, Sven Ove Hansson recommends it not be used when the likelihood or scale of a potential risk is too low for precautionary action to have any benefit. For example, if one person per year dies from an allergic reaction to a guinea pig bite, it’s probably not worth banning pet guinea pigs. We can add a few more examples of situations where it’s generally not a good idea to use the Precautionary Principle.

When the tradeoffs are substantial and known. The whole point of the Precautionary Principle is to avoid harm. If we know for sure that not taking an action will cause more damage than taking it possibly could, it’s not a good idea to use precaution.

For example, following a 2011 accident at Fukushima, Japan shut down all nuclear power plants. Seeing as nuclear power is cheaper than fossil fuels, this resulted in a sharp increase in electricity prices in parts of the country. According to the authors of the paper Be Cautious with the Precautionary Principle, the resulting increase in mortality from people being unable to spend as much on heating was higher than the fatalities from the actual accident.

When the risks are known and priced in. We all have different levels of risk appetite and we make judgments about whether certain activities are worth the risks involved. When a risk is priced in, that means people are aware of it and voluntarily decide it is worthwhile—or even desirable.

For example, riskier investments tend to have higher potential returns. Although they might not make sense for someone who doesn’t want to risk losing any money, they do make sense for those who consider the potential gains worth the potential losses.

When only a zero-risk option would be satisfying. It’s impossible to completely avoid risks, so it doesn’t make much sense to exercise precaution with the expectation that a 100% safe option will appear.

When taking risks could strengthen us. As individuals, we can sometimes be overly risk averse and too cautious—to the point where it makes us fragile. Our ancestors had the best chance of surviving if they overreacted, rather than underreacted, to risks. But for many of us today, the biggest risk we face can be the stress caused by worrying too much about improbable dangers. We can end up fearing the kinds of risks, like social rejection, that are unavoidable and that tend to make us stronger if we embrace them as inevitable. Never taking any risks is generally a far worse idea than taking sensible ones.

***

We all face decisions every day that involve balancing risk. The Precautionary Principle is a tool that helps us determine when a particular choice is worth taking a gamble on, or when we need to sit tight and collect more information.

The post The Precautionary Principle: Better Safe than Sorry? appeared first on Farnam Street.

Perhaps its value for teaching strategic thinking has something to do with the game’s longstanding appeal. Chess has been around for an estimated fifteen centuries, and precursors go back at least 4,500 years; it both reflects and teaches important skills. Seizing the middle is a chess strategy embodying the value of forward thinking. It involves using pieces to commandeer the middle of the board. A player can then restrict their opponent’s movements by controlling the maximal number of pieces in the game.

Strategies akin to seizing the middle are also used in areas such as business, economics, and negotiation. Analogous strategies involve limiting an opponent’s options by asserting control over a resource or area, be it physical or conceptual. Some of the most profitable businesses throughout history employed this strategy and treated the world like a chessboard.

John D. Rockefeller infamously used the strategy of seizing the middle to control the oil industry throughout the nineteenth century. Before he turned forty (according to a Fortune estimate) Rockefeller had personal control over an estimated 90% of the US oil refining industry via the Standard Oil company, and by the time of his death he was the richest person alive. Depending on who you ask, he was either a callous figure who valued money above all else or a shrewd businessman who boosted employment and gave away most of his fortune. Unsurprisingly, every detail of his life and especially his business strategies have been analyzed at great length. While the opportunities Rockefeller capitalized on are unlikely to come about again, they show how chess strategies can translate into business acumen.

It’s hard to overstate just how important the oil industry is to any nation. Because he controlled the oil, Rockefeller could leverage his power to make almost any negotiation go his way. A power which he used on the railroad companies.

Rockefeller recognized early on that railroads were the lifeblood of the oil industry because oil had to be shipped, and thus he sought to gain control of them. Railroads were to the oil business what the middle of a chessboard is to a player—without dependable, controlled access to them, a company could make precious few moves. As he loathed competition, Rockefeller sought to eliminate it—and one of his maneuvers to reduce his competition in the oil business was making sure no one else could transport it around the country.

In the nineteenth century, it was customary for shipping companies to offer rebates (partial refunds) or generous discounts to their biggest customers. Once Standard Oil became the largest oil refining company in the United States, Rockefeller was in an excellent negotiating position with the railroads. In exchange for huge amounts of regular business, the shipping companies agreed to give him an unusually large rebate. Cutting the costs of transporting oil gave Rockefeller a robust competitive advantage. Combine this with his efficient manufacturing process and shrewd usage of byproducts, and Standard Oil’s prices were a fraction of the usual cost of oil. Unsurprisingly, other oil companies had no hope of offering lower or even equivalent rates and still making a profit. If any of them seemed like they might pose a threat, Rockefeller could use his influence over the shipping companies to restrict their ability to transport oil.

Although controlling access to the railroads was a key element in seizing the middle territory of the oil business, Rockefeller had many more pieces in play. Should restricting railroad access be unfeasible, he would cut off competitor’s access to equipment, undercut their prices or buy up all the available raw materials. The amount of control Rockefeller had allowed him incredible power over the entire industry. In The Politics of the Global Oil Industry, Toyin Falola and Ann Genova explain that “Standard Oil had extended its control not only over its competitors but also over oil transportation. Nearly every method of transport from the oil fields to the consumer was owned by Standard Oil, which allowed the company significant control over prices.”

Rockefeller thought in terms of first principles, which often meant controlling his own means of production. For example, he cut the cost of barrels by manufacturing them himself and the cost of laying pipework by employing his own plumbers. As Standard Oil grew, Rockefeller’s power grew exponentially. At a certain point, no one could compete with him. With the lion’s share of the market and profits to match, he could get credit for almost unlimited loans, giving Standard Oil a further advantage over competitors and a dominance over the oil territory.

As Alfred Chandler explains in The Visible Hand, Rockefeller’s strategy was part of a wider transition to a new type of industry, beginning in the 1840s and ending with the crash of the 1920s. Businesses started “seizing the middle” and taking control of the resources they depended on. A single company could take charge of everything from the natural resources required to make a product to the transport systems necessary to deliver it to customers. The implications of this were dramatic. Chandler writes of Rockefeller:

“He and his associates then decided to obtain the cooperation of its rivals by relying on the economic power provided by their high-volume, low-cost operation. They began by asking the Lake Shore Railroad to reduce its rates from $2 to $1.35 a barrel on Standard Oil shipments between Cleveland and New York City if Standard provided sixty carloads a day, every day. The road’s general manager quickly accepted, for assured traffic in such high volume meant he could schedule the use of his equipment much more efficiently and so lose nothing by the reduced rate. Indeed, the general manager, somewhat gratuitously, offered the same rates to any other oil refiner shipping the same volume.”

