It’s one thing if you intend to be strategic about things and fail to do so in part due to lack of numeracy. It’s another if you aren’t even trying to be strategic in the first place. I suspect that a large majority of the time the issue is not being strategic.
Furthermore, I suspect that most people aren’t strategic because they find being strategic distasteful in some way. I’ve experienced this a lot in my life.
I’ll want to skim through Yelp for 10 minutes before choosing a restaurant to eat at.
Or spend 20 minutes watching trailers and googling around before picking a movie to watch.
Or spend 30 minutes on The Wirecutter before making a purchase for a few hundred dollars.
Or spend however many dozens of hours researching all sorts of stuff about different cities before moving to one.
I’ve found that various people see these sorts of things as being, depending on what type of mood they’re in, “overly analytical” or “Adam being Adam”.
On the other hand, I think there is a smaller but not super small subset of people who don’t find it particularly distasteful and would be pretty receptive to a proposal of “you’re currently not being strategic about lots of things in your life, being strategic about them would benefit you greatly, and so you should start being strategic about them”.
I think that it is important to identify what the real blocker or blockers are here. If there are, for example, multiple blockers and you solve one of them, then you end up in a situation where progress is merely latent. It doesn’t really lead to observable results. For example, if someone is both 1) innumerate and 2) not motivated to be strategic, if you teach them to be numerate, (2) will still be a blocker and the person will not achieve better outcomes.
I’m remembering the following excerpt from The Scout Mindset. I think it’s similar to what I say above.
My path to this book began in 2009, after I quit graduate school and threw myself into a passion project that became a new career: helping people reason out tough questions in their personal and professional lives. At first I imagined that this would involve teaching people about things like probability, logic, and cognitive biases, and showing them how those subjects applied to everyday life. But after several years of running workshops, reading studies, doing consulting, and interviewing people, I finally came to accept that knowing how to reason wasn’t the cure-all I thought it was.
Knowing that you should test your assumptions doesn’t automatically improve your judgement, any more than knowing you should exercise automatically improves your health. Being able to rattle off a list of biases and fallacies doesn’t help you unless you’re willing to acknowledge those biases and fallacies in your own thinking. The biggest lesson I learned is something that’s since been corroborated by researchers, as we’ll see in this book: our judgment isn’t limited by knowledge nearly as much as it’s limited by attitude.
I totally agree that’s a (the?) root level cause for most people.
My guess (although I’m not sure) is that in Critch’s case working with CFAR participants he was filtering on people who were at least moderately strategic, and it turned out there was a third blocker.
I wonder whether Humans are not automatically strategic is the deeper issue here.
It’s one thing if you intend to be strategic about things and fail to do so in part due to lack of numeracy. It’s another if you aren’t even trying to be strategic in the first place. I suspect that a large majority of the time the issue is not being strategic.
Furthermore, I suspect that most people aren’t strategic because they find being strategic distasteful in some way. I’ve experienced this a lot in my life.
I’ll want to skim through Yelp for 10 minutes before choosing a restaurant to eat at.
Or spend 20 minutes watching trailers and googling around before picking a movie to watch.
Or spend 30 minutes on The Wirecutter before making a purchase for a few hundred dollars.
Or spend however many dozens of hours researching all sorts of stuff about different cities before moving to one.
I’ve found that various people see these sorts of things as being, depending on what type of mood they’re in, “overly analytical” or “Adam being Adam”.
On the other hand, I think there is a smaller but not super small subset of people who don’t find it particularly distasteful and would be pretty receptive to a proposal of “you’re currently not being strategic about lots of things in your life, being strategic about them would benefit you greatly, and so you should start being strategic about them”.
I think that it is important to identify what the real blocker or blockers are here. If there are, for example, multiple blockers and you solve one of them, then you end up in a situation where progress is merely latent. It doesn’t really lead to observable results. For example, if someone is both 1) innumerate and 2) not motivated to be strategic, if you teach them to be numerate, (2) will still be a blocker and the person will not achieve better outcomes.
I’m remembering the following excerpt from The Scout Mindset. I think it’s similar to what I say above.
I totally agree that’s a (the?) root level cause for most people.
My guess (although I’m not sure) is that in Critch’s case working with CFAR participants he was filtering on people who were at least moderately strategic, and it turned out there was a third blocker.