While reading a posted article via Facebook, I suddenly had a bunch of thoughts and decided to write a few lines...
Key keywords: hunter-gatherer, social proof, outcome bias
As a hunter-gatherer, I use books, meetings, and web surfing to gather information.
But the most frightening — and most efficient — is to have face-to-face meetings.
The reasons it's frightening
1. When I spend time with intellectuals I feel my own inadequacy, but I lack the capacity to tell whether that inadequacy is objective and about me, or subjective (vague admiration, the "they're so cool" kind of envy).
2. Being with intellectuals for long periods leads to the error of starting to identify myself with them.
The reasons it's efficient
1. You can feel the fear above.
2. Rather than just the objective facts of core information, you get to see the varied currents running through individual subjects (and objects).
In other words, you get to observe the many processes of understanding as if from the corner of your eye. Like experiencing an author's perspective indirectly through a book.
The reason is that people often show opposing tendencies between what they think in their own head, what they say out loud, and what they post in places like this. For instance, when you meet in person someone whose posts are very logical, their actual behavior can be very logical — or very inhumane. The important thing isn't to criticize the other person. It's that looking at the cause of that opposing behavior lets me find very realistic understanding and grounds for judgment about the everyday perceptions of myself and of people in general.
3. It also plays the role of aging or refreshing thoughts (pre-existing thoughts or some memorable passage from a book I've read).
To do a specific task, in fact, gathering, learning, and analyzing the related information alone at home or in the office might be the rational choice. But stopping everything you're doing (work or personal worries) and going through the act of moving (taking the subway, walking, encountering different visual, auditory, and olfactory stimuli) gives thought a chance to age.
Source: http://m.biz.chosun.com/svc/article.html?contid=2013053101715
Excerpt from the article
1.
"Simple. It's because our brains are still optimized for the hunter-gatherer stage. Of the roughly 100,000 years humans have been on earth, 99% were spent as hunter-gatherers. Civilization has only just begun to take hold. Our brains weren't designed to understand concepts like cities, industry, globalization, or financial markets. 'Social proof' behavior — unconditionally copying what many people are doing — shows up often in modern financial markets, and it's a classic hunter-gatherer behavior.
On the Serengeti, if the people around you suddenly started running in the opposite direction from you, what would you do? Stand still to figure out why everyone's running, or run like hell too? We are all the descendants of the people who ran with the crowd. The ones who stood still became lunch for the lions and vanished from the human gene pool. That's how social proof got rooted so deeply in our minds. It doesn't fit modern civilized society. Even so, we're still stuck in that mold. We're just hunter-gatherers in suits."
2.
You lecture to executives a lot — what smart traits do successful CEOs share?
"Answering that question is exactly how you fall into the error of 'outcome bias.' Gathering only the cases of people who succeeded and retroactively finding what they have in common is a textbook outcome-bias error. Honestly, the one thing successful CEOs might share could just be 'luck.' Piling up every case where someone else tried something and it worked out says nothing about whether it'll work for each individual reader. Some people who follow that advice will succeed; others won't.
One other thing a lot of them share is that bad leaders are micromanagers. They try to manage and supervise every little company detail and every action of every employee. But if you step back, a company's success depends much more on whether they went into the right industry. That is — it matters that you row well, but it matters a lot more that you got on a good boat in the first place. Warren Buffett said that. When the industry itself is riding a wave, even a mediocre leader can get decent reviews. In a declining industry, even if you do everything right, it's hard to stop the leader's reputation from sliding with it."
3.
Young people about to enter the job market say, 'I want to join that company and do this kind of work.' The company's brand value and salary are the top considerations. Very few actually ask which occupations and industries will be promising in the future. When choosing a career, how the industry will trend over the next 30 years should be the most important thing."
*Where did I come from, where am I going, who am I, where is the real me, what is my true mind
4.
You're famously someone who doesn't consume TV or newspaper news.
"Correct. I haven't followed the news for over 3 years. This is an era of news overload. Modern people being tied to the news can be seen as a kind of 'information error.' Research has shown that once the volume of information being pumped into our brains crosses a certain threshold, the quality of our actual decisions drops. As I've mentioned in other interviews, news has the same effect on the mind that sugar has on the body. Stimulating, but bad for your health."
5.
What's the next step after pointing out these thinking errors?
"Emotional regulation. Emotion is a very important factor that swings success and failure. Emotion plays a huge role in all our decisions. Take 'jealousy.' If you envy someone else's success and jealousy blinds you, you overreach to catch up and make stupid decisions. When making decisions about things that matter but that you don't understand the background of, you decide purely based on how you feel. Emotion is extremely powerful because it was designed, from the start, to transcend thought. It's already been shown through various studies that controlling emotion is far harder than controlling thought and action."
