https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=hXv-4gIXMmg
Hello, and welcome to Navigating Patterns. I’d like to go over a concept today around oversimplification and how this plays into what we do, how we think, how we understand and make sense of the world. And as always, I’m going to be stating these are my definitions. You can adopt my definitions. Hopefully they’re useful. You can reject them and just throw them out. Or better yet, modify them for your own use. So when we’re talking about oversimplification, I don’t want to give the impression that this is always dangerous or something to be avoided. We tend to use the term oversimplification in an oversimplified way, as an absolute, like it’s oversimplification, therefore it’s bad. But sometimes it’s necessary. You need to start somewhere, for example. So when you ask someone how the weather is, for example, you don’t go into detail about exactly how the weather was for the past hour, minute by minute. Even if you know such a thing, you’re not going to start there. Because they’re looking for ways to connect. They’re not looking for details. So oversimplification can be very useful. And it shouldn’t be shied away from. But you need to keep track of it. You need to be aware of where the oversimplifications lie. And more importantly with sense making, it’s not so much about oversimplification as a concept. It’s oversimplifications that we use to build our models. So what do I mean by that? Right, obviously we oversimplify the weather all the time. Not a big deal. Very good. Very positive, actually. But when we’re dealing with a problem, say we have an issue with another person. And we want to go about problem solving this. Like, oh, this person’s doing something I don’t like. There’s got to be a way to make them stop. I’ve tried to talk to them about it before. It hasn’t worked out. I think the solution to this problem is conversation. That’s going to solve it. We’ll have a conversation. That’ll do away with it. This is the type of oversimplification that’s dangerous. Mainly because we’re collapsing too many items into one thing and associating that process with a certain solution. Right? Like, it’s going to solve whatever problem I have. Conversation is the solution to the problem. When you talk about conversation, what are you even on about there? What is a conversation? This is not an easy thing. Because conversation is oversimplified and overloaded, technically. We’re just using too many things. We’re wrapping too many concepts up in it. And this is when, say, the public intellectuals start talking about unpacking things. What do I mean by that? That’s when you know you’ve got an oversimplification that’s actually in the way of making something happen. If you’re going to solve a problem by having a conversation with somebody first, you need to go speak to them. You need to get a time and place and appropriate venue where you’re going to talk. That may seem simple, but sometimes when we have a conversation with people about a difficult subject we want to be on neutral ground. This is actually really important. Some conversations have to happen on neutral ground in order to be successful. You’ll notice that when they do diplomatic negotiations, they bounce between places. But usually they pick a neutral third party place to have a discussion, which is a weird thing. But that works with regular one-on-one conversations too, because negotiation is a regular one-on-one conversation between countries. They have single representatives typically. Or maybe not single representatives, but at least single representatives talking to one 10 people trying to hash something out on each side. Neutral ground is important in some sorts of negotiations, conversations, resolving of issues. Conversations don’t have to be resolutions of issues. There’s a lot wrapped up in conversation. If you go to speak to them, first you have to get agreement on what the issue is. You have to hash out the language. When you say I’m speaking angrily, what do you mean? What I mean by angrily is you’re raising your voice. That may not be them speaking angrily from their perspective. See how much can be wrapped up in this one little conversation. Then there’s an interpretation issue. I don’t think that you should get upset about me raising my voice when I don’t think it’s an anger. Fair enough. Maybe I shouldn’t get upset at that. You have to work all those interpretations out. There’s interpretation on their side and interpretation on your side, and you still have to find a negotiation of middle ground. Then maybe you can get a resolution if you can have a matching understanding of the situation, includes the language, includes the interpretation, includes what you’re willing to do. Because if you’re not willing to change anything, but they are, it’s not going to get resolved and vice versa. You need to be aware of that. Conversation is far and away from solution. Things aren’t that simple. That’s true of most things. Most times when we say we’re just going to have a conversation and everything will be worked out. No, that’s not usually the case. You can see this. You can just look at YouTube conversations and see them not resolving things. You’ve got to start a conversation. There’s lots of people out there going, I’ll talk to anybody from the other side of a certain issues, whatever it is. It can be a contentious issue like abortion, or it can be a simple issue like what to do about the budget in a certain country. It doesn’t matter. There’s always people on the other side who aren’t willing to talk. Sometimes they’re the most important people. Just saying I’ll have a conversation really isn’t going to resolve anything because they’re not going to cooperate. Conversation requires cooperation, or at least positive conversation does. There’s a lot wrapped up in that. When we oversimplify a problem by saying, oh, this X