Unlearning 101

Study at an Anti-Library

 

"There is a huge difference between what people actually know and how much they think they know." – Nassim Taleb

 

Question: Which of these animals is more likely to kill you: A shark or a deer?

 

If you said a shark you are not alone. The right answer, however, is the deer. Even if you answered the question correctly the odds of being killed by a deer instead of a shark may surprise you. You are 300-times more likely to be killed at the hands – or the “hoof” if you will – of a deer.

 

The reason the vast majority of people incorrectly answer this question is because shark attacks, although quite rare, are both vividly recalled and easy to imagine. It is not uncommon for television news stories to report shark attacks even when those attacks occur thousands of miles away; and, if you are over the age of 40, you will likely recall the movie “Jaws.” The former leaves the impression shark attacks are more common than they really are, while the latter ensures those rare attacks are “felt” at a deep, visceral level.

 

Instances of drivers striking deer on remote country roads and dying in the resulting collision, on the other hand, are much more common. They are so common, in fact, that they rarely warrant even a passing mention on the local news.

 

The discrepancy between the relative danger of sharks and deer is a poignant reminder of that old adage: What we don’t know is more important than what we do know. Or as Henry David Thoreau more elegantly framed the issue: “How can we remember our ignorance, which our growth requires, when we are using our knowledge all the time?”

 

One of the better ways to remind of ourselves of our ignorance – and to remain open to the concept of unlearning – is to keep our ignorance top-of-mind. One of the more effective tools to do this is to create an anti-library. As Nassim Taleb recounts in his provocative and insightful book, The Black Swan, an anti-library is a collection of books that one hasn’t read.

 

Unlike a shelf or bookcase filled with previously read books, an anti-library houses unread books that contain valuable information but which you haven’t had a chance to access. With an estimated 3,000 new books being published daily and the rate of scientific knowledge purported to be doubling every seven years, it is safe to assume that there is a growing body of knowledge which is relevant to you and your business.

 

Unfortunately, you won’t often know what this missing knowledge is! The best you can do in such a deplorable situation is to stay intellectually humble by reminding yourself of your growing ignorance and the need to remain open to unlearning.

 

You are free to ignore this advice but remember this: What you don’t know can kill you -- almost as easily as a deer.

 

Homework Assignment #5: If your financial situation permits start an anti-library. Alternatively, using an online tool such as Shelfari, begin compiling a list of books that might contain useful knowledge but which you don’t or won’t have the time to read. Add a minimum of one book a week for a year to your anti-library.

 

 

Unlearning Procrastination

There are five frogs sitting on a log. Four decide to jump off. How many frogs are left sitting on the log? 

The answer is five.   

 Why? Because there is a big difference between deciding to do something and actually doing it. 

This is a particularly important point to recall on the day after Thanksgivings -- the official start of the Holiday Season. Undoubtedly, millions of American's over-indulged on food and drink yesterday and millions more will continue to do so over the next few weeks. (I would add that millions more will also continue to do so over the course of their lifetime ... but America's growing obesity problem is another story altogether.) 

Come January 1st, many people will "resolve" to lose the weight they have gained over the Holidays. Rather than engage in this annual -- and largely ineffective -- ritual, I'd like to suggest an alternative: "No Weight Gain December." Rather than promise to lose excess weight in a month's time, you should simply commit to not gaining any weight in December. 

The plan has three distinct advantages. First, you can begin today; second, not gaining weight is a more realistic goal in the sense that it doesn't require any dramatic change in your current behavior; and, three, if you are successful, it might provide the necessary inspiration and motivation come January should you resolve to begin losing weight.

Unlearning from the Perspective of a Turkey

Being the day before Thanksgiving here in America, I thought I would recount a wonderful story from Nassim Taleb's outstanding book, The Black Swan:  

 "Consider a turkey that is fed every day. Every single feeding will firm up the bird's belief that it is the general rule of life to be fed every day by friendly members of the human race "looking out for its best interests," as a politician would say. On the afternoon of the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, something unexpected will happen to the turkey. It will incur a revision of belief."

Taleb goes on to add this: "Think of the feeding again: What can a turkey learn about what is in store for it tomorrow from the events of yesterday? A lot, perhaps, but certainly a little less than it thinks, and it is just that "little less" that may make all the difference."

