The Best Way To Learn Things (Learning Beyond Facts)
A nugget from Nassim Taleb and Charlie Munger
Hello Friend!
Today’s nugget comes from Nassim Taleb and Charlie Munger. It addresses our tendency to just learn facts, instead of rules (the deep lessons behind the facts). This tendency is particularly dangerous in today’s complex world. Let’s dive in!
💡 Nugget
✦ Charlie Munger:
What is elementary, worldly wisdom? Well, the first rule is that you can’t really know anything if you just remember isolated facts and try bang ’em back. If the facts don’t hang together on a latticework of theory, you don’t have them in a usable form.
You’ve got to have models in your head. And you’ve got to array your experience—both vicarious [indirect → learning from books, interviews, courses…] and direct [your own experience] —on this latticework of models. You may have noticed students who just try to remember and pound back what is remembered. Well, they fail in school and in life. You’ve got to hang experience on a latticework of models in your head.
✦ Nassim Taleb:
The problem lies in the structure of our minds: we don’t learn rules, just facts, and only facts. Metarules (such as the rule that we have a tendency to not learn rules) we don’t seem to be good at getting. We scorn the abstract; we scorn it with passion.
But there is a deeper question: What are our minds made for? It looks as if we have the wrong user’s manual. Our minds do not seem made to think and introspect; if they were, things would be easier for us today, but then we would not be here today and I would not have been here to talk about it—my counterfactual, introspective, and hard-thinking ancestor would have been eaten by a lion while his nonthinking but faster-reacting cousin would have run for cover. Consider that thinking is time-consuming and generally a great waste of energy, that our predecessors spent more than a hundred million years as nonthinking mammals and that in the blip in our history during which we have used our brain we have used it on subjects too peripheral to matter. Evidence shows that we do much less thinking than we believe we do— except, of course, when we think about it.
…
The story of the Maginot Line shows how we are conditioned to be specific. The French, after the Great War, built a wall along the previous German invasion route to prevent reinvasion—Hitler just (almost) effortlessly went around it. The French had been excellent students of history; they just learned with too much precision. They were too practical and exceedingly focused for their own safety.
💭 Reflections
Some quotes that come to mind after reflecting on this:
“Most people would rather die than think and many of them do!”
- Bertrand Russell
“If I had an hour to solve a problem I'd spend 55 minutes thinking about the problem and five minutes thinking about solutions."
- Albert Einstein
Besides Charlie Munger’s advice on creating a latticework of models in your head, I think Elon Musk’s thinking process is also an insightful way to see problems more clearly and build better solutions.
Elon calls it “First Principles Analysis”, and he says it can be applied to any problem.
The idea is to boil everything down to its most fundamental principles (things we are most confident to be true) and then—from this solid base—you reason up. Finally, conclusions are checked against this base. [source]
I think that by thinking more deeply about problems/things, boiling them down to smaller units of truth and developing mental models in our heads, we can become clearer thinkers and build better solutions.
✨ My Latest YouTube Video
Highlights:
💡 “The blazing fire makes flames and brightness out of everything thrown into it.” - Marcus Aurelius
💡“The Antifragile benefits from disorder, errors and stressors” - Nassim Taleb
💡“A couple days ago I finally got being a good startup founder down to two words: relentlessly resourceful.” - Paul Graham
💡“Flâneur: Someone who, unlike a tourist, makes a decision opportunistically at every step to revise his schedule (or his destination) so he can imbibe things based on new information obtained. In research and entrepreneurship, being a flâneur is called “looking for optionality.” A non-narrative approach to life.” - Nassim Taleb
💡 "Formal Education selects for those who don't know how to handle uncertainty" - Nassim Taleb
💡“What I learn on my own I still remember” - Nassim Taleb
💡“Only the autodidacts are free” - Nassim Taleb
💡 Nassim Taleb on Seneca: " He was not against wealth, but against “dependence on wealth”. He wanted the upside of wealth without the downside."
💡 “The only way you know you are alive… is if you like variability. If you are antifragile, that means you are alive.” - Nassim Taleb
📁 All the ideas in this article are saved and classified in a searchable Database, which (as of July 2024) contains nearly 2,000 timeless ideas (sourced directly from the most influential doers and entrepreneurs — captured on books, interviews/podcasts and articles).
I call this Database the Doers Notebook, and I’ve recently opened it for anyone who wants it.
🤔 Why did I build this?
Well, as the Latin motto goes, “A chief part of learning is simply knowing where you can find a thing.” And since it’s all 🔎 searchable, we only need to type a keyword to immediately get a list of insights related to it!
For instance, if I’m unsure about how to get more sales in my business, I can simply type the word “sales” and immediately get 88 search results! In this case from Jim Edwards, Peter Thiel, Naval Ravikant, Paul Graham, Sam Altman, Balaji Srinivasan, Nassim Taleb, and many other remarkable individuals.
It’s like having a 🧠 second brain from which we can pull wisdom on demand.
And this is super valuable because it can significantly decrease the error rate in our judgment.
“In an age of infinite leverage [code and media], judgment is the most important skill.”
- Naval Ravikant
I actually made a video where I went through the list of insights I got for the keywords “sales” and “creative”.
So, if you wanna get better at sales and learn to be more creative (and also see all the features of the database and how you can get access) then definitely check out the video 👇
💥 Stuff I Loved
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Wishing you a lovely weekend!
Julio xx
P.S. If you liked this article, you'll definitely enjoy my free 80-page ebook. It’s packed with 23 big ideas (from top influential doers and entrepreneurs) to become better, richer and wiser. Download your copy here!