Chandler describes how the change in business practices allowed managers to start thinking like chess players: a few moves ahead. Being able to anticipate and plan had the undeniably significant effect of allowing companies to invest more in research and development because they could forecast where current trends headed:

“In allocating resources for future production and distribution, the new methods extended the time horizon of the top managers. Entrepreneurs who personally managed large industrials tended, like the owners of smaller, traditional enterprises, to make their plans on the basis of current market and business conditions. . . . The central sales and purchasing offices provided forecasts of future demand and availability of resources.”

Seizing the middle didn’t just help create the energy industry as we know it today. The strategy also contributed to the creation of the modern film industry.

For four tumultuous decades, known as The Golden Age of Hollywood, eight studios all but governed the global film industry. Between the 1920s and 1960s, Fox, Loew’s Inc., Paramount, RKO Radio, Warner Bros., United Artists, Universal, and Columbia Pictures formed the studio system. Much like Standard Oil needed control over the railroads to ensure their success, the film oligarchy also prioritized power over distribution systems. In this case, that meant owning the cinemas that showed their films. For the most part, they also owned the production facilities, and held Hollywood staff and stars under strict long-term contracts.

For example, actor Cary Grant signed a five-year contract with Paramount in 1931. This gave the studio such control over him that they could literally loan him to other studios—in 1935, Paramount lent him to RKO so he could star alongside Katharine Hepburn. Having popular actors with the cache to draw audiences to anything they appeared in under contract restricted the movements of any other studios, dictating the number of pieces that could be on the board.

New anti-trust laws in the late 1940s and the rise of television in the 1950s contributed to the end of the Hollywood studio system. Both Grant and Hepburn escaped the grip of their respective studios and took control of their own careers. Grant refused to renew his contract once it expired and became possibly the first freelance Hollywood actor. Hepburn bought out her contract after being assigned to a string of unsuccessful films.

Hollywood nonetheless achieved a lot during the studio system days. This era, beginning with the rise of “talkies” (films with sound) shaped many of our expectations of films. Many major cinematic genres and conventions were devised during the Golden Age. The low cost of producing films with all aspects of production and distribution under tight control meant studios could take chances with unproven actors, directors, and scripts for films like Citizen Kane. Although the era produced a lot of formulaic, repetitive, or dull works, it also gave birth to many that remain popular and well-loved even now.

In The Hollywood Studio System: A History, Douglas Gomery describes how Adolph Zukor, founder of Paramount, devised the studio system:

“During the 1910s, Adolph Zukor through his Famous Players and then Paramount corporations developed a system by which to manufacture popular feature-length films, distribute them around the world, and present them in Paramount picture palaces. . . . Zukor taught the world how to make motion pictures popular and profitable in a global marketplace. He also laid down the principles of the studio system.

From his entry into the industry, Zukor wanted to take control of the new movie business . . . and began to develop a national distribution system which would hereafter serve as the basis for the studio system. . . . Zukor was smart and looked to see how other industries developed their corporate economic power . . . and made films in a factor like a system; and he developed a distribution division (Paramount) to sell his wares throughout the world.

. . . In the end, Zukor and his followers developed a set of operating principles. Their industry—symbolized by their Hollywood studios—would be made up of a small set of corporations that produced, distributed, and presented films in order to maximize the profits of their corporations. The number . . . would total eight.”

To control the game, one tries to control as much of the board as possible. At the outset, using your pieces to seize the middle of the playing field is a great strategy, because it gives you the widest possible vantage point from which to control the movement of the other pieces. Both Rockefeller and the studio system in Hollywood employed this strategy successfully, allowing them to anticipate change and maneuver effectively for decades.

The post Seizing The Middle: Chess Strategy in Business 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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

Learning doesn’t happen from skimming through a book or remembering enough to pass a test.

Information is learned when you can explain it and use it in a wide variety of situations. The Feynman Technique gets more mileage from the ideas you encounter instead of rendering anything new into isolated, useless factoids.

When you really learn something, you give yourself a tool to use for the rest of your life. The more you know, the fewer surprises you will encounter because most new things will connect to something you already understand.

Ultimately, the point of learning is to understand the world. But most of us don’t bother to deliberately learn anything.

We memorize what we need to as we move through school, then forget most of it. As we continue through life, we don’t extrapolate from our experiences to broaden the applicability of our knowledge. Consequently, life kicks us in the ass time and again.

To avoid the pain of being bewildered by the unexpected, the Feynman Technique helps you turn information into knowledge that you can access as easily as reaching for a chair.

*

The Feynman Technique

“Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius—and a lot of courage—to move in the opposite direction.”

E.F. Schumacher

There are four steps to the Feynman Learning Technique, based on the method Richard Feynman originally used. We have adapted it slightly after reflecting on our own experiences using this process to learn. The steps are as follows:

1. Pretend to teach a concept you want to learn about to a student in the sixth grade.
2. Identify gaps in your explanation. Go back to the source material to better understand it.
3. Organize and simplify.
4. Transmit (optional).

Step 1: Pretend to teach it to a child

Take out a blank sheet of paper. At the top, write the subject you want to master. Now write out everything you know about the subject as if you were teaching it to a child or a rubber duck sitting on your desk.

It’s important to remember that you are not teaching to your smart adult friend, but rather a child who has just enough vocabulary and attention span to understand basic concepts and relationships. It has to be simple and clear. There is nowhere to hide in obfuscation.

Or, for a different angle on the Feynman Technique, you could place a rubber duck on your desk and try explaining the concept to it. Software engineers sometimes tackle debugging by explaining their code, line by line, to a rubber duck. It sounds silly, but it’s a forcing function to make you walk through your thinking as simply as possible.

It turns out that one of the ways we mask our lack of understanding is by using complicated vocabulary and jargon. The truth is, if you can’t clearly and simply define the words and terms you are using, you don’t really know what you’re talking about.

If you look at a painting and describe it as “abstract” because that’s what you heard in art class, you demonstrate no understanding. You’re just mimicking what you’ve heard. You haven’t learned anything.

When you write out an idea from start to finish in simple language that a child can understand, you force yourself to understand the concept at a deeper level and simplify relationships and connections between ideas. You can better explain the why behind your description of the what.

