Wise vs Smart

Paul Graham has an interesting post, Is It Worth Being Wise?, where he addresses what wisdom is, and how it differs from (“merely”) being smart or intelligent. He dismisses two supposedly-popular accounts:

• wisdom applies to human problems, and intelligence to abstract ones
• wisdom comes from experience, while intelligence is innate.

He suggests an alternative:

• “wise” means one has a high average outcome across all situations, and “smart” means one does spectacularly well in a few.

Without discussing each in detail, I’d say that we have here what JS Mill regarded as the most common situation, i.e., each of a set of apparently conflicting opinions has some part of the truth:

the conflicting doctrines, instead of being one true and the other false, share the truth between them; and the nonconforming opinion is needed to supply the remainder of the truth, of which the received doctrine embodies only a part. Popular opinions, on subjects not palpable to sense, are often true, but seldom or never the whole truth. They are a part of the truth; sometimes a greater, sometimes a smaller part, but exaggerated, distorted, and disjoined from the truths by which they ought to be accompanied and limited. (On Liberty, Ch.2)

Graham’s own suggestion seems to me not quite right, not least because it will be hard to distinguish being smart from being lucky, which on occasion makes some decision turn out spectacularly well. Indeed, in non-trivial domains (“subjects not palpable to sense”), luck is plausibly the operative factor in most decisions which turn out spectacularly well. Curiously, the words “luck” and “fortune” don’t appear in Graham’s essay.

Having had a career in academic philosophy, hanging out at times with people at the top levels, and now having spent a few years in business, I have my own hunch about the difference between wisdom and smartness. It is probably only part of the truth, but worth throwing into the mix.

Academic philosophers are often smart – sometimes spectacularly so – but are rarely wise. Hence, for example, the proliferation of inane opinions supported by powerful-seeming arguments. Meanwhile, in my limited experience of business, the proportion of people who strike me as very smart seems rather less than in academia – but at the same time there seems to be somewhat more wisdom around.

As the “CEO” of a small software enterprise, I’ve found that one of the most demanding parts of the job is being required so often to make decisions on matters where the consequences may be quite large, but there are multiple relevant factors, huge unknowns, and no reliable method of making a decision, at least in any reasonable time-frame.

Wisdom is being able to generally make good choices when confronted with such decisions.

Smartness, on the other hand, is being able to “figure things out.” A good example in our company is when Dan, our lead programmer, figured out the mathematical equations governing the elegant shape of the curvy lines in analysis mode. (I’m not suggesting that Dan isn’t wise, only that he is smart.)

In business decisions, very often you’re simply not able to figure things out. You don’t have the information, the time, or even a reliable method or tools. All you can really go by are your hunches, which are grounded in

• your own personal experience of similar situations
• your general background knowledge. For example, you may learn quite a lot from reading books, blogs, etc.
• relevant insight you can glean from discussions you have with colleagues, company directors, friends etc.

From these sources you get a vague “sense” of the situation which recommends (for better or worse) a way to go. Wise people have more experience (from which they’ve been able to learn); more background knowledge; good colleagues etc; and are able to exploit these resources by synthesizing relevant parts of it into a reasonable “take” on the problem.

Practically speaking, to go beyond just relying on the intuitive hunch based on a sense of the situation, there seem to be two strategies:

1. Apply some simple decision structuring framework – SWOT, multi-attribute utility matrix, etc.
2. Follow an “ideology” – a prior commitment to a strategy, goal or approach which simplifies and guides the decision.

“Smart” people will of course dismiss both of these as being intellectually childish. But people who are merely smart have the luxury of being smart because, generally, they don’t have to be wise. If they were required to be wise, my guess is they’d end up doing much the same thing, and wouldn’t be so quick to dismiss apparently simplistic approaches.

