TKP Insights: Learning and Thinking

In the fifth installment in a series of episodes, The Knowledge Project curates essential segments from five guests revolving around one theme: learning and thinking. This episode will help you create an environment that’s more conducive to clear thinking, improve your intuition, learn the difference between the two main modes of thinking, examine the learning process, use “online experimentation” to develop good judgment, and eliminate blind spots in your thought processes. The guests on this episode are psychologist and economist Daniel Kahneman (Episode 68), engineering professor Barbara Oakley (Episode 31), author and global macro advisor Adam Robinson (Episodes 47 and 48), economist and professor Tyler Cowen (Episode 39), and author and organizational psychology professor Adam Grant (Episode 112). -- Want even more? Members get early access, hand-edited transcripts, member-only episodes, and so much more. Learn more here: https://fs.blog/membership/ Every Sunday our Brain Food newsletter shares timeless insights and ideas that you can use at work and home. Add it to your inbox: https://fs.blog/newsletter/ Follow Shane on Twitter at: https://twitter.com/ShaneAParrish Our Sponsors: MetaLab: Helping the world’s top companies design, build, and ship amazing products and services. https://www.metalab.com Aeropress: Press your perfect cup, every time. https://aeropress.com Vanta: Helping you get compliance-ready, fast. https://www.vanta.com/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:16Shane Parrish?

  Welcome to the Knowledge Project, a podcast about mastering the best of what other people have already figured out, so you can apply their insights to your life. I'm your host, Shane Parrish. Every Sunday, I send out the Brain Food Newsletter to over 600,000 people. It's considered noise-canceling headphones for the internet, and it's full of timeless wisdom you can apply to life and work. Sign up for free and see what you're missing at fs.blog/newsletter. If you're listening to this, you're missing it. If you'd like access to the podcast before public release, special episodes that don't appear anywhere else, hand-edited transcripts, pre-release events, or you just want to support the show you love, you can join at fs.blog/membership. Check out the show notes for a link.

• 1:02Shane Parrish?

  Over the last five years, I've been lucky enough to speak with some of the most incredible people in the world. When I listen to these past episodes, one thing that stands out for me is how well the ideas stand the test of time. They're as relevant and insightful today as when they were originally recorded. That's why a few times a year, we go back to earlier episodes, some of which you may have missed, some of which you might have forgotten, and pull out some key insights around a single theme. The theme for this episode is learning and thinking. You'll hear Daniel Kahneman give advice on how to create an environment that's more conducive to clear thinking, and explain ways to improve your intuition. Then Barbara Oakley will teach you about the two main modes of thinking: diffuse thinking

• 1:47Shane Parrish?

  and focused thinking. You'll hear back-to-back segments from Adam Robinson on the learning process. Plus, he explains how and why your biggest insights can often feel illogical at first. Tyler Cowen will then explain how to use online experimentation to develop good judgment. And finally, Adam Grant will use the idea behind Preacher, Prosecutor, and Politician to explain how the identities we develop for ourselves can often cause us to have blind spots in our thought process. Plus, he discusses a brilliant metaphor for fixing those mistakes. It's time to listen and learn.

• 2:32Shane Parrish?

  From episode number 68, here's Daniel Kahneman. I want to come back to sort of situational decision making based on sort of like what we see is all there is and we have these feelings that we can't sort of disassociate with. How does environment play a role, like the physical environment, in sort of what we decide? Or does it?

• 2:54Speaker 01

  I mean, you know, there are sort of obvious things that we know. If people are hot and bothered and distracted and there is a lot of noise and so on, then they'll think less well and that we know that's... But even there, there are puzzles. I mean, many people think and work a lot better in cafes, you know, where there is actually ambient noise and activity around them and it helps them concentrate better. So there isn't a very simple story of the environment. But certainly you can make the environment tough enough so that people won't be able to think properly. That's feasible.

• 3:34Shane Parrish?

  Are there things that we could do to, I guess, push the environment to be more conducive to clearer thinking, the physical environment in this case?

• 3:45Speaker 01

  Oh, there are all sorts of, you know, odd findings, you know, the color of the room, some colors are better than others and you would expect that some colors are more calming than others. So you wouldn't want to be in a red room.

• 4:02Shane Parrish?

  Making decisions.

• 4:03Speaker 01

  Making decisions. But, you know, those are extreme and minor effects.

• 4:09Shane Parrish?

  I want to come to intuition and noise later. Is there anything else that stands out that gets in the way of clear thinking that we can sort of bring to the surface now?

• 4:19Speaker 01

  Well, you know, what gets in the way of clear thinking is that we have intuitive views of almost everything. So as soon as you present a problem to me, I have, you know, some ready-made answer. And what gets in the way of clear thinking are those ready-made answers and we can't help but have them. So that's one thing that gets in the way. Emotions get in the way. And I would say that independent clear thinking is...

• 4:51Speaker 01

  To first approximation impossible. I mean, in the sense that, you know, we believe in things most of the time, not because we have good reasons to believe them. If you ask me for reasons, I'll explain you. I'll, I'll always find a reason, but the reasons are not the causes of our beliefs. We have beliefs because mostly we believe in some people and we trust them and we adopt their beliefs. So we don't reach our beliefs by clear thinking. Some, you know, unless you're a scientist or doing something like that.

• 5:26Shane Parrish?

  But even then, it's probably a very narrow.

• 5:28Speaker 01

  But that's very narrow and there is a fair amount of emotion when you're a scientist as well that gets in the way of clear thinking. You know, commitments to your previous views, being insulted that somebody thinks he's smarter than you. I mean, lots of things get in the way even when you're a scientist. So I'd say there is less clear thinking than people like to think.

• 5:52Shane Parrish?

  Is there anything that we can do at the belief formation stage? Like, it sounds almost as though when you say that we're reading a newspaper, we read this op ed and it's well constructed and fits with our view of the world. Therefore, we adopt that opinion and we forget the context that we didn't learn it through our own experience or reflection. We learned it sort of from somebody else. So we don't know when it's sort of likely to work or not work, but we just proffer that as our opinion. Is there?

• 6:24Speaker 01

  That's how I believe in climate change. You know, I believe in the people who tell me there is climate change. And the people who don't believe in climate change, they believe in other people. So.

• 6:36Shane Parrish?

  But similarly, there's like fake news and all this other stuff that we would have the same reaction to.

• 6:41Speaker 01

  You know, but, but I'm much more likely to believe fake news on my side than the fake news on, on the other side. I mean, it's true that there is a huge degradation in, in public discourse in, in the recent 10, 15 years of the United States. I mean, there used to be an idea that facts matter.

• 7:04Shane Parrish?

  What would be your hypothesis as to why that, that is playing it? Without getting into politics, because I don't want to talk politics, but like, why is that?

• 7:12Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, it's hard to, it's hard to answer that question without. Without politics because it's a general political polarization has had a very big effect and the fact that people can choose the sources of information.

• 7:31Shane Parrish?

  Let's switch gears a little bit and talk about intuition. I think one of the the things that strikes me the most about some of the work that you've done is the cases where we're likely to trust our intuition and when we're not. And so if I'm, correct me if I'm getting this wrong, so it's sort of like a stable environment, repeated attempts and rapid feedback. It strikes me that most decisions made in organizations do not fit that environment. And yet we're making a lot of these decisions on judgment or experience.

• 8:13Shane Parrish?

  What are the ways that we can sort of make better decisions with that in the context?

• 8:19Speaker 01

  Well, in the first place, I think, you know, you shouldn't expect too much.