Writing helps you think because it gives you nowhere to hide.

Looking at the painting again, you will be able to say that the painting doesn’t display buildings like the ones we look at every day. Instead, it uses certain shapes and colors to depict a city landscape. You will be able to point out what these are. You will be able to engage in speculation about why the artist chose those shapes and those colors. You will be able to explain why artists sometimes do this, and you will be able to communicate what you think of the piece considering all of this.

Chances are, after capturing a full explanation of the painting in the simplest possible terms that would be easily understood by a sixth-grader, you will have learned a lot about that painting and abstract art in general.

Some of capturing what you would teach will be easy. These are the places where you have a clear understanding of the subject. But you will find many places where things are much foggier.

Step 2: Identify gaps in your explanation

Areas, where you struggle in Step 1, are the points where you have some gaps in your understanding.

Identifying gaps in your knowledge—where you forget something important, aren’t able to explain it, or simply have trouble thinking of how variables interact—is a critical part of the learning process.

Filling those gaps is when you really make the learning stick.

Now that you know where you have gaps in your understanding go back to the source material. Augment it with other sources. Look up definitions. Keep going until you can explain everything you need to in basic terms.

Only when you can explain your understanding without jargon and in simple terms can you demonstrate understanding. Think about it this way. If you require complicated terminology to explain what you know, you have no flexibility. When someone asks you a question, you can only repeat what you’ve already said.

Simple terms can be rearranged and easily combined with other words to communicate your point. When you can say something in multiple ways using different words, you understand it really well.
Being able to explain something in a simple, accessible way shows you’ve done the work required to learn. Skipping it leads to the illusion of knowledge—an illusion that can be quickly shattered when challenged.

Identifying the boundaries of your understanding is also a way of defining your circle of competence. When you know what you know (and are honest about what you don’t know), you limit the mistakes you’re liable to make and increase your chance of success when applying knowledge.

Step 3. Organize and simplify

Now you have a set of hand-crafted notes containing a simple explanation. Organize them into a narrative that you can tell from beginning to end. Read it out loud. If the explanation sounds confusing at any point, go back to Step 2. Keep iterating until you have a story that you can tell to anyone who will listen.

If you follow this approach over and over, you will end up with a binder full of pages on different subjects. If you take some time twice a year to go through this binder, you will find just how much you retain.

Step 4: Transmit (optional)

This part is optional, but it’s the logical result of everything you’ve just done.

If you really want to be sure of your understanding, run it past someone (ideally someone who knows little of the subject).

The ultimate test of your knowledge is your capacity to convey it to another. You can read out directly what you’ve written. You can present the material like a lecture. You can ask your friends for a few minutes of their time while you’re buying them dinner. You can volunteer as a guest speaker in your child’s classroom or your parents’ retirement residence. All that really matters is that you attempt to transmit the material to at least one person who isn’t that familiar with it.

The questions you get and the feedback you receive are invaluable for further developing your understanding.

Hearing what your audience is curious about will likely pique your own curiosity and set you on a path for further learning. After all, it’s only when you begin to learn a few things really well do you appreciate how much there is to know.

***

The Feynman Technique is not only a wonderful recipe for learning but also a window into a different way of thinking that allows you to tear ideas apart and reconstruct them from the ground up. It also allows you to supercharge your learning from others.

Too often, we want to seem smart rather than learn. We nod along even when we don’t understand what someone is talking about. This is a missed opportunity for learning. If you’re having a conversation with someone and they start using jargon that you don’t understand, ask them to explain it to you like you’re twelve. Not only will you supercharge your own learning, but you’ll also supercharge theirs.

Feynman’s approach intuitively believes that intelligence is a process of growth, which dovetails nicely with the work of Carol Dweck, who describes the difference between a fixed and growth mindset.

“If you can’t reduce a difficult engineering problem to just one 8-1/2 x 11-inch sheet of paper, you will probably never understand it.”

—Ralph Peck

What does it mean to “know?”

Richard Feynman believed that “the world is much more interesting than any one discipline.” He understood the difference between knowing something and knowing the name of something, as well as how, when you truly know something, you can use that knowledge broadly.

When you only know what something is called, you have no real sense of what it is.

You can’t take it apart and play with it or use it to make new connections and generate new insights. When you know something, the labels are unimportant because it’s not necessary to keep it in the box it came in.

“The person who says he knows what he thinks but cannot express it usually does not know what he thinks.”

—Mortimer Adler

Feynman’s explanations—on why questions, why trains stay on the tracks as they go around a curve, how we look for new laws of science, or how rubber bands work—are simple and powerful. He doesn’t hide behind abstraction or jargon.

Here he articulates the difference between knowing the name of something and understanding it.

“See that bird? It’s a brown-throated thrush, but in Germany it’s called a halzenfugel, and in Chinese they call it a chung ling, and even if you know all those names for it, you still know nothing about the bird. You only know something about people: what they call the bird. Now that thrush sings, and teaches its young to fly, and flies so many miles away during the summer across the country, and nobody knows how it finds its way.”

Knowing the name of something doesn’t mean you understand it. We talk in fact-deficient, obfuscating generalities to cover up our lack of understanding.

You can’t replace translating things into simple language that a kid can understand because you need to reflect in order to learn.

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***

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.

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***

James Carse, the Director of Religious Studies at New York University, wrote a book, Finite and Infinite Games, that explores the difference between approaching life as a game with an end, or a game that goes on forever. According to Carse, playing to win isn’t nearly as satisfying as playing to keep the game going.

For starters, what do you do after you win a finite game? You have to sign yourself up for another one, and you must find a way to showcase your past winnings. Finite players have to parade around their wealth and status. They need to display the markers of winning they have accumulated so that other players know whom they are dealing with. Carse argues that these players spend their time in the past, because that’s where their winning is.

Infinite players, in contrast, look to the future. Because their goal is to keep the game going, they focus less on what happened, and put more effort into figuring out what’s possible. By playing a single, non-repeatable game, they are unconcerned with the maintenance and display of past status. They are more concerned with positioning themselves to deal effectively with whatever challenges come up.

Thus, how you play the game of life will define the learning you pursue. Finite players need training. Infinite players need education. Why? According to Carse, “to be prepared against surprise is to be trained. To be prepared for surprise is to be educated.” If you play life as a finite game, you train for the rules. If life is instead an infinite game, you focus on being educated to adapt to unknowns.

