哪些知识或者行为会让你显得很蠢The Kind of Knowledge That Makes You Look Stupid

"For the person who hasn't mastered a system of thought, any change will weed them out. For the one who has mastered the system, they become the thing doing the weeding."

Everything that exists has its reasons. In theory, all the various kinds of knowledge in this world carry some intrinsic value of their own, or at least something worth learning.

But some "knowledge" doesn't seem all that reliable — sometimes it just makes us look stupid, even makes us the butt of the joke. Take the stuff that goes around the internet: be a bridesmaid three times and you'll never get married. Or the neighbor whose daughter-in-law is pregnant, so the family goes door to door telling everyone WiFi gives off radiation and harms her health — please, everyone, stop using WiFi. Or the revelation that a goldfish's memory isn't just seven seconds but can last for months. None of it does you any good. Your boss isn't going to hand you a bonus for knowing it.

Charlie Munger said there are two kinds of knowledge: real knowledge, and the performance of knowledge. Plenty of people haven't actually mastered anything — like Planck's chauffeur, they've only learned to put on a show. And that show does the performer no good at all. No matter how much knowledge is floating around the internet, the most you'll pick up is a performance. The internet can get you high and make you fly — and land you flat on your face, covered in dust. In the real world, plenty of people can only recite a canned performance; ask them what to do next and they're completely lost.

Clearly, as those examples show, without systematic training — just taking someone's word for it, absorbing fragmented, isolated bits of knowledge with no grasp of the how and the why — it all comes to nothing in the end, and sometimes it just makes you look stupid.

And that's only one part of it. Plenty of other kinds of knowledge and behavior make us look stupid, too. Confucius taught us this long ago: study alone with no companions, and you'll end up narrow and ill-informed. It couldn't be put more simply. And we see it all around us in daily life: no capacity for independent thought, just drifting with the crowd; believing rumors and spreading them — like the great salt-panic-buying stampede after the Japan earthquake; or holding on to some genuinely bad, ugly habit of your own. Experience is a fine thing, no question — it spares us a lot of wrong turns. But if you believe in nothing but experience and the so-called "wisdom of your elders," I suspect your life won't run as smoothly as it does now.

Alfred North Whitehead once said something very true: only after humankind "invented the method of invention" could human society develop rapidly. It was only a few hundred years ago that human society took off in a big way; before that, the progress of each century was essentially zero. Human society could only advance once it had invented the method of invention — and by the same logic, you can only advance once you've learned the method of learning.

So, to keep from looking stupid, we need the right methods of learning, the right ways of behaving. Here's a chart that might help you.

(Figure in original.)

First: truly know yourself. They say the person in the thick of it is blind while the onlooker sees clearly, but the one who truly knows you is you, not anyone else. You know yourself far better than others do. You spend more time with yourself than with anyone. As you grow, through constant learning and lived experience, you come to know yourself better and better — your gifts, your shortcomings, what you like, what suits you, what you want.

A lot of the self-help crowd will say so-and-so just doesn't have the talent — that's them blowing up someone's weakness to gloss over the person's gifts. People who are full of themselves love to skip the whole logical middle and jump straight to an iron-clad, incontestable conclusion. The reason the talent-is-everything theory is dangerous is this: the moment someone decides that getting things done comes down to talent, and that they happen to lack it, naturally they'll give up — no point trying, right? Real self-knowledge means going as far as your gifts will carry you. That's the right method.

Second: think independently, and cultivate inversion. The importance of independent thinking goes without saying. And for the complexity of life and the human brain, if you approach a problem by inverting it, it often becomes far easier to solve.

Let's try a little inversion right now. What makes us fail in life? What should we avoid? Some answers are simple. For instance, laziness and unreliability will make us fail in life. If you break your word, then no matter how many other virtues you have, you can't escape a miserable end. So you should build the habit of doing exactly what you say you'll do; laziness and unreliability are obviously to be avoided.

Another thing to avoid is extreme ideology, because it makes people lose their minds. Young people are especially prone to falling into intense, foolish ideologies — and never finding their way out. When you declare yourself a devoted member of some cult-like group (say, ISIS) and start preaching its orthodox ideology, what you're doing is cramming that ideology into your own head, over and over. And so your mind goes bad — sometimes at astonishing speed. So be extremely wary of intense ideologies; they pose a huge danger to your precious mind.

Third: read across disciplines, and build your own system of knowledge on that foundation. Take Warren Buffett, whom plenty of people know. If you followed him around with a stopwatch, you'd find he spends half of his waking hours reading. Most of the rest he spends in one-on-one conversation with extremely capable people — sometimes by phone, sometimes in person, all of them people he trusts and who trust him. Look closely and Warren rather resembles a scholarly recluse, even though he's been wildly successful in worldly life.

The Buffett biography once summed up the factors behind his success, and on the point of IQ it put it this way: Buffett is extremely intelligent, but never in a small-minded, clever way — his is great wisdom. He has profound insight into people, into events, into markets; he always grasps the most fundamental thing and solves the problem in the simplest, easiest way.

I think Buffett's success, his wisdom, is bound up in a thousand intricate ways with his decades of unbroken, cross-disciplinary reading. That's exactly what made him the Oracle of Omaha.

