Cognitively Yours 1.15

 

Raja R, Author

"One doesn’t need to know everything about how something works to be able to use it, or more appropriately, to benefit from it"

“All that glitters is not gold” is a saying that refers to a line in the Shakespeare play, The Merchant of Venice, read from a note in act 2, scene 7. The phrase “All that glitters is not gold” expresses in a beautiful metaphor, the idea that the things that seem most valuable on the surface – like gold – are often deceptive: that frequently, the more modest-looking things in life have the kind of substance that makes them more valuable.

 

Using a substance like gold as an image of the thing that is most valuable in the material world, recognising its shiny appearance, and pointing out that there are other things that are also shiny, then concluding that because they are shiny doesn’t mean they are valuable, makes a universal statement about our values. We could so easily be taken in by shiny objects, both in the material sense and in more abstract areas like relationships. Often, the most modest appearances hide an inner ‘gold.’

 

The original line in the play is ‘all that glistens is not gold’, and some people use the word ‘glisters’. The full quote reads:

O hell! what have we here?

A carrion Death, within whose empty eye

There is a written scroll! I’ll read the writing.

All that glistens is not gold;

Often have you heard that told:

Many a man his life hath sold

But my outside to behold:

Gilded tombs do worms enfold.

Had you been as wise as bold,

Young in limbs, in judgment old,

Your answer had not been inscroll’d:

Fare you well; your suit is cold.

This full ‘All that glitters is not gold’ quote requires some context and an explanation - The beautiful, educated and highly accomplished young Portia has been left with a fortune on the death of her wealthy father. Concerned, before his death, that his daughter would be vulnerable to fortune hunters he stipulated in his will that all suitors would be subjected to a test. They would have to correctly pick one of three caskets that contains Portia’s picture, to claim her hand in marriage. One of the caskets is made of gold, one silver, and the last one is made of base lead.

 

Suitors line up to undergo the test. The first suitor (the Prince of Morocco) chooses the gold casket and opens it to find a skull with a rejection letter including this ‘all the glistens’ quote. His preference for gold has proved to be deceptive, and Portia’s comment as he leaves is ‘a gentle riddance’. The second suitor chooses the silver casket and finds a puppet of a jester.

 

A poor young Venetian, who is poor and has to borrow money comes to Belmont to woo Portia. He chooses the lead casket and reveals her picture within. She returns to Venice with him to marry.

 

In the last post, we saw how the world does not make sense without cause and effect. In a world filled with randomness, we crave for causality and build a story to prove causality. What works in real world may not match our stories of why or how it works. Unimportant details and post-hoc narratives can often distract us into thinking we know the reasons for something when we really don’t. Nassim Nicholas Taleb explains it in his famous book “Antifragile”

 

"In one of the rare non-charlatanic books in finance, descriptively called "What I Learned Losing a Million Dollars", the protagonist makes a big discovery. He remarks that a fellow named Joe Siegel, one of the most successful traders in a commodity called ‘green lumber’, actually thought that it was lumber painted green (rather than freshly cut lumber, called green because it had not been dried). And he made it his profession to trade the stuff! Meanwhile the narrator was into grand intellectual theories and narratives of what caused the price of commodities to move, and went bust."

 

"It is not just that the successful expert on lumber was ignorant of central matters like the designation ‘green’. He also knew things about lumber that non-experts think are unimportant. People we call ignorant might not be really ignorant."

I had a similar experience. Two years back, during the sudden crypto boom, I attended a bunch of conferences where people talked about the block-chain, the bitcoin, and how to trade various coins and get rich. Many successful technologists gave talks who knew about the intricacies of the inner and then there were crypto traders who didn't know much about the nitty-gritty, but made killer bucks by trading them."

 

"The fact is that predicting the order flow in lumber and the usual narrative had little to do with the details one would assume from the outside are important. People who do things in the field are not subjected to a set exam; they are selected in the most non-narrative manner—nice arguments don’t make much difference. Evolution does not rely on narratives, humans do. Evolution does not need a word for the colour blue."

 

"In other words, one doesn’t need to know everything about how something works to be able to use it, or more appropriately, to benefit from it. For example, you need not be aware of the history of an internal combustion engine to learn driving. Knowledge is helpful, but there’s a stark difference between, what Aristotle calls practical wisdom (phronesis) and scientific knowledge (epistēmē)."

 

Practical wisdom is rooted in action, and you can create different outcomes by taking various actions. Whereas scientific knowledge describes how reality is.

 

In Nichomachean Ethics, Aristotle writes: “Since scientific knowledge involves demonstration, but there is no demonstration of things whose first principles are variable (such as decision making in reality), and since it is impossible to deliberate about things that are of necessity, practical wisdom can not be scientific knowledge nor art (technē, a technique, in the sense of making things); not science because that which can be done is capable of being otherwise, not art because action and making are different kinds of things. The remaining alternative, then, is that it is a true and reasoned state of capacity to act.”

 

Taleb sums it up “We mistake a source of necessary knowledge—the greenness of lumber—for another, less visible from the outside, less tractable, less narratable.”

 

The real causative factors of success are often hidden. We think that knowing the intricacies of green lumber are more important than keeping an eye on the order flow. They are TBU (True But Useless) facts. The greenness of the lumber is one such true but useless fact, yet it isn’t very obvious to an outsider.

 

Next time, refrain from believing in people who appear to exude great knowledge. Analysts and journalists love narratives that neatly explain for example, a company’s loss of form, but they are no executives. Also, think twice before judging somebody to be a lucky fool. Erudition that is useless in real world has very little value for an entrepreneur. Doers have no place for armchair philosophy.

A related analogy from Nassim Taleb himself is that you don’t lecture birds on how to fly. Birds learn to fly by doing, by trial and error. They do not go to flight school and listen to theories on aerodynamics. In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice, but in practice there is. Academic knowledge is required but so too, various attributes that are not glittery which we overlook.

Hence, in future, when we comment about a  person who has become successful that he is a dud person yet successful, we should be careful as we might have overlooked some of his qualities he had, which we presumed are not reasons for success. Otherwise, we would be termed as "Intellectual yet idiot" to use the phrase coined by Nassim Nicholas Taleb in his later book.

To sum up,

·    Looks are deceptive and modest appearances hide “an inner gold”.

·    We tend to give importance to everything that “glitters” more than its true “value”

·    Success in business may be due to the knowledge of things which many experts’ think it is unimportant.

·    There is always a gap between what “we think” are important and what “really” are important for the success.

·    We have to differentiate between “True But Useless” facts and facts that are considered “unimportant but really critical” to the success.

·     Academic knowledge is necessary but it should be complimented with other attributes which are non-glittery and which we tend to overlook.

 

Reference:

William Shakespeare “The Merchant of Venice”,

Antifragile - Things that gain from disorder by Nassim Nicholas Taleb.

 

Photo by Sharon McCutcheon on Unsplash