Showing posts with label smart. Show all posts
Showing posts with label smart. Show all posts
Sunday 24 September 2023
Sunday 14 May 2023
Are smart people deliberately acting stupid? The Rise of the Anti-Intellectual
Nadeem Paracha in The Dawn
Across the 20th century, intellectuals played an important role in political parties and governments, both democratic and authoritarian. According to Richmond University’s Professor of Politics Eunice Goes, intellectuals perform several roles in the policy-making process.
They help politicians make sense of the world. They offer cause-effect explanations of political and economic phenomena, and diagnoses and prescriptions to policy puzzles. They also help political actors develop ideas and narratives that are consistent with their ideological traditions and political goals.
But in this century, politics has often witnessed a backlash against the presence of intellectuals in political parties and in governments. This is likely due to the strengthening of the parallel tradition of anti-intellectualism, which was always (and still is) active in various polities.
This tradition has been more active in right-wing groups. It was especially strengthened by the rise of populist politics in many countries in the 2010s. But mainstream political outfits in Europe and the US still induct the services of intellectuals, even though this ploy has greatly been eroded in the Republican Party in the US after it wholeheartedly embraced populism in 2016, and still seems to be engulfed by it.
Since the 1930s, the Democratic Party in the US has always had the largest presence of intellectuals in it. This policy was initiated during the four presidential terms of the Democratic Party’s Franklin D. Roosevelt (1932-45), during which time a large number of intellectuals were inducted. Their role was to aid the government in bailing the US out of a tumultuous economic crisis, and to develop a narrative to neutralise the increasing appeal of organisations on the far right and the far left. This tradition of inducting intellectuals continued to be employed by the Democrats for decades.
Interestingly, even though the Republican Party has had an anti-intellectual dimension ever since the early 20th century, it carried with it intellectuals to counter intellectuals active in the Democratic Party. This was specifically true during the presidencies of the Republican Ronald Reagan (1981-88) who was, in fact, propelled to power by an intellectual movement led by conservatives and some former liberals. This movement evolved into becoming ‘neo-conservatism’ during the Reagan presidencies. Britain’s Labour Party and Conservative Party have carried with them intellectuals as well, especially the Labour Party.
Some totalitarian regimes too employed the services of intellectuals in the Soviet Union, Germany and Italy. The Soviet dictator Stalin was not very kind to intellectuals, though. But intellectuals played a major role in shaping Soviet communism. Hitler’s Nazi regime had the services of some of the period’s finest minds in Germany, such as the philosophers Carl Schmitt and Martin Heidegger, the logician Rudolf Carnap, and a host of others.
They helped Hitler mould Nazism into an all-encompassing ideology. Just how could some extremely intelligent men start to both romance as well as rationalise a brutal ideology is a topic that has often been investigated, but it is beyond the scope of this column.
In Pakistan, three governments banked heavily on intellectuals to formulate their respective ideologies, narratives and economics. The Ayub Khan dictatorship (1958-69) carried scholars who specialised in providing ‘modernist’ interpretations to various traditional aspects of Islam. This they did to aid Ayub’s modernisation project. The intellectuals included the rationalist Islamic scholars Fazalur Rahman Malik and Ghulam Ahmad Parwez, and, to a certain extent, the progressive novelist Mumtaz Mufti and Justice Javed Iqbal, the son of the poet-philosopher Muhammad Iqbal. The writer Qudrat Ullah Shahab was Ayub’s Principal Secretary.
Z.A. Bhutto’s Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) was studded with intellectuals who remained active in the party during at least the first few years of Bhutto’s regime (1971-77). These included the Marxist theorist JA Rahim who (with Bhutto) wrote the party’s ‘Foundation Papers’ and then its first manifesto. He also served as a minister in the Bhutto regime till his acrimonious ouster in 1975.
Then there was Dr Mubashir Hassan, who was the main theorist behind PPP’s concept of a ‘planned economy’. He served as the Bhutto regime’s finance minister. The intellectuals Hanif Ramay and Safdar Mir wrote treatises to counter the ideologies of the Islamists. Ramay also formulated the party’s core ideology of ‘Islamic socialism’. The lawyer and constitutional expert Hafeez Pirzada too was a founding member of the party. He was one of the main authors of the 1973 Constitution.
The Ziaul Haq dictatorship adopted the Islamist theorist Abul Ala Maududi as the regime’s main ideologue. Maududi was also the chief of the Jamaat-i-Islami (JI). Zia, when he was a lieutenant general in the early 1970s, used to distribute books written by Maududi to his officers and soldiers. Maududi passed away in 1979, just two years after Zia overthrew the Bhutto regime. But Zia continued to apply Maududi’s ideas to his dictatorship’s ‘Islamisation’ project.
Zia also had the services of the prominent lawyers AK Brohi and Sharifuddin Pirzada. Brohi and Pirzada were instrumental in formulating the murder charges against Bhutto. In his book, Betrayals of Another Kind, Gen Faiz Ali Chisti wrote that Brohi and Pirzada encouraged Zia to hang Bhutto, which he did. Pirzada also wrote oaths for judges sworn in by Zia that omitted the commitment to protect the Constitution. He would go on to do the same for the Musharraf dictatorship (1999-2008). In fact, Sharifuddin Pirzada had also served the Ayub regime.