“What will undo any boundary is the awareness that it is our vision, and not what we are viewing, that is limited.”

Whether you choose the finite or infinite game will also determine how you define success, and what you need to achieve it. Finite players need power. Power gives them the best chance to win in each successive contest. Infinite players need endurance. They need attributes to keep them going. Carse explains, “let us say that where the finite player plays to be powerful, the infinite player plays with strength.”

Ultimately, approaching life as a finite game or infinite game impacts your daily attitude. Carse asserts that “the finite play for life is serious; the infinite play of life joyous.” Considering your life through this frame helps you determine if you are making the right choices to be successful at the kind of game you want to play.

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We’re busier than ever. The typical inbox is perpetually swelling with messages awaiting attention. Meetings need to be rescheduled because something came up. Our relationships suffer. We don’t spend as much time as we should with those who mean something to us. We have little time for new people; potential friends eventually get the hint and stop proposing ideas for things to do together. Falling behind, turns into a vicious cycle.

Does this sound anything like your life?

You have something in common with people who fall behind on their bills, argue Harvard economist Sendhil Mullainathan and Princeton psychologist Eldar Shafir in their book Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much. The resemblance, they write, is clear.

Missed deadlines are a lot like over-due bills. Double-booked meetings (committing time you do not have) are a lot like bounced checks (spending money you do not have). The busier you are, the greater the need to say no. The more indebted you are, the greater the need to not buy. Plans to escape sound reasonable but prove hard to implement. They require constant vigilance—about what to buy or what to agree to do. When vigilance flags—the slightest temptation in time or in money—you sink deeper.

Some people end up sinking further into debt. Others with more commitments. The resemblance is striking.

We normally think of time management and money management as distinct problems. The consequences of failing are different: bad time management leads to embarrassment or poor job performance; bad money management leads to fees or eviction. The cultural contexts are different: falling behind and missing a deadline means one thing to a busy professional; falling behind and missing a debt payment means something else to an urban low-wage worker.

What’s common between these situations? Scarcity. “By scarcity,” they write, “we mean having less than you feel you need.”

And what happens when we feel a sense of scarcity? To show us Mullainathan and Shafir bring us back to the past. Near the end of World War II, the Allies realized they would need to feed a lot of Europeans on the edge of starvation. The question wasn’t where to get the food but, rather, something more technical. What is the best way to start feeding them? Should you begin with normal meals or small quantities that gradually increase? Researchers at the University of Minnesota undertook an experiment with healthy male volunteers in a controlled environment “where their calories were reduced until they were subsisting on just enough food so as not to permanently harm themselves.” The most surprising findings were psychological. The men became completely focused on food in unexpected ways:

Obsessions developed around cookbooks and menus from local restaurants. Some men could spend hours comparing the prices of fruits and vegetables from one newspaper to the next. Some planned now to go into agriculture. They dreamed of new careers as restaurant owners…. When they went to the movies, only the scenes with food held their interest.

“Scarcity captures the mind,” Mullainathan and Shafir write. Starving people have food on their mind to the point of irrationality. But we all act this way when we experience scarcity. “The mind,” they write, “orients automatically, powerfully, toward unfulfilled needs.”

Scarcity is like oxygen. When you don’t need it, you don’t notice it. When you do need it, however, it’s all you notice.

For the hungry, that need is food. For the busy it might be a project that needs to be finished. For the cash-strapped it might be this month’s rent payment; for the lonely, a lack of companionship. Scarcity is more than just the displeasure of having very little. It changes how we think. It imposes itself on our minds.

And when scarcity is taking up your mental cycles and putting your attention on what you lack, you can’t attend to other things. How, for instance, can you learn?

(There was) a school in New Haven that was located next to a noisy railroad line. To measure the impact of this noise on academic performance, two researchers noted that only one side of the school faced the tracks, so the students in classrooms on that side were particularly exposed to the noise but were otherwise similar to their fellow students. They found a striking difference between the two sides of the school. Sixth graders on the train side were a full year behind their counterparts on the quieter side. Further evidence came when the city, prompted by this study, installed noise pads. The researchers found this erased the difference: now students on both sides of the building performed at the same level.

Cognitive load matters. Mullainathan and Shafir believe that scarcity imposes a similar mental tax, impairing our ability to perform well, and exercise self-control.

We are all susceptible to “the planning fallacy,” which means that we’re too optimistic about how long it will take to complete a project. Busy people, however, are more vulnerable to this fallacy. Because they are focused on everything they must currently do, they are “more distracted and overwhelmed—a surefire way to misplan.” “The underlying problem,” writes Cass Sunstein in his review for the New York Review of Books, “is that when people tunnel, they focus on their immediate problem; ‘knowing you will be hungry next month does not capture your attention the same way that being hungry today does.’ A behavioral consequence of scarcity is “juggling,” which prevents long-term planning.”

When we have abundance, we don’t have as much depletion. Wealthy people can weather a shock without turning their lives upside-down. The mental energy needed to prevail may be substantial, but it will not create a feeling of scarcity.

Imagine a day at work where your calendar is sprinkled with a few meetings and your to-do list is manageable. You spend the unscheduled time by lingering at lunch or at a meeting or calling a colleague to catch up. Now, imagine another day at work where your calendar is chock-full of meetings. What little free time you have must be sunk into a project that is overdue. In both cases time was physically scarce. You had the same number of hours at work and you had more than enough activities to fill them. Yet in one case you were acutely aware of scarcity, of the finiteness of time; in the other it was a distant reality, if you felt it at all. The feeling of scarcity is distinct from its physical reality.

Mullainathan and Shafir sum up their argument:

In a way, our argument in this book is quite simple. Scarcity captures our attention, and this provides a narrow benefit: we do a better job of managing pressing needs. But more broadly, it costs us: we neglect other concerns, and we become less effective in the rest of life. This argument not only helps explain how scarcity shapes our behaviors; it also produces some surprising results and sheds new light on how we might go about managing our scarcity.

In a way, this explains why diets never work.

Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much goes on to discuss some of the possible ways to mitigate scarcity using defaults and reminders.

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Shane Parrish is on a mission to make you think, and think better. With over 30,000 subscribers — and that number growing quickly — Shane runs Farnam Street, an intellectual hub of curated “interestingness” that covers topics like human misjudgment, decision making, strategy, and philosophy. He exposes his readers to big ideas from multiple disciplines, adding tools to their problem-solving toolbox that improve decision making.

