The secret weapon of becoming a wise man from an expert.
Editor’s note: This article is from the micro-channel public number “mental toolbox” (ID: Mindnote), Author: Dorians mental Chairman Yang Zhiping, an authorized reprint.
The so-called abstract level of thinking refers to how many narrow subcategories this wise man can escape from “restrictions and refinements.” Those who think at a very high level of abstraction often have a God’s perspective. You will find that this person’s speech and writings are supported by research in different disciplines.
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At the level of evidence, good ideas have more living evidence than bad ideas. If two ideas have the same level of good evidence, what is the difference between a good idea and a bad idea?
Since summer, there has been a cool breeze. In this quiet evening, dear friend, I want to talk to you about the second difference between good thoughts and bad thoughts: the abstract level of thinking.
Let’s first look at Pinker’s criticism of social psychology. Who is Pinker? A cognitive psychologist I often mention.
He has not only won awards in scientific research fields, such as cognitive psychology, evolutionary psychology and psycholinguistics, but also shines in the field of scientific writing. His books “Sense of Style”, “Language Instinct” and “Mind Exploration” , Rigorous writing, beautiful writing, magnificent imagination, best-selling and long-selling.
Such a recognized intellectual has publicly criticized social psychology:
Why can’t social psychology get more respect? …This field always insists on some superficial theories tirelessly, thus stagnating oneself. There are always countless studies that prove that people are not good at X and can find the answer from a long list of nouns. The list contains deviations, fallacies, illusions, neglect, blindness, and basic errors. Every noun is repeating. People are really not good at X.
Like I once ridiculed, since the psychologist Kahneman won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2002, many psychologists have turned their eyes on the field of cognitive bias research. Numerous psychology papers continue to prove that human beings are indeed not good at decision-making, and there are many cognitive deviations.
Human beings, in the eyes of psychologists, are a group of mice with loopholes in their thinking and being manipulated at will by experiments. I really don’t know, what kind of luck did this kind of guinea mouse have been able to evolve to this day?
In Pink’s view, many studies of social psychology are superficial bad ideas. So, the same is psychology, and the evidence is good. Why are some good ideas and some bad ideas? My answer lies in: the abstract level of thinking.
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For a while, I was obsessed with studying the mental models of wise men, so I bought thousands of biographies or related works of wise men. From these thousand books, I have selected a list of more than two hundred talents. Then let them fight each other, watchWhich wise men can win in the end.
For example, in the penultimate round of selection, I chose both Qian Zhongshu and Zhao Yuanren. At this time, I let Qian Zhongshu fight Zhao Yuanren to see if the two have PK. Finally found evidence, Qian Zhongshu did satirize Zhao Yuanren. And Qian Zhongshu did succeed in persuading me, so he deleted Zhao Liuqian from my list of wise men.
The wise men retained in the last round are, in order of age, they are Qian Zhongshu, the master of the humanities collection, Sima He, the interdisciplinary generalist, the Nobel Prize winner Feynman, the popular science and science fiction master Asimov, and business ideas. Leader Munger, “Master of Masters” March, “Contemporary Da Vinci” Eco and “Contemporary Russell” Dennett. The most important thing I learned from these wise men is that the wise men’s thinking has a very high level of abstraction.
What is the abstraction level of thinking?
Go back to the first level of good ideas, bad ideas: the level of evidence. You will find that those who can continue to find fresh evidence tend to become domain experts.
However, wise men are not the same as experts. For example, as a wise man, the biggest difference between Pinker and a psychology professor is that he will not limit his field of vision to his subject.
Once a wise man discovers outstanding wisdom in other fields, even if these wisdom will cause many people in the discipline to lose their jobs, he will still use it to deny the tacky things in this discipline without hesitation.
The essence of professional skills is “limitation and refinement.” Experts have enough “conditional knowledge” in the field they created to be clear about the constraints of each conclusion; at the same time, they can present the beauty of truth-seeking in depth and breadth, which is for exquisiteness.
The difference between Minke and experts is that Minke’s knowledge system is unlimited, arbitrarily named, arbitrarily tailored, and innovated; similarly, Minke cannot present the exquisite beauty of knowledge.
But wise men are different from experts! The so-called abstract level of thinking is how many narrow sub-categories of “restrictions and refinements” this wise man can escape. According to the compilation of my biographies of wise men, the interdisciplinary limit that humans can reach is also similar to the breadth limit of working memory. Four disciplines are common, and 9 disciplines are the pinnacle of human wise men.
Those who have a very high level of abstraction tend to have a God’s perspective. You will find that this person’s speech and writings are supported by research in different disciplines. Such people are Qian Zhongshu, Sima He, Feynman, Asimov, and Munger; moreover, they are March, Eco and Dennett.
