YouSaid · the spoken record

Venkatesh Rao

lines on the record: 73
first: 2016-01-28
most recent: 2016-01-28
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Books that I reread. Douglas Adams is probably the most consistent kind of rereading. Oddly enough, TV has had a very weird effect on my rereading. Like Agatha Christie, I love her mystery novels and I used to reread at least a handful of them every few years. But once we got streaming Netflix and all the television versions of the Poirot mysteries have been available, I just re-watch them instead.”
2016-01-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #7 Venkatesh Rao: The Three Types of Decision Makers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Years where I might be reminiscing with an old friend, and we say, Oh, remember when we beat our heads against that difficult book? So influence is a very hard thing to quantify. And I think what we end up doing when we talk about influential books is almost a social signaling game where you're trying to advertise the identity you most want to inhabit right now to others. So right now I might be thinking of myself as, I don't know, a mid-career blogger slash management consultant and I want to come across as say wise and somebody who has everything together and then I might list three books that sort of reflect that perception I want to project. And that would be kind of a bad faith exercise in hypocrisy, which is why I don't like this question of what books have influenced you because influence is like we discussed a very complicated phenomenon.”
2016-01-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #7 Venkatesh Rao: The Three Types of Decision Makers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“30s, and all they are is huge books of trigonometric identities that you sit and solve, like several hundred problems. And this is like a mental weight training. And I work through several such books. Another is a book by a Soviet scientist called Irodov, i.e. Irov I R O D OV. It's an obscure little book of math and physics problems that was very popular in Soviet Russia and was very popular in India when I was studying for exams to get into university. And Erodov is a book that has been massively influential in my thinking because I spent two years of my life probably some of my smartest years, hours and hours a day simply sitting and solving calculus and physics problems from the book and beating my head against the wall with that book. And that's obviously been a huge influence. But I barely ever think of it. I don't have a copy now. I don't go back and reference it. It comes up maybe in conversation once every 10 years.”
2016-01-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #7 Venkatesh Rao: The Three Types of Decision Makers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Gatch 22 is a book that I read as a teenager and I've never read since. That was kind of a short turn influence. I don't know what influence it's had on my life, but it has had an influence. Whereas Douglas Adams, Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, is more of the trickle influence where I definitely reread it every three years or so. And each time I unpack a new layer of sort of philosophical cleverness and humor in the book and it sort of reshapes my thinking all over again. So there's that kind of influence. And then there's other stuff like, I mean, school is underrated. The things we learn in school. I spent two years in high school becoming very good at solving trigonometry and calculus problems. And that sort of really shaped and forged my brain. And these are not books that you would typically put on a list of the sort you're suggesting where the books would be, let me try and see if I can even remember. There's a series of books by a British mathematician called SL Loney. And these are books written in the”
2016-01-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #7 Venkatesh Rao: The Three Types of Decision Makers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That they are the books that have influenced me the most because that's actually a question that's kind of problematic because influence is a very hard quantity to measure where you might say that when you were going through like a very angsty team crisis at the age of 17 and you read the little prints or catcher in the rye and that totally, I don't know saved your sanity back when you were 17 and you know, kicked your life on a 90 degree different course. That's very influential. It might have steered your life that way. Whereas another book might be the sort of little trickle of a drop at a time seeping into your brain because you reread it every three years like say a lot of the rings for whom for a lot of people a lot of the rings is something that we reread every three years. I'm not one of them, but there's a lot of people who do that. So there's that kind of book. So for me, an example of both kinds would be”
2016-01-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #7 Venkatesh Rao: The Three Types of Decision Makers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I have a page on my blog. It's rubenforum.com reading, so now dash reading, where I maintain kind of an active radar of things in my pipeline, so to speak. And I do have a list there of top books and their top in the sense that I reference them a lot. They're like foundational mental models. So Lake Off is one of the metaphors we live by. We've got Gareth Morgan's images of all.”