So in short, being wise is making a reasonable choice in an inherently speculative or vague situation, a choice guided by a good sense of the situation which in turn is based on the knowledge one has immediately at hand – prior experience, background knowledge, and the people around you.  Often, with decisions demanding wisdom, you’ll never really know ifyou were right, i.e., if one of the other choices would have been better.  Being smart is being able to apply general intellectual resources to “think through” a problem and arrive at a recognisably “right” answer.

Being wise is not intrinsically better than being smart. Both have their place, and of course one would like to be both.

Benefits for lawyers

Why should lawyers, in their high-pressure, time-is-money line of work, bother to map arguments?

Yesterday Jane Lewis and I presented to a large Australian firm in their “Continuing Legal Education” series. There were about 100 or so lawyers from across the various practice areas. The session was introduced by the partner who has been most active in building a culture of argument mapping in his team. He mentioned the following four potential benefits:

• improve the quality of reasoning, primarily by making the reasoning more explicit and thereby available for more rigorous scrutiny
• improve the efficiency of the processes by which legal “products” containing reasoning are generated
• improve lawyers’ basic reasoning skills, i.e., their ability to organise and evaluate arguments “in their heads”
• improve the communication of complex reasoning to others, either within the firm or to clients, in court etc.

Of course, the extent to which these benefits are realised depends in part on the level of commitment to the activity.

Critical Thinking – Where to start?

“Just Some Guy” wrote today:

I recently stumbled on an excellent online article authored by yourself entitled “Teaching Critical Thinking“. I was wondering if you could take a moment of your valuable time to suggest a couple of books on the subject. I would like improve my critical thinking skills so I suppose the focus sought would be adult learner skill(s) acquisition with emphasis on techniques and (lots of) practice. I have been trying to develop said skills on my own (without much success). I would really like to have find a proven program to apply. As you know there is tons of information available online however I am getting lost trying to sort out all the wheat from chaff. Thank you in advance for your consideration.

I used to be a regular academic, and one reason for heading off in a different direction was the experience most academics know all too well, which is that you’ll slave for months on a paper, have it published, and then… nothing happens. It seems you may as well not have bothered. So it is gratifying when some paper you wrote, and which seemed to have vanished without a trace, starts to get picked up, read, and perhaps even appreciated. In the case of the paper mentioned above, in past month I’ve heard that it is the subject of a faculty discussion group at the University of Pittsburgh (where I did my PhD), and read by administrators at a startup university campus in Singapore. Now it seems to have helped Just Some Guy. Maybe it was worth the effort that went into it.

Anyway, regarding JSG’s query, in workshops I used to hand out brief annotated “further reading” list. Here it is:

There are hundreds of books on thinking and how to improve it, ranging from airport junk to turgid academic treatises. Here is a short list of some of the best, focusing on critical thinking. All are accessible, entertaining, and contain many valuable insights. Listed in alphabetical order, so don’t necessarily start at the top.

Cialdini, R. B. (1984). Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion. New York: William Morrow and Co. Classic, eye-opening description of the tricks, ruses and deceptions others use to manipulate us into doing what they want.

Giere, R. N. (1996). Understanding Scientific Reasoning (4th ed.). Fort Worth: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Inc. Very clear overview of the fundamentals of scientific reasoning. Basic literacy in scientific methodology.

Heuer, R. J. (1999). Psychology of Intelligence Analysis. Center for the Study of Intelligence, CIA. Although intended primarily to assist intelligence analysts, there is a lot of good stuff here, on both the descriptive (how our minds work) and normative (rules for better thinking) sides. Plus, available free online!

Kepner, C. H., & Tregoe, B. B. (1997). The New Rational Manager. Princeton: Princeton Research Press. These are the people who first brought “critical thinking” to the business world and built out of it a multinational consulting firm. Very practical orientation.

Minto, B. (1996). The Minto Pyramid Principle: Logic in Writing, Thinking and Problem Solving.  Minto Books International Limited (www.barbaraminto.com). [Note: this edition supersedes the earlier edition, published by Pearson.]  Barbara Minto was a McKinsey consultant and editor; this book is now the “Bible” in this area for major consulting firms. Some profound truths about good thinking and communication, cast in a way which makes sense for folks in the business community.

