YouSaid · the spoken record

Scott Page

lines on the record: 90
first: 2019-04-02
most recent: 2019-04-02
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Thanks. This was really fun to have these open-ended conversations, and I really appreciate the format as opposed to simple answer respond, but to give me time to elaborate on the book and what I've been thinking. Thank you.”
2019-04-02 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #55 Scott Page: Becoming a Model Thinker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You don't want to, so there's a limits of inclusion, right? I mean, the sense that you only want to be inclusive to things that are actually going to help you do whatever it is you're trying to do.”
2019-04-02 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #55 Scott Page: Becoming a Model Thinker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Stick to the fridge, and you let it go, right? It may be something, it's probably something you keep around because there's going to be other cases where it does work. But the point is there's going to be cases where it doesn't. And so”
2019-04-02 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #55 Scott Page: Becoming a Model Thinker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Difference in the world as opposed to just purely appreciating all these different ways of seeing things. And the reason that distinction matters is if in literature it could be that every perspective is worth considering, right? In engaging and thinking about because there's no end game, ironically given the name of the story you can mention. But if I'm making an investment decision or if I'm worried about drug approval, if I'm trying to write a policy to reduce inequality, if I'm trying to think about how do we teach people, there is an endgame in a way, right? There are things we can measure. There is performance characteristics. And so it could very well be the case that you could say, I think we should think about it from this perspective, or I think we could use this model, and then we can kind of beta test that perspective in that model and think, no, we shouldn't, right? So there's a difference, I think, in the approach I'm promoting in that, yeah, you throw out a whole bunch of models, but if the spaghetti doesn't stick to the fridge, the spaghetti doesn't.”
2019-04-02 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #55 Scott Page: Becoming a Model Thinker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Or U.S. economic history, or something like that, is because there's all these other people who experience that same thing and saw it from a very different perspective. But what's funny here is that I'm kind of making this point when you think about many models, you could think like I'm making this point like, oh my gosh, people should be spending more time learning technical stuff. On the one hand, that's kind of true. People should be learning technical stuff. But the core argument I'm making is very similar to the argument that people at the other extreme are making in terms of like the reason why liberties education is so important is the ability to do perspective taking, right? To sort of learn to see the world through different eyes. I think where the difference is is that I'm a pragmatist in a way, right? I mean, I just see so many. And so I feel like I'm coming at it from a much more sort of pragmatic perspective in terms of going out there and making it.”
2019-04-02 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #55 Scott Page: Becoming a Model Thinker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Could it be abused? What uses it takes? There's also sort of a purely almost organizational science business school perspective in terms of how do we, if it's complicated, Explain how do we actually educate the doctors in terms of how to use this, right? Then there's also people who understand just the political process, which is like, you know, what's the likelihood they'll get approved, even if it works on all these other dimensions, can we get this through the government approval process if it's somehow something different given that they've got boxes that they use? So what you've got is you bring all these different disciplines to bear and you've got to, just like you're saying in this book, if I'm the CEO of Gilead and I've got to make the call do we take this drug to market, I actually have to hire people who can take all those different perspectives, right? Otherwise, I probably won't be CEO for very long because I'm not going to do. But then you realize just let's make things just a tiny bit less abstract for a moment and think about traditional arguments for liberal arts education, right? The reason you want to read literature from a whole bunch of different vantage points. So the reason you don't want to just read sort of the great man view of Canadian history.”
2019-04-02 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #55 Scott Page: Becoming a Model Thinker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's such a great point because one of the things that I struggle with in this whole space, and I think it's a good place to struggle, is as you move from sort of very formal models, like I'm fitting some sort of hierarchical linear model versus some abstract perspective taking versus sort of some notion of sort of like a disciplinary approach to a problem. So let me give a very specific example that I find cool to think about, which is the drug approval process. So if you look at a company like Gilead, Genentech, right, somebody constructs a molecule, then they've got to decide, okay, is this molecule something that we can use to improve people's health? One perspective to take on that is just purely a pharmacological perspective, right? Sort of body chemistry, how does it work, right? Just pure science. But then there's also sort of a sociological perspective in terms of like, you know, will people, you know, how will people take this? How will this get passed on? Will it get abused?”