2016-01-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #7 Venkatesh Rao: The Three Types of Decision Makers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's a dangerous question because the moment you answer 10 years later, it turns out to have been a very productive thing to have been doing. What are they wasting time on? Honestly, I don't know. Yeah, that's a tough one”
2016-01-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #7 Venkatesh Rao: The Three Types of Decision Makers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You go through some pathological thought process of mourning for that lost utopia. A lot of people are going through that right now where they're upset that we didn't get our 1950s flying car. So that's the reason I don't play the game of trying to predict the future.”
2016-01-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #7 Venkatesh Rao: The Three Types of Decision Makers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, I don't play that game. This is something that's almost become, I don't know, a philosophy of mine where I say this in breaking smart, where I say I'm not going to attempt to predict the what and when of the future, I'm only going to try and predict the how of the future. What ways of working are going to be more effective in the future as opposed to in the present? The moment you get sucked into this game of trying to predict what's in the future and you're not doing it in a systematic way like being part of a hedge fund that's doing very recent calculated bets on your predictions, it sort of sucks you into a sort of utopianism of the new. And I talk about this in Breaking Smart as well, where you get attached to a particular vision, where you say, oh, the thing that's going to happen and must happen is flying cars with bio nanotech circuitry. And then that doesn't happen.”
2016-01-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #7 Venkatesh Rao: The Three Types of Decision Makers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Because a lot of these things, when you actually let the market decide what the cost is, the cost is so close to zero that we round it down to zero. That makes it very hard to actually do meaningful computations here. And that's one of the things that people think cryptocurrencies might be helpful there, where it becomes possible to meter even the tiniest of cash flows where each individual transaction might be worth like a fraction of a penny. But if you put on enough automated circuitry in all your transactions, it might build up to something more meaningful. So that's a vision that some people have.”
2016-01-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #7 Venkatesh Rao: The Three Types of Decision Makers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, Definitely, it's a case of that. The thing that trips people up about this conversation is there are too many zeros in the equation where you are getting information that would, in terms of substitute products, would cost you thousands of dollars if you had to do it through a traditional network of paper libraries, right? Like I can just type in a search term and get an answer I want and if I didn't have Google, I'd have to go to my local library, look for the reference there, go through the interlibrary loan system to get a book if they don't have it. It would be instead of 15 minutes of work processing search results, I would do 20 hours of work. The value to me is 20 hours of my own time. But it's clearly ridiculous to value things that way because the economy is not a closed system where you can value things the cost of a substitute sort of in a vacuum so”
2016-01-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #7 Venkatesh Rao: The Three Types of Decision Makers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So the beginnings of such an information for money, economy are starting to emerge, but it's going to take hundreds of examples, probably a dozen or more court cases and lots of regulation before we sort of figure this thing out.”
2016-01-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #7 Venkatesh Rao: The Three Types of Decision Makers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And you're seeing limited versions of that where you can now buy a little device that you plug into your car that your insurance company will use to give you lower premium. So you'll get a discount on your premiums based on like transmitting data back to them.”
2016-01-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #7 Venkatesh Rao: The Three Types of Decision Makers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, one sort of interesting argument I've heard is these people are the equivalent of laboratory researchers and they should be paid for the research function as well. And this sort of ties into the larger argument that anybody who's involved in producing large amounts of data that go into these big platform type industries, they really should be compensated for the value of the intelligence they're pouring into the platform. And this is why people, of course, are talking a lot about data monopolies and the new algorithmic monopolies because that's what these companies are doing. They're generating a huge amount of data through their operations that is feeding the next generation of machine learning based technology and automation. And they're in the position to, of course, reap the benefits of that. And to some people, it seems fair that the people involved in generating that data should be compensated for it.”
2016-01-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #7 Venkatesh Rao: The Three Types of Decision Makers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Good versus evil thinkers, or they might be, I need to be part of this tribe that makes this happen kind of thinkers, whatever their approach, the contributing intelligence in the form of information in addition to money. And this group typically gets compensated a bunch of, I don't know, gift economy type artifacts. You might get a t-shirt, you might get a shout out on Twitter, you might get like an early advance.”
