Tag: Wisdom

Recognizing Our Flaws is The Beginning of Wisdom

Reading Time: 1 minute

A short post today that packs a punch.

The liberating power of humility is one we’ve covered before. In fact, it’s a concept that is core to understanding your Circle of Competence. Now Russ Roberts adds to our collection of wisdom with this excerpt from How Adam Smith Can Change Your Life: An Unexpected Guide to Human Nature and Happiness:

As I have gotten older, I have become less confident and maybe more honest. The economy is too complex; we can’t measure the interactions of all its various pieces with any precision. We don’t have enough data, and we don’t understand how things fit together. We are drunks looking for our lost keys under a lamppost not because that’s where we lost our keys but because that’s where the light is. We should be humbler and more honest. Our empirical studies are very imperfect. We often hold the views we do because of ideology and principle. Then we find some evidence that supports those views. We ignore the rest … An awareness of reason’s limits is a caution sign to remind us that we’re not as smart as we think; we’re not perfect truth seekers. We’re flawed. Recognizing our flaws is the beginning of wisdom. Many things look like nails that do not benefit from being pounded. That should induce caution and humility for those with hammers … Humility is an acquired taste. Once you come to like it, it’s a dish best served hot. It’s amazing how liberating it can be to say “I don’t know.”

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Joseph Tussman: Getting the World to Do the Work for You

Reading Time: 2 minutes

“What the pupil must learn, if he learns anything at all, is that the world will do most of the work for you, provided you cooperate with it by identifying how it really works and aligning with those realities. If we do not let the world teach us, it teaches us a lesson.”

— Joseph Tussman

Nothing better sums up the ethos of Farnam Street than the quote above by Joseph Tussman.

How’s that for a guiding principle?

Tussman was a philosophy professor at Cal Berkley and an educational reformer. We got this beautiful quote from a friend of ours in California. Isn’t it brilliant?

The world will do a lot of the work for us if we only align with how it works and stop fighting it. Most of the time we want the world to work differently so we work against it. What Tussman really does is identify a leverage point.

Leverage amplifies an input to provide a greater output. There are leverage points in all systems. To know the leverage point is to know where to apply your effort. Focusing on the leverage point will yield non-linear results. Doesn’t that sound like something we want to look for?

Working hard and being busy is not enough. Most people are taking two steps forward and one step back. They’re busy, but they haven’t moved anywhere.

We need to work smarter not harder.

What Tussman has done is identify a leverage point in life. One that will increase what you can accomplish (through tailwinds) and reduced friction. When we work smart rather than hard, we apply energy in the same direction.

The person who needs a new mental tool and doesn’t have it is already paying for it. This is how we should be thinking about the acquisition of worldly wisdom. We’re like plumbers who show up with a lot of wrenches but no blowtorches, and our results largely reflect that. We get the job half done in twice the time.

A better approach is the one Tussman suggests. Learn from the world. The best way to identify how the world works is to find the general principles that line up with historically significant sample sizes — those that apply, in the words of Peter Kaufman, “across the geological time scale of human, organic, and inorganic history.”

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Members can discuss this post on the Learning Community Forum. 

Still Curious? Pair with Andy Benoit’s wisdom and make some time to think about them.

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Daniel Kahneman in Conversation with Michael Mauboussin on Intuition, Causality, Loss Aversion and More

Reading Time: 2 minutes

Ever want to be the fly on the wall for a fascinating conversation. Well, here’s your chance. Santa Fe Institute Board of Trustees Chair Michael Mauboussin interviews Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman. The wide-ranging conversation talks about disciplined intuition, causality, base rates, loss aversion and so much more. You don’t want to miss this.

Here’s an excerpt from Kahneman I think you’ll enjoy. You can read the entire transcript here.

The Sources of Power is a very eloquent book on expert intuition with magnificent examples, and so he is really quite hostile to my point of view, basically.

We spent years working on that, on the question of when can intuitions be trusted? What’s the boundary between trustworthy and untrustworthy intuitions?

I would summarize the answer as saying there is one thing you should not do. People’s confidence in their intuition is not a good guide to their validity. Confidence is something else entirely, and maybe we can talk about confidence separately later, but confidence is not it.

What there is, if you want to know whether you can trust intuition, it really is like deciding on a painting, whether it’s genuine or not. You can look at the painting all you want, but asking about the provenance is usually the best guide about whether a painting is genuine or not.

Similarly for expertise and intuition, you have to ask not how happy the individual is with his or her own intuitions, but first of all, you have to ask about the domain. Is the domain one where there is enough regularity to support intuitions? That’s true in some medical domains, it certainly is true in chess, it is probably not true in stock picking, and so there are domains in which intuition can develop and others in which it cannot. Then you have to ask whether, if it’s a good domain, one in which there are regularities that can be picked up by the limited human learning machine. If there are regularities, did the individual have an opportunity to learn those regularities? That primarily has to do with the quality of the feedback.

Those are the questions that I think should be asked, so there is a wide domain where intuitions can be trusted, and they should be trusted, and in a way, we have no option but to trust them because most of the time, we have to rely on intuition because it takes too long to do anything else.

Then there is a wide domain where people have equal confidence but are not to be trusted, and that may be another essential point about expertise. People typically do not know the limits of their expertise, and that certainly is true in the domain of finances, of financial analysis and financial knowledge. There is no question that people who advise others about finances have expertise about finance that their advisees do not have. They know how to look at balance sheets, they understand what happens in conversations with analysts.

There is a great deal that they know, but they do not really know what is going to happen to a particular stock next year. They don’t know that, that is one of the typical things about expert intuition in that we know domains where we have it, there are domains where we don’t, but we feel the same confidence and we do not know the limits of our expertise, and that sometimes is quite dangerous.