2019-04-02 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #55 Scott Page: Becoming a Model Thinker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Your mental models better than mine, but it's still worth it for me to hang on to my mental model because it's giving that diversity. So collectively, it's worthwhile. But there's going to be, so again, back to the point you raised earlier about evolution. And this is where the many model thinking becomes fun. So you realize like, so I go work in some organization or I'm working in some community of practice and I've got a collection of metal models I'm using. It just becomes easy for me to start coordinating on other people's metal models, right? Using other people's terminology because it's more efficient.”
2019-04-02 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #55 Scott Page: Becoming a Model Thinker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Nobody mentioned it. It turns out, like, I guess somebody dead for like 15 years, supposedly, like, did they think, right? And then they decided going forward that they would make one ceremonial beat or something, but then. So I think that what you don't realize though is that you can a lot of who we are and what we do comes from these local interaction models. Now let's make this serious for a moment away from like the ketchup and the Mental models that we use are like local interaction, right? I mean, like it's like, oh, you're using that mental model. It's easier for me to use that metal model. And that then works against this diversity, right? So it really becomes a super important thing. And what's also very funny is that.”
2019-04-02 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #55 Scott Page: Becoming a Model Thinker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“He just thought these are crazy people who have, he goes, they have their own napkins. Like they always have their own napkin with a napkin holder. They take their shoes off. They always have the radio out of the house. It was just a whole set of things that they did. Like they hugged each other, right? And he's like, well, they're hugging me, right? All these things that they did. He thought that they were just like part of their genetic makeups, an essential part of their character, when in fact it was just a series of coordination problems that their family had solved, right? The other example I have in this space that was great is somebody told me this story about how at New Year's Eve one year, she'd been married into this family for 20 years. She said, you know, look, I love the family. They're great. But I hate the boiled cabbage and beet soup by New Year's Eve. But 20 years later, I think I can say that. Turned out everybody hated it.”
2019-04-02 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #55 Scott Page: Becoming a Model Thinker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But the best part about teaching this is one time, this is like 10 years ago, this kid comes up after class and he goes, Oh my God, oh my God, this explains it. And I'm like, explains what? He's like, my girlfriend's family. And I was like, what? And he goes, everything I do, they do the opposite. And what's weird about it, what's great about these local interaction models is that... Prior to that, he had thought intrinsically they were just weird people.”
2019-04-02 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #55 Scott Page: Becoming a Model Thinker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Say, okay, do people read their phones at the dinner table? Do people take their shoes off in your house? Is the TV on? You hug your family, right? Just a whole set of things, and then I'll have people sort of, I have the students vote, like, you know, using a Google form like, you know, which ones they do. And we sort of have like, you know, here's the modal response across all these things. Here's the people who are correct, which are the people who do what I do, right? And these are my people. You could move to the front and you all get A's.”
2019-04-02 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #55 Scott Page: Becoming a Model Thinker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and the covered people think the French people are crazy. Once a doctor said to me, Scott, I think you may think this is funny, but you have to store ketchup in the fridge because it has vinegar in it. And I said, where do you store your vinegar? He said, in the fridge. And like the whole room is like, what are you a crazy person? Like, you know, you don't strike vinegar. The same is true with soy sauce. There's soy in the fridge, soy, and in the cupboard people. And it doesn't matter what you do, but whatever you do takes on a lot of importance. It defines who you are. So one of the fun things I do in class, I also talked about in the book, is you can imagine you're actually playing a whole series of local interaction models. And that collection of local interaction solutions, you can think of as comprising a part of culture. So my wife, Jenna Bednar, I mentioned before, is a political scientist. She had some papers on this where you could think of culture as like a set of sort of coordinated behaviors across a variety of settings. And so I'll do this in class.”
2019-04-02 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #55 Scott Page: Becoming a Model Thinker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“With the people I'm interacting with. This happens on so many dimensions. So in an earlier book I wrote called The Difference, I talk about where you store your ketchup, like do you store your ketchup in the fridge or do you store your ketchup in the cupboard? Again, it doesn't matter what you do.”