2016-01-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #7 Venkatesh Rao: The Three Types of Decision Makers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I don't think there's a single universal answer, it's a very sort of contentious debate right now, and people are sort of exploring different answers. So it's useful to think not at the general principle level, but at the example level. So two examples, I think, that are driving the conversation forward the most are Kickstarter and the ride share economy. So Kickstarter, if you think about it, the early group of backers that gets a project off the ground, they're actually not just paying with their money to support a project, they're paying with their intelligence, they're doing work, they're reviewing like lots and lots of projects that they might be scanning on Kickstarter and sort of making reasoned decisions about, hey, this is an interesting new innovation that deserves support. Now, they might be using any of the three decision-making processes we thought about before. They might be conceptual thinkers, they might be”
2016-01-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #7 Venkatesh Rao: The Three Types of Decision Makers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Then you've got another big layer of, say, a developer community that's beta testing and you're trying to woo them to use your technology. Beyond that, you might have a much broader ring of say 100 people who are really not even part of your producer team. They're part of your early adopter consumer team. But because they're like power users who understand your technology well and may do a little bit of hacking, they're the ones who are going to discover the use cases that will actually work and establish a product. So think of the outermost ring as sort of the prosumers, the people who are partly producing in addition to consuming in return for things like discounts and the very core being like the best compensated people who have a chance of becoming stock option millionaires or something. That's the structure of a team that makes something happen in today's economy. It's not matrix management or any of these old ideas.”
2016-01-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #7 Venkatesh Rao: The Three Types of Decision Makers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Typical project, so no good, successful project in a software eaten world can be really, really big. At most, you might have, let's talk about the software project as sort of a prototype because that's a new kind of core work. You might have, say, an overall extended team of say 150 building a product. And you might have a structure where the core team of employees with stock options and careers and the ability to buy houses and all these super talented people who've kind of gotten the golden ticket, that might be a core group of 15 to 20 inside the company. Then you might have another ring of longer term contract workers of say 15 to 30 who are doing less critical tasks. Then you've got another layer of small boutique firms handling things like social media marketing, doing a little bit of focus group research, things like that.”
2016-01-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #7 Venkatesh Rao: The Three Types of Decision Makers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Matrix management is a very old idea, actually. It's at least as old as I would say in early 80s is when it became popular. So with the first wave of deregulation and the creation of a lot of outsourced and subcontracting kind of economy in the manufacturing sector. So the Reagan Thatcher era matrix management came about when people realized that you needed a line management access, which was traditional companies along with a project management access because so many needs were transient. So that is a very old idea. And that's, I would say, actually the incumbent traditional management now. It's not the new stuff. Matrix management is the default in the old economy right now. That's how projects get managed. What is new is managing projects through multiple circles of contingent labor. So think of a”
2016-01-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #7 Venkatesh Rao: The Three Types of Decision Makers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Was paycheck employees, and by 1980 it was close to 80 to 90 percent. So that was a very long, two century long trajectory of increasing paycheck employment. And if you flip that around, you see that what it means is the number of free agents, the number of people living in the interstices of the economy slowly shrank in the developed world. Now that process is being re sort of inverted, and now I would say, depending on whose estimates you believe, it's somewhere between 30 to 40 percent.”