The rise of populist politics in the second decade of the 21st century has greatly diminished the role of intellectuals in political parties and governments. This is because populism is inherently anti-intellectual. It perceives intellectuals as being part of a detested elite. Therefore, for example, one never expected intellectuals of any kind in Imran Khan’s Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaf (PTI). This is why the nature of this party’s narrative is ridiculously contradictory and even chaotic.
However, in a January 2022 essay for The Atlantic, David A. Graham wrote that it’s not that intellectuals have vanished from political parties. Rather, due to populism’s anti-intellectual disposition, they have purposely dumbed down their ideas.
According to Graham, “This is the age of smart politicians pretending to be stupid.” If stupidity can now attract votes and save the jobs of intellectuals in parties and governments, then smart folks can act stupid in the most convincing manner. Even more than those who are actually stupid.
Across the 20th century, intellectuals played an important role in political parties and governments, both democratic and authoritarian. According to Richmond University’s Professor of Politics Eunice Goes, intellectuals perform several roles in the policy-making process.
They help politicians make sense of the world. They offer cause-effect explanations of political and economic phenomena, and diagnoses and prescriptions to policy puzzles. They also help political actors develop ideas and narratives that are consistent with their ideological traditions and political goals.
But in this century, politics has often witnessed a backlash against the presence of intellectuals in political parties and in governments. This is likely due to the strengthening of the parallel tradition of anti-intellectualism, which was always (and still is) active in various polities.
This tradition has been more active in right-wing groups. It was especially strengthened by the rise of populist politics in many countries in the 2010s. But mainstream political outfits in Europe and the US still induct the services of intellectuals, even though this ploy has greatly been eroded in the Republican Party in the US after it wholeheartedly embraced populism in 2016, and still seems to be engulfed by it.
Since the 1930s, the Democratic Party in the US has always had the largest presence of intellectuals in it. This policy was initiated during the four presidential terms of the Democratic Party’s Franklin D. Roosevelt (1932-45), during which time a large number of intellectuals were inducted. Their role was to aid the government in bailing the US out of a tumultuous economic crisis, and to develop a narrative to neutralise the increasing appeal of organisations on the far right and the far left. This tradition of inducting intellectuals continued to be employed by the Democrats for decades.
Interestingly, even though the Republican Party has had an anti-intellectual dimension ever since the early 20th century, it carried with it intellectuals to counter intellectuals active in the Democratic Party. This was specifically true during the presidencies of the Republican Ronald Reagan (1981-88) who was, in fact, propelled to power by an intellectual movement led by conservatives and some former liberals. This movement evolved into becoming ‘neo-conservatism’ during the Reagan presidencies. Britain’s Labour Party and Conservative Party have carried with them intellectuals as well, especially the Labour Party.
Some totalitarian regimes too employed the services of intellectuals in the Soviet Union, Germany and Italy. The Soviet dictator Stalin was not very kind to intellectuals, though. But intellectuals played a major role in shaping Soviet communism. Hitler’s Nazi regime had the services of some of the period’s finest minds in Germany, such as the philosophers Carl Schmitt and Martin Heidegger, the logician Rudolf Carnap, and a host of others.
They helped Hitler mould Nazism into an all-encompassing ideology. Just how could some extremely intelligent men start to both romance as well as rationalise a brutal ideology is a topic that has often been investigated, but it is beyond the scope of this column.
In Pakistan, three governments banked heavily on intellectuals to formulate their respective ideologies, narratives and economics. The Ayub Khan dictatorship (1958-69) carried scholars who specialised in providing ‘modernist’ interpretations to various traditional aspects of Islam. This they did to aid Ayub’s modernisation project. The intellectuals included the rationalist Islamic scholars Fazalur Rahman Malik and Ghulam Ahmad Parwez, and, to a certain extent, the progressive novelist Mumtaz Mufti and Justice Javed Iqbal, the son of the poet-philosopher Muhammad Iqbal. The writer Qudrat Ullah Shahab was Ayub’s Principal Secretary.
Z.A. Bhutto’s Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) was studded with intellectuals who remained active in the party during at least the first few years of Bhutto’s regime (1971-77). These included the Marxist theorist JA Rahim who (with Bhutto) wrote the party’s ‘Foundation Papers’ and then its first manifesto. He also served as a minister in the Bhutto regime till his acrimonious ouster in 1975.
Then there was Dr Mubashir Hassan, who was the main theorist behind PPP’s concept of a ‘planned economy’. He served as the Bhutto regime’s finance minister. The intellectuals Hanif Ramay and Safdar Mir wrote treatises to counter the ideologies of the Islamists. Ramay also formulated the party’s core ideology of ‘Islamic socialism’. The lawyer and constitutional expert Hafeez Pirzada too was a founding member of the party. He was one of the main authors of the 1973 Constitution.