Keep practicing the cross-disciplinary approach. This habit can do you an enormous amount of good — it makes life more fun, lets you do more, makes life more constructive. Thinking habits, once practiced correctly, really do help.

Munger, too, was a devoted believer in cross-disciplinary learning. He once explained why people must have a cross-disciplinary cast of mind to live efficiently and maturely, drawing on an important idea from Cicero, the greatest lawyer of the ancient world. Cicero has a famous line: a man who does not know what happened before he was born goes through life like an ignorant child. This is exactly right, and it rightly mocks those foolish enough to know nothing of history. But if you extend Cicero's line — as we should — then beyond history, there are many other things people must understand.

And those "many things" are the great ideas of every discipline. If, however, you cram some piece of knowledge by rote just to score well on an exam, that knowledge won't do you much good. You have to master many kinds of knowledge, let them form a mental framework in your head, and then apply them automatically in the days that follow. If you can do that, I solemnly promise you: one day, without even noticing, you'll realize, "I've become one of the most effective people among my peers." Conversely, if you don't work at practicing this cross-disciplinary approach, then many of the smartest among you will achieve only mediocre results, or even live out your lives in the shadows.

Here's another chart, for reference and study.

(Figure in original.)

Fourth: build the habit of using checklists. People need to build the habit of working through checklists. A checklist heads off a lot of mistakes; it keeps you from scrambling in a panic, lost about what to do. For any industry, for anyone, it's a fine habit. You shouldn't merely master a wide base of knowledge — you should lay it out into a checklist in your head, and then put it to use. No other method achieves the same effect.

Fifth: guard against bias, and build the habit of objectivity and fairness. Cultivating habits that keep you objective and fair is, of course, enormously helpful to cognition. We all learned in middle school that Darwin paid special attention to contrary evidence, especially when it disproved a theory he believed in and loved. If you want to make as few mistakes as possible in your thinking, you need habits like this.

Sixth: avoid being driven by perverse incentive systems. Don't put yourself in a perverse incentive system — one that rewards you more the more stupidly or badly you behave. Perverse incentives have a powerful capacity to control human behavior, and people should avoid being influenced by them.

Perverse working relationships are also to be avoided. You should especially avoid working under someone you don't admire and wouldn't want to become — that's very dangerous. To some degree, everyone is controlled by authority figures, above all the ones who hand out our rewards. To handle this danger correctly, you need both talent and resolve. One method is to figure out whom you respect and then find a way to transfer under them — but don't criticize anyone, and that way you can usually end up working for a good boss. As long as you're smart enough to do it gracefully. In short, working under people you rightly admire will make your achievements in life far more satisfying.

A perverse incentive system can drive you out of your mind and into fanaticism. And there's a psychological factor called "self-serving bias" that also often makes people do stupid things; it's frequently subconscious, and no one is immune. You figure the "self" is entitled to do what it wants — overdrawing your income to satisfy its needs, say. What's the harm in that? Well, once upon a time there was a man, the most famous composer in the world, who spent most of his life in misery, and one of the reasons was that he was forever overdrawing his income. That composer was Mozart. If even Mozart couldn't escape the poison of this stupid behavior, I think you'd better not try it either.

Taken together, envy, resentment, hatred, and self-pity are all catastrophic states of mind. Excessive self-pity can drive a person nearly to paranoia, and paranoia is one of the hardest things to reverse — so don't sink into self-pity. And remember: self-pity solves nothing. It always produces negative effects; it's a mistaken way of thinking. If you can steer clear of it, your advantage over others — over almost everyone — will be enormous, because self-pity is a standard reaction. You can train yourself out of it.

You should also, of course, purge self-serving bias from your own thinking habits. Don't assume that what benefits you benefits all of society, and don't use this self-centered, subconscious tendency to justify your stupid or evil behavior — that's a terrible way to think. Free yourself from this mindset, because you want to be wise, not a fool; a good person, not a bad one. At the same time, in your own cognition you must allow others their self-serving bias, because most people can't very successfully purge it — that's just human nature. And if you can't tolerate others acting on their self-serving bias, then you're the fool.

The internet is only a tool, a vessel. On its own it can't make you smarter — it may even make you "stupider."

And knowledge alone can't constitute the tool either. Only by truly knowing yourself, learning across disciplines, and thinking independently across multiple systems can you become the kind of person who looks genuinely formidable — and only then does the internet become a tool in the real sense.

Wu Xiaobo once said: in the end, tools weed people out. After AlphaGo beat Lee Sedol, the chatter about whether artificial intelligence will replace human beings flared up all over again. That claim has to be viewed dialectically. Natural selection, the weeding out — sure, it's real. But the ones it weeds out are always the "stupid" ones, the ones who've built no system of thought of their own, the ones who don't understand progress and can't make it. They're the ones who resist progress.

As the internet and the mobile internet develop, they will inevitably weed out the "stupid," and weed out those who can't search, and those who can only search for knowledge. Unless you learn to build a system of knowledge, and use it to better guide your own life. This holds regardless of age, gender, or race — and being young by no means keeps you out of that group. Age has nothing whatsoever to do with progress.

For the person who hasn't mastered a system of thought, any change will weed them out. For the one who has mastered the system, they become the thing doing the weeding.