Learning to Learn
Taleb argues that people can learn too narrowly from past surprises, preparing for a repeat of the same event while missing broader weaknesses in their assumptions. He illustrates the point with responses to 9/11 and the Maginot Line.
THE IDEA
Learning to Learn
Another related human impediment comes from excessive focus on what we do know: we tend to learn the precise, not the general.
What did people learn from the 9/11 episode? Did they learn that some events, owing to their dynamics, stand largely outside the realm of the predictable? No. Did they learn the built-in defect of conventional wisdom? No. What did they figure out? They learned precise rules for avoiding Islamic prototerrorists and tall buildings. Many keep reminding me that it is important for us to be practical and take tangible steps rather than to “theorize” about knowledge. The story of the Maginot Line shows how we are conditioned to be specific. The French, after the Great War, built a wall along the previous German invasion route to prevent reinvasion—Hitler just (almost) effortlessly went around it. The French had been excellent students of history; they just learned with too much precision. They were too practical and exceedingly focused for their own safety.
We do not spontaneously learn that we don’t learn that we don’t learn. The problem lies in the structure of our minds: we don’t learn rules, just facts, and only facts. Metarules (such as the rule that we have a tendency to not learn rules) we don’t seem to be good at getting. We scorn the abstract; we scorn it with passion.
This narrow learning leaves conventional wisdom poorly suited to a modern, complex, and increasingly recursive environment.*
But there is a deeper question: What are our minds made for? It looks as if we have the wrong user’s manual. Our minds do not seem made to think and introspect; if they were, things would be easier for us today, but then we would not be here today and I would not have been here to talk about it—my counterfactual, introspective, and hard-thinking ancestor would have been eaten by a lion while his nonthinking but faster-reacting cousin would have run for cover. Consider that thinking is time-consuming and generally a great waste of energy, that our predecessors spent more than a hundred million years as nonthinking mammals and that in the blip in our history during which we have used our brain we have used it on subjects too peripheral to matter. Evidence shows that we do much less thinking than we believe we do—except, of course, when we think about it.
When to use it
In risk management, avoid over-reliance on past specific events to predict future risks.
In education, teach students to extract general rules from examples rather than memorizing facts.
In business strategy, be wary of over-learning from a single competitive move and missing broader market shifts.
FROM THEORY TO EVERYDAY LIFE
In practice
9/11 Response
Taleb argues that responses to 9/11 focused too narrowly on recognizable attackers and tall buildings. His broader concern is that preparing for a repeat of one event can leave other forms of surprise unexamined.
The Maginot Line
The French built a wall along the previous German invasion route, but Hitler went around it. They learned with too much precision from history.
A MOMENT TO REFLECT
Put it to work.
What recent event have you learned from, and did you take away a specific lesson or a general principle?
Can you think of a time when focusing on precise facts prevented you from seeing a broader pattern?
When do specific lessons transfer well to a new situation, and when would you need a broader principle?
CONTINUE THE CONVERSATION
Source texts
- The Black Swan The Impact of the Highly Improbable With a new section On Robustness and Fragility (Nassim Nicholas Taleb)