The Ziaul Haq dictatorship adopted the Islamist theorist Abul Ala Maududi as the regime’s main ideologue. Maududi was also the chief of the Jamaat-i-Islami (JI). Zia, when he was a lieutenant general in the early 1970s, used to distribute books written by Maududi to his officers and soldiers. Maududi passed away in 1979, just two years after Zia overthrew the Bhutto regime. But Zia continued to apply Maududi’s ideas to his dictatorship’s ‘Islamisation’ project.
Zia also had the services of the prominent lawyers AK Brohi and Sharifuddin Pirzada. Brohi and Pirzada were instrumental in formulating the murder charges against Bhutto. In his book, Betrayals of Another Kind, Gen Faiz Ali Chisti wrote that Brohi and Pirzada encouraged Zia to hang Bhutto, which he did. Pirzada also wrote oaths for judges sworn in by Zia that omitted the commitment to protect the Constitution. He would go on to do the same for the Musharraf dictatorship (1999-2008). In fact, Sharifuddin Pirzada had also served the Ayub regime.
The rise of populist politics in the second decade of the 21st century has greatly diminished the role of intellectuals in political parties and governments. This is because populism is inherently anti-intellectual. It perceives intellectuals as being part of a detested elite. Therefore, for example, one never expected intellectuals of any kind in Imran Khan’s Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaf (PTI). This is why the nature of this party’s narrative is ridiculously contradictory and even chaotic.
However, in a January 2022 essay for The Atlantic, David A. Graham wrote that it’s not that intellectuals have vanished from political parties. Rather, due to populism’s anti-intellectual disposition, they have purposely dumbed down their ideas.
According to Graham, “This is the age of smart politicians pretending to be stupid.” If stupidity can now attract votes and save the jobs of intellectuals in parties and governments, then smart folks can act stupid in the most convincing manner. Even more than those who are actually stupid.
Wednesday 29 June 2022
Being smart makes our bias worse: Life is Poker not Chess - 3
Abridged and adapted from Thinking in Bets by Annie Duke
We bet based on what we believe about the world.This is very good news: part of the skill in life comes from learning to be a better belief calibrator, using experience and information to more objectively update our beliefs to more accurately represent the world. The more accurate our beliefs, the better the foundation of the bets we make. However there is also some bad news: our beliefs can be way, way off.
Hearing is believing
We form beliefs in a haphazard way, believing all sorts of things based just on what we hear out in the world but haven’t researched for ourselves.
This is how we think we form abstract beliefs:
We hear something
We think about it and vet it, determining whether it is true or false; only after that
We form our belief
It turns out though, that we actually form abstract beliefs this way:
We hear something
We believe it to be true
Only sometimes, later, if we have the time or the inclination, we think about it and vet it, determining whether it is, in fact, true or false.
These belief formation methods had evolved due to a need for efficiency not accuracy. In fact, questioning what you see or hear could get you eaten in the jungle. However, assuming that you are no longer living in a jungle, we have failed to develop a high degree of scepticism to deal with materials available in the modern social media age. This general belief-formation process may affect our decision making in areas that can have significant consequences.
If we were good at updating our beliefs based on new information, our haphazard belief formation process might cause relatively few problems. Sadly, we form beliefs without vetting most of them, and maintain them even after receiving clear, corrective information.
Truthseeking, the desire to know the truth regardless of whether the truth aligns with the beliefs we currently hold, is not naturally supported by the way we process information. Instead of altering our beliefs to fit new information, we do the opposite, altering our interpretation of that information to fit our beliefs.
The stubbornness of beliefs
Once a belief is lodged, it becomes difficult to dislodge. It takes on a life of its own, leading us to notice and seek out evidence confirming our belief, rarely challenge the validity of confirming evidence, and ignore or work hard to actively discredit information contradicting the belief. This irrational, circular information processing pattern is called motivated reasoning.
Fake news works because people who already hold beliefs consistent with the story generally won’t question the evidence. Disinformation is even more powerful because the confirmable facts in the story make it feel like the information has been vetted, adding to the power of the narrative being pushed.
Fake news isn’t meant to change minds. The potency of fake news is that it entrenches beliefs its intended audience already has, and then amplifies them. The Internet is a playground for motivated reasoning. It provides the promise of access to a greater diversity of information sources and opinions than we’ve ever had available. Yet, we gravitate towards sources that confirm our beliefs. Every flavour is out there, but we tend to stick with our favourite.
Even when directly confronted with facts that disconfirm our beliefs, we don’t let facts get in the way.
Being smart makes it worse
Surprisingly, being smart can actually make bias worse. The smarter you are, the better you are at constructing a narrative that supports your beliefs, rationalising and framing the data to fit your argument or point of view.
Blind spot bias - is an irrationality where people are better at recognising biased reasoning in others but are blind to bias in themselves. It was found that blind spot bias is greater the smarter you are. Furthermore, people who were aware of their own biases were not better able to overcome them.
