Are you working on the most important problem in your field? Why not? (with Rohit Krishnan)
Spencer Greenberg speaks with Rohit Krishnan about curiosity, problem-solving, and shaping mental models. They also discuss credentialing and its evolving value in society, exploring how individuals can best navigate these complex topics.
Deep Dive Analysis
12 Topic Outline
Curiosity as a Driver for Innovation
The Value of Exploring 'Weird Directions'
Distinguishing Between Bad and Improbable Ideas
Societal vs. Individual Optimization and Heuristics
The Role of Obsessive Focus in Success
The Importance of Creating Your Own Worldview
Network Theory as a Default Mental Model
Critique of Reductionism and Emergent Phenomena
Credentialing: Value Decline and System Cracks
Fakeable vs. Hard-to-Fake Signals in Credentialing
The Gaming of Standardized Tests and IQ
The Life Cycle of Credentialing Procedures
8 Key Concepts
Curiosity as a Heuristic
Curiosity serves as a valuable heuristic for individuals and society to allocate resources and discover high-potential problems. It suggests that allowing people to pursue what genuinely interests them, even if it seems 'weird,' can lead to collective innovation and unexpected positive externalities.
Objective-Driven Management Futility
Joel Lehman and Ken Stanley's work suggests that purely objective-driven management can be futile for innovation. Instead, unleashing curiosity is often more effective, as projects in technology and science rarely end up looking like their initial plans.
Worldview Creation
Creating a personal worldview involves synthesizing unique, borrowed, and stolen philosophies and mental models to understand how one feels about the world. This process helps in understanding one's own thought processes, identifying the limits of knowledge, and connecting disparate ideas into a cohesive knowledge tree.
Network Theory (Worldview)
This mental model views the world as complex systems of interconnected networks, where individual actors (nodes) make decisions that create relationships (edges). This framework helps analyze how information or resources flow and allows for slicing off 'mini-universes' to understand specific phenomena like the economy.
Incompetence, Malice, Bureaucracy Trilemma
A mental model used to understand why things go wrong, attributing problems to one of three categories: incompetence, malice, or bureaucracy. This helps avoid immediately blaming incompetence and provides a more nuanced understanding of systemic failures, especially in complex administrative situations.
Reductionism vs. Emergent Phenomena
Reductionism attempts to understand phenomena by breaking them down into their smallest interacting parts, which works well for some physical systems but poorly for social or emergent phenomena. A network or complex systems approach acknowledges that higher-level behaviors can emerge from simple interactions and require different analytical tools.
Credentialing Value Decline
As more people acquire credentials like college degrees, their signaling value decreases due to a 'scale problem.' What once served as an effective gateway for talent assessment becomes less predictive as the strategy gets gamed, leading to a 'red queen race' for ever-more credentials.
Fakeable vs. Unfakeable Signals
Signals of skill or talent can be 'fakeable' (e.g., a degree obtained through non-meritocratic means) or 'harder to fake' (e.g., direct proof of work like GitHub projects). The challenge is that as soon as a 'harder to fake' signal becomes widely known and adopted, it tends to become gamed and thus less predictive.
7 Questions Answered
Curiosity is seen as a potent force for innovation, serving as a key yardstick for individuals and society to decide where to allocate resources and pursue new creations, often leading to unexpected discoveries and growth.
While curiosity can lead to 'weird directions,' it is argued that the collective exploration of such directions, even if some fail, can lead to overall societal benefit by fostering learning, skill development, and unpredictable positive externalities.
Developing a personal worldview involves making an internal effort to synthesize one's unique, borrowed, and stolen views, philosophies, and mental models. This helps in understanding one's own thought processes, connecting ideas, and identifying the limits of one's knowledge.
Reductionism is an extremely popular default mental model, where people believe that by atomizing a process and understanding its moving parts, they can understand the broader phenomenon. However, this model struggles with social and emergent phenomena.
The value of credentials has declined because as more people pursue them, the strategy of obtaining them becomes widely known and gamed. This leads to a 'red queen race' where credentials become less effective at signaling true merit and require ever more hoops to jump through.
Yes, standardized tests can be gamed through studying and practice, as demonstrated by examples like Indian college entrance exams where students take years off to specifically prepare for tests. The claim that such tests are 'unfakeable' or 'ungameable' is viewed with suspicion.
Credentialing procedures tend to follow a cycle: a new procedure is introduced, it works effectively for a while, it eventually gets gamed as people learn to exploit it, and then a new credential or assessment method must be introduced to replace it.
14 Actionable Insights
1. Be Careful Who You Let Close
Be vigilant and careful about who you allow to become close to you, especially if they exhibit character traits that tend to cause harm to others.
2. Develop Personal Worldview
Synthesize your views and philosophies into a coherent personal worldview to better understand your own thought processes and address issues mindfully.
3. Prioritize Curiosity for Innovation
To be innovative or create something new, use your curiosity as the primary guide for allocating your time and resources, as this often leads to better collective outcomes.
4. Ask the “Hamming Questions”
Regularly ask yourself what the most interesting problems in your field are, and then honestly assess if you are actively working on those problems.
5. Evaluate Ideas by Value
Distinguish between ideas that are improbable but would be highly valuable if successful (worth pursuing) and those that would be pointless even if successful (avoid).
6. Cultivate Obsessive Focus
Observe that many successful individuals exhibit an obsessive focus on unique interests; steer towards deep interests to foster similar dedication.
7. Avoid Utilitarian Career Choices
Instead of solely pursuing the “best opportunity” based on external analysis, steer your career and time towards what genuinely interests you for greater engagement.
8. Test Belief Coherence
Actively think about the internal coherence of your opinions to test their limits and efficacy, especially when discussing topics outside your immediate silo.
9. Embrace Emergent Thinking
For complex social and biological issues, move beyond purely reductionist approaches and consider empirical or heuristic-based solutions that account for emergent phenomena and context.
10. Use Network Mental Model
Approach understanding complex phenomena by conceptualizing them as networks of interacting nodes and edges, visualizing information flow and recognizing model limitations.
11. Apply Trilemma for Problems
When something goes wrong, analyze it through the lens of incompetence, malice, or bureaucracy to avoid immediate blame and gain a nuanced understanding of the root cause.
12. View Understanding as Models
Recognize that all understanding is based on models, not absolute reality, and use multiple models to grasp different facets of a phenomenon.
13. Pursue Incremental Efficiencies
Focus on making small, incremental improvements in processes, as these accumulate over time to create significant collective value and platform advancement.
14. Stay Vigilant on Selection Metrics
Consistently evaluate and update the tools and metrics used for hiring or selection, moving past measures that become less predictive or are easily gamed.
5 Key Quotes
If you were curious about the problem that is in front of you, why are you actually not working on that?
Rohit Krishnan
I think bad crazy ideas sound awfully close to good crazy ideas. So I guess the light version of what I'm saying is maybe we should be a little bit more humble about our ability to distinguish between those two sorts of ideas, especially when someone else is trying to go off and do it for instead of us.
Rohit Krishnan
What's good for the hive is not always good for the bee.
Spencer Greenberg
I think there can be this tendency to think that the lower level things are more real than the higher level things.
Spencer Greenberg
Ultimately, what we want from people, and what the various credentials and tests actually tell us are correlated until they're not. And they're correlated when they're not actively being gamed.
Rohit Krishnan