• 8:24Shane Parrish?

  Back to low expectations.

• 8:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, you shouldn't have low expectations about improving decisions. I mean, there is, you know, one basic rule is slow down, especially if you if you have the immediate conviction, slow down. There are procedures, you know, there are ways of reaching better, better decisions, but reaching better judgments and we can talk about them.

• 8:49Shane Parrish?

  I would love to.

• 8:50Speaker 01

  If you really want to improve the quality of decision making, use algorithms. I mean, whenever, wherever you can, if you can replace judgments by by rules and algorithms, they'll do better. Now, there's big social costs to trusting, allowing algorithm to make decisions, but but the decisions are likely to be better. So that's one thing. If you can't use algorithms, then you slow yourself down. And then there are things that you can do for certain types of problems, and there are different types of problems.

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• 10:23Speaker 01

  So, one class of problems, like forecasting problems. My friend Phil Tetlock has that book on super forecasters, where he identifies with people who are good at forecasting the future, what they do that makes them good. And he tries to train people and he can improve people. So that's one class of problems. I'm interested specifically in another kind of problem, judgment problems, where basically you're considering options or you're evaluating a situation, and you're trying to give it a score. There is advice, I think, on how

• 11:03Speaker 01

  to do it. For me, it goes back to something I did in the Israeli army when I was like 22 years old. So, that's a long time ago, like 63 years ago. I was a psychologist in the Israeli army, and I was assigned the job of setting up an interviewing system for the army. It's ridiculous, but you know, this was the beginning of the state of Israel, so people were improvising all over the place. I had a BA, and I was, I think I were the best trained psychologist in the army. My boss was a chemist. Brilliant, but anyway, and the the existing system was one where people would

• 11:47Speaker 01

  interview and try to form an intuitive global image of how well that recruit would do as a combat soldier, which was the objective, the object of the interview. And because I had read a book called "Me," I took a different tack. And the different tack was I identified six traits that I sort of made up, and I had them ask questions and evaluate each of these traits independently, and score it, and write down the score, then go on to the next trait. And they had to do it for all six traits, and that was, that's all I asked them to do. And the interviewers, who were about one year younger than I, all recruits, but very,

• 12:31Speaker 01

  very smart, selected for being good at it, they were furious with me. And they were furious with me because they wanted to exercise their intuition. And I still remember that one of them said, "You're turning us into robots." So I compromised with them. And I said, "Okay, you do it my way." And I told them, "You try to be reliable, not valid, you know? I'm in charge of validity, you be reliable," which was pretty arrogant, but that's, that's how I presented it. But then, when you're done, close your eyes and just put down a number. How good a soldier has that guy going to be?

• 13:11Speaker 01

  And when we validated the results of the interview, it was a big improvement on what had gone on before. But the other surprise was that the final intuitive judgment added, it was good, it was as good as the average of the six traits, and not the same. It added information. So actually, we ended up with a score that was half, was determined by the specific ratings, and the intuition got half the way. And, and that, by the way, stayed in the Israeli army for well over fifty years. I don't know whether it's, I think it probably, some version of it was still being forced,

• 13:52Speaker 01

  but around fifteen years ago, I visited my old base, and, and the commanding officer of the research unit was telling me how they ran the interview, and, and then she said...

• 14:07Speaker 01

  And then we tell them, close your eyes. So that that had stayed for fifty years. Now, the close your eyes and that whole idea is now the basis of the book that I'm writing. So actually, I have the same idea, really. That when you are making decisions, you should think of options as if they were candidates. So you should break break it up into dimensions, evaluate each dimension separately, then look at the profile. And and the key is, delay your intuition. Don't try to form an intuition quickly, which is what we normally do. Focus on the separate points. And then when you have the whole profile,

• 14:50Speaker 01

  then you can have an intuition and it's going to be better. Because people make form intuitions too quickly. And the rapid intuitions are not particularly good. So if you delay intuition until you have more information, it's going to be better.

• 15:05Shane Parrish?

  I'm curious how we delay intuition.

• 15:07Speaker 01

  You delay intuition by focusing on the separate problems. So our advice is that if you have, you know, the board of directors making decisions about an investment, we tell them, you do it that way. Take the separate dimensions and really think about each dimension separately and independently. And don't allow, you know, if you're the chair, don't allow people to give their final judgment. So we wait until we cover the whole thing. I mean, if you find a deal breaker, then you stop. But if you haven't found a deal breaker, wait to the end and look at the profile.

• 15:50Speaker 01

  And then your decision is almost certainly going to be better.

• 15:55Shane Parrish?

  Does that include waiting the different aspects of the problem differently? Or do you highlight that in advance? Or do you keep that?

• 16:01Speaker 01

  It makes you see the trade offs more clearly. Otherwise, when we don't follow that discipline, there is a way in which people form impressions. Very quickly, you form an impression. And then you spend most of your time confirming it instead of collecting evidence. And so if accidentally your impression was in the wrong direction, you're going to confirm it. And you don't give yourself a chance to correct it. Independence is the key. Because otherwise, when you don't take those precautions, it's like having a bunch of witnesses to some crime

• 16:44Speaker 01

  and allowing those witnesses to talk to each other. They're going to be less valuable if you're interested in the truth than keeping them rigidly separate and collecting what they have to say.

• 16:59Shane Parrish?

  From episode number 31, here's Barbara Oakley.

• 17:04Shane Parrish?

  I want to go back to something you said earlier about the two modes of thinking, so focused and diffused. And how does that relate to procrastination?

• 17:15Speaker 05

  Oh, I think it relates in that it is it is the other main key of learning. And in other words, learning about focused and diffuse helps inoculate you against thinking you're stupid when you're trying to learn. But the other major, major issue in learning relates to the fact that people procrastinate. And how do you do? How do you deal with that? Because I think a lot of times it's just, it's easy to say great learning takes place when you use deliberate practice and so forth. But they, people forget about the fact that, well, you got to get to the table.

• 18:00Speaker 05

  You've got to not procrastinate before you even, you know, start using deliberate practice. So in any case, what happens when you even just think about something you don't want to do? Uh, or don't like, it activates a portion of the brain in the insular cortex that experiences pain. So it's kind of like that same feeling eh, you get in the pit of your stomach when you don't really want to do something.

• 18:29Speaker 06

  Right.

• 18:30Speaker 05

  You know, so what does the brain do? The brain says, oh, hey, guess what? I didn't like this. When I thought about this, it made me feel uncomfortable. So I'll think about something else. And so off it skitters to uh, think about uh, Facebook or something or anything. I mean, even cleaning your room can be more pleasant than whatever unpleasant task you're, you're thinking about. So the best trick, um, you know, to overcome this as uh, as literally thousands and thousands of people from learning how to learn have told us is the Pomodoro technique. So this technique is just, it's fantastic. Uh, it

• 19:11Speaker 05

  was invented by an Italian Francesco Sirillo and all you have to do is just turn off all distractions. So nothing bugging you on the phone or whatever, uh, nothing popping up on your computer screen. And instead, what you do is you just, um, after turning off these distractions, set a timer for 25 minutes and then focus for 25 minutes. And uh, your mind may drift off it because that's very natural, but just bring it back. And you're, the whole idea is you're focusing as intently as you can for those 25 minutes. And when

• 19:51Speaker 05

  you're done, you, and this is the most important part of the whole Pomodoro technique, you reward yourself. So listen to a piece of music you like, go on to Facebook, you know, go walk around, go dance around, anything to comfortably distract yourself from what you've been doing. And that can, this whole business of uh, focus intently and reward yourself at the end, that almost trains your brain.