Dan Kahan discovered that the more numerate people made more mistakes interpreting data on emotionally charged topics than the less numerate subjects sharing the same beliefs. It turns out the better you are with numbers, the better you are at spinning those numbers to conform to and support your beliefs.
Wanna bet
Imagine taking part in a conversation with a friend about the movie Chintavishtayaya Shyamala. Best film of all time, introduces a bunch of new techniques by which directors could contribute to story-telling. ‘Obviously, it won the national award’ you gush, as part of a list of superlatives the film unquestionably deserves.
Then your friend says, ‘Wanna bet?’
Suddenly, you are not so sure. That challenge puts you on your heels, causing you to back off your declaration and question the belief that you just declared with such assurance.
Remember the order in which we form abstract beliefs:
We hear something
We believe it to be true
Only sometimes, later, if we have the time or the inclination, we think about it and vet it, determining whether it is, in fact, true or false.
‘Wanna bet?’ triggers us to engage in that third step that we only sometimes get to. Being asked if we're willing to bet money on it makes it much more likely that we will examine our information in a less biased way, be more honest with ourselves about how sure we are of our beliefs, and be more open to updating and calibrating our beliefs. The more objective we are, the more accurate our beliefs become. And the person who wins bets over the long run is the one with the more accurate beliefs.
Of course, in most instances, the person offering to bet isn’t actually looking to put any money on it. They are just making a point - a valid point that perhaps we overstated our conclusion or made our statement without including relevant caveats.
I’d imagine that if you went around challenging everyone with ‘Wanna bet?’ it would be difficult to make friends and you’d lose the ones you have. But that doesn’t mean we can’t change the framework for ourselves in the way we think about our biases. decisions and opinions.
Sunday 20 February 2022
Wednesday 25 July 2018
Monday 6 June 2016
When left alone in a room, people preferred to give themselves electric shocks than quietly sit and think. Why do smart people do stupid things?
Andre Spicer in The Guardian
Thinking is hard work and asking tough questions can make you unpopular. So it’s no wonder that even clever people don’t always use their brains
Thinking is hard work and asking tough questions can make you unpopular. So it’s no wonder that even clever people don’t always use their brains
Scene from The Big Bang Theory: ‘Having a high IQ score does not mean that someone is intelligent.’ Photograph: CBS/Everett/Rex
We all know smart people who do stupid things. At work we see people with brilliant minds make the most simple mistakes. At home we might live with someone who is intellectually gifted but also has no idea. We all have friends who have impressive IQs but lack basic common sense.
For more than a decade, Mats Alvesson and I have been studying smart organisations employing smarter people. We were constantly surprised by the ways that these intelligent people ended up doing the most unintelligent things. We found mature adults enthusiastically participating in leadership development workshops that wouldn’t be out of place in a pre-school class; executives who paid more attention to overhead slides than to careful analysis; senior officers in the armed forces who preferred to run rebranding exercises than military exercises; headteachers who were more interested in creating strategies than educating students; engineers who focused more on telling good news stories than solving problems; and healthcare workers who spent more time ticking boxes than caring for patients. No wonder so many of these intelligent people described their jobs as being dumb.
While doing this research I realised that my own life was also blighted with stupidities. At work I would spend years writing a scientific paper that only a dozen people would read. I would set exams to test students on knowledge I knew they would forget as soon as they walked out of the examination room. I spent large chunks of my days sitting in meetings which everyone present knew were entirely pointless. My personal life was worse. I’m the kind of person who frequently ends up paying the “idiot taxes” levied on us by companies and governments for not thinking ahead.
Clearly I had a personal interest in trying to work out why I, and millions of others like me, could be so stupid so much of the time. After looking back at my own experiences and reading the rapidly growing body of work on why humans fail to think, my co-author and I started to come to some conclusions.
Having a high IQ score does not mean that someone is intelligent. IQ tests only capture analytical intelligence; this is the ability to notice patterns and solve analytical problems. Most standard IQ tests miss out two other aspects of human intelligence: creative and practical intelligence. Creative intelligence is our ability to deal with novel situations. Practical intelligence is our ability to get things done. For the first 20 years of life, people are rewarded for their analytical intelligence. Then we wonder why the “best and brightest” are uncreative and practically useless.
Most intelligent people make mental short cuts all the time. One of the most powerful is self-serving bias: we tend to think we are better than others. Most people think they are above average drivers. If you ask a class of students whether they are above the class average in intelligence, the vast majority of hands shoot up. Even when you ask people who are objectively among the worst in a certain skill, they tend to say they are above average. Not everyone can be above average – but we can all have the illusion that we are. We desperately cling to this illusion even when there is devastating evidence to the contrary. We collect all the information we can find to prove ourselves right and ignore any information that proves us wrong. We feel good, but we overlook crucial facts. As a result the smartest people ignore the intelligence of others so they make themselves feel smarter.
Being smart can come at a cost. Asking tricky questions, doing the research and carefully thinking things through takes time. It’s also unpleasant. Most of us would rather do anything than think. A recent study found that when left alone in a room, people preferred to give themselves electric shocks than quietly sit and think. Being smart can also upset people. Asking tough questions can quickly make you unpopular.