2019-04-02 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #55 Scott Page: Becoming a Model Thinker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so these are fun. These are like super fun. So, local interaction models, there's some simple computer models, not the convexity and concavity aren't fun, but they're fun for a smaller set of people, I think. So these local interaction models are models where you think of people, first off, like maybe on a checkerboard, but eventually can put them on a network. And what you imagine is the set of things my behavior depends on the people around me. So one of the examples, a simple example I give often is sort of like, how do you greet people? So do you shake hands, do you bow, do you fist bump? It doesn't matter what you do, but you do the same thing that other people do, right? If you go to bow and I go to shake hands, I'm going to poke your eye out. So it's not important. It's not going to work. So what you want is these are in some sense what we call engaged like a pure coordination game. What I'm trying to do is I'm trying to just coordinate.”
2019-04-02 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #55 Scott Page: Becoming a Model Thinker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Some sense fundamental to not recognizing, in particular, concavity, can lead to really flawed assumptions. In the 1970s, Japan had this really fast growth. And there were all these articles saying Japan's going to overtake the United States in eight years. But the thing is, if you construct the model, you realize that as you sort of industrialize, you're going to be able to grow pretty fast, but there's going to be diminishing returns so that industrialization. The same is true of China. So if you do a linear projection of China five years ago, you'd have said, oh my gosh, by 2040, China's economy is going to be just enormous. But the reality is growth's going to fall off because what the model shows in order to maintain anything even close to a linear growth, you have to innovate like crazy. Massive levels of innovation. So I think that the idea behind the concavity and convexity chapter was to try and get people to recognize that there's just diminishing returns to so many things that”
2019-04-02 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #55 Scott Page: Becoming a Model Thinker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The next bite of chocolate cake, the next scoop of ice cream, right? There's just diminishing returns to that. So if you think about like adding workers to a firm, as you keep adding workers, like the value to those additional workers go down. And that's true of people in teams as well, right? So when you think about, suppose I decided I got an important decision to make, you know, the second person's going to add a lot to the first. The third person add a lot to the second, right? and so on. But at some point, you're just not going to add much value. And so there tends to be in sort of team performance on a specific path a certain level of concavity. The challenge for me in writing that was like, how do you make concavity and convexity even remotely exciting? Because it's just kind of like mainstream math and the easiest way to teach it is almost in terms of derivative, right? So linear function has a constant derivative and a concave function falls off. But so what you try and make the case that these are”
2019-04-02 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #55 Scott Page: Becoming a Model Thinker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, no, this is a challenging thing because there are certain things you almost, you have to cover. Otherwise, it's a disservice, right? And so the basic idea of sort of linearity, right, is that something has the same slope always. So the next doll, you know, the next thing is worth just as much as the previous thing. And fundamental to so many models throughout the book is some assumptions of either concavity, which is sort of diminishing or convexity, which is increasing, Richard. So we just talked about preferential attachment. That's a form of convexity. The odds that somebody buys your book increase as more and more people buy your book. So the odds that the first person buys the tipping point are low, but then the odds that the million and first buy is that are much higher, right? Because so many people have bought. So convexity just means that the odds of something happening or the payoff from something increase as more people do it. So many things in the world are the opposite. They're concave. So if you think about like, so concave.”
2019-04-02 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #55 Scott Page: Becoming a Model Thinker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Because there are just so much better, that's a very different story than if you say, no, just a natural process of people buying books leads to big winners. Then you start realizing, no, the big winners are as much luck as they are skilled.”
2019-04-02 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #55 Scott Page: Becoming a Model Thinker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Is sort of aggregating to this critical state. Think of like traffic in Los Angeles or traffic in Toronto or New York. What happens is it gets self-organized despite where cars are spaced pretty close and all of a sudden there's one accident, boom, there's three hour delays. So most of the time things are kind of fine, but one accident can lead to lakes. So now what you've got is you've got, okay, now we have a logic that explains the structure. Why does it matter? It clearly matters in the case of things of things like book sales, music sales, those sorts of things. It means that there's going to be some people who are wildly successful and a whole bunch of people who are not that successful. And that may not be, you may decide that's not fair, right? We may decide that like if I'm Malcolm Gladwin, I shouldn't necessarily think, wow, I'm amazing because I sold 4 million books because no, you just happen to be the New Yorker books because you benefited from those positive feedback. So it actually could change how we think about how we tack people. If you thought, no, this person sold these books.”