• 20:22Speaker 05

  To to be more comfortable in the focused mode and to and to enjoy it. And then to integrate that, the consolidation that's happening in the diffuse mode at the end of your your little session there. And it is really a powerful technique.

• 20:42Shane Parrish?

  Are there some activities that are better than other for encouraging that diffuse mode kind of reconciliation, like going to the gym? Or are they all very similar, as long as they take your mind off?

• 20:55Speaker 05

  Well, I I always think that something active is is better than anything else in that what you want to do, let's say you've been writing a report. And then when you're taking your break, you don't want to go onto Twitter or Facebook and continue writing because you're using sort of the same areas of the brain and it's not giving that area a little bit of a rest. So the the best all purpose break thing is to move around to some extent, do something that's physical. And we, of course, as far as exercise itself goes, oh, my gosh, that's one of the best things you can do for learning.

• 21:39Speaker 05

  What exercise does is it helps produce brain derived neurotropic factor in your, you know, in your brain. And this is kind of like a fertilizer that helps dendritic spines grow. In other words, it helps make new connections. So and you can see it. I mean, there's some great neuroscience papers, like in Nature Neuroscience, that that show that little dendritic spines just popping right out when they've got B D N F, you know, they're exposed to that. And so exercise is what kind of brings this all out for you.

• 22:19Speaker 05

  And it's it's it is a fantastic learning, you know, it's like a medication to help you learn better. My my co instructor, Teri Sienowski.

• 22:33Speaker 05

  I'm convinced that he did some of the earliest studies that showed that exercise is a really helpful tool in learning and because it in part because it promotes neurogenesis. You get new neurons and they help you build new patterns. But the guy is so he's approaching, you know, 70 and he's going stronger now than he ever was before. And I'm convinced part of it is just he really makes exercise an important part of his working day. And, um, you know, every other day or so, he's down on the beach going for a run.

• 23:13Speaker 05

  And, um, I, I, I, I think that people don't quite, sometimes don't take the, um, the wherewithal to add exercise in, you know, because they're, they're working as hard as they can and they don't realize that adding at least a little bit of exercise can actually help them to learn in shorter periods of time and help it kind of stick in their brain better.

• 23:39Shane Parrish?

  Is there kind of like an ideal frequency or ratio between how much time we should be spending in focused versus diffuse mode?

• 23:49Speaker 05

  Um, not that I'm aware of. Um, I think the one thing to be the, that I'm just aware of is I, I think there's a little bit of, of concerning evidence and it still has to be borne out with even further research and so forth, that the more time you spend focusing, as for example, if you are folk, if you do focused mantra type meditation, uh, and let's say you add that in to a lot of other focused work you're doing and so forth. Um, the mantra meditation can be excellent in helping to even further build your focusing

• 24:33Speaker 05

  ability, but there's some evidence that at the same time, it's also suppressing that default mode activity. So it may be that you're focusing, great, you can get even better at focusing, but you may be doing it at a trade-off cost as far as that other very different network, which makes wild and random and totally crazy connections, which is what fuels your creativity. So I can't help but wonder that I think it's important to spend at least some part of your day letting your brain just go random. And that's why I think

• 25:17Speaker 05

  going for a walk is excellent, especially if you're just kind of letting your brain go while you're doing it and almost letting yourself be bored for some periods of the day is helpful because if you focus every, every single second that you have available, I'm just a little concerned that that's, that's not healthy for, for your creative thinking.

• 25:44Shane Parrish?

  I like that a lot because I, I do think we need this sort of downtime and we can't always be on. I want to come back to a little bit more about learning, which is, can you explain to me kind of the, the role that memory plays as it relates to learning?

• 25:59Speaker 05

  Well, memory is integral to learning and, and we all know that, but we've kind of gone off, I mean, there's this like seesaw through history. I mean, we see this in all sorts of ways through history. Some, some idea will take hold and then everybody will go nuts for this idea and they go way overboard and then it goes way overboard and like Freudian psychology or psychiatry that.

• 26:33Speaker 05

  You can think there were some points to Freudian psychiatry, but everything got Freudian. And then you couldn't like break out of that. And then it went to Skanarianism. And then you couldn't publish anything that was against Skanarian approaches and so forth. And similarly, in education, we've gone on to this thing where memorization is evil. No, never allow people to memorize things because you just want them to understand it. And I mean, it's gone just crazy. And the fact that I even had a student, I remember I had a student come up to me. And he flunked this test.

• 27:17Speaker 05

  And he's like, oh, you know, I just don't understand how I could have flunked this test. I understood it when you said it in class. And he'd heard for so many years that all he needed to do was understand something. And that was it. That's enough. That's like the golden thing. And, and it's not enough. It's not enough at all. Sometimes I will say to people, like, you'll hear poets say, memorize the poem and you will understand it more deeply. It's, why should we let the poets have all the fun? I mean, if you memorize an equation, you will also understand it more deeply.

• 28:01Speaker 05

  So sure, I think there's ways you can memorize where it's just sort of your, your rote, putting something in your mind and you're not thinking about it while you're doing it. But actually, if you memorize equations, if you actively pull out a solution from your mind enough times, it's, it's, you've memorized it, right? But it's really a healthy form of memorization that allows you to master the material.

• 28:39Shane Parrish?

  From episode number 47 and 48, here's Adam Robinson.

• 28:46Shane Parrish?

  I want to come back to something you said about thinking and how we learn to think better. How do we learn to think better?

• 28:53Speaker 07

  Huh, you know, that reminds me of a great quote by the physicist Niels Bohr, who chastised one of his colleagues. And he said, "No, no, you're not thinking, you're just being logical." And there are limits to logic. And I think that the thing about thinking is it's a relentless asking of questions, that one question will suggest, will offer an answer, which will suggest another question. And so, part of thinking, at least logical thinking, is the relentless asking of questions. The, my greatest insights, such as they are, the meager insights I've had in the world, always come to me spontaneously, out of the blue.

• 29:36Speaker 07

  And I know you wanted to ask me about the Princeton Review and other things, and my work in investing and my insights, and they all came out of the blue. They weren't a logical chain of deductions, and therefore, this is the answer. The answer pops into my head, and then I work backwards to what steps should have gotten me there. But I never know beforehand, really. So, thinking, I think part of it is listening to your unconscious. Modern thought, logic, is the creation of the ancient Greeks, perhaps a civilization or two earlier than that, but relatively recent, a few millennia of modern history.

• 30:21Speaker 07

  And logic only takes us so far. The essay, as G.K. Chesterton once said, "You can discover truth by logic only if you've discovered it first without it." And I think that's true. The great truths can't be reached by logic. I can prove that logically.

• 30:39Speaker 07

  If you think about it, we've had many billions of people on this planet who've devoted a lot of their lives to thinking about the world, using logic, and I'm using air quotes now, "common sense." And yet... They haven't answered all the questions. So if logic could get us to the answers we seek as beings, as human beings, to the real questions, the real insights, the great truths with a capital T, then logic would have given them to us centuries ago. We'd have all be a little book, in fact, a booklet. Here, here are all the answers. But no, and the great insights come from our unconscious somehow, unbidden.

• 31:22Speaker 07

  They're just out of the blue. And so, yeah, I don't think any of the great, I don't think, for example, Stephen Jobs was walking around, what, 40 years ago, thinking, how can I change the world? Right? He and Wozniak had little, those little Atari mini-computers or something. I think they were, it wasn't Atari, but it was something like that, right? You look Packard little things and they said, oh, my gosh, this is going to change the world, right?