Intelligent people quickly learn these lessons. Instead of using their intelligence, they just stay quiet and follow the crowd – even if it is off the side of a cliff. In the short term this pays off. Things get done, everyone’s lives are easier and people are happy. But in the long term it can create poor decisions and lay the foundations for disaster.
Next time I find myself banging my own head and asking myself “Why are you so stupid?”, I will try to remind myself that I’m trapped in the same situation as many millions of others: my own idiocy probably came with a payoff.
We all know smart people who do stupid things. At work we see people with brilliant minds make the most simple mistakes. At home we might live with someone who is intellectually gifted but also has no idea. We all have friends who have impressive IQs but lack basic common sense.
For more than a decade, Mats Alvesson and I have been studying smart organisations employing smarter people. We were constantly surprised by the ways that these intelligent people ended up doing the most unintelligent things. We found mature adults enthusiastically participating in leadership development workshops that wouldn’t be out of place in a pre-school class; executives who paid more attention to overhead slides than to careful analysis; senior officers in the armed forces who preferred to run rebranding exercises than military exercises; headteachers who were more interested in creating strategies than educating students; engineers who focused more on telling good news stories than solving problems; and healthcare workers who spent more time ticking boxes than caring for patients. No wonder so many of these intelligent people described their jobs as being dumb.
While doing this research I realised that my own life was also blighted with stupidities. At work I would spend years writing a scientific paper that only a dozen people would read. I would set exams to test students on knowledge I knew they would forget as soon as they walked out of the examination room. I spent large chunks of my days sitting in meetings which everyone present knew were entirely pointless. My personal life was worse. I’m the kind of person who frequently ends up paying the “idiot taxes” levied on us by companies and governments for not thinking ahead.
Clearly I had a personal interest in trying to work out why I, and millions of others like me, could be so stupid so much of the time. After looking back at my own experiences and reading the rapidly growing body of work on why humans fail to think, my co-author and I started to come to some conclusions.
Having a high IQ score does not mean that someone is intelligent. IQ tests only capture analytical intelligence; this is the ability to notice patterns and solve analytical problems. Most standard IQ tests miss out two other aspects of human intelligence: creative and practical intelligence. Creative intelligence is our ability to deal with novel situations. Practical intelligence is our ability to get things done. For the first 20 years of life, people are rewarded for their analytical intelligence. Then we wonder why the “best and brightest” are uncreative and practically useless.
Most intelligent people make mental short cuts all the time. One of the most powerful is self-serving bias: we tend to think we are better than others. Most people think they are above average drivers. If you ask a class of students whether they are above the class average in intelligence, the vast majority of hands shoot up. Even when you ask people who are objectively among the worst in a certain skill, they tend to say they are above average. Not everyone can be above average – but we can all have the illusion that we are. We desperately cling to this illusion even when there is devastating evidence to the contrary. We collect all the information we can find to prove ourselves right and ignore any information that proves us wrong. We feel good, but we overlook crucial facts. As a result the smartest people ignore the intelligence of others so they make themselves feel smarter.
Being smart can come at a cost. Asking tricky questions, doing the research and carefully thinking things through takes time. It’s also unpleasant. Most of us would rather do anything than think. A recent study found that when left alone in a room, people preferred to give themselves electric shocks than quietly sit and think. Being smart can also upset people. Asking tough questions can quickly make you unpopular.
Intelligent people quickly learn these lessons. Instead of using their intelligence, they just stay quiet and follow the crowd – even if it is off the side of a cliff. In the short term this pays off. Things get done, everyone’s lives are easier and people are happy. But in the long term it can create poor decisions and lay the foundations for disaster.
Next time I find myself banging my own head and asking myself “Why are you so stupid?”, I will try to remind myself that I’m trapped in the same situation as many millions of others: my own idiocy probably came with a payoff.
Wednesday 13 March 2013
The Ten Biggest Lies of B-School
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I went to B-School about 10 years ago. I remember the good times, the parties, the camaraderie. I also remember the long hours in the library, working on team projects with other keen classmates, and the sense of accomplishment at graduation.
However, 10 years later, Business School missed out on a lot in terms of teaching me the skills needed to succeed in my career and life.
Here are the ten biggest lies of B-School you should protect yourself against:
1. You will be rich. My experience (and from talking to others) is that it will take you 2 or 3 times as long as you think it will take to succeed after Business School. So take it easy running up your student loans and credit card debts expecting you’re going to be a rock star later.
2. You are smarter than people without an MBA. You were smart enough to get in to Business School. That doesn’t mean you are smarter than other people without an MBA. Stay humble.
3. There’s always a right answer. B-School students are usually very analytical and achievement-oriented. They like to think there’s always a “best” answer. There’s not. The perfect answer is always the enemy of the good enough one. You make decisions you can with the best information available. Life and business today doesn’t let you count how many angels can fit on the head of a pin.