2016-01-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #7 Venkatesh Rao: The Three Types of Decision Makers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“40 50 years that's slowly shrinking and disappearing and with it the middle class and so forth so my hypothesis is that not all of Chandler's sort of hypotheses about the 1950s era are being slowly flipped one by one and we've seen that for the last 20-30 years but perhaps the biggest flip is that the defining archetype of the new world of organizations is no longer the middle manager but in fact the free agent so people like you and me the people who don't actually live in organizations at all but live in the ecosystems of organizations or as intermediaries between organizations so it's like in the 1950s 90 of i think it was about yeah almost 90 at that point of humanity lived a paycheck lifestyle and this was the end of like a 200 year historical process that i've written about like in 1780 there were less than 20 of the american workforce”
2016-01-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #7 Venkatesh Rao: The Three Types of Decision Makers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“CEOs or senior leaders were the defining feature of the new kind of organization that had emerged by the 50s and 60s. And the culture of modernity, the structure of cities, the structure of education, everything could be sort of inferred from the single fact of the rise of the middle manager, professional large organization. And that's of course being reversed today. That's the layer of the working world at least that's increasingly being automated. We no longer go through like four layers of approvals to get like a travel expense farm reimbursed. We go to a piece of software, enter some details. Maybe one person takes a look at it and clicks OK and then you get your reimbursement in your next paycheck, right? So that entire population that was the sort of anchor element of an entire way of life that persisted.”
2016-01-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #7 Venkatesh Rao: The Three Types of Decision Makers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh, okay. So he's written a couple of books structure and strategy, the visible hand, and so forth. And at the beginning of, I think structure and strategy, there's a list of hypotheses he lists about the new kind of organizations that were emerging in his time. So remember, when Chandler wrote his works, the robber baron corporations of the 1880s and 1890s had become established, big companies and had created a whole way of life around them. Populations had moved from the agrarian hinterland to the evolving new cities. A second generation of companies had come up. And Chandler made a whole bunch of observations. I think there was a list of about 10 or 12 hypotheses in chapter one about the nature of this new kind of organization that had emerged. And among them, for example, was the idea that middle managers, managers of other managers who were not”
2016-01-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #7 Venkatesh Rao: The Three Types of Decision Makers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I haven't yet. So, I'm just getting started on framing my hypotheses and ideas here. So let me give you the starter frame and where I'm hoping to go from there. So my starting frame is this idea from Alfred Chandler in the 1960s called Structure Follow Strategy. You may have heard that phrase.”
2016-01-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #7 Venkatesh Rao: The Three Types of Decision Makers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Impact of digital technologies on the one hand, and because of just our growing understanding of what organizations are and how they work on the other, where we've had now a couple of centuries of experience running corporate entities and various sorts of modern organizations. And we have like 30 to 50 years of management science that has given us a lot of insight into how organizations work. Can we put that together and sort of paint a portrait of the world of organizations that's emerging now? So that's kind of my big theme.”
2016-01-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #7 Venkatesh Rao: The Three Types of Decision Makers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And run and operationalized. And you've got everything from the extreme fringe of smart contracts on cryptocurrency blockchains where there is no organization per se, but everybody has this sort of digitally mediated peer-to-peer relationship with everybody else that they're economically engaged with. So it's like the smart network of contracts that's doing economic work to the other extreme where you might have like a really ancient organization like the Catholic Church, which might adopt digital realities in a very sort of measured and slow way and is probably not going to go away because it's not becoming a blockchain based organization or something. And most of the world is somewhere in between those two extremes. And it would be, I think, fascinating to really sit back and think about, all right, what's happening to organizations because of the”
2016-01-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #7 Venkatesh Rao: The Three Types of Decision Makers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'm going to be looking at the future of organizations. It's a topic that's been really interesting to me for almost 10 years now. And since the beginning of my blogging on Ribbon Farm, in fact, what put me on the map as a blogger was the Gervase Principle series, which I started in 2009 and finished, I think, in 2013. So a six-part series that's now an ebook. And that was all about organizational psychology and how organizations really work. So that's one element of the thread that I want to develop and more careful and complete ways. The other motivation, of course, is that as things happen in the environment now that are causing a big change in, how do I put it, the operating system of how organizations are conceived and grow?”