• 31:51Shane Parrish?

  The homebrew kits.

• 31:52Speaker 07

  Right, those homebrew kits, right?

• 31:54Shane Parrish?

  Yeah.

• 31:54Speaker 07

  Right, that you could just make on your own. And so, notice that Stephen Jobs didn't, what? I don't even think, whenever he first saw that kit, he was asking himself, how can I change the world? He saw it and then he realized, oh, my gosh, this is just going to change everything.

• 32:11Shane Parrish?

  Yeah.

• 32:11Speaker 07

  And I think that the great insights happen like that. They come not from logical thought. Now, of course, you're going to have to apply logic at a certain point. But I think one thing that should be taught is, certainly in schools, to the extent that it can be, is allowing students to get in touch with their unconscious and to listen to that voice.

• 32:33Shane Parrish?

  How do we learn to do that? What does that mean?

• 32:37Speaker 07

  Gee, you know, it's a bit like asking Bob Bowman, who is Michael Phelps' coach, how do you get, you know, Michael to, you know, extend his arm reach, you know? And he's going to go, well, I don't know. It's just the inspiration of the moment. So I'm not sure that I can offer a...

• 33:02Speaker 07

  An easy rule for how do I, how do, how would I teach someone to get in touch with his unconscious? I think it would start with just allowing themselves some time. Here's, here's a clue that you've tapped into truth with a capital T. And that your unconscious is speaking is that the answer will surprise you. You'll be startled by it. In the same way that I was startled by what I said up on stage. That was something I had never thought about. I'd been an introvert my entire life. And so here I was up on stage talking about the delights of extraversion. And, and as I was saying it, it surprised me. I had no idea where that came from. So, yeah.

• 33:43Shane Parrish?

  Talk to me about the power of things that don't make sense or surprise us. What does that mean? It means our, our expectation of the world is different or off?

• 33:51Speaker 07

  Yes, well, it, you know, Sherlock Holmes once said, it's a capital mistake to theorize before you have all the facts. And I think it's, that's silly advice with respect, Sherlock. We, we can't help but theorize beforehand, before we have all the facts. It's not clear what all the facts, I'm using air quotes, constitutes. But it's more important to have expectations about the world and then look for anomalies. Surprise is always, what surprise is telling you, Shane, is this? Your model of the world is incorrect, which is fantastic. It's a learning opportunity. That's what surprise is. And so I know when people talk about surprise, that's, surprise is an investing algorithm for me.

• 34:36Speaker 07

  When things don't make sense, when people say things don't make sense, all that tells me is they're not thinking about the world correctly. So when someone says, for example, it makes no sense why 10 year yields, US 10 year yields remain below 3%. After all, the Fed's talking about how. Well, the economy is doing, and by historical standards, 3% is pretty darn low. So I don't understand. It makes no sense why 10-year yields aren't going higher. And when someone says that, I know that 10-year yields are going to stay below 3% for quite a while, because that person's model of the world is in conflict with what that person is seeing. That person is in denial. So when someone says it makes no sense why gold keeps going higher,

• 35:20Speaker 07

  or Tesla stock doesn't sell off, or, by the way, I'm not offering investment advice, but when people say those things, I know that they're experiencing confirmation bias, that the world is conflicting with

• 35:33Shane Parrish?

  What they think

• 35:34Speaker 07

  What they think should happen. And really, when someone says, "It makes no sense that", really what they're saying is this, "I have a dozen logical reasons why gold should be going higher, but it keeps going lower. Therefore, that makes no sense." But really, what makes no sense is their model of the world, right? So I know, when that happens, that there's some other very powerful reason why gold keeps going lower, that trumps all the logical reasons, I'm using air quotes, "the logical reasons, the case, as it were", their argument for why it should be going higher.

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• 37:08Speaker 07

  So I know, once I hear that, whether it's from an individual or some talking head on Bloomberg or CNBC, that there are a lot of traders out there, investors, who are still on the wrong side of the trade, staring in disbelief about what is going on right in front of their eyes. And that's true, not just in the investing sphere, it's true in the political sphere, it's true in any sphere. If you want to find gold, it's where things don't make sense. I spoke at length with Tim about that, things that don't make sense. But that's, that's an algorithm for finding opportunities. You know, the question is, where do we get our good ideas? And one way to get good ideas is to look where no one looks. And I'll tell you one place that no one looks, where things that don't make

• 37:53Speaker 07

  sense, because they dismiss them. They go, that doesn't make any sense. And they shake their head and they move on.

• 37:59Shane Parrish?

  Instead of diving in.

• 38:00Speaker 07

  Instead of diving in going, yeah, let's find out why that's true. I mean, you could almost lay it out as a, as an algorithm. I'm not offering investment advice, that when somebody says, it doesn't make any sense, that X keeps going lower, get in the trade, it's got a lot lower to go.

• 38:15Shane Parrish?

  It's probably going to go lower.

• 38:16Speaker 07

  It's going to go lower. Yeah, for sure. And the more people that say that, and they'll say things like this, they'll say, or they'll say permutations of that. They'll say, after all, how much lower can gold go?

• 38:25Shane Parrish?

  Right.

• 38:26Speaker 07

  They're all permutations of the same thing, a person in denial, instead of seeing what's actually going on in front of them.

• 38:33Shane Parrish?

  What is the process for learning? Is there a process?

• 38:37Speaker 07

  Well, I think, yes, there is.

• 38:39Shane Parrish?

  Like, how do we learn?

• 38:40Speaker 07

  Right. So, it's such a good question. I wrote a book, wow, 25 years ago, called What Smart Students Know. And I, I did the following. I, I realized that, by the way, I'm not plugging the book, I am not, absolutely not, because I can summarize it now, and I wish I had the time to rewrite the book. But what I did was this, no one ever shows us how to learn, ever. Nowhere in school, for example, imagine, Shane, in French class, French 101, your first French class, your teacher said, everyone, you're going to have to learn a lot of vocabulary in this class. So before I teach you any words, I'm going to teach you a way to remember vocabulary. They never do that. They just go, we're going

• 39:23Speaker 07

  to have a quiz on these 30 words on Monday, good luck.

• 39:26Shane Parrish?

  Right.

• 39:27Speaker 07

  But they don't teach us how to learn. Actually, or remember things like, for example, they don't tell students if you want to remember anything, create a picture, a pattern, a story, or a rhyme out of it. All mnemonics come back to picture, pattern, story, or rhyme, but they don't tell us that. So we struggle, we, you know, we create flashcards, which are totally ineffective. And we keep rereading our notes. So I wrote, what smart students know, I gave students a page from a geology textbook, like a sample page, and I spent the next 200 pages showing how to actually, what it would mean to learn that. Like, I actually- Oh, that's amazing. It's really cool, right? I mean, not that you would do that depth, but like, what does it mean to learn that page of information?

• 40:12Speaker 07

  Like, here's everything that you would actually need to do. By the way, if I told you all the steps it would take you to tie your shoe, it'd be much harder than just- Showing you. -watch this. Yeah, yeah. Right? So, so the secret to learning anything is this, anything. I'm glad you asked that question. Rehearsing. If you want to get good at football, play football. If you want to get good at playing the guitar, play the guitar. If you want to get good at chess, you've got to play chess. Now, you want to break that down to certain skills and rehearse each one of them. So you see people playing pickup basketball or tennis, and they haven't broken it down to skills, and they're just out there playing, right?