4. If you’ve made it this far (to B-School), you’re destined to succeed. In my B-School, there were always amazingly talented executives coming in to give talks on business and life. They’d always compliment us on what a great school we attended and why we had our future by the tail. It made us all feel invincible — destined to succeed once we set out on our various career paths. It doesn’t work that way. I know B-School classmates who’ve failed miserably, under-achieved, gotten divorced, gotten severely depressed, etc. B-School is a great educational opportunity in life, but you still have to go out there and succeed. Nothing is given to you as a birthright.
4. If you’ve made it this far (to B-School), you’re destined to succeed. In my B-School, there were always amazingly talented executives coming in to give talks on business and life. They’d always compliment us on what a great school we attended and why we had our future by the tail. It made us all feel invincible — destined to succeed once we set out on our various career paths. It doesn’t work that way. I know B-School classmates who’ve failed miserably, under-achieved, gotten divorced, gotten severely depressed, etc. B-School is a great educational opportunity in life, but you still have to go out there and succeed. Nothing is given to you as a birthright.
5. You know how to “fix” the first few companies you join after school. You’ve probably worked at companies were people who’ve been there for 2 decades roll their eyes telling you about the new hotshot MBA who just started and is now telling everyone how to do their jobs. It’s so clear to him, yet others find it deeply offensive that he would think he knows how the company works when they’ve spent countless years there and are still trying to figure it out. All hotshot MBAs should wear tape over their mouths for the first 3 months on the job and not be allowed to “fix” anything.
6. Discounted Cash Flow (DCF) will always tell you what a company is worth. MBAs love DCF. They think the true answer to what a company is worth is always a DCF away. Just crank it out on a spreadsheet or whiteboard, show the boss, and move on to the next problem. Unless you’re going to be a sell-side analyst, you’ll never do a DCF after B-School. And even the sell-side analysts get their underlings to do them. And no one reading your reports will read them anyway.
7. The “soft” courses (leadership and people management) are least important. I remember talking to the professors from theManagement Department at my school who had to teach the courses on leadership and people management. They used to lament that the MBAs never paid attention to them in class. Yet, the Executive MBAs (usually in their 40s or 50s) always told them that these courses were the most important of all the B-School classes they took. You learn after B-School that the perfect answer or strategy means nothing if you can’t get people around you to buy in to it and help you achieve it. To do that, you need to motivate them, listen to them, connect with them, and support them when they need it.
8. You are going to be more creative and entrepreneurial after Business School than before. In my experience, B-School makes you less creative, the longer you’re in it. They teach courses on entrepreneurship but it’s kind of an oxymoron the idea of the analysis paralysis B-School Students being entrepreneurial. You will learn a lot of tools and frameworks in B-School, but you won’t learn how to start a company. You just need to start a company.
9. Your peers will give you lots of tips and insights that will help you succeed in your career. In my experience, the majority of B-School students are lemmings. They don’t know what they want to do afterwards, so they just do what their peers say they should do (maybe that’s why they applied to B-School in the first place). Ten years ago, everyone at my school wanted to be a dot com entrepreneur. That didn’t work out so well and most students later went back to being investment bankers or management consultants. Your peers don’t know what you want to do with your career. You need to start listening to that voice inside your head.
10. The Ivy League MBAs will be even more successful. An Ivy League credential will be a big plus for you on your resume – no question. However, you have to realize that if you’re getting an Ivy League MBA, you’re probably 10x more susceptible to the previous 9 lies than other MBAs. Don’t let yourself be the next Jeff Skilling, the smart Harvard MBA, who worked at McKinsey and then went to Enron and drove the company off a cliff. He had a golden resume – and where did it get him?
If you treat B-School like an amazing educational experience, chances are you’ll get a lot out of it. Just keep your attitude and sense of entitlement in check.As Casey Kasam used to say, “Keep your feet on the ground, and keep reaching for the stars.”
Tuesday 30 October 2012
'You Are Not So Smart: Why Your Memory is Mostly Fiction....
So you remember your wedding day like it was yesterday. You can spot when something is of high quality. You keep yourself well-informed about current affairs but would be open to debate and discussion, You love your phone because it's the best, right? Are you sure? David McRaney from Hattiesburg, Mississippi, is here to tell you that you don't know yourself as well as you think. The journalist and self-described psychology nerd's new book, You Are Not So Smart, consists of 48 short chapters on the assorted ways that we mislead ourselves every day. "The central theme is that you are the unreliable narrator in the story of your life. And this is because you're unaware of how unaware you are," says McRaney. "It's fun to go through legitimate scientific research and pull out all of the examples that show how everyone, no matter how smart or educated or experienced, is radically self-deluded in predictable and quantifiable ways." Based on the blog of the same name, You Are Not So Smart is not so much a self-help book as a self-hurt book. Here McRaney gives some key examples
Expectation
The Misconception: Wine is a complicated elixir, full of subtle flavours only an expert can truly distinguish, and experienced tasters are impervious to deception.
The Truth: Wine experts and consumers can be fooled by altering their expectations.
