The Harvard Business School’s emphasis on decision trees. When I was young and

foolish I used to laugh at the Harvard Business School. I said, “They’re

teaching twenty-eight- year-old people that high school algebra works in real

life?” But later, I wised up and realized that it was very important that they

do that to counter some bad effects from psychological tendencies. Better late

than never.

The use of autopsy equivalents at Johnson & Johnson. At most corporations, if

you make an acquisition and it turns out to be a disaster, all the people,

paperwork, and presentations that caused the foolish acquisition are quickly

forgotten. Nobody wants to be associated with the poor outcome by mentioning it.

But at Johnson & Johnson, the rules make everybody revisit old acquisitions,

comparing predictions with outcomes. That is a very smart thing to do.

The great example of Charles Darwin as he avoided confirmation bias, which has

morphed into the extreme anti-confirmation-bias method of the “double blind”

studies wisely required in drug research by the F.D.A.

The Warren Buffett rule for open-outcry auctions: Don’t go.

My fourth question is: What special knowledge problems lie buried in the thought

system demonstrated by your list?

 

Well, one answer is paradox. In social psychology, the more people learn about

the system the less it is true, and this is what gives the system its great

value as a preventer of bad outcomes and a driver of good outcomes. This result

is paradoxical, and doesn’t remind one of elementary physics, but so what. One

can’t get all the paradox out of pure math, so why should psychology be shocked

by some paradox?