thing will fix whatever the problem is, conversation will be able to resolve my issue I have with another person, that’s very naive. When you go into a complicated situation with lots of moving parts, it helps to have a plan. It helps to have an idea of what you’re doing so you don’t get caught. I don’t mean caught by the other person, although that’s possible too, but caught in general not being able to make your point, not being articulate enough, not knowing where to go, not being able to get close to a resolution, or not being able to negotiate at all. If you go into a negotiation and you don’t know what you’re willing to give up, that’s going to be a problem, potentially. Maybe one of two things can happen. Either you’ll give up nothing and not get a resolution, or you’ll give up nothing and become a tyrant. I don’t know which of those is worse. Or you’ll be talked into giving up something that you’re actually not comfortable with. That’s why you need to go in, and Jordan Peterson talks about this, you need to go in knowing what you can lose. Another example of oversimplification is we tend to think things like politics. We pass a law, everyone will obey the law, problem goes away. That never happens. It absolutely doesn’t happen. Again, politics is like the force of last resort. It’s the third party force in a system, and it’s the projection of what we’ve already agreed to. Passing the law doesn’t make it people change their behavior. People have to change their behavior, and then based on that people pass the law. Passing the law doesn’t generally do much. People speed all the time, there’s little signs, you’re breaking the law, they just pay the fine. Or most of them don’t get caught. Because the law is not able to keep up with them. Part of their force is law, and you have to have law enforcement to do something. Sometimes that law enforcement isn’t going to do it, and sometimes they can’t, and most of the time it’s ineffective. So it’s a big problem. It just isn’t that simple. Just getting a law passed is ridiculous. It’s insane. There’s so many processes to getting regulations passed, especially at a larger scale. Then you’ve got no guarantee at all. By the time it gets done, because laws get negotiated, it may not have the punch you thought it was going to have, and when you do a thing, other things change. Everything’s interconnected. Passing a law often has a contrary effect. That happens all the time. Things aren’t that simple. We just oversimplify our problems. That’s one area where we really oversimplify a lot. Another area is a lot of people place a lot of stock on, oh, there’s a new scientific discovery and now we can do X. Let’s just say superconductors. We’ve got a new superconductor breakthrough. We have one of these about, I don’t know, once every three months, roughly speaking. Now we’re going to have superconducting wires in computers and houses are going to use much less electricity and we’ll be able to transmit electricity across the country for next to no money because there’ll be no electric loss. Sure, someday. Not in your lifetime. And I mean that. Not in your lifetime. The fact of a discovery doesn’t actually mean much. Some of these discoveries, labs, and I have been in some of these labs. I’ve seen people working on some of these discoveries in places like MIT because I was fortunate enough to grow up around Boston. And oh yeah, we’ve spent 4 million to do something at a small scale again? And you might have to, right? Just because you have a discovery doesn’t mean that you can manufacture that discovery at scale. It doesn’t even mean that it’s possible to be done outside of a lab. Doesn’t mean that. So the fact of a discovery is so far down the chain that maybe it’ll never see the light of day. Most discoveries don’t ever see the light of day. Not that we shouldn’t make discoveries or keep spending money on schools. I mean, people have made those arguments. Maybe those arguments were correct in some cases, right? Because that discovery may lead to something else or may spark some else curiosity and you’re learning something in the discovery, usually not the discovery itself. People who come out of research lab work where they’ve worked with heavy duty equipment, usually they build half of that equipment or all of that equipment. And now they have skills about building equipment and understanding measurements and discovering ways to do things. So it has all these sort of second order effects that aren’t around the discovery itself but are around like, oh, what it takes to make a discovery, right? What things you have to go through in terms of problem solving and not oversimplifying. All of that stuff is super valuable. It’s far more valuable than discovery in most cases. I remember there was a course a while back online from, I think it was Caltech or one of the big schools out west and it was a machine learning course. It was one of the first ones. It was a 10 hour, I think it was a 10 hour course. And in the comments in the course, the people who actually took the class were saying the most valuable thing about this class was getting to work with the TAs and learning MATLAB. And I was taking the course online by listening to the lectures. A little bit of a disconnect. I would have liked to have learned MATLAB. Wasn’t going to learn MATLAB that way because everybody has to learn MATLAB and other tools like that differently, right? So having somebody sit down with you and show you how to do things with a tool is useful. And lectures are less useful because they tend to be higher level and not that they’re not useful. They’re very useful. Listen a lot to lectures. Learned a lot of stuff for free online that way, right? As I’m sure we all have. But the real meat of that course was in the TA interaction to learn the tool to make the calculation to do the exercises, all those ancillary things that were around the lectures but