Myers, D. G. (2002). Intuition: Its Powers and Perils. New Haven: Yale University Press. “Europe in ten days” tour of the ways intuitive thinking can go wrong, according to serious psychologists. Pretty exhaustive coverage, but most of it will just wash over you.

Paul, R. W., & Elder, L. (2002). Critical Thinking: Tools for Taking Charge of Your Professional and Personal Life. Upper Saddle River, New Jersey: Financial Times Prentice Hall. Paul and Elder are prominent critical thinking instructors. This book packages their insights as practical tools for personal and professional life. Stresses psychological and ethical issues, though often becomes a bit too “pop psychology”.

Piatelli-Palmarini, M. (1994). Inevitable Illusions: How Mistakes of Reason Rule our Minds. New York: Wiley. Very readable introduction to some of the most famous cognitive biases and blindspots. More diagnosis than therapy.

Salmon, M. (1989). Introduction to Logic and Critical Thinking (2nd ed.). San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. The best of the standard undergraduate textbooks. A bit dull, but very sound.

Spence, G. (1995). How to Argue and Win Every Time. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Written by a criminal attorney who (according to the dust jacket) never lost a case. If you can look beyond the very “American” style, there is much wisdom here. It is a treatise in the art of rhetoric, but it is principled rhetoric rather than mendacious sophistry.

Whyte, J. (2004) Crimes Against Logic. McGraw-Hill. A short introduction to “fallacies,” i.e., common patterns of bad reasoning. Whyte runs through about a dozen, but there are dozens of others. Witty, fast-moving and brief.

Yep, that’s what we do…

On the AILACT list, Michael Scriven wrote:

Mark got in a dig about ’speed reasoning’ my most popular course; perhaps I should mention that the first thing I say in the first session is, there’s no royal road to speed reasoning, you just have to become good at plain old slow reasoning first, and then do it a thousand more times, and you’ve mastered speed reasoning. BUT WE CAN HELP with the first part, by giving you a nice bunch of tools, beginning with argt structuring, plus a number of templates for patterns to spot as problematic, plus some neat ways to counter those, and now let’s see how that works in ten subject matter fields, and then we’ll test you on five other ones to see if you’ve ‘got the point’ See… it’s easy to improve!

As it happens, that’s a pretty good description of the pedagogical approach in our “Critical Thinking: The Art of Reasoning” subject at the University of Melbourne. Though I’d emphasize that we don’t just begin with argument structuring, we use argument structuring in diagrammatic form (i.e., argument mapping) throughout the subject.

Money Detector Pen

Tonight was my talk at the Melbourne branch of the Skeptics, Are Philosophers Any Good?  The audience, about 50 or so, seemed engaged and entertained.  Most people had had a few drinks and were in a mood for a bit of fun and hyperbole at the expense of the philosophical profession.

At the end, I was given the de rigueur bottle of fine Australian red wine (much appreciated).  But more memorable, in the long run, was the novel gift of a boxed “MONEY DETECTOR PEN” inscribed with the words Australian Skeptics.   What does this do?  A quick Google search revealed that there is a quite a market for Counterfeit Money Detector Pens, i.e., pens which supposedly detect counterfeit money.  However the Australian Skeptics variety, it seems, detects not counterfeit money but money, i.e., the real thing.  So it is obviously much more useful.  I’ve tried it out (it took a while to figure out how to insert the batteries).  When it detects something it flashes green and red lights.  It seems to detect anything I point it at, so it certainly detects money.  In addition, it is “ANTI-RADiATION”, and “PORCH”.  By Porch, I think they mean Torch, though what it is in fact is a laser pointer.  Unfortunately the laser point only worked for a few seconds.

