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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Ozan Varol
Started reading
January 12, 2023
we all encounter complex and unfamiliar problems in our daily lives. Those who can tackle these problems—without clear guidelines and with the clock ticking—enjoy an extraordinary advantage.
We’re all programmed with the same fear of the uncertain. Our predecessors who weren’t afraid of the unknown became food for saber-toothed tigers. But the ancestors who viewed uncertainty as life-threatening lived long enough to pass their genes on to us.
Answers are no longer a scarce commodity, and knowledge has never been cheaper. By the time we’ve figured out the facts—by the time Google, Alexa, or Siri can spit out the answer—the world has moved on.
Where certainty ends, progress begins.
We’ve been told to “fake it until we make it,” and we’ve become experts at the faking part. We value chest beating and delivering clear answers with conviction, even when we have little more than two minutes of Wikipedia knowledge on an issue. We march on, pretending to know what we think we know, oblivious to glaring facts that contradict our ironclad beliefs.
“We can’t live in a state of perpetual doubt,” Nobel Prize–winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman explains, “so we make up the best story possible and we live as if this story were true.”20
All the facts in the world can’t keep democratically elected hate machines from taking office as long as they can inject a false sense of certainty into an inherently uncertain world.
Confident conclusions by loud-mouthed demagogues who pride themselves on rejecting critical thinking begin to dominate the public discourse.
The problem with the modern world, as Bertrand Russell put it, is that “the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt.” Even after physicist Richard Feynman earned a Nobel prize, he thought of himself as a “confused ape” and approached everything around him with the same level of curiosity, which enabled him to see nuances that others dismissed. “I think it’s much more interesting to live not knowing,” he remarked, “than to have answers which might be wrong.”
it’s far better to be uncomfortably uncertain than comfortably wrong. In the end, it’s the confused apes—the connoisseurs of uncertainty—that transform the world.
The connoisseurs of uncertainty know that an experiment with a known outcome is not an experiment at all and that revisiting the same answers is not progress.
The discovery of quantum mechanics, X-rays, DNA, oxygen, penicillin, and others, all occurred when the scientists embraced, rather than disregarded, anomalies.51
Think about it: Where are the redundancies in your own life? Where’s the emergency brake or the spare tire in your company? How will you deal with the loss of a valuable team member, a critical distributor, or an important client? What will you do if your household loses a source of income? The system must be designed to continue operating even if a component fails.
You’ll learn why knowledge can be a vice, rather than a virtue,
“It’s difficult to get a man to understand something,” Upton Sinclair said, “when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”
“Do we own the process or does the process own us?” 7
“When faced with two hypotheses that explain the data equally well,” you should “choose the simpler.”37 In other words, “when you hear hoofbeats, think horses, not unicorns.” 38
“Any intelligent fool can make things bigger and more complex,” economist E. F. Schumacher said in a quote often misattributed to Einstein. “It takes a touch of genius and a lot of courage to move in the opposite direction.”
As shocking as it sounds, we can generate breakthroughs simply by thinking. No Google. No self-help books. No focus groups or surveys. No advice from a self-proclaimed life coach or an expensive consultant. No copying from competitors. This external search for answers impedes first-principles thinking by focusing our attention on how things are rather than how they could be.
For fear of sounding stupid, we assume most questions are too basic to ask, so we don’t ask them.
At best, we pay lip service to curiosity but end up discouraging it in practice. Businesses hold a “creativity day” to foster innovation—complete with a PowerPoint presentation and an expensive outside speaker—but go back to business as usual for the remaining 364 days.
Moonshots force you to reason from first principles. If your goal is 1 percent improvement, you can work within the status quo. But if your goal is to improve tenfold, the status quo has to go. Pursuing a moonshot puts you in a different league—and often an entirely different game—from that of your competitors, making the established plays and routines largely irrelevant.
If your goal is to improve car safety, you can make gradual improvements to the design of a car to better protect human life in an accident. But if your goal is a moonshot of eliminating all accidents, you must start with a blank slate and question all assumptions—including the human operator behind the wheel. This first-principles approach paves the way for the possibility of autonomous vehicles.
Jaime Waydo, who led the design of Curiosity’s mobility system, is a fan of far-fetched solutions. “I worry that we are programming people to do the safe thing,” she told me. “But safe answers will never change the world.” This belief in expanding what’s seemingly possible dates back to Waydo’s early schooling.
When X first starts spinning ideas for moonshots, divergent thinking predominates. “At the very early stages of idea formation,” Felten told me, “there’s tremendous value to science-fiction thinking. If it doesn’t break the laws of physics, the idea is potentially
In our lives, we spend our time doing what we know best—writing emails, attending endless meetings—instead of tackling the hardest part of a project.
A strategy is a plan for achieving an objective. Tactics, in contrast, are the actions you take to implement the strategy.
Once you move from the what to the why—once you frame the problem broadly in terms of what you’re trying to do instead of your favored solution—you’ll discover other possibilities in the peripheries.
We’ll explore the benefits of switching our default from convincing others that we’re right to convincing ourselves that we’re wrong.
Regardless of your intelligence, Feynman’s adage holds true: “The first principle is that you must not fool yourself—and you are the easiest person to fool.”11
Opinions are defended, but working hypotheses are tested.
Robertson Davies put it, “The eye sees only what the mind is prepared to comprehend.”
A scientific theory is never proven right. It’s simply not proven wrong.
In a proper test, the goal isn’t to discover everything that can go right. Rather, the goal is to discover everything that can go wrong and to find the breaking point.
Testing can help turn unknowns into knowns.