• 40:52Speaker 07

  You want to break the domain down to sub-skills and then rehearse each one. Now, the reason I use rehearse is you want to do exactly what you would do in the actual game, right? So, for example, if you want to get good at taking tests, you have to take tests, which is to say the following. Let's deconstruct that. So I'm going to, in the next two minutes, summarize everything there is to know about learning a subject. And it's this. You rehearse whatever you were required to do on the test. So think about a test. On a test, you are asked questions you've never seen before. And you have to search your memory for the relevant information.

• 41:34Speaker 07

  Right. So step one, read the question. Step two, search brain for for relevant information. Step three, collate that information into an answer, write answer. You have to rehearse each one of those steps to do well in those subjects. Right. So what that means is you need the way to prepare for a test. I hate the word prepare or study because here's what most people mean by the word prepare for or study for a test. Reread my notes. If you think back to when you were in high school and college, I looked at most students and what they would do is they would highlight their textbooks and take lots of notes and then reread their highlightings and reread their notes. But that's not rehearsing a skill. Right.

• 42:18Speaker 07

  No one tests you on how will you highlight. Right. No one tests you on on rereading your notes because on the test, you're not rereading anything. You're seeing an entirely new situation. So the way to get good at at any subject in any domain is to rehearse the skills that you're actually required to do. So practice questions. Practice questions that you've never seen before. And you then have to search your memory for the relevant information. By the way, it helps. What I would do in in college is I would get textbooks the teacher wasn't using and I would see what questions were asked there. So I'd really get questions I'd never seen before, even from teachers, teachers, authors,

• 43:01Speaker 07

  textbook authors that weren't my professor and weren't the authors of the textbook I was reading. So I'd really get stumped with questions, right? And so because that's going to happen in the actual game. So for example, imagine you're a basketball coach, right? And you want to train your basketball players. At certain points, your key player is going to be out of action, right? Fouled out or or injured, right? I would have them play basketball games where take out one of the players and you're now playing with four, right? Or one of you, like, I would try to find a way to make their arm a little, like, wrap it up or something. So it was a little constrained, like, okay, you've got a muscle sore. Now you're playing the game.

• 43:45Shane Parrish?

  Now practice.

• 43:45Speaker 07

  Now practice. Now rehearse.

• 43:47Shane Parrish?

  Rehearse.

• 43:48Speaker 07

  Right? So rehearse under varying conditions. But a key, the key to learning any skill, really, if there's anything I said today, like, that was super important, the key to learning any skill, rehearse it. Break it down into sub-skills and then rehearse each of those skills. If you're doing something other than that, you're wasting your time. Rereading your notes, waste of time. You want to get good at a job interview? Have someone ask you questions. Someone who doesn't know you, ask you questions, right?

• 44:18Shane Parrish?

  And then grade your feedback and listen to it and...

• 44:21Speaker 07

  Exactly right. And then, exactly right with the feedback, Shane. Then, okay, I spoke too fast.

• 44:26Shane Parrish?

  Right.

• 44:27Speaker 07

  I was coaching a young woman. She had a job interview coming up. And whenever I spoke, she's, she did the following. Here, talk to me. Talk to me right now. And I'm going to pretend to be her listening. So talk to me right now, Shane. Just say anything.

• 44:44Shane Parrish?

  What I want you to do is

• 44:45Speaker 07

  Uh huh, uh huh.

• 44:46Shane Parrish?

  Go to that.

• 44:48Speaker 07

  Uh huh. She would say, uh huh, so quickly. And I said, are you aware that you are signaling that you're not listening to the other person? And she was dumbfounded. And she'd gone to Columbia University. I mean, you know, a good school, right? Great school. She said, no one's ever told me that before. I said, you say, uh huh, so quickly, there's no way you heard what I asked you or said to you. And all you're signaling is, you're not listening to me. I already don't like you. I liked her. I mean, I was giving her feedback as a mentor, right? And so, so you need feedback. And she was stunned. She said, no one's ever told me that before. And I said, just talk more slowly. Don't say, uh huh, so quickly. Listen to the person.

• 45:30Shane Parrish?

  So let me encapsulate this a little bit. If I'm in school, I'm in university, high school, I'm doing physics. The question's at the end of the chapter, which most people annoy or avoid. And teachers may assign the odd numbers or the even numbers.

• 45:44Speaker 07

  Right.

• 45:45Shane Parrish?

  You should be doing them all and not, not looking at your notes, trying to do them. And then if you're stuck, go back and look in your book.

• 45:52Speaker 07

  Exactly right. If you reread your notes, all you're getting good at is like following Following problems you've already seen before, that's not going to help you when you get a new problem because that's what's going to happen on the test. I'll go one better. You want to get really good? Try the sample questions at the end of the chapter before you read the chapter.

• 46:10Shane Parrish?

  Oh, that's interesting.

• 46:11Speaker 07

  Now, because what that does is it primes you. Now, now, all of a sudden, whoa, how would I, there's no way I can answer those questions. Let's now you're primed as you read the chapter of what's relevant and what's not. And you also prime yourself for the following. What happens when I have incomplete information?

• 46:29Shane Parrish?

  Right.

• 46:30Speaker 07

  What happens if I forget the Pythagorean theorem? How do I answer the question then? That's what I did at the Princeton Review, by the way. What happens when you know only two of the five choices? What do you do?

• 46:40Shane Parrish?

  Right.

• 46:41Speaker 07

  Like, there's, there's a whole range of things that you can do when you're skilled. Right? So what happens in a, what happens as a baseball player? If I've, if I've got sweat in my eye and a, and a fly ball is coming at me, what do I do? Right? I mean, you need to rehearse for the unusual as well as

• 47:01Shane Parrish?

  Non-optimal conditions.

• 47:03Speaker 07

  Non-optimal conditions because you can't ever count on optimal, ever. And if you get them, great, you're lucky.

• 47:09Shane Parrish?

  So would you organize what's, what smart students know differently now? Or would you take the same approach, which is like, here's a page of geology? And how would you update that?

• 47:19Speaker 07

  I would ask them to say, I'd, I'd ask them to break down. I'd have, I'd teach them how to teach themselves. I'd say, okay, in a little Socratic way, will, on their test, on this material, will you have seen the questions before? Yes or no? No. Like, I'd step them through and get them to discover, whoa, reading my notes, rereading my notes is just a total waste of time.

• 47:42Shane Parrish?

  Right.

• 47:43Speaker 07

  Like, that's all they do. They take notes in class verbatim. Here's a skill. On the test, do you parrot back exactly your teacher's words or do you express them in your own words? Well, of course, you express them in your own words. Well, then you have to rehearse doing that.

• 47:58Shane Parrish?

  Right.

• 47:58Speaker 07

  Right? So when you take notes in school, they're probably verbatim just because you got to keep up with the teacher, right? But then translate those notes into your own words because that's what you're going to have to do on the test. Don't reread your notes. Translate them.

• 48:12Shane Parrish?

  Right.

• 48:12Speaker 07

  Because you got to do that on the test. And if you haven't done it before, you're not going to be able to do it on the test.

• 48:18Shane Parrish?

  That's really fascinating. How does that carry over to adults then who might be working in an organization or need to acquire new skills?

• 48:26Speaker 07

  Ah, well, to figure out what it is you're required to do and then and to rehearse that skill. Like, let's say it's presentations. You've got to give presentations to clients, right? Then you're going to have to rehearse that.