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So, how to judge whether the abstract level of thinking is high or low?
For example, an expert who masters French, English, and German at the same time is obviously inferior to an expert who masters computer science, network science and cognitive science at the same time and can extract essential laws from them.
An important criterion for the abstract level of judgmental thinking lies in the distance from the chain of causal explanation.
As Pinker said:
Good research is often concise, more universal, in the early stage of the causal chain, and closer to the irreducibility of the laws of physics and mathematics, rather than catering to the research data as appropriate.
At this moment, you are trying to replace good research with good ideas, and it does not violate peace. Good ideas are like good research, and the distance from the beginning of the causal chain is shorter.
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What is a causal chain?
Look at the classic essay by Philip W. Anderson, the Nobel Prize winner in Physics in 1977: More is different. In this paper, he made a famous point:
The ability to restore everything to simple basic laws does not imply the ability to reconstruct the entire universe from these laws.
The picture below is the subject-causal chain mentioned in this paper by Mr. Anderson. For example, solid-state or many-body physics may be subject to elementary particle physics, chemistry is subject to many-body physics, and molecular biology is subject to chemistry. Psychology may be controlled by physiology, and social sciences may be controlled by psychology. The disciplines of different levels will have different laws, and we need a multi-layered view of evolution to treat this world.
For example, neurons are a scale, and the human brain is another scale. The gathering of countless human brains to form a human society is another measure. In this way, there are three different scales: neurons, individual brains, and the entire human society. Do these three different scales follow the same law?
In this paper, Mr. Anderson, as a wise man, gives the answer: different scales will obey different laws. why?
Once the symmetry of the same level is extended to a larger scale, the phenomenon of “symmetry incompleteness” will appear. Mr. Anderson believes that with the pull of different scales, symmetry will be broken, and eventually different levels of science/thought/reality will be formed.
Everything in the universe and everything in the world follow a principle: at the same level, it is symmetrical; when this scale is too large or too small, it will eventually break the symmetry at a human observable angle, and appear Symmetrical incompleteness.
Good thoughts and bad thoughts, at the same level, have different strengths in breaking symmetry. The so-called good ideas are those cool things that can penetrate more symmetry at the same level and bring more profound beauty.
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Take social psychology research as an example. Whether the Stanford prison experiment that emphasizes the gloomy human nature or the helping experiment that emphasizes the lightness of human nature, you will find that these studies have a shorter time span for interpretation. The research conclusions applicable to the industrial age are not necessarily applicable to primitive people.
BBS (Behavioral and Brain Sciences), a highly cited journal of cognitive science and psychological science, once published a classic paper: The strangest person in the world? I have ridiculed this phenomenon. Many psychological research conclusions are based on a small sample of weird (WEIRD).
WEIRD is the first letter of five words: Western, educated, industrial society, wealthy, and democratic. Sometimes jokingly called “American sophomore psychology.”
On the contrary, the cognitive science and evolutionary psychology advocated by Pinker are often observed on the scale of billions of years. Therefore, Pink and Ren PK, often win. He uses the time span of evolution to despise the social psychology of small time scales, which focuses on explanation instead of control and prediction. Isn’t this bullying?
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Munger mentioned in his 1996 speech:
The academic world has deviated far from the right track and has become dysfunctional. The reason for the dysfunction of enterprises is that they divide the whole into various private fields, each of which is dominant and independent. If you want to be a rational thinker, you must cultivate a mind that transcends the boundaries of conventional disciplines.
So, how do you get good ideas? How can we, like a wise man, obtain a higher level of abstraction of thought and go to the front end of the causal chain? Munger’s suggestion may be for your reference:
Principle 1: Just like Anderson, you should rank the subjects according to their basic level;
Principle 2: Whether you like it or not, you must master the level that can pass the test, and be able to routinely apply its most basic content, especially those subjects that are more basic than your major;
Principle 3: Forever! forever and always! Do not absorb any interdisciplinary knowledge of unknown origin, let alone violate the principles of economics, that is, refuse to adopt any explanation in the basic knowledge of this subject or other subjects;
Principle 4: When the above cannot produce useful new ideas, then imitate those methods of creating successful ideas to make bold assumptions and innovations, but the innovative theory should not conflict with the previous ones, unless you really prove it wrong.
The so-called “more basic”, “seeking a lower level of scientific explanation”, that is to say, try to go to the earlier stage of the causal explanation chain.
Summary
Corresponding to the curse of knowledge is the blessing of abstraction. From the level of evidence to the level of abstraction of thinking, you begin to have the secret weapon from an expert to a wise man.