An experiment in 2001 at the University of Bordeaux had wine experts taste a red and white wine, to determine which was the best. They dutifully explained what they liked about each wine but what they didn't realise was that scientists had just dyed the same white wine red and told them it was red wine. The tasters described the sorts of berries and tannins they could detect in the red wine as if it really was red. Another test had them judge a cheap bottle of wine and an expensive one. They rated the expensive wine much more highly than the cheap, with much more flattering descriptions. It was actually the same wine. It's not to say wine-tasting is pointless, it's to show that expectation can radically change experience. Yes, these people were experts, but that doesn't mean they can't be influenced by the same things as the rest of us, whether it be presentation or advertising or price. This drives home the idea that reality is a construction of the brain. You don't passively receive the outside world, you actively construct your experience moment by moment.
The Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy
The Misconception: We take randomness into account when determining cause and effect.
The Truth: We tend to ignore random chance when the results seem meaningful or when we want a random event to have a meaningful cause.
Imagine a cowboy shooting at the side of a barn over and over again with a gun. The side of the barn fills up with holes. If you walk over and paint a bullseye around clusters of holes it will make it look like you have made quite a lot of correct shots. It's a metaphor for the way the human mind naturally works when trying to make sense out of chaos. The brain is very invested in taking chaos and turning it into order. For example, in America it's very popular to discuss how similar the Lincoln and Kennedy assassinations were. Elected 100 years apart, Lincoln was killed in the Ford theatre; Kennedy was in a Lincoln automobile made by Ford. They were both killed on a Friday, sitting next to their wives, by men with three names. And so on and so on. It's not spooky. People take hold of the hits but ignore the misses. They are pulled into the things that line up, and are similar or coincidental, but they ignore everything else that's not. The similarities are merely bullseyes drawn around the many random facts.
Confirmation Bias
The Misconception: Your opinions are the result of years of rational, objective analysis.
The Truth: Your opinions are the result of years of paying attention to information that confirmed what you believed, while ignoring information that challenged your preconceived notions.
Any cognitive bias is a tendency to think in one way and not another whenever your mind is on auto-pilot; whenever you're going with the flow. Confirmation bias is a tendency to pay attention to evidence that confirms pre-existing beliefs and notions and conclusions about life and to completely ignore other information. This happens so automatically that we don't even notice. Say you have a flatmate, and you are arguing over who does most of the housework, and both people believe that they do most of the work. What is really happening is that both people are noticing when they do the work and not noticing when they don't. The way it plays into most of our lives is the media that we choose to put into our brains; the television, news, magazines and books. We tend to only pick out things that line up with our pre-existing beliefs and rarely choose anything that challenges those beliefs. It relays the backfire effect, which is a cognitive bias where if we're presented with contradictory evidence, we tend to reject it and support our initial belief even more firmly. When people watch a news programme or pundit, they aren't looking for information so much as confirmation of what they already believe is going in.
Brand Loyalty
The Misconception: We prefer the things we own over the things we don't because we made rational choices when we bought them.
The Truth: We prefer the things we own because we rationalise our past choices to protect our sense of self.
Why do people argue over Apple vs Android? Or one car company versus another? After all, these are just corporations. Why would you defend a brand as if you are their PR representative? We believe that we prefer the things we own because we made these deep rational evaluations of them before we bought them, but most of the rationalisation takes place after you own the thing. It's the choosing of one thing over another that leads to narratives about why you did it, which usually tie in to your self-image.
There are at least a dozen psychological effects that play into brand loyalty, the most potent of which is the endowment effect: you feel like the things you own are superior to the things you don't. When you buy a product you tend to connect the product to your self-image, then once it's connected to your self-image you will defend it as if you're defending your own ego or belief structure.
The Misinformation Effect
The Misconception: Memories are played back like recordings.
The Truth: Memories are constructed anew each time from whatever information is currently available, which makes them highly permeable to influences from the present.
You might think your memory is a little fuzzy but not that it's completely inaccurate. People believe that memory is like a video or files stored in some sort of computer. But it's not like that at all. Memories are actually constructed anew each time that you remember something.
Each time you take an old activation sequence in your brain and re-construct it; like building a toy airplane out of Lego and then smashing the Lego, putting it back into the box, and building it again. Each time you build it it's going to be a little bit different based on the context and experience you have had since the last time you created it.
Oddly enough, the least remembered memory is the most accurate. Each time you bring it into your life you edit it a little more. In 1974 Elizabeth Loftus had people watch a film of two cars having a collision and divided them into groups. Asking each group the same question, she used a slightly different description: how fast were the cars going when they contacted, hit, bumped, collided or smashed? The more violent the wording, the higher they estimated the speed. The way in which questions were worded altered the memories subjects reported.
They weren't looking back to the memory of the film they watched, they were building a new experience based on current information. Memory is actually very malleable and it's dangerous to think that memory is a perfect recording of a past event.