As an avid reader of FS myself, I recently caught up with Shane to discuss its genesis, how he works through a problem, why he was frustrated with his education, and, of course, Justin Bieber.

Here are two excerpts, in particular, I think you’ll enjoy.

The first is on my experiences doing an MBA.

Beshore: What was the core problem with your MBA program?

Parrish: There is a big difference between knowing what something is called and understanding. My MBA was all about vocabulary. For me, it was too much memorizing and regurgitating. …

The second one focuses on incorporating mental models into your thinking.

Beshore: How can we use these mental models to improve our decision making?

Parrish: When you come across a difficult decision, you really want to have a double filter that shifts your mind from reactive to rational. The first filter is running through your mental models and determining the factors that govern the situation. If I look at this through the lens of evolution, what do I see? What about supply and demand? What are the incentives?

The second filter is how you might be fooling yourself. What’s happening subconsciously? Am I only looking at a small subset of data? Am I in love with my solution? Am I biased by authority?

One of the added benefits of this approach is that when you make a bad decision, and you will, you now have a mental framework where you can account for your mistake in the future. If you failed to consider something you should have, you can easily identify it and account for it. So you’re always getting incrementally better and, over a long life, those increments will make a huge difference.

Beshore: Can you give a hypothetical example of how this system of thinking might play out?

Parrish: Looking at problems through a single discipline often leads to the wrong conclusion. For example, let’s say you’re the CFO of a textile company. The industry is not profitable and plagued with overcapacity, with only one company posting profits in the last 12 months. Your board is pressing you to demonstrate a credible path to profits.

A salesman shows up at your door one day, offering new processing equipment that is 50 percent more efficient. It will save your company a ton of money, improve margins, and pay for itself within only a few years. You verify his claims and determine that by purchasing this equipment, you’d get a 20 percent pre-tax return on your investment. Should you do it? Most people would say yes, but I’d say no.

If you only look through a financial lens, it seems to make sense. But that’s not going far enough. The second question is, “Where will the savings go?” What will likely happen is you’ll install this machine and either keep prices the same (to improve margins) or lower prices (to gain market share). But the salesman is already on the way to your competitors. Only now, he can say they must install this to stay competitive. The salesman points to your increasing market share or big margins, ensuring your competitor purchases the same equipment. Eventually, everyone has the same equipment, plummeting prices. Things go back to the way they were, only now you have more capital invested in the business. But that salesman will be back next year with a newer, improved version.

So from a mental model perspective, we can just list some of the ones at play: incentives (the salesman is not your friend), game theory, and The Red Queen Effect (where you need to put continuously more money in to keep your same position). Of course, I didn’t come up with this myself. Warren Buffett faced a similar dilemma in the early 1980s with Berkshire Hathaway’s unprofitable textile business.

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You can’t deal with ignorance if you can’t recognize its presence. If you’re suffering from primary ignorance, it means you probably failed to consider the possibility of being ignorant or you found ways not to see that you were ignorant.

You’re ignorant and unaware, which is worse than being ignorant and aware.

The best way to avoid this suggests Joy and Zeckhauser, is to raise self-awareness.

Ask yourself regularly: “Might I be in a state of consequential ignorance here?”

They continue:

If the answer is yes, the next step should be to estimate base rates. That should also be the next step if the starting point is recognized ignorance.

Of all situations such as this, how often has a particular outcome happening? Of course, this is often totally subjective.

and its underpinnings are elusive. It is hard to know what the sample of relevant past experiences has been, how to draw inferences from the experience of others, etc. Nevertheless, it is far better to proceed to an answer, however tenuous, than to simply miss (primary ignorance) or slight (recognized ignorance) the issue. Unfortunately, the assessment of base rates is challenging and substantial biases are likely to enter.

When we don’t recognize ignorance, the base rate is extremely underestimated. When we do recognize ignorance, we face “duelling biases; some will lead to underestimates of base rates and others to overestimates.”

Three biases come into play while estimating base rates: overconfidence, salience, and selection biases.

So we are overconfident in our estimates. We estimate things that are salient – that is, “states with which (we) have some experience or that are otherwise easily brought to mind.” And “there is a strong selection bias to recall or retell events that were surprising or of great consequence.”

Our key lesson is that as individuals proceed through life, they should always be on the lookout for ignorance. When they do recognize it, they should try to assess how likely they are to be surprised—in other words, attempt to compute the base rate. In discussing this assessment, we might also employ the term “catchall” from statistics, to cover the outcomes not specifically addressed.

It’s incredibly interesting to view literature through the lens of human decision making.

Crime and Punishment is particularly interesting as a study of primary ignorance. Raskolnikov deploys his impressive intelligence to plan the murder, believing, in his ignorance, that he has left nothing to chance. In a series of descriptions not for the squeamish or the faint-hearted, the murderer’s thoughts are laid bare as he plans the deed. We read about his skills in strategic inference and his powers of prediction about where and how he will corner his victim; his tactics at developing complementary skills (what is the precise manner in which he will carry the axe?; what strategies will help him avoid detection) are revealed.

But since Raskolnikov is making decisions under primary ignorance, his determined rationality is tightly “bounded.” He “construct[s] a simplified model of the real situation in order to deal with it; … behaves rationally with respect to this model, [but] such behavior is not even approximately optimal with respect to the real world” (Simon 1957). The second-guessing, fear, and delirium at the heart of Raskolnikov’s thinking as he struggles to gain a foothold in his inner world show the impact of a cascade of Consequential Amazing Development’s (CAD), none predicted, none even contemplated. Raskolnikov anticipated an outcome in which he would dispatch the pawnbroker and slip quietly out of her apartment. He could not have possibly predicted that her sister would show up, a characteristic CAD that challenges what Taleb (2012) calls our “illusion of predictability.”

Joy and Zeckhauser argue we can draw two conclusions.

First, we tend to downplay the role of unanticipated events, preferring instead to expect simple causal relationships and linear developments. Second, when we do encounter a CAD, we often counter with knee-jerk, impulsive decisions, the equivalent of Raskolnikov committing a second impetuous murder.

References: Ignorance: Lessons from the Laboratory of Literature (Joy and Zeckhauser).

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In Friendfluence: The Surprising Ways Friends Make Us Who We Are, Carlin Flora explores “the powerful and often unappreciated role that friends—past and present—play in determining our sense of self and the direction of our lives.”

What is Friendship?