Arguments for compound events

Peter Tillers raised an important issue on the Rationale google group:

“I will have to figure out how best to use ‘Rationale’ to assess the
occurrence or non-occurrence of “composite events,” e.g., an event X
consisting of events a, b + c. This is because in law the factual
events in question in adjudication and investigation are invariably
such composite events; e.g., Did the Defendant (a) deliberately (b)
cause (d) the death of (e) another person… Incidentally, almost all
work on charting argument about or analysis
of factual questions in litigation assumes that the occurrence or
character of but a single event is in question. But that assumption is
incorrect. See P. Tillers, “Probability and Uncertainty in Law,”
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=738764″

I replied as follows:

Peter’s note concerns what lawyers call the elements of the crime of murder. Murder is a compound event. One way to specify the elements is, as Peter does, by listing the parts of speech which occur in a succinct sentence describing the compound event, i.e. the defendant

- deliberately

- caused

- the death of

- another person

Each of these however is shorthand for a component or aspect of the compound event. Thus “caused” is shorthand for the proposition

The defendant caused the death of the victim.

Note that this proposition takes for granted another proposition

The victim died.

and, if the charge of murder is to be sustained, another proposition must be true:

The victim was a person.

Since these propositions must all be true together, in Rationale we’d use an “Analysis” mode map:

The disadvantage of such a representation is that it is wordy, especially as compared with the shorthand approach mentioned above. However there are corresponding advantages. In particular it more accurately represents what the prosecution will, in fact, have to establish – i.e., the truth of a series of distinct but interrelated propositions. It also represents them in a more logically appropriate order, i.e, getting the order of logical priority roughly right; there’s no point in proving that the defendant did it deliberately if the victim wasn’t even a person. (It is interesting that the natural order in an English sentence is almost the reverse of the order of logical dependency.)

Nevertheless, we’re interested in the idea that there might be some alternative diagramming format in software such as Rationale which provides a more succinct and perhaps in some ways more practically “useable” way of representing these sorts of top-level legal cases.

Rationale 1.2 now available

 We’ve just released an update to Rationale.  No dramatic changes, but a bunch of enhancements aimed at improving the “user experience” and the general usefulness of the software. 

• Annotate maps by attaching sticky notes
• View maps in full-screen mode
• Present maps using improved layout options
• Enjoy animated zooming
• Keep workspace organised using auto-spacing of maps
• Open files faster
• Save preferences

Also, we’ve taken the interesting step of reducing the trial period from 30 to 14 days.  There were various pros and cons about doing this, and as with so many business decisions for a small, new software venture, we had limited information and no real way to know, within practical time and resource limits, what the best choice is.  So we have some informal deliberation in the team, and go with our collective hunches. 

[BTW the new 14 day trial period is available to anyone, even if you previously had a trial version which expired.]

We’re happy to be releasing 1.2.  With additional features and various “under the hood” improvements and fixes, it is a substantially improved product.  Naturally we’re very keen to know how it goes down with our community of actual and potential users, so if you have any thoughts or suggestions, please let us know.

Download from www.austhink.com/download  

Like Western Mass., only more so

Bill Bither of Atalasoft has an interesting post on the pros and cons of “Starting a software company outside a startup hub.”

“Outside,” for him, means an hour and a half drive away from the centre of gravity, which in his case is Boston.

There is no software startup hub remotely comparable to Silicon Valley or Boston in Australia. So, if an hour and a half drive is a real issue, we may as well be on another planet. The nearest real hub is thousands of miles and a very long flight away.

Yet, it does sometimes seem there are some compensatory advantages of being well outside where it is “all happening.” Bither mentions a number of possibilities, some of which apply to being in Melbourne. Another is, I suspect, that you have a little more space to be independent and original in your thinking.  Whether you can take advantage of that to produce a genuinely fresh innovation is of course another matter.

Why distinguish reasons and explanations?

A colleague wrote:

In both your new Rationale materials and your old Reason! lessons you distinguish between reasons and explanations. For instance, you point out that the word “because” is sometimes a reason indicator, other times an explanation indicator. I was wondering why, pedagogically, you make a point of distinguishing between arguments and explanations. You seem to want the students to focus primarily on the former and not the latter, but I anticipate that my students will find this confusing. I was wondering why, as a pedagogical matter, you point out this distinction to your students, and how you explain it to them.

