Scott H Young

Blog

Book Club: The Elephant In The Brain (February 2018)

March, 2018
No comments

This month we read The Elephant In The Brain by Kevin Simler and Robin Hanson.

About the book: Human beings are primates, and primates are political animals. Our brains, therefore, are designed not just to hunt and gather, but also to help us get ahead socially, often via deception and self-deception. But while we may be self-interested schemers, we benefit by pretending otherwise.

In fact, the less we know about our own ugly motives, the better – and thus we don’t like to talk or even think about the extent of our selfishness. This is “the elephant in the brain.”

Such an introspective taboo makes it hard for us to think clearly about our nature and the explanations for our behavior. The aim of this book, then, is to confront our hidden motives directly – to track down the darker, unexamined corners of our psyches and blast them with floodlights. Then, once everything is clearly visible, we can work to better understand ourselves: Why do we laugh? Why are artists sexy? Why do we brag about travel? Why do we prefer to speak rather than listen?

This month, I sat down with one of the co-authors of the book, Robin Hanson, to discuss the main ideas of the book.

If you would like to stream audio on your browser, click here listen on Soundcloud.

Broadly, one the takeaways from this book is that politics isn’t about policy, healthcare isn’t about wellness, and education isn’t about learning. One of the first ideas that Robin explains is that:

Most areas in life aren’t central to you and your identity. So in these areas outside of your center, you are much more willing to believe that what goes on there is less than it seems and perhaps even a little fake. But if we get to some that is really close to the center of your identity, something that’s really precious, you’ll find it that much hard to believe. So if you’re an atheist, you’ll find it easy to believe that religion isn’t about God.

When I asked Robin what he thought about how to find the balance between accepting the tension between his own beliefs and what works for getting along well in society, he had this to say:

In all of these areas, the reason that people behave the way they do is because the social incentives push them that way–even if you don’t believe that medicine is very effective for health, you still have to buy it for your family. Similarly, even if you don’t think you’ll have much influence on politics and the outcomes, you still need to act as if you care and act as if you thought you had an influence otherwise people around you might think you are uncaring about your society and the consequences for it. For the most part if you want to get along, you should probably do what everybody does. If you want to be different, you need to pick your battles. I still send my kids to school even if education is not about learning because it is a route to success in our society.

I ask Robin to delineate between the tension of higher, more sincere motives that might be undercut by lesser, faker motives and the idea that there really are selfish motives recast in an altruistic life.

The most high-minded altruistic best motives do exist to some percentage. At the conscious level of our mind we are sincerely trying to help and trying to do good, and trying to learn and trying to get healthy etc. and it’s these underlying motives that systematically shift our behavior to something more effective at other goals and we often don’t even notice the conflicts and if we do we are puzzled and confused and we struggle to overcome it and if we fail we wonder why we fail so much to do this thing we thought we wanted to do when something inside us keeps pushing us the other way.

What is the main takeaway?

I think the mistake we’re making is that we’re taking people at their word for the main goal. We’re designing reforms that help them better achieve that thing they say they want but at some level, we all know it’s not what they want… we need to come up with ways to reorganize systems.

Special thanks to Robin Hanson for being my guest this month. Feel free to join in on our Facebook Group Discussion I’d love to discuss this book with you there. For March, we’ll be reading Dao De Jing by Laozi.

 

 

Lesson One: How much of your career is running to stay in the same spot?

February, 2018
No comments

In Lewis Carol’s novella Through the Looking Glass, there’s a quirky little dialog between Alice and the Red Queen:

“‘Well, in our country,’ said Alice, still panting a little, ‘you’d generally get to somewhere else — if you run very fast for a long time, as we’ve been doing.’

“‘A slow sort of country!’ said the Queen. ‘Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!’”

I think about this dialog a lot. Not in the context of bizarre, Victorian-era novellas, but in the normal fact that many of us, unwittingly, are doing the exact same thing.

Think about your professional life. How much of the time do you spend working is getting you to where you’d like to be? How much is creating growth, opportunity, mastery? And, how much is running just to stay in the same place?

