Any science or math teacher worth their salt stresses the importance of knowing how to derive every formula that you use, because only then do you really know it. It's the difference between being able to attack a math problem with a blank sheet of paper and needing a formula handed to you to begin with.
It's also the difference between being a chef—someone who can take ingredients and turn them into an amazing dish without looking at a cookbook—and being the kind of cook who just knows how to follow a recipe.#4944•
The central mental model to help you become a chef with your thinking is arguing from first principles. It's the practical starting point to being wrong less, and it means thinking from the bottom up, using basic building blocks of what you think is true to build sound (and sometimes new) conclusions.
First principles are the group of self-evident assumptions that make up the foundation on which your conclusions rest—the ingredients in a recipe or the mathematical axioms that underpin a formula.#4950•
One way you can be wrong with your assumptions is by coming up with too many or too complicated assumptions up front when there are clearly simpler sets you can start with. Ockham's razor helps here. It advises that the simplest explanation is most likely to be true. When you encounter competing explanations that plausibly explain a set of data equally well, you probably want to choose the simplest one to investigate first.#4953•
In physics your perspective is called your frame of reference, a concept central to Einstein's theory of relativity. Here's an example from everyday life: If you are in a moving train, your reference frame is inside the train, which appears at rest to you, with objects inside the train not moving relative to one another, or to yourself.
However, to someone outside the train looking in, you and all the objects in the train are moving at great speed, as seen from their different frame of reference, which is stationary to them.
In fact, everything but the speed of light—even time—appears different in different frames of reference.#4942•
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Goodhart's law summarizes the issue: When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. This more common phrasing is from Cambridge anthropologist Marilyn Strathern in her 1997 paper "'Improving Ratings': Audit in the British University System." However, the "law" is named after English economist Charles Goodhart, whose original formulation in a conference paper presented at the Reserve Bank of Australia in 1975 stated: "Any observed statistical regularity will tend to collapse once pressure is placed upon it for control purposes."#5641•
An apt adage is Don't kick a hornet's nest, meaning don't disturb something that is going to create a lot more trouble than it is worth. With all these traps—Goodhart's law, along with the cobra, hydra, and Streisand effects—if you are going to think about changing a system or situation, you must account for and quickly react to the clever ways people may respond.
There will often be individuals who try to game the system or otherwise subvert what you're trying to do for their personal gain or amusement.#5608•
If you do engage, another trap to watch out for is the observer effect, where there is an effect on something depending on how you observe it, or even who observes it. An everyday example is using a tire pressure gauge. In order to measure the pressure, you must also let out some of the air, reducing the pressure of the tire in the process.
Or, when the big boss comes to town, everyone acts on their best behavior and dresses in nicer clothes.#5542•
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[Peter] used to insist at PayPal that every single person could only do exactly one thing. And we all rebelled, every single person in the company rebelled to this idea. Because it's so unnatural, it's so different than other companies where people wanted to do multiple things, especially as you get more senior, you definitely want to do more things and you feel insulted to be asked to do just one thing.
Peter would enforce this pretty strictly. He would say, I will not talk to you about anything else besides this one thing I assigned you. I don't want to hear about how great you are doing over here, just shut up, and Peter would run away. . . .
The insight behind this is that most people will solve problems that they understand how to solve. Roughly speaking, they will solve B+ problems instead of A+ problems. A+ problems are high-impact problems for your company, but they are difficult. You don't wake up in the morning with a solution, so you tend to procrastinate them.
So imagine you wake up in the morning and create a list of things to do today, there's usually the A+ one on the top of the list, but you never get around to it. And so you solve the second and third. Then you have a company of over a hundred people, so it cascades. You have a company that is always solving B+ things, which does mean you grow, which does mean you add value, but you never really create that breakthrough idea.
No one is spending 100% of their time banging their head against the wall every day until they solve it.#4974•
U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower famously quipped, "What is important is seldom urgent and what is urgent is seldom important."#4973•
In his 1957 book Parkinson's Law, Parkinson presents an example of a budget committee considering an atomic reactor and a bike shed, offering that "the time spent on any item of the agenda will be in inverse proportion to the sum involved." The committee members are reluctant to deeply discuss all of the complicated aspects of the atomic reactor decision because it is challenging and esoteric.
By contrast, everyone wants to weigh in with their opinion on the bike shed decision because it is easy and familiar relative to the reactor, even though it is also relatively unimportant.
This phenomenon has become known as bike-shedding.#4972•
For a real-life example, consider the recurring prominent debates about small items in the national budget each year in the United States. In the name of balancing the budget, politicians perennially suggest cutting national arts funding, science funding, and foreign aid.
No matter what you personally think of these programs, cutting them substantially will not significantly reduce the budget, as they respectively amount only to approximately 0.01 percent, 0.2 percent, and 1.3 percent of the total budget. In other words, if your goal is to significantly cut the budget, you would need to focus on much more major items in the budget.
The sound and fury you hear over these relatively small items is therefore either a distraction from making any substantive progress on the stated goal or a misleading use of the idea of overall budget cuts to attack these programs for an unstated goal (like getting the federal government out of the business of funding these types of programs altogether).#4975•