My reply, such as it was:

I think that in the larger world of critical thinking, students should understand evidential reasons, and what makes them strong, and explanatory reasons, and when explanations are good ones. However when we are focusing on the former, the latter tends to muddy the waters.

Deanna Kuhn, in her classic The Skills of Argument, provides weighty evidence that a very large proportion of people have a seriously deficient grasp of the basic skills of reasoning and argument, and she diagnoses the problem as due in part to a poor grip on what a (evidential) reason is, i.e., what evidence consists in. Part of understanding this notion of an evidential relationship is understanding that sometimes, when we say things like the reason for X is Y, we’re not using Y to convince somebody that X is true, i.e., we’re using it to explain X rather than as evidence for X, which may already be uncontroversial.

There is now a considerable psychological literature on (evidential) reasons versus explanations. My take on this, which I think is broadly consistent with the literature, is that (causal) explanations come first. Our three-year-old seems to be getting a grasp of causal relations and answering “why” questions in terms of causal narratives, but she’s a long way from understanding the notion of evidence. The latter is a more sophisticated intellectual operation, one which only with considerable maturity is separated from explanations. A problem we face as university teachers is that our students haven’t fully made this transition; they are still foggy about the difference, which means they are foggy about the notion of evidence, which means they haven’t yet mastered the most fundamental concept in reasoning and argumentation.

You’ll notice that in Rationale, the second or “Reasoning” mode uses “because/but” language. This is ambiguous between explanations and evidential reasons. In the designing the software we were quite deliberately “allowing” that ambiguity, since it helps people who aren’t yet clear on the distinction become comfortable with structured reasoning on their own terms. As they progress to proper use of “Analysis” mode, with its language more weighted to the evidential (“supports”), they should be becoming more clear about what an evidential relationship consists in, not by being lectured on the topic (though that might sometimes help) but by dealing with examples in a scaffolded way.

By the way, Deanna Kuhn has an interesting piece on peoples’ ability to identify causal relationships in the current edition of Scientific American Mind.

Talk at Victorian Skeptics

Anyone likely to be in Melbourne on Feb 19 is welcome to join the Victorian Skeptics for an informal talk:

The abstract is

Academic philosophers, like most professionals, think they’re pretty good at what they do. I’ll present some general reasons for scepticism on this score. Then I’ll focus on one particular respect in which philosophers think they’re pretty good – teaching critical thinking. I’ll show detailed empirical evidence on critical thinking skills gains, which suggests that if you want students to get better at critical thinking, you should teach them critical thinking (not philosophy) and if you want them to get even better, you should teach them using argument mapping.

The talk is a blending of two things. First, a talk I gave about five years ago to various philosophy departments in Australia, in which I challenged the audience to come up with positive reasons to think that they are, in their core professional activities, any better than investment professionals such as stockbrokers, fund managers and the ilk, which have been shown by mountains of evidence to be useless at choosing superior investments, even if they are quite good at skimming vast sums of money from the savings of others. In response, philosophers generally came up with, at best, the kind of lame arguments they’d instantly ridicule others for making; the main outcome of all this, as far as I could tell, was resentment towards me for even raising the topic, which may partly explain why I haven’t been invited to talk at any philosophy department ever since.

The second thing is the work of a Masters student at the University of Melbourne, Claudia Alvarez, who has written on whether studying philosophy is, as philosophers claim, especially effective in developing critical thinking skills. Claudia did (or at least, carried through to completion) a meta-analysis which gives us the best available fix on whether this claim is true. In fact, if you make reasonable comparisons, it is hard to make a strong case that philosophy is especially effective, and it is markedly less effective than certain other strategies, such as… teaching critical thinking. The thesis will be completed and available very soon. (I’m happy to give a talk on this material at philosophy departments, but I don’t expect to be swamped with offers.)

It should be fun…