2019-04-02 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #55 Scott Page: Becoming a Model Thinker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Down to one person or at a third person. Well, the life of that firm, the firm's going to exist as long as there's a positive number of workers. Well, if it's a completely random walk, like a coin flip, you can imagine that most firms are going to die really quickly, right? You add an employee yourself, then you fool. You add two employees, then you go down one, up one, down one, down one, you die up. So that would say that the lifespan of firms, some of it would be really short, but if you happen to get really big, you're going to last a long time. That should be a power. And it is. It's also true that the lifespan of species phylogenera in ecology can think of that as perfectly random also satisfies the power. And then a third way to get these power laws is from something called self-organized criticality. So if I drop grains of sand over a desk, eventually I get a big sand pile. And then if I look at how many grains of sand fall off the floor, most of the time when I drop a grain of sand, once the pile is formed, it'll be very few. But occasionally I'll get these giant avalanches. And so what's happening there is the system.”
2019-04-02 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #55 Scott Page: Becoming a Model Thinker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's a structure we see a lot, right? This long tail distribution. The question is what causes it? And so I talk about three models in the book. One is something called the preferential attachment model, where imagine things kind of like there's a set of cities or there's a set of books and the probability I move to a city or the probability I buy a book is proportional to the number of other people living in that city or buying that book. We can see right away there's positive feedback there as more people moved to New York, right? more people move to New York or as more people buy the tipping point ironically more people buy the tipping point so the tipping point sells a million copies there's 10 million people in New York if nobody buys somebody's boring book then nobody buys the boring book but another way that power laws form is through is through random walk so imagine that each firm a firm starts by somebody you know joining their firms they get they start a firm so they're one person now suppose that they're equally likely to sort of fail or hire a second person and then suppose they're equally likely to go back”
2019-04-02 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #55 Scott Page: Becoming a Model Thinker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Okay, so power law distributions are distributions that have, so let's start with what they're not. So a normal distribution is something like human height, where the average person's 510, there's some people 5'8", there's some people six foot, and it falls off really fast. A power law distribution, most events are very, very, very small, and there's an occasional huge event. So if you look at earthquakes, there's thousands and thousands of tiny, tiny earthquakes, and there's an occasional huge earthquake. If you think of the distribution of city sizes in those countries, there's tons and tons of small towns. There's an occasional New York-London Tokyo. If you look at book sales, music sales, right, most books sell 300 or 400 copies. There's occasional books at some means of copies. And there's a question of, you know, what causes power loss. So unlike normal distributions, which come from just kind of adding things up or averaging things, power laws have a bunch of causes. So what I do in the book is I go back, let's go back to this logic structure function.”
2019-04-02 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #55 Scott Page: Becoming a Model Thinker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Get the incentives right. No, but it is funny though how I think it's because it's a physical game when I'm doing this in class, I'll say you only have 10 minutes. Sometimes I'm just extracting the game from my students' hands. And then I'll like, look, you could take it home. Get back the next day because it's so much fun.”
2019-04-02 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #55 Scott Page: Becoming a Model Thinker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And what happens is they're just a lot better. And what you see is that this is something where it's not tacit knowledge. It's actually learnable knowledge when rush out. What I've been struggling with, and you probably have a good idea, this is, I'm trying to come up with a game where you can't, it's purely tacit. I can't communicate. So, my friend John Milveroy's jokes that like this weekend he's going to read a couple books on tennis and then go become a professional tennis player. You know, you can't. Yeah, yeah. Right, right, right. Yeah, so I'm trying to find a really cool example to juxtapose with rush hour. Maybe one of your listeners will email it. You could do it in a classroom setting, some new game. Where people can learn it, but then there's nothing they can.”
2019-04-02 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #55 Scott Page: Becoming a Model Thinker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And what happens is so here's what's the experiment I do in class. And again, the numbers are too small to say this is any sort of scientific result, but it's always work that it's always been really fun. Is I have people play rush hour and they play like an easy, a medium, a hard, and reasonable. And we time how long it takes them to do each one on average, right? And the harder ones take a lot longer. Then I have them write down models for how to play Russia. So one model might be solve it backwards, which is think about how that car is going to get out. Another model is like get the big trucks out of the way, right? Another model is move forward, then move backwards. So move forward as far as you can, right? And then move it backward. And then what I do is I have another set of people read the mental models from the first set of people and then play not the same games, but different games, but of the same difficulty, and compute how long it takes them.”