Friendships are the least institutionalized and most voluntary social relationship we have. Our friends can cycle in and out of our hearts and calendars; they can be our “everything” or just a refreshing anomaly, a small pop of color in a busy social landscape. Amorphous in nature, friendship fills in the cracks left open by our personalities, or backgrounds, or temporary circumstances. Friends adapt to our needs and styles, and we to theirs. Perhaps we’ll never arrive at a precise definition, but descriptions of true friends can bring a jolt of recognition.

De Amicitia
Cicero, in somewhere around 44 BC, wrote De Amicitia, a beautiful piece on friendship. In it, he writes:

[H]ow can life be what Ennius calls “the life worth living,” if it does not repose on the mutual goodwill of a friend? What is sweeter than to have someone with whom you may dare discuss anything as if you were communing with yourself? How could your enjoyment in times of prosperity be so great if you did not have someone whose joy in them would be equal to your own?

Cicero defines friendship as “complete sympathy in all matters of importance, plus goodwill and affection.”

Montaigne was no stranger to friendship either. He penned a work on the subject “Of Friendship,” in 1580. Portraying his usually strong bond with Étienne de La Boétie.

Friendship as Love

The closest of friendships contain the mysterious spark of attraction and connection as well as drama, tension, envy, sacrifice, and love. For some, it’s the highest form of love there is.

Predicting Friendship Duration

The longer you are friends with someone, the more likely you’ll continue to be friends. Time spent as friends is the best predictor of friendship longevity.

Parenting and Creating a Sense of Entitlement
While The Secrets of Happy Families primarily concerns the present happiness of your family, long term implications need to be considered. Maximizing the short term at the cost of the long term needs to be considered. Often what’s great in the short term creates horrible outcomes. For instance, you could go shoot meth right now. You’d wreck your life, but it’d be a great few hours to start.

Some researchers believe that parents who were concerned more with being “liked” as a friend than with being respected as a leader caused the uptick in feelings of entitlement and narcissistic traits among today’s young people, compared to the youth of 1979.

What Does Friendship Mean to You?

If I ask you, “What does friendship mean to you?” you might say loyalty or compatibility, in the abstract. However, if I ask you why eight different people are your friends, I’ll bet you would describe their individual qualities, the circumstances in which you met, and the traits they tend to bring out in you— this one invites you to fun parties and that one challenges you to be a better person. In other words, asking people to define friendship in the first place is a bit like asking people to define flowers. Friends have baseline characteristics just as flowers are basically the blossoms of a plant, but beyond that they are unique and thrive under very different conditions.

As hard to grasp as it is, friendship brings with it a host of benefits to mood and health.

Solid friendships can help you shed pounds, sleep better, stop smoking, and even survive a major illness. They can also improve memory and problem-solving abilities, break down prejudices and ethnic rivalries, motivate people to achieve career dreams, and even repair a broken heart.

We are generally unaware that our friends influence everything “from our basic linguistic habits to our highest aspirations.” The converse is also true. Without friends it’s easier to spiral downward.

[H]aving few social ties is an equivalent mortality risk to smoking 15 cigarettes a day and even riskier than being obese or not exercising!

Evolution and Friends

Evolutionary psychologists theorize that friendship has roots in our early dependence on others for survival. Having a friend help you hunt, for instance, made it more likely that you and your family—and your hunting buddy and his family—would have food cooking over the fire.

Just because we don’t build fires and hunt in packs doesn’t mean we don’t need friends today.

Anthropologists have found compelling evidence of friendship throughout history and across cultures. Universally, we’re built to care deeply about select people outside of our kin group. It’s hard to construct a personal life history that doesn’t include important parts for one’s friends.

Sociologist Eric Klinenberg points out that “more people live alone now than at any time in history.” So the argument goes that if more people are living outside of traditional family structures friends become even more important.

More than for single people, friendships often help marriages.

Friends are also important for parents and those who are married or living with a romantic partner. Time with friends is actually our most pleasant time: We are most likely to experience positive feelings and least likely to experience negative ones when we are with friends compared to when we are with a spouse, child, coworker, relative, or anyone else. We’re not surprised when we hear people grumbling about how they have to attend a family holiday party, yet it would puzzle us to hear the same people complain about having to go to a celebration full of their friends.

Friends or Families?
Why do we prefer spending time with our friends over our families?

Some say it is because we pick our friends (God’s consolation prize) while we don’t pick our families. Insofar as we choose our spouses and decide to have children, we do have some say over our families. More likely, our time with our pals is more enjoyable because of our expectations. When we’re with friends, we bring sympathy and understanding and leave out some of the grievances we carry into interactions with family members. We tend to demand less from friends than we do from relatives or our romantic partners, and each friend provides us distinct benefits.

Busy Parents Should Stop Considering Friendships a Nonessential Luxury.

When working parents devote every scrap of free time to their children, their friendships are the first thing to slide. We know from research (and our own intuition quickly confirms this) that expecting one’s spouse to be everything is a recipe for disaster. Leaning on friends for intellectual stimulation, emotional support, and even just fun activities relieves the pressure of the overheated nuclear family. Busy moms and dads would do well to stop considering friends to be a nonessential luxury.

Time With Friends

The more friends want and enjoy our company, the more we tend to enjoy theirs, whereas lovers sometimes become more desirable the more they pull away from us.

Friends Make Work Better

If you can count at least three dear friends at the office, you are 96 percent more likely to be extremely satisfied with life in general.

As the role of friendship seems to expand in our culture, Friendfluence: The Surprising Ways Friends Make Us Who We Are, offers a look at the often under-appreciated influence it has on “our personalities, habits, physical health, and even our chances of success in life.”

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Centuries ago, the philosopher Jeremy Bentham wrote, “Pain and pleasure … govern us in all we do, in all we say, in all we think.” There is little doubt that we are drawn to physical pleasure and work hard to avoid physical pain. But do they “govern us in all we do”? Is this all that we are? I think they govern us far less than we typically assume. The institutions and incentive structures of society operate largely in accordance with Bentham’s claim and thus are missing out on some of the most profound motivators of human behavior.

What Bentham and the rest of us typically overlook is that humans are wired with another set of interests that are just as basic as physical pain and pleasure. We are wired to be social. We are driven by deep motivations to stay connected with friends and family.We are naturally curious about what is going on in the minds of other people. And our identities are formed by the values lent to us from the groups we call our own. These connections lead to strange behaviors that violate our expectation of rational self-interest and make sense only if our social nature is taken as a starting point for who we are.