• 48:46Shane Parrish?

  From episode number 39, Tyler Cowen.

• 48:51Shane Parrish?

  How in your opinion do we develop good judgment?

• 48:54Speaker 08

  I think having people you trust who serve as your mentors, and I mean that word in a very general way, who teach you things about different areas and teach you judgment, that supplemented by, you know, extreme and intense online experimentation. That's the way to do it.

• 49:10Shane Parrish?

  What do you mean by online experimentation?

• 49:13Speaker 08

  Read Wikipedia, use Google creatively, listen to your favorite podcasts, read your favorite blogs, Twitter, put time into having a wonderful Twitter feed, whatever it's going to be, it is worth investing time in and do a lot of it because today is the golden age for that for the first time in world history. There's this new thing like internet culture, the internet way of learning, internet modes of writing. Right now is to that, as say, you know, the 1780s were to classical music. So enjoy it. It's incredible. Online education as we have it is one of the world's greatest achievements ever. And we've put almost all of it in place in, say, 15 years, incredibly rapid transformation. So do that, but you cannot neglect face to face learning from other human beings who can like guide

• 49:57Speaker 08

  you, inspire you, motivate you, steer you. It's really people who can combine those two things who will do well.

• 50:05Shane Parrish?

  How do we collect the feedback for ourselves to realize our own limitations? Like, there's two problems with that. One is getting accurate feedback and the second is kind of moving out of the way of our ego and allowing ourselves to see it. How can we be better at that?

• 50:18Speaker 08

  Well, I think there's more feedback today than ever before. So many jobs, your performance is measured or can be measured in a way that wasn't true 20 or 30 years ago. You know, if you're a programmer, it's not that hard to figure out how good you are. You know, there's GitHub and you can post what you've done and the world will want to hire you or they won't.

• 50:37Shane Parrish?

  Right.

• 50:38Speaker 08

  So a lot of it's psychological. How can you accept the feedback? Because, you know, none of us are actually that great. And life is an experience of being humbled all the time. So you're either discouraged or you're re-energized by that. And I think learning how to re-energize yourself, you can always go online and see someone who's like smarter or better looking or who can, you know, lift more weights in the gym than you can, whatever the metric is. Unless it's Magnus, unless you're Magnus Carlsen in his chest, there's someone better than you. And when knowledge and peer groups were more local in earlier periods of time, that wasn't usually the case. So attitudinally adopting to never being the best, I think is, you know, a new tough challenge brought to us by the internet.

• 51:22Speaker 08

  But I see many people up to it. It can be re-energizing. It's exciting how much new stuff there is to learn. So be more internally motivated, like I want to become something, I aspire to something, and be less like, oh, you know, I'm the best at this, I'm the best at that, because you're not.

• 51:39Shane Parrish?

  As a parent, how did you foster that in your kids?

• 51:42Speaker 08

  We have one daughter, she is now 28, and she's doing great. I don't really claim credit for her, that credit goes to her.

• 51:53Shane Parrish?

  But as a parent, you shape the environment and you have, you do have some influence. I mean, was there anything that you consciously were doing in terms of building resistance and tenacity and internal motivation?

• 52:07Speaker 08

  Other than the platitudes, here's what I recommend. Expose your child in teen years to as many of your friends who might be possible role models as possible. Like at some margin, they're just not going to listen to you anymore. They're not going to watch your behavior anymore. They know what you're about. They've taken from that what they're going new. Have them meet and spend time with some of your quality friends. Show them new role models. That's what I tell people. Your influence is limited, for better or for worse.

• 52:36Shane Parrish?

  You used to read a few important books. You called them, I think, Quake books. And now you read many more books, almost disposable. Like, why the change?

• 52:46Speaker 08

  When you're young, it's quite easy to read books that will shake everything you know, and those are the Quake books. So for me, you know, a Quake book was reading Friedrich A. Hayek. A Quake book was reading the early science fiction I read in my life. A Quake book was reading John Stuart Mill's autobiography. And because you don't, your worldview is not as formed, books have an incredible influence over you. Then, as you get older, say, you know, by the time you hit 40, I don't mean that you never change your mind about things, you're changing your mind all the time. But it's very hard for something to have the impact, say, like the first time you heard Beethoven, or the first time you, you know, picked up Shakespeare. It's just not possible anymore.

• 53:27Speaker 08

  So you read more history books, you read more biographies, you read more for particular facts, you read for a kind of entry into cultural anthropology of different places or different industrial sectors. And what reading is, uh, changes. And books do, in a way, become more disposable. Like, the books I still own are, you know, Homer, Shakespeare, some basic works of economics. And I'm not ever going to give up those books. But they're not necessarily the books I'm reading now. I do reread them sometimes.

• 53:57Shane Parrish?

  Do you reread anything you've kind of read in the last five years?

• 54:00Speaker 08

  Uh, Shakespeare, I reread pretty frequently. That's probably what I reread the most. But any classic work, I'm likely to reread over the course of, say, a 10-year period. So James Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, I'm going to reread soon. I probably haven't read it for 20 years, I would guess.

• 54:17Shane Parrish?

  What are your rules for reading? I mean, do you read cover to cover? Do you, how do you, after you pick up a book, what's your process like?

• 54:24Speaker 08

  Classics, I read cover to cover, almost by definition of a classic. Uh, most books I don't finish. Very good books I finish. Maybe one book in 10 I'll finish. But I don't mean that as any slight to the books. You've always got to think... Well, you know, chapter seven in this book, is it better than starting a new book altogether? So much of my reading now is shaped by my reading for my own podcast series to interview guests. So I just interviewed Matt Levine of Bloomberg and he writes on law and finance, but when he was an undergraduate, he was a classics major. So I reread quite a bit of Horace, you know, the Roman essayist and poet to try to get into the mind of Matt Levine. So that more than anything now drives my reading, reading to understand other people I'm interviewing.

• 55:08Shane Parrish?

  So with a typical nonfiction book, are you reading introductions straight through or are you flipping around or?

• 55:14Speaker 08

  I flip around, you know, I start the opening 20, 30 pages just to see, should I read this book at all? More than half of all books I get don't pass that test. Uh, then there's plenty of books I'll read, you know, maybe half of and be quite happy with them, but still want to read something else. And then, you know, a really good book like the new Charles C. Mann book, The Wizard and the Prophet, it's about the history of debates over the environment. I read all of that. Uh, that kept my interest the whole way through. There's certainly still plenty of books like that.

• 55:43Shane Parrish?

  Do you read mostly in Kindle or physical books?

• 55:46Speaker 08

  Uh, I don't like Kindle. Sometimes when I travel, I need to use it. I can manage with Kindle. I find it hard with Kindle to like turn back. And I also remember things better when I think physically, what is their place in the book? Maybe that's silly. But I think, oh, that was like early in the book and I see where it is in my mind in the book and I remember it. And I can't do that with Kindle.

• 56:06Shane Parrish?

  I have the same thing. It's really weird. I can remember, oh, I think it's like this part of the page, you know, between 70 and 80. But I can't do that at all with the Kindle for some reason. That's a really strange, uh, do you write in the books?

• 56:19Speaker 08

  Uh, no, what I sometimes do is fold over pages where there's something notable. That's if I own the book, not a library book. And then, uh, maybe I'll go back to it, but usually I don't. Just the act of folding over the page helps me remember it like, I found that notable, I'm telling myself and then it sticks with me better. And then I'll, you know, give the book away or throw it out.

• 56:40Shane Parrish?