2019-04-02 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #55 Scott Page: Becoming a Model Thinker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Are just as good as physicists because it's as if derivatives and markets are just as good as physicists. But when it gets super hard, the market's not going to work. Because you need all sorts of coordination. So that's going back then to this thing we talked about before about when to use a market, when to use a democracy, when to use a hierarchy, when do you just kind of let it rip, that probably depends on the difficulty of the problem. But what's cool about that, and this is where you can do things with young kids, is they see, wow, here's this idea, collective intelligence that spans disciplines. If you want to teach So in the same class, I just give our example because it was just so fun. There's this amazing game called Rush Shower. I don't know if you've ever seen it where you have little cars and trucks and you slide them around and you've got to get this red car out so you get that. Yeah, so you get the car and it gives you configuration. And these configurations are called easy, medium, hard, and very hard.”
2019-04-02 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #55 Scott Page: Becoming a Model Thinker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And then we compared the waggle dancing bees to the Hakkians to the physicist. And on an easy problem and on the problem with five peaks, the bees did just physicists, right? Infection on the five peaks, they did ironically just a tiny bit better than the physicist. And so we're talking about this afterwards. And someone says, well, that's because the bees can take a derivative. And nobody's like, what? He goes, well, no. To solve this, you just got to got to take derivatives and they can sort of find the highest. They can find the highest point and then they can take derivatives because they could see who was wagging long, right? And it was only on the really hard problem physicists did the best. And so what you learn from that is that bees markets and problem-solving teams are all deal with high dimensional problems with like, you know, things that they solve, right? If it's not super hard and finding food isn't super hard, then”
2019-04-02 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #55 Scott Page: Becoming a Model Thinker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“For yourself and the group by trying other points, right? So there was all sorts of cooperation and competition of that group. The third group was the bees. So the bees would point at a square. They couldn't give a number. Like they couldn't say A26. They just could point somewhere on this big square. We would approximate we thought that was. We would show and they had to go back and waggle dance, right? Now the thing is it turns out undergrads won't like waggle dance. They're just too insecure. So we had them just dance with their hand. What they did do is they had to like kind of like point the direction it was in. And then the longer they waggled, that was kind of the better the value.”
2019-04-02 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #55 Scott Page: Becoming a Model Thinker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“He just created a bunch of problems, and I didn't know what they were, right? That was part of the key. No one knew what the values were. So then created three T's. One team was the physicist. And what the physicists did is they got to sit around and first say, okay, which eight points do we check? And then they would get the values from those points. So it's kind of like that game battleship where they would say D7 and they'd come in and we'd say, this is the value from D7. And then they'd get another, so they got like five rounds where they got to check. Here's 10 points. So five rounds where they got to check 10 points. And the goal was to find the highest point. Another group was the Heekians, the decentralized market where each person went to pick a point and then they just come back and they would say, here's the point I picked and here's the value. But no coordination. So you could, the idea was then you could see value by comparing those two because you could kind of see where other people picked that you might want to go near where they were, but you also wanted to build information.”
2019-04-02 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #55 Scott Page: Becoming a Model Thinker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Collective intelligence is where sort of the whole is sort of smarter than any one individual unit. So you can think of that in a predictive context. This could be the wisdom of crowds sort of thing where people guessing the way to a steer, the average, the crowds guess is going to be better than the average guess of the person in it. That's just a mathematical fact. But here what we're doing is we're looking at sort of collective intelligence in terms of solving a problem. So here's the setup really fun. I had a graduate student make up a bunch of problems defined over 100 by 100 grids. So mention a checkerboard that's 100 by 100 and each one of those cells has a value. So one of the problems was really simple. It was like what we call a Mount Fuji problem. It was just one big peak, not necessarily right in the center. It was just kind of in the upper right. It's a huge peak and that had the highest value and everything kind of fell off from that. Another problem had like five or six little peaks over the landscape with one being higher. And then another one was really, really rugged.”
