The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish - TKP Insights: Learning and Thinking

Episode Date: November 7, 2023

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

Welcome to the Knowledge Project 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 brainfees. Every Sunday, I send out the brain food newsletter to over 600,000 people. It's considered noise cancelling 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 slash 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 slash membership. Check out the show notes for a link.

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. There is 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 Conman 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 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 Cowan 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 listen. and learn. From episode number 68, here's Daniel Conman. 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? I mean, you know, there are a sort of obvious thing 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. 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. Are the things that we could do to, I guess, push the environment to be more conducive to clear thinking, the physical environment in this case? Oh, there are all sorts of, you know, odd findings, you know, the color of the room,

And 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. Making decisions. Making decisions. But, you know, those are extreme and minor effects. 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? Well, you know, what? But it gets in the way of clear thinking that we have intuitive views of almost everything. So as soon as you present a problem to me, I have some ready-made answer. And it gets in the way of clear thinking, 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 to a first approximate.

impossible 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 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, you know, unless you're a scientist or doing something like that. But even then, it's probably a very narrow... 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 are. 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. 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 it 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? That's how I believe in climate change. 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. But similarly, there's like fake news and all this other stuff that we would have the same reaction to you. But I'm much more likely to believe fake news on my side than the fake news on these. the other side. I mean, it's true that there is a huge degradation in public discourse in the recent 10, 15 years of the United States. I mean, there used to be an idea that

facts matter. What would be your hypothesis as to why that is playing it? With it getting into politics because I don't want to talk politics, but like, why is that? Well, I mean, it's hard to answer that question without politics because was the general political polarization has had a very big effect and the fact that people can choose the source of information. Let's switch gears a little bit and talk about intuition. I think one of 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. What are the ways that we can sort of make better decisions with that? in the context? Well, in the first place, I think, you know, you shouldn't expect too much. Back to low expectations. Yeah, it should have low expectations about improving decisions. I mean, there is, you know, one basic rule is slow down, especially if you have the immediate conviction, slow down.

There are procedures, you know, there are ways of reaching better decisions, but reaching better judgments and we can talk about them. I would love to. If you really want to improve the quality of decision-making, use algorithms. I mean, wherever you can, if you can replace judgments by rules and algorithms, they'll do better. There's big social costs to trusting, allowing algorithm to make decisions, 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. So one class of problems are forecasting problems. A 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, you know, it tries to train people and we 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, there is advice, I think, on how 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 armed, 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, so 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 existing system was one where people would interview and try to form an intuitive global image of how well that recruit would do as a combat soldier, which was the objective of the object of the interview. And because I had read a book by Paul Meal, I took a different tack. And the different intact 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 and then go on to the next trade. And they had to do it for all six traits, and that's all

I asked them to do. And the interviewers, who were about one year younger than I, all recruits, but very, very smart, selected for being good at it, they were. 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'll be reliable, which was pretty arrogant, but that's how it presented it but then when you're done

close your eyes and just put down a number of how good a soldier is that guy going to be and when we validated the results of the interviewed it was a big improvement on what had gone on before but the other

surprise was that the final intuitive judgments added it was good it was as good as the average of the six straights and not the same. It added in formation. 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 that, by the way, stayed in the Israeli army for well over 50 years. I don't know

whether it's, I think it probably some version of it was still being forced, but around 15 years ago, I visited my old base, and the commanding officer of the research unit was telling me how they run the interview, and then she said, and then we tell them, close your eyes. So that had stayed for 50 years. Now, 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 there were candidates. So you should break it up into dimensions, evaluate each dimension separately,

then look at the profile, 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, 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. I'm curious how we delay intuition. You delay intuition by focusing on the separate problems. So our advice is that if you have a board of directors making a 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. Say, 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. And then your decision is almost certainly going to be better. Does that include weighting the different aspects of the problem differently? Do you highlight that in advance?

Or do you keep that? Yeah, I mean, 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 are 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 crimes 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.

From episode number 31, here's Barbara Oakley. 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? 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 um the people

procrastinate and uh yeah how do you do how do you deal with that uh 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 people forget about the fact that, well, you've got to get to the table. 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, 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 you get in the pit of your stomach when you don't really want to do something. Right.

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 think about Facebook or something or anything. I mean, even cleaning your room can be more pleasant than whatever unpleasant task you're thinking about. So the best trick, you know, to overcome this 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. It was invented by an Italian, Francesco Citiolo. and all you have to do is just turn off all distractions, so nothing bugging you on the phone or whatever, nothing popping up on your computer screen. And instead, what you do is you just, after turning off these distractions, set a timer for 25 minutes and then focus for 25 minutes. And your mind may drift off it because that's very natural. just bring it back. And the whole idea is you're focusing as intently as you can for those 25

minutes. And when you're done, you, and this is the most important part of the whole Pomodoro technique, you reward yourself. So listen to up you some 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 focus intently and reward yourself at the end that almost trains your brain 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. 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? Well, I always think that something active 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 brain, you don't want to go on to 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 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. What exercise does is it helps produce brain-derived neurotropic factor in your brain.

And this is kind of like a fertilizer that helps dendritic spines grow. In other words, it helps make new connections. And you can see it. I mean, there's some great neuroscience papers like a nature neuroscience that show that little dendritic spines just. popping right out when they've got BDNF, you know, they're exposed to that. And so exercise is what kind of brings this all out for you. And it's, it's, it is a fantastic learning, you know, it's like a medication to help you learn better. My co-instructor, Terry Sounowski, I'm convinced he did some of the earliest studies that showed the 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 a guy is 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, you know, every other day or so, he's down on the beach going for a run. And I think that people don't quite, sometimes don't take the wherewithal to add exercise in, you know, because 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.

Is there kind of like an ideal frequency or ratio between how much time we should be spending in focused versus diffusement? Not that I'm aware of. I think the one thing to be that I'm just aware of is I think there's a little bit 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 do focused mantra-type meditation, and let's say you add that in to a lot of other focused work you're doing and so forth, the mantra meditation can be excellent in helping to even further work,

build your focusing 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 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've

focus every, every single second that you have available. I'm just a little concerned that that's, that's not healthy for, uh, for your creative thinking. 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? Well, memory is integrated. to learning. And we all know that. But we've kind of gone off. I mean, there's just like seesaw through history. I mean, we see this in all sorts of ways through history. Some some mild 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 there 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 Schenarianism and then you couldn't publish anything that was against Schenarian 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 of that I even had a student, I remember I had a student come up to me,

and he flunked this test. 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 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 it if you memorize an equation you will also understand it more deeply 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. You've memorized it, right? But it's really a healthy form of memorization that allows you to master the material. From episode number 47 and 48, here's Adam Robinson. 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? 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. 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. 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, a modern history, 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. 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. They 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 those 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, and they said, oh my gosh, this is going to change the world, right? They were all, right, those homebrew kits. 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? change the world. He saw it and then he realized, oh my gosh, this is just going to change everything. Yeah. And I think that the great insights happen like that. They come not from logical thought. Now, because 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. How do we learn to do that. What does that mean?

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 an easy rule for 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 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,

So here I was up on stage talking about the delights of extroversion. And as I was saying it, it surprised me. I had no idea where that came from. So, yeah. Talk to me about the power of things that don't make sense or surprise us. What does that mean? It means our expectation of the world is different or off? Yes.

Well, 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 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 surprises an investing algorithm for me. 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, U.S. 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, 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 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. 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 an algorithm for finding opportunities. 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

one looks where things that don't make sense because they dismiss them. I go, well, that doesn't make any sense and they shake their head and they move on. Instead of diving in and exploring. Instead of diving in going, yeah, let's find out why that's true. I mean, you could almost lay it out 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. It's probably going to go lower. 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 go go. Right. They're all permutations of the same thing, a person in denial,

instead of seeing what's actually going on in front of them. What is the process for learning? Is there a process? Well, I think, yes, there is. How do we learn? Right. So that's such a good question. I wrote a book, wow, 25 years ago, called What Smart Students Know. And I did the following. 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 to have a quiz on these 30 words on Monday. Good luck. Right. 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. That's amazing. It's really cool, right? I mean, not that you would do that depth, but what does it mean to learn that page of information? 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 watch this, 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? 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, right? So step one, read the question. Step two, search brain for relevant information. Step three, collate that information into an answer, right answer. You have to rehearse each one of those steps to do well in those subjects.

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. Re-read 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 highlighting and reread their notes. But that's not rehearsing a skill.

Right. No one tests you on how will you highlight. Right. No one tests you 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 any subject and any domain is to rehearse the skills that you're actually required to do. to 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 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,

textbook authors, that weren't my professor and weren't the authors of the textbook I was reading. So I 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? Fowled out 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 constraint, like, okay, you've got a muscle sore. Now you're playing the game. Now practice. Now practice. Now rehearse.

Rehears. 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 the rehearse each of you. those skills. If you're doing something other than that, you're wasting your time. Rereading your notes, waste a time. You want to get good at a job interview? Have someone asked you questions. Someone who

doesn't know you, ask you questions, right? And then grade your feedback and listen to it. Exactly right. And then exactly right with the feedback, Shane. Then, okay, I spoke too fast. Right. I was coaching a young woman. She had a job interview coming up. And whenever I spoke, 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. What I want you to do is go to that. Uh-huh. 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, aha, so quickly, there's no way you heard what I asked you or said to you. And all your 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 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 aha so quickly. Listen to the person. 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 is at the end of the chapter, which most people annoy or avoid, and teachers may assign the odd numbers or the even numbers.

You should be doing them all and not looking at your notes, trying to do them. And then if you're stuck, go back and look in your book. Exactly right. If you reread your notes, all you're getting good at is like following problems you've already seen before. That's not going to help you when you get a new problem, because that's that. 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. Oh, that's interesting. Now, because what that does is it primes you. Now all of a sudden, whoa, how would I, there's no way I can answer those questions. 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?

Right. 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? Right. Like there's a whole range of things that you can do when you're skilled, right? So what happens as a baseball player, if I've got sweat in my eye 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 non-optimal conditions. Non-optimal conditions because you can't ever count on optimal, ever. And if you get them, great, you're lucky. So would you organize what smart students know differently now? Or would you take this same approach, which is like, here's a page of geology. And how would you update that? I would ask them to say, I'd ask them to break down.

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. Right.

Like that's all they do. They take notes in class verbatim. Here's a skill. On the test, do you pair it 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. own words. Well, then you have to rehearse doing that. Right. Right. So when you take notes in school, they're probably verbatim just because you've 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. Right. Because you've 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. 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 or 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 from episode number 39 Tyler Cowen how in your opinion do we develop good judgment 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's supplemented by, you know, extreme and intense online experimentation. That's the way to do it. What do you mean by online experimentation? Read Wikipedia. Use Google creatively. Listen to your favorite podcasts, read your favorite blogs, 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, 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 since, say, 15 years, incredibly rapid transformation. So do that, but you cannot neglect. face-to-face learning from other human beings who can guide you, inspire you, motivate you, steer you. It's really people who can combine those two things who will do well. 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? 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. Right. 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 you're Magnus Carlson and its 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 attitudeally adopting to never being the best, I think is, you know, a new tough challenge brought to us by the internet but i see many people up to it uh 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 as a parent how did you foster that in your kids uh we have one daughter she is now 28 and uh she's doing great uh i don't really claim credit for her That credit goes to her. But as a parent, you shape the environment and 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? 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 to. 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 worse. You used to read a few important books. You called them, I think, Quick Books. And now you read many more books almost a disposable. Like, why the change?

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 Hayek. A quake book was reading the early science fiction I read in my life. A quake book was reading John Stuart Mills' autobiography. And because 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. 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 changes. And books do in a way become more disposable. Like the books I still own are, you know, Homer or 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. Do you reread anything you've kind of read in the last five years? 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 is a young man. I'm going to reread soon. I probably haven't read it for 20 years, I would guess. 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 classics i read cover to cover almost by definition of a classic most books i don't finish very good books i finish maybe one book in ten 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. So with a typical nonfiction book, are you reading introductions straight through or are you flipping around or? I flip around. You know, I start the opening 2030 page is just to see should I read this book at all more than half of all books I get don't pass that test 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 seamann book the wizard and the profits about history of debates over the environment I read all of that that kept my interest the whole way through there's certainly still plenty of books like that do you read mostly in kindle or physical books 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 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 do you write in the books do you know 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 a while ago be careful about giving books away if you give a book away the danger is a person will read it just because it's 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. 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 message that I was never intending to give them. Like, oh, you think I'm this neurotic character. Well, I'm sorry. Yeah, that's exactly what happens. And it takes a while for it to come out. And it's like,

hey, what happened? 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 ten 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.

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 than 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? 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 and 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. I like that. What would you say is the way to think well? I don't know anyone who thinks well. 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.

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. What do you mean, the wisdom to knowing how to defer or when to defer? 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 averages 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 and significance. Most people, they're not getting that much better at it. How do you think about that? How can we improve our ability to judge? I think, again, It's this triangulation with really good face-to-face people you trust and who knows 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. So when you read something that disagrees with your thoughts or opinions, how do you process that information? 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.

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? 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, you know, to focus more on the mundane things, maybe is also helpful for reading the books, because 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, you know, try not to do devalue and dismiss. You learn much less. And it's always justified, right? Again, unless it's Magnus Carlson playing chess or maybe a computer program playing chess, you can 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. Are we doing that to discredit them or relatively position ourselves better? 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. And finally from episode 112, my friend Adam Grant. Let's talk about the preachers, prosecutors and politicians and scientists. 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 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 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, like occupations we were never trained in. So think about how much time you spend in your life preaching, right? 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 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 I started realizing was, I was actually about

halfway through writing Think Again, I realized it needed an order. organizing framework. And so much of what I was trying to encourage people to do was about getting out of the mode of preaching, prosecuting, and politicking, and into the mode of thinking more like a scientist. 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?

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 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. If it's not a law of nature, like effectively, it's just a theory. Exactly. Can you say that again and repeat it to approximately 8 billion people?

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 change their mind and look for evidence. Ooh, that is such an interesting reframing of my stance. on identity. I think you might be right. See 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 your truth. I'm more interested in getting the answer right than I am in being right. You know, 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 tools have been rigorously tested over centuries, right, as being the most valid and probably independently verifiable or at least most difficult to falsify, right, techniques for reaching the truth or at least getting closer to it. And I think as an identity, scientists is helpful because 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. 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, 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? I don't know. I think we have elected that person. I don't think it happens that often. But I think that in the U.S., Franklin Delano Roosevelt, that was literally his campaign with the new deal. It was a whole campaign to say, you know what? We're going to 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 going to figure it out and going to fix it. And so 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 the basic trap that you've railed against for years, Shane, which is we should stop confusing confidence for competence, right? Just because somebody is sure of an opinion does not mean they actually know what they're talking about. And in fact, anybody who is familiar with the Dunning-Kruger effect will know that 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, 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 get too attached to that vision and stick to it long past its time. 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 wrecks havoc on us. At some level, you're right. 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. 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. 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 and 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. 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. We want belonging. We also want status. 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 a 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, if you can join a kind of an unusual group or a group with clear, well-defined boundaries, then you're able to satisfy 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 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 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 most robust findings 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 threats to your own mortality. Or at least it makes you worry less about what might happen to you in the future and whether you have a legacy. It connects you to something larger and more lasting than yourself. And so, you know, it's easy to see why people are drawn to these groups. It's also a little bit scary. That's a perfect place to end this conversation.

Thank you so much, Adam. No, we can't end it. You haven't told me what I should rethink. I'm going to push for this. You have a phenomenal, phenomenal website and phenomenal articles, and it's really a pleasure to be here with you. I'm a huge fan of your site, so thank you for your interest. Shane, it was a delight. Thank you so much.

Thanks for listening and learning with us. For a complete list of episodes, show notes, transcripts, and more, go to fs. 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 slash clear. Until next time. Thank you.