Get to the right idea, by killing bad ideas.
What would happen if you assume you will fail?
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A bear called No-No
Once upon a time, in a tranquil forest, there lived a charming but very stubborn young bear named No-No.
No-No said "No" to everything.
Each morning, he refused to get dressed, he wouldn't eat his meals, and he never wanted to go out and play.
Every morning was a world war for his mother to get him ready for school.
And he wasn’t even a teenager yet.
He was only 5.
No-No's parents, gentle and loving, tried to encourage him to try new things, always with patience and understanding.
One sunny day, after many refusals, No-No's parents had a clever idea. They began to say "no" to things they knew No-No might enjoy. "No, we won't go to the park today," they said. "No, you can't play with your favorite toys right now”.
This puzzled little No-No. Why were his parents saying "No" to all the fun things?
One evening, a tiny, shimmering fairy named Glimmer appeared. "Hello, No-No," Glimmer said with a twinkle in her eye. "I’ve been watching you, and I bet you are frustrated by your parents saying No all the time".
No-No stomped his foot down and said, “No, I’m not frustrated. Why are my parents being so annoying?”
Through their conversation, Glimmer helped No-No understand the importance of a growth mindset.
He realized that being open to new challenges and experiences fostered happiness and personal development.
No-No learned an invaluable lesson: while it’s okay to set boundaries, cultivating a growth mindset by saying "yes" can lead to more meaningful and enriching experiences.
And so, No-No bear learned to balance his No’s with thoughtful Yes’s embracing the journey of exploration and the fulfillment that comes with a growth mindset. Glimmer, the fairy, continued to visit from time to time, always encouraging No-No to keep growing.
And they all lived happily ever after.
Adapted from the children’s story by Meir Shalev to be West Coast compliant
Introduction
This week, I’ll talk about inversion, why it works and how to use it to solve tough problems.
The concept of inversion was introduced by the mathematician Carl Gustav Jacobi, who lived in Germany over 200 years ago. Jacobi made fundamental contributions to elliptic functions, differential equations, and number theory.
Jacobi would tell his students that when looking for a research topic, one must always invert ("man muss immer umkehren"). The idea is that inverting known results can open up new fields for research, for example inverting elliptic integrals and focusing on the nature of elliptic and theta functions.
Charlie Munger, the business partner of Warren Buffett and Vice Chairman of Berkshire Hathaway, is famous for his inversion quote “All I want to know is where I’m going to die, so I’ll never go there.”
What is inversion?
Inversion involves examining a problem or goal from the perspective of failure, focusing on how to achieve failure rather than how to achieve success.
Inversion challenges your conventional beliefs.
Proof by inversion (or contradiction) is a standard method in mathematics. It’s studied in first year mathematics courses in universities.
I could bore you with proof by contradiction of the theorem:
If n is not divisible by 3, then n2 is not divisible by 3,
but I won’t.
Instead I’ll take a popular example in the business world: Innovation.
Suppose you want to stimulate innovation in your company.
With forward thinking, you’d consider the things you could do to support innovation.
With inversion, you’d find things that discourage innovation - like long meetings and committees.
Ideally, you’d outlaw meetings over 10’ and committees.
I could get behind that. You?
Why does inversion work?
Inversion works because success is a series of good decisions without bad decisions.
The core principle of inverted thinking is to approach problems from an assumption of failure.
With inversion, you plan to achieve a negative outcome instead of planning for a positive outcome.
Then you remove what you think is wrong.
Inversion works because we naturally know more about what is wrong, or what is bad, or what is harmful, or what won’t work, than what is right.
Inversion (or Subtractive Epistemology as Nassim Taleb calls it) counters your confirmation bias, where all new data confirms your existing opinions and assumptions of success.
I don’t really need examples of how useful this could be - but consider October 7, 2023 and the attack on Israel by Hamas or 9/11 and the attack on the US by Al-Qaeda.
Planning to fail surfaces your vulnerabilities and how attackers, competitors and incompetence defeat your mission.
“It is remarkable how much long-term advantage people like us have gotten by trying to be consistently not stupid, instead of trying to be very intelligent.”
“Turn a situation or problem upside down. Look at it backward. What happens if all our plans go wrong? Where don’t we want to go, and how do you get there?
Instead of looking for success, make a list of how to fail instead–through sloth, envy, resentment, self-pity, entitlement, all the mental habits of self-defeat.
Avoid these qualities and you will succeed. ”
– Charlie Munger
How to use inversion
Start with a goal or problem. Ask yourself the best way to fail at your mission assuming that you were stupidly incompetent and that all the bad things in the world will happen to you at the same time.
Ask yourself, “How would I make me fail?” You probably know better than most.
Develop solutions to the attacks and vulnerabilities you found. Example:
What could you do to write an awful article that no one would want to read?”
The answer: be boring, offensive, sloppy, and unoriginal.
The solution: Make an extra effort to be interesting, polite, orderly, and novel
Summary
You can use inversion at work, in business and in your personal life.
In investing, you focus on avoiding losses rather than seeking gains, using Warren Buffett's rules - “Rule 1: Never lose money. Rule 2: Never forget rule 1”.
This is particularly relevant in loser games like investing, software development and cybersecurity. In loser games, most of the players are amateurs.
In loser games, you can make more by avoiding mistakes instead of by making brilliant moves.
Other examples of loser games are amateur tennis, amateur chess, and amateur coders that use AI to generate their code without really thinking about the problem thoroughly.
Preventing and correcting your mistakes is an important part of learning.
I think that many people would do much better if they accepted that they are still amateurs. If you use a 18 Trillion parameter LLM to generate code, that does not make you an expert on software engineering.
Because if you think about it, the usual process of getting to the right idea, is by eliminating a lot of bad ideas.
This is the essence of learning.
References