2019-04-02 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #55 Scott Page: Becoming a Model Thinker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Someone as tall as the Burgish Tower, and then be 170 million people in the United States, seven inches tall. And they're like, whoa, that would be pretty bad. It would be really hard to design buildings as well, right? Because you need them for little tiny people in truck. And so I think this logic structure function thing is really important. I think the other thing that we need to do is give them experiences of using the same broad idea across a variety of disciplines. So one of the things I took class that I'm hoping to teach again because the students just absolutely loved it, but it just didn't work out this year called collective intelligence. Where we just sort of did a whole bunch of different sort of in-class exercises to sort of explore where collective intelligence comes from. So here's one example that was just, I think, just most on.”
2019-04-02 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #55 Scott Page: Becoming a Model Thinker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Structures do we actually see in nature? And we don't see that many. We see bell curves, we see sort of stretched out bell curves, which are log normal. We see power law things, but we rarely see things that have like five peaks to them. So why is that? And so then we need a logic that explains the structures we see. And so what logic underpins normal distributions, which are you adding things up? What logic underpins log normal distributions? You're multiplying things. And what logic gives you power laws? Well, in the book, I said there's a bunch of them, right? There's preferential attachment. There's software and there's criticality. But there's logics that'll give us those powers. Then you want to ask, does it matter? Do we care? And then that sort of an easy thing to convince itself because you could say, well, if incomes like heights are distributed normally, so that's nice and predictable and seems fair. But if heights were distributed by a power law, there'd be 10,000 people as tall as giraffes.”
2019-04-02 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #55 Scott Page: Becoming a Model Thinker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it's a great question. I think two things come to mind. One is I think we could do a little bit more of sort of meta teaching in the sense that one of the things that people really like about, I did an online course called model thinking, which is a MOOC. And one of the sort of tropes in there is that there's something that's called, I borrowed from my colleague Mark Newman when he talks about distributions, which is logic structure function. So if you see some sort of structure pattern out there in the world, there has to be some logic as to how that came to be. And then you also want to ask yourself, is there some functionality to that structure? Does it matter, right? So when you talked about like normal distributions versus power law distributions, so we'll teach kids the bell curve. What we won't do is sort of say, here's the bell curve, and this is a structure. Think about all the other structures you can draw. But now we want to ask which”
2019-04-02 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #55 Scott Page: Becoming a Model Thinker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Because otherwise, one of the things I find fascinating about the academy is that where people would be in small departments and they'll study something and it gets really interested to them and they're the world expert in that and that's great because we're advancing knowledge but outside of their small circle no one may find that interesting and I think that it's incumbent upon them to sort of think about are they using their talents in a way to I think you are they making that interesting to other people or at least intriguing to other people because I don't think you're adding that much value if only 30 people read your work”
2019-04-02 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #55 Scott Page: Becoming a Model Thinker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Thing is, you've got to have some innate ability, right? So, my younger son's actually a reasonably good dancer. He was a younger kid, and there's not many adult male dancers. And the guy who runs the dance studios that after I dropped him off one day, chased me down and said, is that your son? And I said, and he goes, well, we need adult male dancers. And I said, yeah, that comes from the other side of the family. He says, no, no, it can't be come in. And he like, watch me dance for like 30 seconds. And he's like, you're right. It comes from the other side of the family. You know, even if I love dancing, my upper bar dancing is going to be pretty low, right? So you've got to have some ability there. And then the third thing is you have to be able to in some sense connect those things to something useful, meaningful, right? It's going to make the world a better place, right? So the question in and of itself or the thing you're going after has to have some meaning or purpose or value. You've got to be able to convince yourself of that and convince others of that.”
2019-04-02 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #55 Scott Page: Becoming a Model Thinker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Your amazing interview with the Tuagawande. In a complex with durability to succeed is going to depend on you sort of filling a niche that's valuable, right? Which, you know, as in Barabasi's book, it could be connecting things. It could be pulling resources and ideas from different places. But it's going to be filling a niche. And that niche could take all sorts of different forms. And so I think when I undergraduates about this, when I talk to my two sons about this, What you want to think about is finding something that combines three things. You have to really love it. That's going to be your passion, but you just gotta, you've got to love the practice of it. You're a great basketball player isn't someone of great ability, someone who loves practicing basketball. A great musician is someone who's got some ability there, but they love practicing music. So you've got to, you've really got to enjoy the practice of the thing you're doing.”