The Neural Overlap Between Social and Physical Pain

We believe that social and physical pain are radically different. Yet, Lieberman argues, the way our brains respond to them suggests they are “more similar than we imagine.”

Our brains evolved to experience threats to our social connections in much the same way they experience physical pain. By activating the same neural circuitry that causes us to feel physical pain, our experience of social pain helps ensure the survival of our children by helping to keep them close to their parents. The neural link between social and physical pain also ensures that staying socially connected will be a lifelong need, like food and warmth. Given the fact that our brains treat social and physical pain similarly, should we as a society treat social pain differently than we do? We don’t expect someone with a broken leg to “just get over it.” And yet when it comes to the pain of social loss, this is a common response.

The Brain has Developed to Mindread Others
We’ve developed in a way to work with and adapt to others. We’re wired to develop social relationships.

While we tend to think it is our capacity for abstract reasoning that is responsible for Homo sapiens’ dominating the planet, there is increasing evidence that our dominance as a species may be attributable to our ability to think socially. The greatest ideas almost always require teamwork to bring them to fruition; social reasoning is what allows us to build and maintain the social relationships and infrastructure needed for teams to thrive.

There is a conflict between social and nonsocial thinking.

In many situations, the more you turn on the brain network for nonsocial reasoning, the more you turn off the brain network for social reasoning. This antagonism between social and nonsocial thinking is really important because the more someone is focused on a problem, the more that person might be likely to alienate others around him or her who could help solve the problem. Effective nonsocial problem solving may interfere with the neural circuitry that promotes effective thinking about the group’s needs.

We are Socially Malleable.
As always we adapt:

In Eastern cultures, it is generally accepted that only by being sensitive to what others are thinking and doing can we successfully harmonize with one another so that we may achieve more together than we can as individuals. We might think that our beliefs and values are core parts of our identity, part of what makes us us. But, as I’ll show, these beliefs and values are often smuggled into our minds without our realizing it.

“The self is more of a superhighway for social influence than it is the impenetrable private fortress we believe it to be.”

Social Networks for Social Networks

Just as there are multiple social networks on the Internet such as Facebook and Twitter, each with its own strengths, there are also multiple social networks in our brains, sets of brain regions that work together to promote our social well-being.

These networks each have their own strengths, and they have emerged at different points in our evolutionary history moving from vertebrates to mammals to primates to us, Homo sapiens. Additionally, these same evolutionary steps are recapitulated in the same order during childhood.

Lieberman explores three primary social adaptations:

Connection: Long before there were any primates with a neocortex, mammals split off from other vertebrates and evolved the capacity to feel social pains and pleasures, forever linking our well-being to our social connectedness. Infants embody this deep need to stay connected, but it is present through our entire lives.

Mindreading: Primates have developed an unparalleled ability to understand the actions and thoughts of those around them, enhancing their ability to stay connected and interact strategically. In the toddler years, forms of social thinking develop that outstrip those seen in the adults of any other species. This capacity allows humans to create groups that can implement nearly any idea and to anticipate the needs and wants of those around us, keeping our groups moving smoothly.

Harmonizing: The sense of self is one of the most recent evolutionary gifts we have received. Although the self may appear to be a mechanism for distinguishing us from others and perhaps accentuating our selfishness, the self actually operates as a powerful force for social cohesiveness. During the preteen and teenage years, adolescents focus on their selves and in the process become highly socialized by those around them. Whereas connection is about our desire to be social, harmonizing refers to the neural adaptations that allow group beliefs and values to influence our own.

But so what? Social: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Connect goes on to explain how we can use these adaptations as principles for how to teach and learn, enhance well-being, and make the workplace more responsive to our social wiring.

Humans are adapted to be highly social, but the organizations through which we live our lives are not adapted to us. We are square (social) pegs being forced into round (nonsocial) holes. Institutions often focus on IQ and income and miss out on the social factors that drive us.

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Honours, the second part, shows Feynman’s healthy disrespect for authority.

I don’t like honors. I’m appreciated for the work that I did, and for people who appreciate it, and I notice that other physicists use my work. I don’t need anything else. I don’t think there’s any sense to anything else. I don’t see that it makes any point that someone in the Swedish Academy decides that this work is noble enough to receive a prize. I’ve already got the prize. The prize is the pleasure of finding the thing out, the kick in the discovery, the observation that other people use it. Those are the real things. The honors are unreal to me. I don’t believe in honors. It bothers me, honors. Honors is epilets, honors is uniforms. My poppa brought me up this way. I can’t stand it, it hurts me.

When I was in High School, one of the first honors I got was to be a member of the Arista, which is a group of kids who got good grades. Everybody wanted to be a member of the Arista. I discovered that what they did in their meetings was to sit around to discuss who else was worthy to join this wonderful group that we are. OK So we sat around trying to decide who would get to be allowed into this Arista. This kind of thing bothers me psychologically for one or another reason. I don’t understand myself.

Honors, and from that day to this, always bothered me. I had trouble when I became a member of the National Academy of Science, and I had ultimately to resign. Because there was another organization, most of whose time was spent in choosing who was illustrious enough to be allowed to join us in our organization. Including such questions as: ‘we physicists have to stick together because there’s a very good chemist that they’re trying to get in and we haven’t got enough room…’. What’s the matter with chemists? The whole thing was rotten . Because the purpose was mostly to decide who could have this honor. OK? I don’t like honors.

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Never under compulsion, out of selfishness, without
forethought, with misgivings.

Don’t gussy up your thoughts.

No surplus words or unnecessary actions.

Let the spirit in you represent a man, an adult, a citizen, a
Roman, a ruler. Taking up his post like a soldier and
patiently awaiting his recall from life. Needing no oath or
witness.

Cheerfulness. Without requiring other people’s help. Or
serenity supplied by others.

To stand up straight-not straightened.

Later he adds this bit of timeless wisdom:

Never regard something as doing you good if it makes you betray a trust, or lose your sense of shame, or makes you show hatred, suspicion, ill will, or hypocrisy, or a desire for things best done behind closed doors.

Four habits of thought to eliminate.

Four habits of thought to watch for, and erase from your mind when you catch them. Tell yourself:

* This thought is unnecessary.
* This one is destructive to the people around you.
* This wouldn’t be what you really think (to say what you don’t think—the definition of absurdity.)

And the fourth reason for self-reproach: that the more divine part of you has been beaten and subdued by the degraded mortal part—the body and its stupid self-indulgence.

