September 2019 - Page 2 of 2

Yesterday did not start on a good note for me.

I broke three cups.

Sunday is when I usually prepare tea for the house. As I was pulling out three teacups from the cabinet, all with a single hand while holding the cabinet door with another, one of them slipped.

I watched, aghast, wanting time to stop. But it didn’t. In fact, it seemed to move faster. The cup was lost.

However, if that was not all, as I vainly attempted to catch it in that millisecond, the other two cups also dropped out of my hand.

All three were gone.

As I was cleaning up the mess, a realization struck. Maybe the second-best thing for me to do to save the two other cups was to let the first one go. The best thing, of course, would have been to not try pulling them out of the cabinet with one hand.

Life teaches us lessons almost all the time. We only need to observe well, and sometimes be prepared to hear the sound of breaking glass.

This post is the sixth episode of the multi-part series based on Peter Bevelin’s book — All I Want to Know is Where I’m Going to Die, So I’ll Never Go There.

So why are we talking about ideas on what doesn’t work rather than ideas on what works? Isn’t it a negative approach to talk about what doesn’t work? I’ll let Nassim Taleb explain why this works. In his book Antifragile, Taleb writes —

The greatest — and most robust — contribution to knowledge consists in removing what we think is wrong — subtractive epistemology…we know a lot more what is wrong than what is right…negative knowledge (what is wrong, what does not work) is more robust to error than positive knowledge (what is right, what works). So knowledge grows by subtraction much more than by addition — given that what we know today might turn out to be wrong but what we know to be wrong cannot turn out to be right, at least not easily…disconfirmation is more rigorous than confirmation.

Charlie Munger, while wearing his curmudgeon hat, declared, “All I want to know is where I am going to die, so I’ll never go there.” And that’s his way of driving home Taleb’s point about focusing on the negative knowledge.

Bevelin’s book is dedicated to Charlie Munger’s philosophy. Here are a few more insights from the book on what doesn’t work.
[Read more…] about Special Report: 27 Ideas on What Doesn’t Work — Part Six

Archives for September 2019