2019-04-02 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #55 Scott Page: Becoming a Model Thinker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“SQL Mass times acceleration. In the economy of 100 years ago, it almost depended a lot more on sort of you yourself being really, really good, like your really good lawyer, your really good furniture maker. Go back 200 years ago. You were successful if you ran your farm well, right? So it was all about your individual ability and hard work, right? So I was putting this fabulous book called The Rise of the Meritocracy, which is an old book like 50 years ago. So it talks about sort of like success as intelligence plus effort, right? And it's actually where the word meritocracy came from. If you imagine the world as a collection of individual silos and the, you know, sort of the amount of grain in your silo depends on sort of how intelligent you are and how hard you work, then it is all kind of about like your ability, work hard, get A's, right, in class, develop these skills. And that's a very instrumental view of the world, but in a complex world, your ability to contribute, and again, I'm going to go back to the”
2019-04-02 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #55 Scott Page: Becoming a Model Thinker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Such a fascinating question. I think that especially the article in the New York Times last week about how the sort of upper quintile was spending so much more money on their children than those below, with the idea of them being economically successful. So let's go back to a question you asked earlier about sort of in school you learn.”
2019-04-02 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #55 Scott Page: Becoming a Model Thinker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But the point is getting them recognized for the group to be better. You want people with other tools, right? So it's tricky because these people think that these people, you know, people in successful things because they've won because they're good, when in fact maybe they've won because they just happen to have the right combinations of talents at the right time.”
2019-04-02 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #55 Scott Page: Becoming a Model Thinker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Combination of the two, but what's really useful is having both those. And so, what you'd like to do is have both these models in your head and say, let's think about this as a spatial model, let's think about this as a purely hedonic competitive model, and think about how do we position ourselves, where are our competitors. And it gives you, I think, I think it's calming in a way, right? Because it gives you a way to structure your thinking. And it also lets you know that if you lose, it's not because you're necessarily worse. And if you win, it's not necessarily because you better. So it's also humbling, right? Because it's easy to think one of the things I deal with a lot in trying to present diversity, the value of diversity is people who are successful by definition have always won and they're in power and they think I'm good because I'm here because I'm good and they typically are and they tend to think they're there because they've had a lot of ability and they have a lot of ability which means that they've got flexibility in terms of what tools they would”
2019-04-02 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #55 Scott Page: Becoming a Model Thinker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Like you're going to win relative to how someone else is, so it's a strategic, it's more like a game, it's strategic, and there's no best thing you can do unless you happen to know where the other person was. And so the nice thing that comes out of that, there's sort of this calming sensation my undergrads always feel like if you don't get a job, if you don't get a scholarship, you don't get into grad school, it's not because somebody was better than you. No, it just happens to be that they were positioned better than you. And that's fine, right? It's just going to happen. Strategically, when you think about maximizing your chance of getting one of those things, you need to think about, is this a spatial thing where I want to sort of make sure I've got the characteristics that are near what they're looking for? Or is it hedonic where I want to beat my competitors on as many things as possible, right? So I would have like, I would like the most undergraduate research done. I don't have the strongest letters. And so, and a lot of things are sort of like a”
2019-04-02 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #55 Scott Page: Becoming a Model Thinker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'm going to go to Northwestern. I'm going to go to Western Ontario and get a degree. And I'm going to apply for a job. And I'm competing against seven other people. Or maybe I'm up for a road trip. But I think how did I not win this? I'm so great. Well, the thing is, it may be that that's, you could think that's a spatial model, and I just wasn't what people liked. Or you could think that's a hedonic model, a kernel bottom model, like somebody just happened to beat me on some collection of fronts. But one of the nice things that both those models sort of tell us is that there's kind of no best answer.”