'You Are Not So Smart: Why Your Memory is Mostly Fiction, Why You Have Too Many Friends on Facebook and 46 Other Ways You're Deluding Yourself' by David McRaney (Oneworld, £8.99)
Thursday 4 September 2008
Oxbridge walls that can't be scaled
Johann Hari
A blunt, blind admissions system still discriminates in favour of wealthy interview-machines
Thursday, 4 September 2008
Nothing causes a louder shriek in Britain than if you challenge the right of the rich to pass their privilege untouched on to their children. The shadow chancellor George Osborne has just decreed that the richest 1 per cent will – under David Cameron – be allowed to inherit £2 million estates they have done nothing to earn without paying a penny of it towards schools and hospitals. The "horror" of inheritance tax – introduced in the great progressive wave of the Edwardian era – will be over. This has been greeted with a gurgle of pleasure by Conservatives; why should anyone get in the way of wealth "cascading down the generations", as a Tory Prime Minister once put it?
Over the next few months, an even more tender spot for the privileged will be pressed: Oxford and Cambridge admissions. Today, a third of all Oxbridge students come from just 100 top schools. For example, half of the entire intake of £20,000-a-year Westminster School go there every year: some 410 pupils. The wealthy now have a taken-for-granted expectation that their kids will go to the best universities.
Some on the right, like the late Bill Deedes, explained this by saying the wealthy are a genetic over-class who naturally have cleverer children. But there's a hole in the side of this theory: several studies have shown that when rich people adopt kids from poor backgrounds, those children go on to do just as well.
To see how this buying of unearned privilege works, I have to introduce you to two people I know who applied to study Philosophy at the same Cambridge college as me in 1998. The first is a likeable, confident guy whose parents are wealthy businesspeople. Let's call him Andrew. They sent him to one of the most expensive private schools in Britain, and he had never been in a class larger than 12. He was trained for over a year for his Cambridge interview – a near-scientific drill that included one-on-one tuition by Oxbridge graduates, extensive rewriting of his application form "with" a teacher, and even being videoed so his body language could be analysed.
The other person, by contrast, was a chain-smoking teenager brought up on an Enfield estate by her dinner-lady mum. Laura wrote her application alone, and she had no preparation for her interview at all. None. Most of her A-level classes had 25 people in them, and were led by teachers who hadn't even got top grades themselves. Andrew got four As. Laura got an A and three Bs.
Who had demonstrated they were smarter? I'd say Laura did – but she was rejected, while Andrew got in. His training – and a lifetime in such surroundings – paid off. Laura was nervous, and her complex thoughts about Nietzsche and Hume and Russell must have appeared less polished. It was Cambridge's loss: the cleverer student got away. This isn't a stray anecdote. For too long, it was the main story. In 2006, for example, the gap between the best private schools and the best grammar schools in exam results was just 1 per cent – but the private schools students were still twice as likely to be admitted.
Here's where we get to the pressure-point. For the past few years, senior figures in Oxford and Cambridge – pressured by a Labour government – have resolved this can't go on. They want to run a university for the best, not a highbrow finishing school. So they have begun to introduce very mild reformist measures. Instead of just looking at the surface of exam and interview performance, they will judge them in the context of the student's life. They'll look at your school's average exam grades, whether your parents went to university, and the area you're from: if you got good grades at a school in Moss Side, you'll be rated higher. This is painted by huffing headmasters at private schools as "positive discrimination". But the choice is not between a system that discriminates and one that doesn't. It's between a blunt, blind admissions system that discriminates in favour of wealthy well-trained interview-machines, and a sophisticated, seeing one that snuffles out the genuinely clever.
Soon the green shoots of these new policies will become clear. Geoff Parks, Cambridge's Director of Admissions, says early indicators show there will be a "significant" increase in pupils from normal backgrounds this year. Expect a firestorm of anger. The right-wing press will rage that "middle-class" children are being "persecuted". Their definition of "middle-class" is increasingly comic: the median wage in Britain is £24,000. Half of us earn more; half of us earn less. Yet they describe as "Middle England" people who spend that entire sum every year on one child's schooling.
Often, the privileged will defend their place merely with a visceral howl of "It's mine!" For example, David Cameron's relative Harry Mount has written an angry article asking, "What's wrong with keeping Oxford within the family?" He admits his success at his interview was "staggeringly unfair" but went on to say the only problem is rich people can't buy preference for their children outright with "donations."
There will be furious predictions that Oxbridge will collapse under a "chav-alanche" of inferior students. Those of us who believe that in Britain you should be able to get to the top if you are smart need to push back hard for these changes to be stepped up. Of course Oxbridge can't get us all the way to genuine meritocracy. For that, the schools system needs to be reworked to be genuinely comprehensive, rather than the parody we have today where they are split between good schools selecting by house-price and sink schools for the rest. But even with the unequal products of that system, Oxbridge can go a lot further.
In the 1970s, when the former Conservative Prime Minister Harold Macmillan was Chancellor of Oxford University, he was amazed by the changes in the admissions process. "In my day," he said, "all they asked you was where you got your boots made." In the 2040s, we will be equally astonished that Oxbridge used to rely so heavily on interviews that give an unfair advantage to the well-drilled children of the wealthy.
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