The best way to read Meditations is not necessarily from start to finish. Another idea, is pair it with Montaigne’s How to Live and read random pages from one every few days.

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France of the 1790s provided an ideal place for Napoleon Bonaparte’s unlikely rise to the top. Paul Johnson explains in Napoleon: A Life:

It demonstrated the classic parabola of revolution: a constitutional beginning; reformist moderation quickening into ever-increasing extremism; a descent into violence; a period of sheer terror, ended by a violent reaction; a time of confusion, cross-currents, and chaos, marked by growing exhaustion and disgust with change; and eventually an overwhelming demand for “a Man on horseback” to restore order, regularity, and prosperity.

Napoleon epitomized opportunism.

Bonaparte believed not in revolution but in change; perhaps accelerated evolution is the exact term. He wanted things to work better, or more fairly, and also faster. In England he would have been a utilitarian; in the United States, a federalist and a follower of Alexander Hamilton …

For better or worse, he was a product of the revolution.

The program could not have been successfully carried out without Bonaparte—that is certain. But equally certain is that Bonaparte would not have possessed the ruthless disregard of human life, of natural and man-made law, of custom and good faith needed to carry it through without the positive example and teaching of the Revolution. The Revolution was a lesson in the power of evil to replace idealism, and Bonaparte was its ideal pupil.

…

In this awesome transformation, Bonaparte was the Demogorgon, the infernal executive, superbly molded by nature and trained by his own ambitions and experiences to take the fullest advantage of the power the Revolution had created and bequeathed to him.

In his first invasion of Italy in 1796, an “imaginative and symbolic” success he set the tone for his relationship with his troops:

Soldiers, you are naked, ill-fed. … But rich provinces and great towns will soon be in your power, and in them you will find honor, glory, and wealth. Soldiers of Italy! Will you be wanting in courage and steadfastness [to obtain these things.]

His implicit contract with his troops: win the war and take the loot. One small and powerful gesture that might be looked over is that Bonaparte made it easy for their spoils to be transferred back to their families.

This made military sense, for it enabled soldiers to save instead of squandering their trophies on drunken debauchery.

Part of Napoleon’s success resulted from the difference between him and his enemies. The Duke of Wellington, who would ultimately be victorious at Waterloo, pinpointed Bonaparte’s advantage.

I can hardly conceive of anything greater than Napoleon at the head of an army—especially a French army. Then he had one prodigious advantage—he had no responsibility—he could do what he pleased; and no man ever lost more armies than he did. Now with me the loss of every man told. I could not risk so much. I knew that if I ever lost 500 men without the clearest necessity, I should be brought one my knees to the bard of the House of Commons.

Before Bonaparte, Wellington had only seen delegated power in the field. Now he was facing direct power. For example, he appointed his own subordinates, whereas Wellington often had generals foisted upon him.

This reminds me of Malcolm Gladwell’s new book, David and Goliath, in terms of how the weak win wars. Often they don’t appear to play by what we consider the established rules. When underdogs choose not to play by Goliath’s rules, Arreguín-Toft concludes in his book How the Weak Win Wars, they win, “even when everything we think we know about power says they shouldn’t.”

Napoleon enjoyed the freedom to take risks that his adversaries wouldn’t or couldn’t for political or other reasons. These risks fit perfectly with “his general strategy of swift aggression and offensive battle seeking.”

The soldiers liked this high-risk approach. In their calculations, they were as likely to be killed by a defensive and cautious commander as by an attacking one, and with little chance of loot to balance the risk.

Ultimately Bonaparte’s most useful weapon was fear.

It was this one he employed most frequently. In his aggressive strategy, it gave him a head start-it was as though an invisible army had softened up the enemy’s defenses before a French shot was fired.

When fighting campaigns, Bonaparte, with few exceptions, was usually vastly outnumbered. Often the other side was a coalition of nations.

His strategy therefore was not only to strike quickly but to strike between his opponents’ forces, before they could join together. He went for each in turn, hoping he would have numerical superiority and defeat them separately. The Allied armies thus rarely had the confidence of numbers, and even when they had, Bonaparte’s notorious ability to bring up reinforcements quickly and surprisingly tended to undermine it.

Napoleon also showed a great understanding by aligning his instructions with his strategy.

No matter how well drilled and disciplined, a unit was likely to lose formation if ordered to carry out complicated movements over distances. Hence, the simpler the plan the better, and the simplest plan as: attack!

Generals, for their part, preferred simple plans. Often these instructions had to be carried by hand to the front line, and innumerable things could go wrong.

Bonaparte’s most brilliant victory, at Austerlitz on 2 December 1805, can be summed up for three reasons:

First, he had complete unity of command. The senior Allied commander, M.I. Kutuzov, had in practice no chance to adopt and carry out a unified tactical plan, and authority was hopelessly divided between sovereigns and individual commanders, some of whom acted on their own initiative. Second, in the poor conditions, orders were frequently miscarried or were misunderstood or disobeyed. … Third, French united operated more efficiently. Their cavalry, and the artillery were persistently resourceful: informed that the Russians were trying to escape over frozen ponds, they quickly prepared red-hot shots and fired them into the ice, breaking it, and causing 2,000 Russians to be drowned.”

I found this bit particularly enlightening. Organizations, large and small, would do well to listen to the lesson embedded within this passage.

What few possessed—and therein lay their weakness—was independence of mind. They were, almost without exception, subordinates. Under the command of a decisive military genius like Bonaparte, they could perform prodigies. They rushed to obey his orders, to please him, to earn his praise and rewards. Sometimes, given an independent command, they acted well, especially if his orders were explicit and the task reasonably simple. But on their own, they tended to be nervous, looking over their shoulders, unresourceful in facing new problems he had not taught them how to solve. This exasperated the emperor, especially in Spain, where they all failed.”

But it was his own fault.

He did not like to delegate, and therefore the men he promoted under his command tended to be those who carried out his orders with precision, rather than men with their own minds. The weakness was central to the failure of the empire, for Bonaparte used his marshals and generals not only to command distant armies, which he could not supervise in detail, but to govern provinces and kingdoms, run embassies, put down rebellions, and deal with all of the crises that, from time to time, swept across territories of nearly eighty million souls.

If you’re hiring men and women who, while they can carry out instructions lack a general ability to think, what makes you think your results will be different?

In Napoleon: A Life is “the magisterial historian Paul Johnson offers a vivid look at the life of the strategist, general, and dictator who conquered much of Europe.”

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