2016-01-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #7 Venkatesh Rao: The Three Types of Decision Makers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think it's more the second case. I'm being immersed in the thought space for a year and then writing about it carefully for about four months and then spending another eight months doing workshops and explaining those ideas to people. It's a very gradual process. There's no sudden moment where you say, oh, I used to be this other kind of guy and now I'm this kind of startup culture evangelist guy. It's not that overnight kind of transition. It's more like a lot of ideas that might have been fringe for you suddenly becoming more and more normalized. So for example”
2016-01-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #7 Venkatesh Rao: The Three Types of Decision Makers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A difficult question. It's really hard to see change in yourself until it's like 10 years down the line and then you think back and say, hey, that was a turning point and I radically changed my personality. Like sometimes there's like cues that say that your personality has changed suddenly and radically. Other times it's like the parable of the frog being boiled and not realizing it.”
2016-01-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #7 Venkatesh Rao: The Three Types of Decision Makers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Spend a lot of time interacting with native thinkers in that world, people whose everyday work involves basically software eating the world and what to do about it, how to take advantage of it, how to do startups in that world, how to invest in that world. So it was very interesting. It was kind of like embedded anthropology. And I'm personally, I don't consider myself part of that world. I don't know what world I'm part of, but I'm not part of that one directly. So it was kind of a very interesting spectator experience for me. And I tried to capture that. And that's where those essays came from. And it's been interesting because they're much more accessible than most of my regular writing and a very different kind of audience has responded in a very different way than I'm used to.”
2016-01-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #7 Venkatesh Rao: The Three Types of Decision Makers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, that was an interesting writing project because it's not like the kind of writing that put me on the Blagosphere maps. So Ribbon Farm is very much sort of my exploratory laboratory of thinking where I basically do my own thing. And Breaking Smart was much more of, all right, here's a universe of ideas that certain people in Silicon Valley understand extremely well and other people outside it see as like this alien idea space that's a new way of living in the world that I don't understand at all. So there's this sort of the intellectual equivalent of a digital divide and so it was very deliberate focused process of all right can I explain fairly clearly to smart people what it means that software is eating the world and working with Andrews and Horowitz for a year sort of gave me an opportunity to”
2016-01-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #7 Venkatesh Rao: The Three Types of Decision Makers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's increasingly digital and increasingly articles over books because books are now a very big investment. And I have to really either enjoy it a lot or have it be very much on the critical path of a project I'm involved in for me to finish a book these days.”
2016-01-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #7 Venkatesh Rao: The Three Types of Decision Makers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You like say, I don't know, let's go take this back to being a kid, and maybe you like adventure stories a lot, but horror stories or romance stories upset you or embarrass you or something. And you have to sort of become aware of that emotional reaction, start to manage it and learn how to enjoy that new kind of content. So it's like, I would reframe the problem of filtering information as learning how to enjoy information.”
2016-01-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #7 Venkatesh Rao: The Three Types of Decision Makers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You get so obsessed with the productivity of your reading that you're not able to enjoy it because enjoyment is actually not nice to have peripheral feature of the process of reading. Enjoyment is actually an important part of how you do the filtering that you're talking about, which is if you are enjoying it, continue reading. If you don't enjoy it, set it aside. And that's your brain's natural heuristic and it does a very good job actually. So there's not that much of a reason as you might think to add more filtering criteria. Now, sometimes there is because you can get into this addictive trap where your enjoyment filters are basically some sort of mind candy filters and you sort of filter out anything that's threatening or upsetting to you. Now, if you notice such a bias, then you kind of have to, I don't know, rewire your habits so that you have developer tolerance or appreciation for a kind of content that used to upset.”
2016-01-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #7 Venkatesh Rao: The Three Types of Decision Makers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Not so much. I mean, so long as I'm being entertained, I don't ask for productivity or like a certain rate of insight. So to me, it's actually the very natural heuristic that I used to practice as a kid, which is just continue reading if something is interesting and keeping engaging my interest where it's important not to overthink this stuff”
2016-01-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #7 Venkatesh Rao: The Three Types of Decision Makers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Evernote file, and if something else comes along, I'll connect it and so forth. That sort of kills the golden goose of serendipity. Where, on the other hand, if you just read and sort of trust the universe that you're exploring to surface the connections that are interesting, that happens a lot more naturally. And the really high value insights and connections that you can spot, they only happen if you don't try to have too much of a meta process.”