  A while ago.

• 56:41Speaker 08

  Be careful about giving books away. If you give a book away, the danger is a person will read it just because it's a gift. Unless you think it's the book they should be reading, it's actually a slightly cruel act to give someone a book.

• 56:51Shane Parrish?

  I've had that happen before where I've given people books and they've taken messages out of it. Like I was trying to send them a subtle, subtle message that I was never intending to give them.

• 57:02Speaker 08

  Like, oh, you think I'm this neurotic character? Well, I'm sorry.

• 57:05Shane Parrish?

  Yeah, that's exactly what happens. And it takes a while for it to come out. And it's like, hey, what happened?

• 57:12Speaker 08

  So giving books away, you know, it's overrated, I think. I also get a lot of review copies because I blog, I cover a lot of books. So a typical day, I could, you know, five to 10 books could come in the mail. And, you know, I need some way of dealing with those. And some I do give away. And then there are people, I know them well enough, they trust me. They know my giving them the book signals nothing. And that's just like a beautiful relationship.

• 57:37Shane Parrish?

  I usually take those advanced copies, preview copies, review copies, and chuck them in the lending library right by my house, which probably has, you know, it has more books coming out before they're actually out. People must love being around there. One thing that you said a while ago was that you read fairly quickly. And you said to read quickly, you should read a lot. What did you mean by that?

• 58:03Speaker 08

  I read nonfiction very quickly. I don't read fiction very quickly. Maybe I read it a little quicker than most people. The more you've read, the more you know what's coming in the books you're reading. So the easier and quicker it is to read them. So like, if I read a book now, you know, I'm 56 years old, I started reading when I was three. If someone asks me, well, how long did it take you to read that book? The correct answer is 53 years. It doesn't matter what the book is. You're bringing to bear your last 53 years of reading on the book. And most of your reading, your understanding results from your prior investment. So that's the way to read well, is, you know, stick around on this earth and keep on reading. That's by far the best advice, I think. Keep at it. Stay alive.

• 58:47Shane Parrish?

  I like that. What would you say is the way to think well?

• 58:50Speaker 08

  I don't know anyone who thinks well.

• 58:53Shane Parrish?

  I think you wrote a piece a while ago, or I seem to remember this, which is the work required to have an opinion. I think you alluded to writing an article from the point of view of someone else.

• 59:05Speaker 08

  Yes, there's a basic dilemma from what's called Bayesian statistical theory. Why should you ever hold an independent opinion? Like on almost any matter, maybe any matter, there's someone out there who knows more about it than you do. So you should, in a sense, just find other people's opinions to copy. But then how do you judge who's the person who knows the most or understands it the best? There's a paradox in that, because if you don't know the right answer, it's hard to judge who is the best judge. So one implication is we should just be far less sure about a lot of our opinions. But also, this point, I referred to it earlier, the wisdom in knowing how and when to defer is like the key wisdom of 2018 of our time. And this is under-publicized.

• 59:47Shane Parrish?

  What do you mean, the wisdom to knowing how to defer or when to defer?

• 59:51Speaker 08

  Well, you can Google to such a high percentage of the world's information. And again, this is pretty new. So when you know how to judge the quality of something on the internet, sometimes said, you know, the internet makes smart people smarter and stupid people stupider. So it gets back to average is over, like which category do you want to be in? Be epistemically modest, but also be a critical reader. And just having a general knowledge of how to evaluate sources, getting back to being generalist versus specialist. If you're going to be a generalist, one of the best things to be a generalist in is evaluating the quality of sources in your Twitter feed, online, everywhere. That is so important, and it's skyrocketing in significance. Most people, they're not getting that much better at it.

• 1:00:35Shane Parrish?

  How do you think about that? How can we improve our ability to judge?

• 1:00:39Speaker 08

  I think, again, it's this triangulation with really good face-to-face people you trust and who know something, and then intense use of the internet to like cross-check and investigate things, and just kind of bounce back and forth and do that around and around in a circle as much as you can, as quickly as you can. And you get better. And don't think you know it all. You know, if something offends you, don't assume it's wrong. I would also recommend. I'm not saying it's right. But if you dismiss it, you won't learn from it. So try to be able to learn from almost everything.

• 1:01:10Shane Parrish?

  So when you read something that disagrees with your thoughts or opinions, how do you process that information?

• 1:01:17Speaker 08

  Uh, I try to be happier about it. It's not always possible. We're all imperfect creatures. But I would say a lot of times I succeed. Overall, I'm more interested in reading books I disagree with than books I agree with. A lot of books I agree with, they could be quite good, but they tend to bore me. And that's one thing about myself I feel good about. Books I agree with tend to bore me. I view that as some kind of like minor tiny victory I've achieved in life.

• 1:01:42Shane Parrish?

  I think that's a pretty big victory. Do you have a mental state before you read the book as in like this is my position? And then after a book you maybe disagree with and view how your position has changed?

• 1:01:54Speaker 08

  I don't know. I think I'm more blasé than that. Like there's a pile of books on the floor. And probably my wife thinks the pile is too large, but if I put them away, I'll forget where they are. So I want the pile to be smaller and I'm more focused on very mundane things than like the grand ideological struggle of our time, whatever. And, uh, you know, to focus more on the mundane things maybe is also helpful for reading the books. Cause you don't get too caught up in being offended or like, oh, I've heard this person isn't like, doesn't know this or that, and I can dismiss them. There's an intellectual move which I call devalue and dismiss. And, uh, you know, try not to do devalue and dismiss. You learn much less. And it's always justified, right?

• 1:02:37Speaker 08

  Uh, again, unless it's Magnus Carlsen playing chess or maybe a computer program playing chess, you could always devalue and dismiss. Oh, that person, he didn't, you know, understand this event 10 years ago, you know? He or she doesn't know very much. Always possible. Don't do it.

• 1:02:52Shane Parrish?

  Are we doing that to discredit them or relatively position ourself better?

• 1:02:57Speaker 08

  I think both, but mostly the latter. People want to feel good about themselves. They want a kind of easy path to virtue, to truth, to feeling in control. We love to feel somewhat in control.

• 1:03:13Shane Parrish?

  And finally, from episode 112, my friend Adam Grant. Let's talk about the preachers, prosecutors and politicians and scientists.

• 1:03:23Speaker 09

  Yeah, so credit to Phil Tetlock for bringing this framework onto my radar. Phil wrote this amazing paper almost 20 years ago now, where he said, look, you know, a lot of, a lot of research on decision making and judgment assumes that people are thinking like hyper rational economists or scientists. And we're not, actually. We're much more social creatures than that. And as I read this paper, it suddenly dawned on me that this is, this is a perfect metaphor for me as an organizational psychologist, because we spend an inordinate amount of time thinking and talking like professions we have never held, right? Like occupations we were never trained in. So think about how much time you spend in your life preaching, right?

• 1:04:07Speaker 09

  You've already found the truth and your job is to proselytize it. Prosecuting, you find somebody who you think is wrong and your job is to prove it and win your, your case or come out ahead in the argument. And politicking, where you think, okay, I've got a base of people who I'm trying to curry favor with, and so I've got a campaign for their approval and support. What, when I started realizing is I was, I was actually about halfway through writing Think Again, I realized it needed an organizing framework. And so much of what I was trying to encourage people to do was about getting out of the mode of, of preaching, prosecuting and politicking, and into the mode of thinking more like a scientist.