Here's to wishing you and your loved ones a Happy Thanksgiving ... but remember this: The knowledge you have learned in the past may have been useful, indeed, instrumental to your current success but it is no guarantee that it will insure your survival tomorrow. Just ask a turkey. Stay open to unlearning!

Related Posts

A Future of Black Swans

Unlearning Incentives

"There is a mismatch between what science knows and what business does." Daniel Pink 

The above quote comes from this wonderful TED presentation by Daniel Pink. If you think you know how to motivate your employees to higher achievement, I strongly urge you to watch the video because it suggests we all have a lot to unlearn about what we think we know about motivation and the use of incentives. Enjoy! Related Post Are We Unlearning Wisdom? Yes!

To Unlearn, Try Boarding an Airplane Differently

We have all been there at some time—standing in line at the airport waiting to board a plane and thinking to ourselves that “there has to be a better way.” Well, apparently, there is now. According to this informative articlea researcher at Fermilab has figured out the optimal way to board an airplane.

His findings are counter-intuitive to say the least. Contrary to what one might expect, boarding from the back of the plane first isn’t the optimal method. Rather, the optimal method is to board passengers 10 at a time in every other row. Apparently, this allows passengers to store their baggage overhead at a faster rate.

As I say in my book, Jump the Curve, accelerating advances in computer processing power and algorithms often result in findings that challenge conventional wisdom. The big question now is whether executives in the airline industry will have the courage to listen to an outsider (the researcher, Jason Steffen is a physicist) and whether the industry itself can “unlearn” its current behavior of loading passengers from the the back of the plane.

The News Industry Must Unlearn -- Now!

This past summer, on my other blog , I posted this article: To Survive the Future, the Publishing Industry Must Unlearn the Past . Today, I came across this excellent post on the "future of news" from David Martin. I strongly encourage you to read it and here are two excellent quotes from the article which I hope will whet your appetite:

"Where are you likely to find people with the least diversity of experience, the largest investment in the past, and the greatest reverence for industry dogma? At the top." -- Gary Hamel

"When it becomes necessary to develop a new perception of things, a new internal model of reality, the problem is never to get new ideas in, the problem is to get old ideas out. Every mind is filled with old furniture. It is familiar. It is comfortable. We hate to throw it out." -- Dee Hock

Unlearning Strategy: Put One Foot in Back of the Other

"Every mile you go in the wrong direction is really a two mile error. Unlearning is twice as hard as learning." -- Unknown

Question: Imagine the Roman Numeral equation below is made out of ten toothpick sticks such that “I” equals one stick and the “X” “+” and “=” all represent two sticks:

XI + I = X

Your mission – should you choose to accept it -- is to fashion the correct answer by moving around as few sticks as possible.

If you answered one – by placing “I” on the other side of “X” – to create this new equation: IX + I = X, you solved the problem but you did not get the correct answer. The correct answer is zero. The equation merely requires you to flip the equation upside down:

X = I + IX

What is interesting about the problem is that when students had their brains scanned while solving the problem the brain waves associated with memory and conventional mental activity experienced abrupt decreases just prior to the solution becoming apparent. This result has lead researchers to theorize that thinking spatially may be one way to expand problem-solving potential.

Recently, I encouraged you to “become uncomfortable in your own skin” by unlearning the regular way you fold your hands or cross your arms. I’d now invite you to take this step further and identify a few other daily rituals that you can do in a spatially different manner.

For example, if you are right-handed trying using your left hand to brush your teeth or move the mouse on your computer. You may also consider putting your pants on with the leg opposite the one you normally use. Other ideas include eating corn-on-the-cob differently (e.g. if you normally eat corn horizontally along the rows try eating it in vertical fashion up the columns) or eating your pie from the outer edge.

Such activities sound frivolous but in each case the brain is required to reactivate seldom used neural connections and the new connections can lead to innovation insights that may facilitate unlearning older and more conventional ways of problem-solving.

For instance, eating pie from the edge was instrumental in causing pizza companies to experiment with making the crust more enjoyable by infusing it with cheese. And the analogy to the Roman numeral quiz is apropos of the engineer who was charged with making elevators run more quickly in order to appease growing customer discomfort with the long waits. When faced with legitimate safety concerns that limited the speed, the engineer flipped the question on its head and asked the seemingly ridiculous question: “What would we do if we wanted to make the passenger wait longer for the elevator?” The result led him to install mirrors by each elevator. The tactic didn’t change the speed of the elevator but it did take passengers mind for the delay and caused the underlying problem to go away.

Homework Assignment: In 1996, Guinness was plagued by plummeting sales due to consumers growing impatience with the time it took to properly pour a Guinness. (The process takes about two minutes). To overcome the problem, company officials made no changes to their beer and instead turned the “problem” of slowness into a virtue by creating a new ad campaign slogan (“Good things come to those who wait”). This, in turn, converted the supposed liability into an asset. Your assignment is to identify one trouble area in your business and turn the issue on its head. List at least one outcome from this process.

Unlearning & the Rise of the Supercomputer

Marshall McCluhan once famously said, “First, we shape our tools and then our tools shape us.” As a professional futurist, I have been trying to explain how some of our tools are getting exponentially more powerful. In turn, these tools are accelerating the advances that will soon shape our future and, by virtue of their findings, necessitate unlearning. Nowhere is this more true than in the field of supercomputers. 

According to this ComputerWorld article, supercomputers with 100 million cores and capable of one quintillion calculations per second—or 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 for those of you counting at home—will arrive around 2018. This growing processing power is important because it will help innovative researchers, scientists and entrepreneurs design next-generation materials, drugs, bio-fuels, batteries and much, much more. 

 One area merits special attention and that is in the area of how supercomputers are yielding new insights about the brain. As scientists learn more about how the brain really operates, I am convinced that we will need to unlearn much of what we now think we "know" about the brain. 

To better understand supercomputers amazing power, I invite you to watch this two-minute video I put together last year. Although be forewarned, one quadrillion is already rather quaint:

An Unlearning Hero: Bill Belichick

Almost two years ago now, after his team's stunning upset loss to the New York Giants in the Super Bowl, I applauded Bill Belichick for his willingness to make an unconventional -- but statistically correct -- decision in a high stake situation. After his latest controversial decision on Sunday night against the Indianapolis Colts, where he decided to go for it on fourth-and-two from his own 30-yard line with his team leading by six points and two minutes to go in the game, I again applaud him. This time, however, I am going to go a step further and name Bill Belichick my first ever "Unlearning" hero for his willingness to stand up proudly against incorrect conventional wisdom.

Just because his New England Patroits didn't convert the play, Belichick's decision has been roundly criticized by thousands of "Monday morning" quarterbacks and scores of professional analysts who felt that Belichick should have punted the ball in the situation. 

Well, as is so often the case, the Monday Morning quarterbacks and the pundits are wrong! Just because a decision doesn't work out, does not mean that it was the incorrect decision. According to this article in today's Wall Street Journal, Belichick's decision gave his team a 79% chance of winning the game. This compares with a 70% chance of winning had he decided to go for the "safe" (or conventional) option of punting the ball. 

In other words, Belichick gave his team the best chance of winning. Isn't that what a coach is suppose to do? Of course it is, but the reality is that a surprisingly high number of coaches play it "safe" and end up hurting their teams prospects for victory. (See this old post: Ohio State Needs to Unlearn).

In situations such as this, where the masses are screaming for Belichick's head, I am reminded of the old quote by John Maynard Keynes: "Worldly wisdom teaches us that it is better for the reputation to fail conventionally than to succeed unconventionally."

Well, I say screw "worldly wisdom." I would rather have a coach that succeeds unconventionally. Bottom-line: Bill Belichick should be applauded -- not criticized -- for his decision. Standing up against the power of conventional wisdom isn't easy but it is the correct thing to do when the numbers are in your favor -- and, in Belichick's case -- they were!

To Unlearn, Try Asking a New Question

One of my preferred strategies for unlearning is to ask a new question. For example, review the two questions listed below:

Question #1: What prompts women to swap good jobs for days spent watching "Dora the Explorer," stirring mac 'n' cheese and mediating play-date squabbles?

Question #2: What prompts women to have children and then hire someone else to spend more time raising them than they do?

The two questions are addressing the issue of balancing professional/mothering responsibilities but how one asks the question can cause people to see the issue in a far different light and may help some people unlearn their underlying assumptions about the nature of balancing work and parenting.

(Note: Obviously, the unlearning angle can and should be taken a step further by challenging the assumption that women are -- or should be -- the only partner to experience this issue. In many relationships, men do assume equal parenting responsibility and, in those cases where they don't, perhaps they should.)