2016-01-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #7 Venkatesh Rao: The Three Types of Decision Makers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, in the first kind of reading where I'm reading towards a very deliberate end, I might take notes or more recently take pictures of a particular paragraph with my phone because I might quote that bit later and so forth. So that's for, again, it's a more academic citation focused way of reading. But the rest of the time, the random part, which I think is more crucial to my way of thinking, that I don't attempt to control it in any way. There's no meta process at all. I just read. And there's a reason for this, because if there's an actual idea that needs to pop into consciousness in a serendipitous way, as you point out, you can't force it. And if you try to sort of, I don't know, encourage it in sort of structured ways where you say, oh, I bought this one idea in this one book and it looks interesting. Therefore, I'm going to clip it and put it in my...”
2016-01-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #7 Venkatesh Rao: The Three Types of Decision Makers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Reading very well. The other kind is probably 80% of my reading, which is honestly pretty much completely random. I follow trails on Twitter, on Facebook, people send me stuff. I spot things on Amazon. And I don't read as much as I used to. My sort of stamina for that is going down. But this process is pretty much random, but that isn't to say that the effect of the process is random. The effect of the process is this is how you discover new stuff, like connecting back to our earlier conversation about blindness and so forth, exploratory reading is what creates cracks in your sort of secure mental models and allows you to see new things.”
2016-01-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #7 Venkatesh Rao: The Three Types of Decision Makers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I don't really have a process. If I'm working on a particular well-defined project, like right now I'm working on Breaking Smart the second season work, then there's a set of books that obviously I have to sort of get through and read and process. So that's somewhat like academic work where you have to do a literature survey and understand what some people call the idea maze of a domain. This is a phrase in the startup world that was coined by Balaji Sri Niwas and it's the idea that you need to understand the map of the area you're exploring. So that kind of reading is relatively well defined where you have a goal you want to get to and you have a rough idea of the path but you have to go about assembling a map so that you can actually navigate your way there. So that's one kind of reading and I think traditional education teaches that kind of”
2016-01-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #7 Venkatesh Rao: The Three Types of Decision Makers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Momentum and inertia in the internal part, the thinking part, and not so much in the engagement part. And there's other kinds of people with the opposite bias where their engagement is overwhelmingly strong and their internal processes aren't keeping up. So their arms race is imbalanced in a different way.”
2016-01-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #7 Venkatesh Rao: The Three Types of Decision Makers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's a very good analogy, yes. So I think it's probably a sign of a very healthy mental process if you are able to create and sustain a Red Queen's arms race between sort of your mindful engagement of external reality data and sort of your eyes shut process of like making your mental model more coherent and useful in terms of simulations and seeing ahead. You actually mentioned something like this in one of your recent posts, the 2x2 of engaged versus thinking and good versus bad. This is roughly that distinction and how to keep that process in balance because you let one overwhelm the other, it gets really unhealthy. And the kind of decision making that you and I seem to enjoy has a bias. It tends to preferentially sort of create”
2016-01-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #7 Venkatesh Rao: The Three Types of Decision Makers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So it's almost like the equivalent of a financial bubble going on inside your head. That's what a mental model that's divorced from reality data is. It's a financial bubble inside your head where valuations are going weirdly and internal dynamics are overwhelming connection with the real economy.”
2016-01-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #7 Venkatesh Rao: The Three Types of Decision Makers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But the sort of cautionary tale here is if you don't have constant reality data coming in into your mental model, you'll make all possible connections. And they won't actually contain any information. They'll just be connections. They'll just be patterns that sort of become evident like in Matt. And this person who is just a head full of information and it being wired up creates a set of mental models in their head that becomes increasingly leak proof over time. So it becomes leak proof by becoming more interconnected internally. You have an explanation for any possible thing you can think of any way your thoughts and decisions turn. There's like some set of connections and ideas that sort of frames the decision for you and makes it. But the actual value of the information is depreciating slowly, like a bank account that's sort of divorced from the reality of the outside world.”
