3 ms·

I'm not quite sure if you meant it as an example of ineffective advice or not, but the "be wary of snakes" advice is quite close to what I give my mentees, alth

I'm not quite sure if you meant it as an example of ineffective advice or not, but the "be wary of snakes" advice is quite close to what I give my mentees, although tailored to my predictably Munger bent of "be wary that other people's incentives often don't align with yours." (As a note, I think we're using the word "snakes" for purpose of context consistency, it's not a word I'd usually use when discussion the actual behaviors here since it paints the conversation a very specific way) I think perhaps the issue here is that I'm coming at the discussion from over-correcting the opposite direction; I was raised with very much a "people are All Good(TM)" outlook, regularly being fed the "Things get better after highschool/people grow up" line as a child. I've found that these both gave me ineffective priors for navigating adult life, largely due to that if you assume people are acting with your best interests at heart, you may be less inclined to look out for your own best interests yourself, or at the very least how other people may be compromising it, consciously or not. Framing it in terms of incentives also has the wonderful side effect of circumventing a lot of they "are they malicious or just self-serving" question since it hops right to "how do you fit your success into whatever equation everyone else is trying to route into"; my inquiry of whether they were TRULY malicious is usually made post-factum (or given sufficient evidence) As a final statement (and to couch my own incompetence with tone over the internet, please don't let any of this come across as a You're Wrong!), I'm not sure I'd agree with your statement that people with bitterness outnumber those who would manipulate others, at least in my work context. In the lense of my "incentives" stance, both are continuums of behavior, but the bitterness continuum is counter-productive to career advancement while the "manipulating incentives" continuum is productive, so I'd logically expect to see more of the latter. (I guess the real crux here is "when does it become malicious," but that's a whole separate discussion)

beat 8y ago
It's not so much I think "All people are good", as "All people are incompetent", and "All people are the hero of their own story". And people are very, very poor judges of risk, generally - how many people are more afraid of terrorists than car crashes? This dovetails into your last paragraph, by way of saying that the fact that paranoid behavior is counterproductive is in no way inhibiting paranoid behavior. People believe it works. What people believe is far, far more important to them than what actually is. We engage in counterproductive, even self-destructive behavior all the time. And not just the "incompetent" people, but everyone I know. We are all stupid. (fwiw, I do not consider "smart" and "stupid" to be opposites, but rather different qualities that happily coexist. Just because you're smart doesn't mean you aren't also stupid.) This is also aggravated by the human distrust of those who are different. How many employees think their managers are ignorant fools at best, and actively malicious at worst? A majority, probably. How many of those people really have a good understanding of their manager's job, and the pressures and conflicts the manager deals with? Not many, I'd wager. This is the root of racism, nationalism, and other forms of tribalism, if you think about it. Those feelings are irrational, but they're common as dirt. This view of humans as stupid rather than malicious was reinforced for me recently, when I read Factfulness, by Hans Rosling (which you should definitely read!). Rosling, a doctor/professor/world health expert, tested thousands of people with basic multiple-choice three-options questions regarding well-documented facts on the subjects of poverty, global health, and the link. What he found was that every audience, no matter how smart, well-educated, caring, or involved in the field, actually performed worse than random chance. Start on his questions, without reading his book first, and you'll find yourself doing worse than if you'd just pulled letters out of a hat. Don't feel bad, the same is true of UN leaders, CEOs, med students, etc. Rosling went on to identify ten different thought patterns that lead us to misunderstand the world, even the most basic facts about it. Read it, and then look around the corporate workplace, seeing it through Rosling's eyes. You'll see very few snakes and a tremendous number of idiots.

beat 8y ago

It's not so much I think "All people are good", as "All people are incompetent", and "All people are the hero of their own story". And people are very, very poor judges of risk, generally - how many people are more afraid of terrorists than car crashes? This dovetails into your last paragraph, by way of saying that the fact that paranoid behavior is counterproductive is in no way inhibiting paranoid behavior. People believe it works. What people believe is far, far more important to them than what actually is. We engage in counterproductive, even self-destructive behavior all the time. And not just the "incompetent" people, but everyone I know. We are all stupid. (fwiw, I do not consider "smart" and "stupid" to be opposites, but rather different qualities that happily coexist. Just because you're smart doesn't mean you aren't also stupid.) This is also aggravated by the human distrust of those who are different. How many employees think their managers are ignorant fools at best, and actively malicious at worst? A majority, probably. How many of those people really have a good understanding of their manager's job, and the pressures and conflicts the manager deals with? Not many, I'd wager. This is the root of racism, nationalism, and other forms of tribalism, if you think about it. Those feelings are irrational, but they're common as dirt. This view of humans as stupid rather than malicious was reinforced for me recently, when I read Factfulness, by Hans Rosling (which you should definitely read!). Rosling, a doctor/professor/world health expert, tested thousands of people with basic multiple-choice three-options questions regarding well-documented facts on the subjects of poverty, global health, and the link. What he found was that every audience, no matter how smart, well-educated, caring, or involved in the field, actually performed worse than random chance. Start on his questions, without reading his book first, and you'll find yourself doing worse than if you'd just pulled letters out of a hat. Don't feel bad, the same is true of UN leaders, CEOs, med students, etc. Rosling went on to identify ten different thought patterns that lead us to misunderstand the world, even the most basic facts about it. Read it, and then look around the corporate workplace, seeing it through Rosling's eyes. You'll see very few snakes and a tremendous number of idiots.