"You Have No Idea What You're Talking About"

Laura Deming is a biologist by trade. Her overarching aim is to bring about a great extension of the human lifespan. She started The Longevity Fund whose stated mission is to “back world class entrepreneurs developing therapeutic breakthroughs for age-related disease." The knowledge needed for Deming to accomplish her goal is an acute understanding of cellular biology and the ability to identify others who also have this understanding. Her understanding and communication of it is vital to accomplish her stated ends.

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What one truly understands is an issue that weighs heavy on Deming. In her inaugural newsletter, Deming gives a bulleted list of 10 mental models that help (or hinder) how she completes her work. Her preoccupation with deep understanding of subjects tops the list:

1. Most people don’t deeply understand [what] they're talking about, me included.

In an interview Deming gave with Primer in June, she pairs this accusation with story from her childhood:

But I had this moment around that time where a friend and I were driving to a camping site, and I was trying to explain a math concept to him, and he abruptly turned to me and said “I’m feeling very frustrated right now because you honestly have absolutely no idea what you are talking about.”

It’s really hard to explain without context how actually useful that comment was. As he explained it, I was just parroting off the definition of something. The real way to understand things is to be able to see, explore, feel the concept from a bunch of different angles, and to be able to rigorously prove things about it. I still struggle with the latter, but having an intuition for what real, deep understanding of a concept looks like has been a great guidepost. For example, I realized I didn’t understand what entropy was, and now kind of do, after a summer of being in near tears with frustration about it.

While most would be hesitant to accept that they have only a one dimensional understanding of whatever we are trying to explain, Deming is correct. Consider when you complete an excellent book. You finish reading, but when you try to relay to someone else just what was so great about it you're stuck repeating some half-representative anecdotes that don't convey what you found so convincing. It's impossible to gain a deep understanding of a subject after an initial introduction. You've only seen the information once, and generally from one author's vantage. You can't "see, explore, feel the concept from a bunch of different angles, and be able to rigorously prove things about it" from a one-sided, cursory overview.

If the number of subjects that one truly understands is less than he or she assumes, it's necessary to determine what one can confidently say he or she understands and further study those things formerly thought to be understood, but aren't. How does one go about delineating what one does understand when we default to unconsciously pretending that we do?

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Paul Graham gives an homage to deep understanding in his essay on how and why to write. Graham places an imperative on being correct when writing. While correctness isn't synonymous with understanding (one can certainly misunderstand and be right in the end), correctness is a necessary condition for deep understanding. Graham explains that it can be very difficult to be correct, and that he's observed a method to avoid saying incorrect things: say very little and rehearse what you do say.

How can you ensure that the things you say are true and novel and important? Believe it or not, there is a trick for doing this. I learned it from my friend Robert Morris, who has a horror of saying anything dumb. His trick is not to say anything unless he's sure it's worth hearing. This makes it hard to get opinions out of him, but when you do, they're usually right.

Graham's solution of "in order to be correct, don't say anything unless you're sure that you're right" doesn't seem intuitively helpful. People say things precisely because they think they are true. What is needed is a measure of correctness that can be used to determine understanding and correctness before opening a claim to criticism.

In order to self identify what one does and does not deeply understand, one has to work out each subject individually using some mental tool. If one is not in an environment where their idea's accuracy is not automatically put to the test there are other options. It could be conversational, with someone like Deming's friend who's willing to say the words "you have no idea what you're talking about." There aren't many people willing to be so blunt. Another option is to write out the ideas that one thinks he or she understands well. Graham continues:

Translated into essay writing, what this means is that if you write a bad sentence, you don't publish it. You delete it and try again. Often you abandon whole branches of four or five paragraphs. Sometimes a whole essay.

You can't ensure that every idea you have is good, but you can ensure that every one you publish is, by simply not publishing the ones that aren't.

Again, Graham is talking about correctness, not necessarily understanding, but the advice holds. As you write out a subject that you think you understand well, you will hit blocks in your ability to communicate an idea, generally meaning you do not comprehend it well. If you simply mull over an idea in your mind, you can easily ignore the gaps in your comprehension. You can't sidestep important ideas in writing and still have what you've written make sense. You must either identify what you cannot explain, learn it, and continue explaining or you must admit you don't understand the idea and abandon it.

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Deming's first mental model should create a desire to identify what one does understand and bridge the gaps that are found. Being critical of one's own ignorance is difficult. Explaining ideas in writing makes identifying one's own ignorance easier.

Bill Watterson vs. Nassim Taleb

Are good works of fiction intellectually useful? I can do a quick google search and jam three or four sources together that prove that reading fiction has some demonstrable social or developmental value, but realistically that isn't my motivator for why I spend time reading fiction.

Paul Graham published an essay in February on how one should write in a useful way. In it Graham outlines his four tenets of useful writing: importance, novelty, correctness, and strength. While emphasizing the second tenet, novelty, Graham points out that even when a writer manages to introduce an idea that is new to the reader, the reader will not necessarily be surprised.

Telling people something they didn't know doesn't always mean surprising them. Sometimes it means telling them something they knew unconsciously but had never put into words. In fact those may be the more valuable insights, because they tend to be more fundamental.

Here Graham summarizes what is most enlightening and enjoyable about good fiction: one's seemingly deep and unknowable thoughts are actually widely held. The fiction that I love most and find valuable is fiction that can effectively do just this: communicate novel thoughts so fundamentally true that I’m not surprised by the claim and instead am surprised that I have never thought of the claim myself. Nonfiction is best when it's new and unique; presenting facts in such a way that one was never privy to. Fiction is best when it’s a reflection of widely held, yet unspoken, thoughts. Nonfiction has the potential to relay knowledge and instruct. Fiction has the potential to reinforce and encourage unconscious truths.

Books that do this really well:

Calvin and Hobbes

Dune

The Screwtape Letters

Gates of Fire

The Sisters Brothers

Fantastic Ideas and Where to Find Them

In 1902 humans had yet to take to the skies in airplanes. Balloons and dirigibles could be found soaring through London and Paris but winged airplanes had yet to be put to a successful test. Great innovators were long on the hunt to accomplish the task but had found no success. Two were much closer than any others: Orville and Wilbur Wright. In addition to their mental and mechanical prowess, the brothers chief advantage over their fierce competitors was the their source of innovative inspiration: the bird.

In David McCollough’s account of the Wright brother’s lives special emphasis is given to the avian influence in their defining accomplishment. To point out that mimicking the physics employed by birds may help humanity to accomplish the same task seems intuitive to the point of condescension. Yet McCollough shows that this was not necessarily a widely held assumption before 1903. While others utilized obvious characteristics of birds such as basic wings or the addition of feathers to primitive flying contraptions, no other innovators placed such emphasis on the specific pitch of wings and the importance of the intuition involved in bird's ability to fly. Others did not study the minutia of ornithology the way the brothers did.

Prior to that first famed flight on the coast of North Carolina, Orville and Wilbur Wright made numerous practice glides to get accustomed to the physical rules of the air, how flight should feel, and aerial reactions to their steering. In the pair's intensive study of avian flight, the two had the realization that while, yes, birds were built for flight, adeptness in the air was contingent on experience. Consider young birds. All the necessary components of flight are present in the juvenile, yet it is not immediately fit for any intensive maneuvering in the sky. They must be pushed from the nest and practice the requisite hours in flight to become accustomed to how the air around them reacts to their bodily movements. The Wright brothers realized that they could build the perfect flying contraption, yet it would be nothing without the understanding of an experienced pilot. The brother’s deep understanding stemming from their observations of birds massively bolstered their likelihood of success.

Learning from avian flight leading to the dawn of human flight is, again, intuitive, but it stirs a curiosity about what other difficult, seemingly impossible challenges exist today which could be made simple by observing natural solutions to those problems? Are there answers all around us to quandaries of scientific innovation which we must take the time to observe in order to unlock?