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The Two Types of Knowledge: The Max Planck/Chauffeur Test

Reading Time: 3 minutes

Charlie Munger, the billionaire business partner of Warren Buffett, frequently tells the story below to illustrate how to distinguish between the two types of knowledge: real knowledge and pretend knowledge.

At the 2007 Commencement to the USC Law School, Munger explained it this way:

I frequently tell the apocryphal story about how Max Planck, after he won the Nobel Prize, went around Germany giving the same standard lecture on the new quantum mechanics.

Over time, his chauffeur memorized the lecture and said, “Would you mind, Professor Planck, because it’s so boring to stay in our routine. [What if] I gave the lecture in Munich and you just sat in front wearing my chauffeur’s hat?” Planck said, “Why not?” And the chauffeur got up and gave this long lecture on quantum mechanics. After which a physics professor stood up and asked a perfectly ghastly question. The speaker said, “Well I’m surprised that in an advanced city like Munich I get such an elementary question. I’m going to ask my chauffeur to reply.”

The point of the story is not the quick-wittedness of the protagonist, but rather — to echo Richard Feynman — it’s about making a distinction between knowing the name of something and knowing something.

Two Types of Knowledge

Munger continues:

In this world we have two kinds of knowledge. One is Planck knowledge, the people who really know. They’ve paid the dues, they have the aptitude. And then we’ve got chauffeur knowledge. They’ve learned the talk. They may have a big head of hair, they may have fine temper in the voice, they’ll make a hell of an impression.

But in the end, all they have is chauffeur knowledge. I think I’ve just described practically every politician in the United States.

And you are going to have the problem in your life of getting the responsibility into the people with the Planck knowledge and away from the people with the chauffeur knowledge.

And there are huge forces working against you. My generation has failed you a bit… but you wouldn’t like it to be too easy now would you?

Real knowledge comes when people do the work. This is so important that Elon Musk tries to tease it out in interviews.

On the other hand, we have the people who don’t do the work — they pretend. While they’ve learned to put on a good show, they lack understanding. They can’t answer questions that don’t rely on memorization. They can’t explain things without using jargon or vague terms. They have no idea how things interact. They can’t predict the consequences.

“Any fool can know. The point is to understand.”

— Albert Einstein

The problem is that it’s difficult to separate the two. This is the Batesian Mimicry problem. One way to tease out the difference between Planck and chauffeur knowledge is to ask them why.

In The Art of Thinking Clearly, Rolf Dobelli offers some commentary on distinguishing fake from real knowledge:

With journalists, it is more difficult. Some have acquired true knowledge. Often they are veteran reporters who have specialized for years in a clearly defined area. They make a serious effort to understand the complexity of a subject and to communicate it. They tend to write long articles that highlight a variety of cases and exceptions. The majority of journalists, however, fall into the category of chauffeur. They conjure up articles off the tops of their heads or, rather, from Google searches. Their texts are one-sided, short, and— often as compensation for their patchy knowledge— snarky and self-satisfied in tone.

The same superficiality is present in business. The larger a company, the more the CEO is expected to possess “star quality.” Dedication, solemnity, and reliability are undervalued, at least at the top. Too often shareholders and business journalists seem to believe that showmanship will deliver better results, which is obviously not the case.

One way to guard against this is to understand your circle of competence.

Dobelli concludes with some advice worth taking to heart.

Be on the lookout for chauffeur knowledge. Do not confuse the company spokesperson, the ringmaster, the newscaster, the schmoozer, the verbiage vendor, or the cliché generator with those who possess true knowledge. How do you recognize the difference? There is a clear indicator: True experts recognize the limits of what they know and what they do not know. If they find themselves outside their circle of competence, they keep quiet or simply say, “I don’t know.” This they utter unapologetically, even with a certain pride. From chauffeurs, we hear every line except this.

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Garrett Hardin: The Other Side of Expertise

Reading Time: 2 minutes


From Garrett Hardin‘s mind-blowingly awesome Filters Against Folly.

In our highly technological society we cannot do without experts. We accept this fact of life, but not without anxiety. There is much truth in the definition of the specialist as someone who “knows more and more about less and less.” But there is another side to the coin of expertise. A really great idea in science often has its birth as apparently no more than a particular answer to a narrow question; it is only later that it turns out that the ramifications of the answer reach out into the most surprising corners. What begins as knowledge about very little turns out to be wisdom about a great deal.

So it was with the development of the theory of probability. It all began in the seventeenth century, when one of the minor French nobility asked the philosopher-scientist Blaise Pascal to devise a fair way to divide the stakes in an interrupted gambling game. Pascal consulted with lawyer-mathematician friend Pierre de Fermat, and the two of them quickly laid the foundation of probability theory. Out of a trivial question about gambling came profound insights that later bore splendid fruit in physics and biology, in the verification of the causes of disease, the calculation of fair insurance premiums, and the achievement of quality control in manufacturing processes. And much more.

The service of experts is indispensable even if we are poor at ascertaining under which circumstances they add value, when they add noise, and when they are harmful. Hardin cautions that each new expertise introduces “new possibilities of error.”

“It is unfortunately true that experts are generally better at seeing their particular kinds of trees than the forest of all life.”

— Garrett Hardin

Thoughtful laymen — that’s us — can, however, “become very good at seeing the forest, particularly if they lose their timidity about challenging the experts. … In the universal role of laymen we all have to learn to filter the essential meaning out of the too verbose, too aggressively technical statements of the experts. Fortunately, this is not as difficult a task as some experts would have us believe.”

Filters Against Folly is Hardin’s attempt “to show there …. (are) some rather simple methods of checking the validity of the statements of experts.”

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