2016-01-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #7 Venkatesh Rao: The Three Types of Decision Makers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Data, if there's like three objects and you've tried to connect them up, there's three different ways to do it. If there's four objects in your head, there's six different ways to connect them up.”
2016-01-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #7 Venkatesh Rao: The Three Types of Decision Makers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“15 years of such data, and then they live their life without any more data. Now, I think two things could happen to such a person. One is that information in their head that's already there, it can erode or depreciate like a bank account. It can start to lose value. But the other thing that can happen is it can get more and more interconnected internally. That's what happens when you close your eyes to reality data, information that's already inside your head has a tendency to sort of get wired up in more and more complex ways and people love that. It's an addictive process. It's like, oh, this idea from the Bible is actually very similar to quantum mechanics. And therefore, quantum mechanics was predicted by the Bible. That's sort of process sort of snowballs and your head becomes full of this richly interconnected web of ideas. But the basis for the interconnection is blindness. I mean, it's not supported by more reality.”
2016-01-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #7 Venkatesh Rao: The Three Types of Decision Makers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah. And I think that actually is a very dangerous process. That's how mental models sort of snowball in complexity and connectedness and increasing in their ability to blind you. Because if you close your eyes, let's take this hypothetical person who spends 15 years in college and grad schools becoming like the world's most erudite academic. They've read all the books, they've read, they watch all the movies, they've viewed all the paintings and read all the criticism about everything. So their head is completely full of information from mediated sources, so to speak. Not direct reality data of looking at the world itself, but lots of these process, it's like processed food for the brain. So this hypothetical person closes their eyes at age 30, say, and their head is full of like.”
2016-01-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #7 Venkatesh Rao: The Three Types of Decision Makers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'm going to take this idea I learned in mathematics and combine it with this other idea I learned from art history. And I'm going to come up with this new way of doing mathematical art, right? So a lot of people fall in love with that idea of forming connections as the foundation of thinking.”
2016-01-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #7 Venkatesh Rao: The Three Types of Decision Makers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This might sound like stating the obvious, but it actually needs to be stated, and people need to repeat this to themselves frequently, that there is in fact a real world out there that you can stop and pause and actually take a look at. It's not all abstract categories inside your head. Anytime you just pay attention to what your eyes are seeing or your ears are hearing, that's how you sort of make sure the cracks stay open. So that's the short answer. And I know it wasn't super short. The longer answer, which is sort of perhaps more helpful, has to do with something that took me a long time to realize, which is a lot of people think that creative and imaginative thinking has to do with connecting ideas from different domains. That's the function of, for example, metaphor. That's the function of certain types of creative pattern recognition in academic research where people say,”
2016-01-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #7 Venkatesh Rao: The Three Types of Decision Makers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Give you a short answer and a long one. The short answer is basically mindfulness, just paying attention to the world itself, which is shut down the inner dialogue. And, well, look at the world. Look outside your window. Right now there's a Magnolia tree that's about to flower outside my window.”
2016-01-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #7 Venkatesh Rao: The Three Types of Decision Makers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“My views have evolved a little bit on this since I wrote tempo, and I would say the easiest way to understand what mental models do in our thinking is they act like the blinders they put on horses. You've seen those things, right? Little side blinders that prevent the horse from looking on the sides and getting distracted. So your mental model's job is basically to blind you. It's to blind you to 99.99999999999999999999999999999999% of all the pertinent reality data that could possibly be salient to a decision so that you're paying attention to an extremely narrow stream of information. That's the purpose of mental bottles to blind you.”
2016-01-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #7 Venkatesh Rao: The Three Types of Decision Makers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT