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Contrary to what we’re led to believe, thinking better isn’t about being a genius. It is about the processes we use to uncover reality and choices we make once we do.

To defeat Antaeus, Heracles separated him from the source of his power.

  • This book gives us different lenses to understand the reality. Reality is the strength for our knowledge, we should keep ourselves in touch with reality.
  • To understand the reality, we need to see the reality at different perspectives. The trajectory of the ball dropping on a train will differ from the view of one who drop it and one who observes from a platform. Three flaws we usually makes when interacting with the reality:
    • Not having the right perspective.
    • Ego-induced denial: we tend to invested too much on our idea and ignore the world’s feedbacks.
    • Distance from the consequences of our decisions: it’s easy to fool ourselves that we are right at a high level rather than the micro level.
  • We have to keep our foot on the ground since it is easier to distort the reality at a high level than a micro level.
  • We also tend to undervalue elementary ideas and overvalue the complicated ones. One thing to keep in mind that complex ideas will carry complex problems.
  • Our expertise in our field limits us from seeing the problem at different perspectives. An engineer will see a problem different from a business man. The world does not isolate itself into discrete disciplines. We should see how it connects to other bits of knowledge to reduce our blind spotd, to understand the whole.

The map is not the territory

  • Maps do not reflect all the aspects of territory. Maps are reductions of reality. Not only the geographical maps, there are many kinds of maps that exists in our life. For examples, business reports are maps of a company operations. Stock boards are maps of cash flow in markets.
  • Maps/models have their own limitations. We should not use them to represent the whole reality. For example, people who lives in a same territory does mean they share an identical cultures and thoughts.
  • In order to use a map or model as accurately as possible, we should take three importants consideration into account:
    • Reality is the ultimate update: we could use maps to navigates in territories. But territories sometimes could change faster than the map. We can and should update them based on our own experiences in the territories.
    • Consider the cartographer: maps reflect the values, standards, and limitations of its creators. When we look at the world map, we tend to associate societies with nations, assuming that the borders reflect a common identity shared by everyone contained within them. For examples, the modern borders of Syria, Jordan and Iraq reflect British and French determination to maintain their influence in Middle East after WWI.
    • Maps can influence the territories: for example, the design of a city could shape our lives and thoughts to what the city planners expect.
  • Maps and models help us simplify the world and therefore interact with it. We cannot explore every bit of the territory by ourselves. However, we must not let them prevent us from discovering new territory or updating our existing maps.
  • Maps and models are flawed but they are useful tools for us to understand and relate to the world around us. In order to think a few steps ahead, we must think beyond the map.

Circle of competence

  • To master a subject, it would take you years of experience, of making mistakes, and of actively seeking out better methods of practice and thought. You call someone a Lifer when they spend their life to master the subject, and Strangers are ones who are new comers to the area.
  • Knowing little about a subject is dangerous because it could give you a false impression that you know everything about subject. We are usually not aware of what we don’t know as we don’t know the existence of our blind spot.
  • There are three key practices needed in order to build and maintain a circle of competence: curiousity and a desire to learn, monitoring and feedback.
    • First, willing to learn: Learning comes when experience meets reflection. Learning from experiences of others is much more productive.
    • Second, honestly monitor your track of record in areas which you have, or want to have. Feedbacks are important and should be treated honestly. We sometimes don’t really want to know what we are good and bad at. Ego is a powerful enemy when it comes to better understanding reality. The best way to do it is to keep a private journal. To answer the questions: What went wrong? How could I do better?
    • Third, solicit external feedback. Find a people you trust or hire a coach to give you honest feedbacks about your traits and your skills. Leave you ego at the door.
  • When stepping outside of your cicle of competence, there are three parts to sucessful to learn:
    • Learn at least the basics of the realm you’re operating in. However, keep in mind that basic information is easy to obtain and often gives the acquirer an unwarranted confidence.
    • Talk to someone whose circle of competence in the area is strong. Try to find a detailed and thoughtful questions so that they will show you how to fish, not giving you a fish. Also, taking a grain of salt when receiving advice of other since the advice could be influence by their situations.
    • Use the broad understanding of the domain that you are good at to augment your limited understanding of the field. These will help you identify the foundation concepts that would be most useful.

      When studying a new framework of software or new research, the broad understanding of the domain that I know well help me to nagivate through important parts that I should learn in the new framework. It’s inevitable for us to occasionally make decisions outside of our circle of competence. There are definitely missing part of information but using a good model could help us maximize the chance to make it right and minimize the risk.

  • The problem of incentives: When taking advice from experts of the area that you are a Stranger, be aware of their set of incentives. For instance, when we consult a saleman for a good washing machine, even it’s his circle of competence, his incentives is not the same as ours.
  • Staying in your cicle: Warren Buffet suggests that each individual to stick to their area of special competence, and be very reluctant to stray. For when we stray too far, we get into areas where we don’t even know what we don’t know.

    Supporting idea: Falsifiability

    A theory is part of empirical science if and only if it conflicts with possible experiences and is therefore in principle falsifiable by experience (Karl Popper)

  • The idea is that if you can’t prove something wrong, you can’t prove it right either.

Applying the filter of falsifiability helps us sort through which theories are more robust. If the can’t ever be proven false because we have no way of testing them, then the best we can do is try to determine their probability of being true.

First principles thinking

First principles are skeleton principles on which many works relies. We should not rely on convention and what we’re told. We should breking things down into first principles and reasoning on them.

First principles thinking is one of the best ways to reverse-engineer complicated situations and unleash creative possibility.

Sometimes called reasoning from first principles, it’s a tool to help clarify complicated problems by separating the underlying ideas or facts from any assumptions based on them.

Socratic questioning can be used to establish first principles through stringent analysis. Socratic questioning process:

  • 1 - Clarifying your thinking and explaining the origins of your ideas.
    • Why do I think this?
    • What exactly do I think?
  • 2 - Challenging assumptions.
    • How do I know this is true?
    • What if I thought the opposite?
  • 3 - Looking for evidence
    • How can I back this up?
    • What are the sources?
  • 4 - Considering alternative perspectives
    • What might others thing?
    • How do I know I am correct?
  • 5 - Examining consequences and implications
    • What if I am wrong?
    • What are the consequences if I am?
  • 6 - Questioning the original questions.
    • Why did I think that? Was I correct?
    • What conclusions can I draw from the reasoning process?

Thought experiment

Thought experiements can be defined as “devices of the imagination used to investigate the nature of things”.

Thought experiments generally has the following steps:

  1. Ask a question.
  2. Conduct background research.
  3. Construct hypothesis.
  4. Test with (thought) experiment.
  5. Analyze outcomes and draw conclusion.
  6. Compare to hypothesis and adjust accordingly (new question, etc.)

Three areas that thought experiments are very useful:

  • Imagining physical impossibilities:
    • Einstein is famous for those experiments
  • Re-imaging history:
    • In Why the West rules, the author puts a lot of thought experiments by inverting events in history.
  • Intuiting the non-intuitive:

    Reduce the role of chance: When buying stocks, we could imagine the possible fall of a stock and consequences that could happen. From that experiment, we have a better view before making decisions.

Second-order thinking

  • Many of us can anticipate the intermediate result of our actions but few of us could look further to see what is the effect of the effect of our action. This is what second-order thinking mean.

  • Every decision has its effect. We don’t make decision in a vacuum and we can’t get something for nothing. When making choices, considering consequences can help us avoid future problems. We must ask ourselves the critical question: And then what?

What I think: this model is very general and not so straightforward. It’s hard to link it to any application in our life.

Probabilistic thinking

  • The probabilistic is essentially trying to estimate, using some tools of math and logic, the likelihood of any specific outcome coming to pass.

Bayestian thinking

  • Nowaday, we can easily be fooled by headlines of the media. We should carefully look into the information with the eyes of probability thinking. Every estimation might not be independent and has its prior. In the Bayesian view, we should ask: What are the relevent prior? What might I already know that I can use to better understand the reality of the situation?

Fat-tailed curves

Ambiguous and not so helpful

Asymmetry

  • Summary of Antifragile by Nassim Taleb:

    • To understand the core idea of antifragile, we can think about three categories of objects: ones that are harmed by volitility and unpredictability, ones that are neutral to volatility and unpredictability, ones that benefit from it. The latter category is antifragile. Up to a point, certain things benefit from volatility, that how we want to be. Why? Because the world is fundamentally unpredictable and volatile, and large events - panics, crashes, wars, bubbles, and so on - tend to have a disproportionate impact on outcomes.

    • There are two ways to handle such world: try to predict, or try to prepare. For the rare and impactful events in our world, predicting is impossible.

      It’s counter-intuitive here, if things can be predict, it cannot have a strong impact.

      It’s more efficient to prepare.

    • What are some ways we can prepare - arm ourselves with antifragility - so we can benefit from the volatility of the world?

      • First, we should seek out situations that we expect have good odds of offering us opportunities.

        Try to prepare and put ourselves in situations to increase our odds/chance of encountering opportunities. For example, if you want to be an engineer in Google, we should prepare to a chance of an Google recruiter come to our Linkedin profile by armed ourselves with license, good connections in our target field.

      • Second, we should learn how to fail properly. Failing properly has two major components:
        • 1 - Never take a risk that will do you in completely. (Never get taken out of the game completely).
        • 2 - Develop the personal resilient to learn from your failure and start again.
    • No one likes to fail. It hurts. But failure carries with it one huge antifragile gift: learning. Those who are not afraid to fail (properly) have a huge advantages over the rest. What they learn makes them less vulnerable to the volatility of the world. They benefit from it, in true antifragile fashion.

      If you would like to start a successful business, a real business will teach you much better than what the business school can teach you.

    • The Antifragile mindset is a unique one. Whenever possible, try to create scenarios where randomness and uncertainty are your friends, not your enemies.

Causation vs Correlation

  • We could inverse the relationship to determine if we are dealing with true causation or just correlation. For example, study show the relationship between the alcohol consumption rate in parents and low academic success in their children. Ones could think that the alcohol consumption causes the low academic success. But the reverse could be true, that having kids do poorly in school causes parents to drink more. In this case, we could define if it’s just the correlation or causation.

Inversion

Occam’s razor

Hanlon’s razor

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