Are You "Dr. John" or "Fat Tony"?

Nugget by Nassim Taleb and Reid Hoffman

Hey friend!

Today I’m sharing with you a story from the book The Black Swan, which is not only incredibly insightful, but it’s also quite hilarious (I laughed many times).

I actually read that story some time ago, but I remembered it while listening to an interview with Reid Hoffman, the co-founder of LinkedIn. He transmitted the same lesson, but with a different approach. You can also read the transcription of that part of the interview below.

👤 Doers

💡Nugget

🟠 Nassim Nicholas Taleb:

I found the perfect non-Brooklyn in someone I will call Dr. John. He is a former engineer currently working as an actuary for an insurance company. He is thin, wiry, and wears glasses and a dark suit. He lives in New Jersey not far from Fat Tony but certainly they rarely run into each other. Tony never takes the train, and, actually, never commutes (he drives a Cadillac, and sometimes his wife’s Italian convertible, and jokes that he is more visible than the rest of the car).

Dr. John is a master of the schedule; he is as predictable as a clock. He quietly and efficiently reads the newspaper on the train to Manhattan, then neatly folds it for the lunchtime continuation. While Tony makes restaurant owners rich (they beam when they see him coming and exchange noisy hugs with him), John meticulously packs his sandwich every morning, fruit salad in a plastic container. As for his clothing, he also wears a suit that looks like it came from a Web catalog, except that it is quite likely that it actually did. Dr. John is a painstaking, reasoned, and gentle fellow. He takes his work seriously, so seriously that, unlike Tony, you can see a line in the sand between his working time and his leisure activities. He has a PhD in electrical engineering from the University of Texas at Austin. Since he knows both computers and statistics, he was hired by an insurance company to do computer simulations; he enjoys the business. Much of what he does consists of running computer programs for “risk management.”

I know that it is rare for Fat Tony and Dr. John to breathe the same air, let alone find themselves at the same bar, so consider this a pure thought exercise. I will ask each of them a question and compare their answers.

NNT (that is, me): Assume that a coin is fair, i.e., has an equal probability of coming up heads or tails when flipped. I flip it ninety-nine times and get heads each time. What are the odds of my getting tails on my next throw?

Dr. John: Trivial question. One half, of course, since you are assuming 50 percent odds for each and independence between draws.

NNT: What do you say, Tony?

Fat Tony: I’d say no more than 1 percent, of course.

NNT: Why so? I gave you the initial assumption of a fair coin, meaning that it was 50 percent either way.

Fat Tony: You are either full of crap or a pure sucker to buy that “50 pehcent” business. The coin gotta be loaded. It can’t be a fair game. (Translation: It is far more likely that your assumptions about the fairness are wrong than the coin delivering ninety-nine heads in ninety-nine throws.)

NNT: But Dr. John said 50 percent.

Fat Tony (whispering in my ear): I know these guys with the nerd examples from the bank days. They think way too slow. And they are too commoditized. You can take them for a ride.

Now, of the two of them, which would you favor for the position of mayor of New York City (or Ulan Bator, Mongolia)? Dr. John thinks entirely within the box, the box that was given to him; Fat Tony, almost entirely outside the box.

To set the terminology straight, what I call “a nerd” here doesn’t have to look sloppy, unaesthetic, and sallow, and wear glasses and a portable computer on his belt as if it were an ostensible weapon. A nerd is simply someone who thinks exceedingly inside the box.

Have you ever wondered why so many of these straight-A students end up going nowhere in life while someone who lagged behind is now getting the shekels, buying the diamonds, and getting his phone calls returned? Or even getting the Nobel Prize in a real discipline (say, medicine)? Some of this may have something to do with luck in outcomes, but there is this sterile and obscurantist quality that is often associated with classroom knowledge that may get in the way of understanding what’s going on in real life. In an IQ test, as well as in any academic setting (including sports), Dr. John would vastly outperform Fat Tony. But Fat Tony would outperform Dr. John in any other possible ecological, real-life situation. In fact, Tony, in spite of his lack of culture, has an enormous curiosity about the texture of reality, and his own erudition—to me, he is more scientific in the literal, though not in the social, sense than Dr. John.

👉 From the book - The Black Swan

"People believe thinking outside the box takes intelligence and creativity, but it’s mostly about independence. When you simply ignore the box and build your reasoning from scratch, whether you’re brilliant or not, you end up with a unique conclusion — one that may or may not fall within the box."

- Tim Urban (Book - The Elon Musk Blog Series: Wait But Why)

🟠 Reid Hoffman:

One of the things I wrote my thesis on, in Oxford, was "the uses and abuses of thought experiments":

The most classic one is "trolley problems".

[The problem with Trolley Problems]

The fundamental problem is... they try to frame it to derive an intuition, a principle, etc... They try to frame an artificially different environment.

[They say]: No, no, it's a trolley. And the trolley will either hit the five criminals or the one human baby. And it's default set to hit the human baby. Do you throw the switch or not?

And then when you start attacking the problem, you say: Well, how do I know that I can't break the trolley....

[They say]: Well, but you know that.

[You say]: Oh, so you're positing in your thought experiment that I have perfect knowledge that breaking the trolley is impossible. So, in your posit to make your thought experiment work, you're positing something [that] when we encounter [in real life], we generally think people are crazy, right? Like... you have perfect knowledge that you can't break the trolley?

What is the right human response to this trolley problem? [The answer] is, I'm going to try to break the trolley, so it doesn't hit either of them.

You're trying to get me to say: "Do I do nothing and run over the baby? Or do I do something and run over the five criminals?" Like, those are my only two options.

Well, no. Even if I think I can't break the trolley, that's what I'm going to try to do because that's the moral thing to do...

👉 Video Source

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💥 Stuff I Loved

I’m writing this letter from a nice Starbucks in Madrid (date: Thursday 4th of July). This month is insanely hot in Madrid (just 5 mins of unrushed walking and I’m already sweat enough to wanna change my t-shirt!), but I’m having a great time! By the time you read this, I’ll be on my way to Guayaquil (Ecuador) to visit my dad and relatives.

I hope you enjoyed today’s edition!

Happy Friday ;)

Julio xx

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