• 1:04:50Speaker 09

  And part of the reason that I wanted to do that is I think that, you know, the danger of preaching and prosecuting is that you don't change your mind. You're right, everyone else is wrong. And so you might be very motivated to get other people to rethink, but your views are frozen, they're set in stone. And politicking is interesting because when we're being political, we're actually more flexible, right?

• 1:05:11Shane Parrish?

  Until next time.

• 1:05:11Speaker 09

  We might even flip-flop, but we're doing it at the wrong times and we're doing it for the wrong reasons because we're just doing it to appease our tribe as opposed to doing it to find the truth. And so I think we could all get better at thinking more like scientists to say, you know what? Your views, they're actually just theories, right? You could, you could kind of make them into hypotheses and then you could run little experiments in your life to figure out whether they're true or false. And that should leave you not only more mentally flexible, but also more likely to change your mind at the right times for the right reasons.

• 1:05:42Shane Parrish?

  If it's not a law of nature, effectively, it's just a theory.

• 1:05:46Speaker 09

  Exactly. Can you say that again and repeat it to approximately 8 billion people?

• 1:05:53Shane Parrish?

  Yeah, I wish. In that case, would you want your identity sort of tied up with your profession a little bit? Because scientists are known to sort of think and, and change their mind and look for evidence and...

• 1:06:05Speaker 09

  Ooh, that, that is such an interesting reframing of my stance on identity. I think you might be right. Seeing myself as a social scientist, right? And thinking about myself, seeing myself as someone who likes to think and talk scientifically and who was trained to do that. What that means to me is I value truth. I'm more interested in, in getting the answer right than I am in being right. You know, that, that means lots of my opinions are still flexible, right? I have a set of tools, so I really like experiments. I really like doing, you know, carefully constructed longitudinal studies. And I think those, those tools have been rigorously tested over centuries, right?

• 1:06:47Speaker 09

  As being the, the most valid and probably independently verifiable, or at least most difficult to falsify, right? Techniques for, for reaching the truth or at least getting closer to it. And I think as an identity, scientist is helpful because it, it reminds me how much we don't know and how hard it is to, you know, to arrive at the truth or an approximation of it.

• 1:07:09Shane Parrish?

  I want to preface my next sort of question with, I don't want to talk about politics. I don't want to talk about sort of liberal, Democrat, Republican, conservative, anything to do with that. I really, what I want to hit at is it seems that most of our leaders, we elect them for being strong-minded.

• 1:07:27Shane Parrish?

  Clear sighted, you know, often charismatic is, why are we drawn to these people if we know that actually maybe the best elected official would be the one that gets up and says, I don't know how to fix this. I would just hire the best people and listen to them. But we would never elect that person. Why do you think that is? Why are we drawn to this?

• 1:07:47Speaker 09

  I don't know. I think, I think we have elected that person. I don't, I don't think it happens that often, but I think that in the US Franklin Delano Roosevelt, that was literally his campaign with the New Deal. It was, it was, it was a whole campaign to say, you know what? We're gonna, we're gonna run a bunch of trial and error experiments and learn from what works. I think it's hard for that person to get elected though, because as we face crises and we grapple with uncertainty, we're drawn to people who we feel like are gonna figure it out and gonna fix it. And so if, if somebody hedges too much, if somebody shows too much humility, I think we mistake that as a sign of ignorance, right? And it's, it's the basic trap that you've, you've railed against for years, Shane, which

• 1:08:32Speaker 09

  is we should stop confusing confidence for competence, right? Just because somebody is, is sure of an opinion does not mean they actually know what they're talking about. And in fact, anybody who is, is familiar with the Dunning Kruger effect will know that the, the more sure people are of their opinions, the more hesitant we should be to listen to them, right? But there's something very intoxicating about following someone who believes they've already found the way. And I think it, you know, it gives us a sense of coherence. It can give us a sense of purpose. It's easy to put our trust in people who, you know, who, who have a clear vision. Of course, you know, in the long run, those are the people that I worry most about because they're the ones who are most likely to, to get too attached to that vision and stick to it long past its time.

• 1:09:17Shane Parrish?

  And I think it removes uncertainty too. We would almost rather be wrong and certain than uncertain and land in the correct spot because it like wrecks havoc on us.

• 1:09:28Speaker 09

  At some level, you're right. It, it's a way of letting other people do your thinking for you. And this, this is why political parties have always been such a mystery to me. You know, when people ask me what my politics are, I think for myself, I try to form independent opinions based on the information that I encounter. And the idea of identifying myself as a Republican or a Democrat or a liberal or conservative. That's ridiculous to me because it means I've outsourced my thinking to some group of people that I don't think are thinking very scientifically.

• 1:10:02Shane Parrish?

  Let's talk about that without using politics, sort of, but like tribes, like we fit into these groups, we want a sense of belonging. It's a very human thing to want to fit in with a group, be part of a group, have status within that group in a hierarchy. There's a biological sort of hierarchy need that we have, even if we're lowest on the totem pole, we sort of like want to know where we stand in this pecking order. And then we assume group identities and group positions, and those are really hard. Talk to me about that.

• 1:10:29Speaker 09

  Well, I think the idea that comes to mind right away here is the, these twin desires that human beings are constantly grappling with. We want to fit in, we also want to stand out, right? We want belonging, we also want status. There's, there's a theory that I love, Marilyn Brewer calls it optimal distinctiveness. And she says, look, there's a way to fit in and stand out at the same time. It's by joining unique groups. Because then you are part of something, and you're not only part of something, you're part of something that has a clear identity, because there are very few other groups like it. But you also stand out because of the very way that that group has differentiated itself from others. And so if you can join a group that gives you that sense of optimal distinctiveness,

• 1:11:14Speaker 09

  if you can join a kind of an unusual group, or a group with, with, with clear, well-defined boundaries, then you're able to satisfy those, those motivations simultaneously. That explains the rise of a lot of movements and a lot of groups, where people will say, okay, I want to, I want to belong somewhere where, where I also feel like, you know, I'm not like everyone else. You know, it goes back to, that's how people gain a sense of predictability. It's how they, they have a sense of control in their lives. It's how they avoid feeling excluded. And frankly, the other function it serves is existential, right? One of the, one of the most robust findings in, in psychology over the past three decades is that belonging to a unique group actually serves a terror management function, that it helps you avoid

• 1:11:59Speaker 09

  threats to your own mortality. Or at least it, it makes you worry less about what might happen to you in the future and, you know, whether you have a legacy. It connects you to something larger and more lasting than yourself. And so, yeah, it's, it's easy to see why people are drawn to these groups. It's also a little bit scary.

• 1:12:18Shane Parrish?

  That's a perfect place to end this conversation. Thank you so much, Adam.

• 1:12:21Speaker 09

  No, we can't end it. You haven't told me what I should rethink. I'm going to push for this.

• 1:12:27Speaker 05

  You have a phenomenal, phenomenal website and phenomenal articles. And it's really a pleasure to be here with you.

• 1:12:37Speaker 08

  I'm a huge fan of your site, so thank you for your interest. Shane, it was a delight. Thank you so much.

• 1:12:47Shane Parrish?

  Thanks for listening and learning with us. For a complete list of episodes, show notes, transcripts, and more, go to fs.blog/podcast or just Google The Knowledge Project. The Farnham Street Blog is also where you can learn more about my new book, Clear Thinking: Turning Ordinary Moments Into Extraordinary Results. It's a transformative guide that hands you the tools to master your fate, sharpen your decision-making, and set yourself up for unparalleled success. Learn more at fs.blog/clear. Until next time.