2019-04-02 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #55 Scott Page: Becoming a Model Thinker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so nobody might be happy. But then there's another model that models the same thing called the kernel blotto game. And in the kernel blotto game, there's a whole set of fronts. You can think of those as dimensions. But instead of it being a spatial characteristic, it's hedonic in the sense more is better, right? So if I think about buying a car, it could be like more miles per gallon is better. More legroom is better, right? Higher crash test scores are better. Less environmental damage is better. And so now when I think about comparing two things, I could just sort of say it's not which one is closer to me. Like this Brito is better because it's near my ideal point. I can sort of go across all these different dimensions and say wins. Well, what's cool about both those models is that if there's a big set of people deciding in the first one, there's a whole bunch of people who have different ideal points and they're trying to decide. There's generally no winner. So there's those sort of best things. So if you think about, okay, I'm going to go to University of Michigan.”
2019-04-02 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #55 Scott Page: Becoming a Model Thinker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Eyes, there's a heat, there's an amount of beef and amount of rice or something. That's your perfect burrito. Well, then you can imagine all the burritos that are for sale in Toronto or Ann Arbor or New York or you can put each of those same space. And then you're going to sort of choose the burrito that's closest to you. So then you're going to say, oh, this is the best burrito in Chicago. Well, if my ideal point's different than your ideal point. Then I may think a different thing is the best breed. Well, that same model you can use for it's actually the workhorse model in political science, we're thinking about which candidate do I vote for?”
2019-04-02 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #55 Scott Page: Becoming a Model Thinker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This gets back to, I mean, you asked a really prescient question earlier, which was. Do you know how to model something and how do you think about what assumptions to make? And I think what you do when you think about which models to use and how do you play them off one another is you want to get asked what is the nature of the thing I'm looking at? And then not so much, you know, sort of a checklist, but you can sort of like page through the book or page through your collection of models and think which ones here might be relevant. So let me give an example that I find my students love to sit around and play with, which is there's two models that have to do with sort of competition between two high-dimensional things. So one of them is a spatial model. And in the spatial model, there's an ideal point. So let's suppose that you have like your ideal burrito, which said it's like weighs about a pound and a half. It's got this proportion of sort of meat and rice. And it's hot, but not so hot that you've got to like, you know, have a giant cup of water right next to you. So you can think of that as a point, like sort of four-dimensional space, right?”
2019-04-02 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #55 Scott Page: Becoming a Model Thinker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I think that it's worth having a discussion with yourself, I mean, not you, but your listeners, is to think, okay, what are my capacities? Am I someone who's able to learn things really, really deeply? Am I able to learn a lot of stuff? And then think about a strategy for what sort of human capital you develop, right? Because I think you can't make a difference in the world. You can't go out there and do good. You can't take this knowledge and this wisdom and make the world a better place. Unless you've sort of acquired a set of useful tools, not only individually, but also sort of they've got to be collectively useful. Because you could learn 15 different models that are disconnected, that applied in different cases, and never sort of have any sort of just solved any sort of whole, and that might make it hard for you to sort of make a contribution. Or you could say, I'm going to be someone who learns 30 different models, but if you're not someone who's nimble and able to move across them, that may be more frustrating for you.”
2019-04-02 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #55 Scott Page: Becoming a Model Thinker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, you know, so you need this weird balance of specialists, super generalists, quasi specialist generalists. I mean, there's even people who I've heard describe themselves as having that their human capital is in the shape of a T, right, in the sense that there's a whole bunch of things they know a decent amount about, and then one thing they know deep. Or other people describe themselves as like a symbol for pie, right? Where there's two things they know pretty deep, not as deep as the tea person, and then a range of things that sort of connect those two areas of knowledge, and then a little bit after each side.”
2019-04-02 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #55 Scott Page: Becoming a Model Thinker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In the sense that you want each model, there is a sense in which different models look at different parts, but you need that overlap, right? Because you can't carve nature at its joints. That's what we've learned over the last 50, 100 years, is that it's complex. The world is a complex place. And so I think that the challenges to become a more nimble thinker is to be able to sort of move across these models. But at the same time, if you can't, like if that's just not your style, that doesn't mean there's no place for you in the modern economy. To the contrary, it means that maybe you should be one of those people who goes deep, right?”
2019-04-02 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #55 Scott Page: Becoming a Model Thinker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, I think the simple models we teach people because we thought like Plato, it was Plato's famous quote about carving nature at its joints, right? I think there was a belief that we could carve nature at its joints. And then for each one of those little pieces. Just sort of apply this model, and so people will sometimes say, oh,”
2019-04-02 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #55 Scott Page: Becoming a Model Thinker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT