Unlocking the Power of Experience: The Hidden Benefits of Seasoned Minds
Embracing Complexity: How Expertise and Intuition Thrive in an Ever-Changing World
In a world that often seeks simplicity, true expertise thrives on complexity. 🌟
Imagine a seasoned nurse, her intuition honed by years of experience, sensing the subtlest signs of an impending cardiac arrest in a patient. She doesn't rely on a single factor but combines fragments of past cases, assembling a diverse collection of prototypes in her mind.
Contrast this with our simplified notions of a heart attack—an idealized image of clutching one's chest. Expert doctors don't limit themselves to a single prototype. They cultivate a mental repository of prototypes, constantly evolving with each new encounter.
An adaptive worldview means resisting the urge to oversimplify. It means collecting a cluster of prototypes, letting them shape your understanding of a concept, and updating it as you encounter new cases. Expertise thrives on this ever-evolving database of intuition.
Consider the auxiliary nurse with three decades of experience, detecting suicide indicators with uncanny accuracy. Her power lies in her wealth of experience—she's seen it all.
Experts don't just build hard-and-fast rules; they create a massive database for their intuition. Each new situation enriches their mental model, responding effectively to novel circumstances in our chaotic world.
Age may correlate with compounded wealth, but wisdom doesn't always follow suit. Experience is the bedrock of intuition, but it can be accelerated. Medical residency, as grueling as it is, accelerates expertise acquisition, emphasizing flexible intuition over rigid rules.
The key? Rapid feedback, constant learning, and an ever-expanding mental database. In an era of complexity, it's not just what you know—it's how adaptable and intuitive you can be. 🚀
Experts consume a wealth of case studies, stories and history, but not only to create hard-and-fast rules. They also do it to build a massive database for their intuition. Each new situation is an opportunity to update the model, rather than something to be overfitted to a stale one. One way to think of it is that reality is so variable and complex that you don’t always know which part of which story will be useful in advance.
Perhaps most importantly for these chaotic times, deep expert intuition is able to respond to increasingly novel circumstances far more effectively.
You typically need to be older to have compounded wealth; about 97% of Warren Buffett’s net worth came after his 65th birthday. It’s a lot more surprising that wisdom doesn’t correlate that strongly with age, especially since experience determines the power of intuition. I think this is because experience can be accelerated (Cedric’s work linked below covers a lot of the “how” beautifully). This helped explain to me why medical residency is such a brutal hazing: it’s the accelerated acquisition of expertise in a high-consequence environment with a master giving you rapid, harsh feedback. You’re not learning rigid rules as much as gaining flexible intuition. Expertise can also be accelerated by simulations and games with rapid feedback from experts.
More than ever before it’s tempting to use the “15 minute book summary” apps, or ask ChatGPT to extract the key points. But in pursuit of wisdom, sometimes it’s better to seek out the richest, most accurately-researched stories.
“What we see is not all there is.”
When writing this piece I wondered how much of this was all just painfully obvious. Of course expert experience is superior to learning basic rules! I think we may all abstractly know this is true, but we don’t act that way in the real world. In an existence that’s increasingly mediated by screens we can easily assume what we see is all there is. We can get everything we need from a company filing or data feed. But, in one of his most popular pieces ever, Frederik Gieschen exploded the myth of Buffet as some kind of reclusive reading machine. He utilized a vast network and spent a huge amount of time in face-to-face meetings building an intuitive feel for the real world.
What is subtly profound to me is the idea that experts literally experience a different world within their specialism, especially in embodied reality. As Matthew B. Crawford writes in his tremendous book The World Beyond Your Head:
It follows that when we become skilled in some particular domain, we begin to see and feel things we otherwise wouldn’t see or feel. The world acquires new “affordances” that guide us in what amounts to a new ecological niche that we have begun to inhabit. This new ecological niche is a new space for action.
As you become more fitted into your niche, your area of expertise, it discloses more information back to you. An elite martial artist squaring off in a bar fight will instantly notice the balance of his opponent, striking distance and potential weapons nearby. This gives him more options for action. He literally inhabits a richer world, and this makes him more powerful than an average person. He quite literally “sees through the matrix.” When it comes to understanding the connection between “openness” and wisdom, the expert is more open to the world, and the world is more open to him.
So when Charlie Munger “reasons by analogy” he’s reaching back into his case studies to find a relevant comparison to the current situation. By extracting and recombining multiple pertinent details (what Cedric calls “fragments”), he might literally be seeing a pattern nobody else can see, which is why he can invest in a totally differentiated way. Like the cardiac nurse, he’s observing the entire whole, rather than applying a single concept to the situation.
The apex of wisdom is a sage. His disciplined usage of his attention has helped him become flexible, because he can literally see more and act decisively with less effort. But his domain isn’t limited to stock markets, a tennis court or a chessboard. He sees the whole world that way, and he is more powerful within it. It’s why sages are associated with miracles of congruence like snapping one’s fingers to make a thunderstorm appear. They have harmonized with deep reality and act from within it, rather than the modern man who too often tries to rigidly impose his rules from without.
“For the wise men of old, the cardinal problem of human life was how to conform the soul to objective reality, and the solution was wisdom, self-discipline, and virtue. For the modern, the cardinal problem is how to conform reality to the wishes of man, and the solution is a technique.”
#Expertise #Intuition #AdaptiveLearning #Complexity #Wisdom