Stagnation is Default

K. Anders Ericsson’s pioneering work on deliberate practice was celebrated in books like Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers or Geoffrey Colvin’s Talent is Overrated. A recurring theme in those popularizations is the idea that mastery takes hard work. Ten thousand hours, as Gladwell puts it, is the requirement to succeed in a field, no way around it.

While the exact ten-thousand hour figure is only an average, there’s a subtler mistake in this account of mastery. That is, it assumes that putting in the hours is the main variable to control for success.

Digging into the research, Ericsson’s work suggests almost the opposite: hours alone don’t mean very much. Most of us put in thousands of hours at our jobs, favorite hobbies and leisure activities, and yet, for the vast majority, we never reach the level that could be described as a top performer or expert.

The reason is simple: most of that effort isn’t going anywhere. We’re running just to stay in the same place.

The Problem With Being Too Busy

There’s a pernicious logic to this. You’re working hard to build the kind of career you’d like. Even if you’re happy with your pay and surroundings, you want to have a legacy—a level of skill and craft that makes your work stand out. Yet—if we take the research seriously—virtually none of the time you spend working will help you reach this goal.

This isn’t universally true. When you start on a new task, position or responsibility, there often *is* a steep line of improvement. However, once adequacy on core tasks has been reached, those skills often reach a level of automaticity, and they lose the conscious deliberation that made growth possible.

It is also not the case, as some have imagined, that these plateaus represent insurmountable barriers to further increases in skill. Creating an opportunity for deliberate practice, such as by incentivising higher levels of performance or by offering an opportunity to learn from better feedback, can often return one to the initial part of the growth phase.

Running just to stay in the same spot is how most of us live our lives. We’re so inundated with responsibilities, tasks, emails, requests and pressures, that we live in frenzied stasis.

Moving Forward

Moving forward is difficult. Getting better at what you do is against your natural urge to transform adequate skills into solidified habits.

However, the benefits to getting better are worth that price. As you improve, your career capital increases. Applying that career capital wisely, you can use it to make choices about your professional life instead of having them be decided for you. That can be more prestige, money and status. But it can also mean having more time for your family, travel or freedom to choose your own projects.

Career capital, which in most professions manifests itself at least partly as having rare and valuable skills, is like currency. You can spend it in different ways, to suit your tastes, but ultimately it’s up to you to earn it.

This was the motivation that started Cal and I onto researching and developing our course, Top Performer. We recognized that virtually everyone, without specific systems in place, eventually ends up running just to stay in the same place.

In that realization, there’s both a hope and a danger. The danger is that, because this is the tendency, it requires a special kind of thinking to get away from it, to make constant growth of your career capital and spend it wisely to make your life better, not just more hectic. The hope, however, is that because such deliberate efforts are rare, there’s a potential for great advantage for those who know how to apply it.

Lesson One Homework

Your homework for today is simple:

  1. Think back over the last twenty four hours. Try to remember all the things you did, and list them out on a piece of paper.
  2. Ask which of these things will matter ten years from now.
  3. Of those tasks that will matter in ten years, which were directed at improving a specific aspect of a skill you have? This could be learning something new, or consciously trying to get better at something you already know how to do. Doing a skill you already know, without this conscious effort to improve, doesn’t count.

If you’re like me, you maybe only had one or two tasks that met the third criteria. Maybe zero. There’s no reason to feel bad about that. The important thing to feel isn’t guilt, but the sense of opportunity. If you could shift even an hour or two of your day onto deliberate practice of a skill that will matter ten years from now, you could make dramatic changes in your professional life.

The challenge, of course, is how to do this. Slipping back to simply doing the work instead of getting better at it is so easy, and often the immediate pressures of daily life make it hard to get through the day, nevermind improve.

Over the next three lessons, I’ll be sharing some advice on how to start creating a wedge in your daily life for deliberate practice to create growth. It may start small, but over time it can become larger as you have more flexibility from the career capital it provided.

After this, Cal and I will be opening a new session of our full eight-week course on this topic, Top Performer. Stay tuned!

Note: The remaining three lessons will only be made available to those who join my newsletter. If you’d like to receive them, you’ll need to sign up here before they go out.

AS SEEN IN