not directly related. So just in oversimplification, well, we just educate somebody. Well, education is really just a lecture and then, you know. So those are some examples of oversimplification. Another example of oversimplification is in business. A lot of times we see somebody selling a product and we’re like, ah, well, they’re selling this product so they must be making money. That’s not how that works at all. Businesses are very complicated creatures. A lot of times businesses will sell things deliberately at a loss. This happens constantly. It’s called loss leader. You can look up loss leader. The Black Friday specials, those are used to be typically loss leaders, right? So they’d lose 50 bucks on every sale. I used to work for, I did a contract for a while for Dell computer. And what I found out while I was there, because they were taking forever to pay me, was that they have a trick. They sell all, or they used to, sell all of their computers at a loss. They’d lose like 50 or 100 dollars every time they sold a PC in the consumer space. Every sale. Literally every sale. They made it all back in interest by paying their vendors 90 days after the sale. And I was blown away. At the time it didn’t bother me that they were taking 90 days to pay invoices. Once they get caught up, right? Once the first 90 days passes, you’re fine. But you gotta go three months without money. I was just blown away. I was like, you gotta be kidding me. And they showed me. I was like, wow, this is amazing. And it worked out for them. They typically net some money that way. So really, they weren’t even making their money on selling the product. At all. They were making money on the float. That’s how they were making their money. So it’s not necessarily as easy as business sells something, thing must make money. Most businesses fail. Most businesses fail. Maybe it takes five years because they’re well funded. Maybe it takes three years because they’re not that well funded. But most businesses fail. Like 95%. So just because something’s being sold doesn’t mean it’s profitable. It doesn’t mean that that profit’s worth it either because a lot of people are just selling stuff because they have nothing else to do. I mean, I knew somebody who was basically burning through his retirement doing business for such a low profit that he really wasn’t covering all of his expenses, we’ll say. So he basically wasn’t paying himself any money. But it gave him something to do during the day. Very fruitful. But we get into these habits of oversimplification where we’re really not thinking about all the possibilities and all the things that can go on. And I had a, I lived a few doors down. I had a neighbor who was a musician. And he brought me over one day. He said, oh, we cut our first CD. You got to check this thing out. And I was like, oh, great. This is cool. And he said, yeah, I shouldn’t have done this. Very expensive. These CDs, I can only sell them for like 15 for a CD. You’re going to be kidding me. He said, but even if I sell all of them, because he had the number that he had printed and all that, he said, I’m really losing money. And I looked at him and I said, really? And he said, well, yeah, absolutely. I’m definitely. I said, well, how long do you work on this album for? I think it was like two and a half years or something. And I said, all right, well, how many hours did you put in to working on this album for the past two and a half years? And he said, oh, yeah, no. I mean, this was 60 hours a week. He says, our weekends were jammed. He’s his full time job. And then he’d work on the music. And they were rehearsing almost every night and getting the band together all weekend long. hours and hours and hours of rehearsing and playing and writing new songs and trying them out. Right. And you get to this big, long sequence as with any creative process where you’re creating a hundred drafts to get one, you know, one minute of perfect product. And I pointed out to him, I said, well, had you not spent all that time with the band, what would you have done? And he was like, well, I don’t know. I said, would you? I mean, you still have to entertain yourself. Would you have gone out to the movies? He said, oh, yeah, probably is. How much would all that entertainment over the past two and a half years have cost you? And he went, oh, so it’s not that that he didn’t lose money. It’s that he saved himself a lot of money by doing what he loved. And that’s sort of one of those things that people teach you in business, right? Like, well, if you do something you love, you’ll never have a job, you’ll write. Maybe that’s a little oversold. Maybe that’s an oversimplification. It’s interesting to think about these oversimplified ways. Like, oh, he thought he was just losing money, like it was just a flat loss. You know, and he was trying to justify it with, well, it’s the music, it’s the thing I love. But he felt a lot better about it after I pointed out to him that you might have lost more money had you not made that album, because at least you’ve monetized all that time that you spent enjoying yourself. And it’s a nice offset for all the other things and all the other ways you could have spent money. And he really, you know, really settled into that and decided that was a pretty cool way to think about it. And that’s why oversimplification is important, because there’s better ways to think about things sometimes. Not all the time. Sometimes the oversimplification is the right level of analysis. So I’m not, like, trying to sell you some panacea here. I’m just saying it’s important to know what our oversimplifications might be and then to deal with them appropriately, which might be to keep them. But it might be to break them apart and be prepared and understand that maybe my way of thinking about this oversimplification isn’t going to serve me the way it should. Thank you for your time and attention.