Hi there!
Reading time: About 4 minutes
Quote
“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”
Mental Model
Domain Dependence
Again if I were describe this model into one line I would quote Charlie Munger,
“To a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail”
Nassim Taleb in Anti fragile wrote,
Some people can understand an idea in one domain, say, medicine, and fail to recognize it in another, say socioeconomic life…humans somehow fail to recognize situations outside the contexts in which they usually learn about them…Imagine someone capable in learning languages, but unable to transfer concepts from one tongue to another, so he would need to relearn “chair” or “love”, or “apple pie” every time he acquires a new language. He would not recognize “house”(English) and “casa” (Spanish) or “beyt” (Semitic). We are all, in a way, handicapped in a similar way, unable to recognize ideas when presented in a different contexts. It is as if we were doomed to be fooled by the most possibly superficial part of things, the packaging, the gift-wrapping paper around the object…[Because of the domain dependence] of our reactions, our mode of thinking, our intuitions, depend on the context in which the matter is presented.
We understand things in theory but in practicality many times we do not. We cannot apply things because we cannot make the jump from the learning domain to the application one.
Yogi Berra famously said, “In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice, but in practice there is.”
Recently Nassim Taleb even tweeted about the domain dependence that he saw with his gym trainer. His gym trainer told him he is anti vax because everything should be natural. But he takes supplements in his training to enhance his performance.He used an idea with one domain and ignored it in another.
One of the biggest aspects for innovation in businesses or startups is to overcome domain dependence and get out of the box thinking.
In Investing
Many CEO’s fail. Buffett believes one of the reasons is because they are rising from the corporate pyramid specialising in one particular field such as finance, marketing, sales, etc. This causes them to think accordingly and have a domain dependence.
Buffet,
The heads of many companies are not skilled in capital allocation. Their inadequacy is not surprising. Most bosses rise to the top because they have excelled in an area such as marketing, production, engineering, administration, or sometimes, institutional politics. Once they become CEOs, they now must make capital allocation decisions, a critical job that they may have never tackled and that is not easily mastered. To stretch the point, it’s as if the final step for a highly talented musician was not to perform at Carnegie Hall, but instead, to be named Chairman of the Federal Reserve.
How do you battle this?
It’s simple you just have a latticework of mental models from multiple disciplines and try and apply it to your daily life. I would suggest writing about it and connecting it to your life. Simply follow your curiosity and learn about the things you like.
Twitter Thread
Idea
Life is not short
Not to get too philosophical here and bore you but one idea we can all take from Seneca is that life is not short we just make it short by wasting most of it. When we waste most of our lives doing things we do not enjoy like bitching about people, gossiping and not spending it reading or quality time with your friends. This time wasted adds up and on our deathbed we face regret and feel like life is too short. We have been given ample time on this planet to do extraordinary things. We waste it. Try and live your life backwards and ask yourself when I’m 80 will I regret this decision that I am making right now.
That’s it for today!
Have a great weekend!