How Not to Be Stupid

After a four-hour conversation on The Knowledge Project (Part 1, Part 2), Adam Robinson (@IAmAdamRobinson) and I shared another 10-minutes that shouldn’t be missed on how not to be stupid.

Shane Parrish: Adam, you did a presentation once on how not to be stupid. Can you tell me about that? What is stupidity?

Adam Robinson: Right. It’s so funny you should ask that, because people think stupidity is the opposite of intelligence. In fact, stupidity is the cost of intelligence operating in a complex environment. It’s almost inevitable. And so I was asked by an organizer of an investment conference in the Bahamas of some elite global investors to do a talk on anything I wanted to do, except not about investing. It’s just, pick an interesting topic. So I thought for a second and I blurt out, “Okay. How about how not to be stupid?” He laughed and he said, “Okay. Great.” It took me a month of hard thinking, mind you, just to define stupidity. By the way, if you’re in any field and you want to find ways to innovate, focus on words that are commonly used and try to define them simply. It took me about a month, and I defined stupidity as overlooking or dismissing conspicuously crucial information. Right? It’s crucial information, like you better pay attention to it. It’s conspicuous, like it’s right in front of your nose and yet you either overlook it or you dismiss it. How not to be stupid, what are the causes of human error—and it took me a couple of months of research just to come up with data points, because most stupidity is ignored or swept under the rug. I studied instances of scientific stupidity and literary stupidity and military stupidity and every other kind of stupidity, as well as two domains that engineer stupidity. One is benign: magic. The magician misdirects your attention. The whole goal of the magician is to make you stupid, to not notice something you should have. The other is frauds and cons and hoaxes. That’s also—but that’s a malicious, malevolent kind of engineering of stupidity. The magician does so with our full consent, for entertainment purposes. The conman engineers stupidity for their own gain. I do historical research, everything, and I identify seven factors that lead to stupidity. These seven factors are fascinating. In no particular order: one, being outside your normal environment or changing your routines. Two, being in the presence of a group. Three, being in the presence of an expert or if you, yourself, are an expert. Four, doing any task that requires intense focus. Five, information overload. Six, physical or emotional stress, fatigue. Seven—I’ll come back to seven. I forget it right now. It’s a few years. It’ll come back to me in a second. All seven factors are present in U.S. hospitals. All seven factors. This will astonish you. This was recently written about, but I don’t think it’s really dawned on people. In the United States every year, there are roughly 30,000 fatalities from automobile accidents. That is a benchmark. How many deaths accidentally occur, accidentally, in hospitals every year? In other words, you go in with a broken arm and you don’t come out. Not, you died as a result of what you went in for. You died because of error, human error. I would tell you the current best estimate—this is deaths, mind you, not injuries—is 210 to 440 thousand people die every year in the United States from hospital error.

Stupidity is overlooking or dismissing conspicuously crucial information

(Editors note, that was not part of the conversation but will add context: When it comes to overloading our cognitive brains, the seven factors are: being outside of your circle of competence, stress, rushing or urgency, fixation on an outcome, information overload, being in a group where social cohesion comes into play, and being in the presence of an “authority.” Acting alone any of these are powerful enough, but together they dramatically increase the odds you are unaware that you’ve been cognitively compromised.)

We know what to do, we just don’t do it correctly. (Atul Gawande and I talk about this in our interview).

It’s the third leading cause of death in the United States, right behind cancer and heart disease. If those seven factors—by the way, you don’t need all seven factors to be present. They’re additive. Oh, I remember what the final one was, and it’s so funny I should forget it because it’s the one that usually triggers stupidity. Rushing or a sense of urgency. So funny I would forget that one. It’s usually the first one I say. By the way, if you’re outside your normal environment and you are rushing, you are in big trouble, which is why often people are rushing on the way to the airport and they forget their passport or they do something. It has to do with information overload. All seven factors were present at the U.S. Challenger disaster. Remember back in 1986? Didn’t have to happen. All seven factors were present. There was the musician Yo-Yo Ma, in 1998 I believe, was rushing to an appointment in New York City. He lives in Boston. He was outside his normal environment, rushing, and he was preoccupied because he was late for an appointment. Three of the seven factors. You don’t need all seven to create stupidity. In the back of the cab in which he’s being driven is his million-dollar cello in a big blue Plexiglas thing. It’s in the trunk. He gets out of the cab, he leaves it in the back of the trunk. All of a sudden, because Yo-Yo Ma is such a celebrity, the mayor is called, the police chief and all cars bulletin goes out, find this cello.

Cello?

They do. In the press conference, get this, he says, “I just did something stupid.” I’m using air quotes. That’s an exact phrase. “I just did something stupid. I was in a rush.” Sure enough, in my research, I found three other situations where world class musicians were in a different city, rushing, and they left their instruments. Each one of them. One a $3 million violin. He was on a national tour, left a $3 million violin in an Amtrak train. Imagine $3 million violin in the luggage compartment of an Amtrak train. Fortunately, they called ahead and they found it at the next station. He was lucky. Each of the musicians, in exactly the same—

Circumstance.

—circumstances led to stupidity. Now, Atul Gawande wrote a book called The Checklist Manifesto. Atul Gawande is brilliant. Brilliant, brilliant, brilliant. However, the problem with checklists is that the stupidity factors override them. The worst aviation disaster in history, Shane, occurred in 1977. Nearly 600 lives were lost when two planes collided during the day on the ground. Imagine, two planes collided in an airport on the ground. Six hundred lives were lost. You might say, how does that even happen? All seven factors were present. Something else. Do you know what the pilot that caused the crash was doing right before he took off and slammed into the plane? He was racing through a checklist. Checklists don’t help you if you’re stupid about the checklist. You’re just not going to use it. A really important takeaway from that, and I’m so glad we got that final question in, is beware of rushing—and if these factors are present, don’t make any important decisions. It doesn’t take much. By the way, I mentioned fatigue and illness. If you’re tired or emotionally overwrought, if you have pulled an all-nighter, you have the motor control and the reflex speed of someone who is legally drunk. An all-nighter you think, I mean we’ve all pulled all-nighters, right? We all sometimes pull multiple all-nighters. You gotta be aware. You may think that cognitively you’re okay, but your motor control skills and your reflexes are those of someone who’s legally drunk. You’ve really got to be careful. By the way, multitasking is information overload. That comes under the information overload thing, and if you’re talking on Bluetooth while you’re driving a car, you have exponentially increased the odds that you’re going to get into an accident.

This is why when you’re lost, the first thing you do is turn down the radio.

Oh, fascinating. You’re right.

When you’re in a car, when you get lost, you always…one of the first things you do is eliminate an input, which is the radio.

That’s so funny. You’re right.

Or if you’re talking with somebody you say, “Hold on a second,” because you intuitively know that that’s just—subconsciously, you know that’s distracting you.

By the way, that’s so funny you should mention that, because that’s why when I tell people that statistic about…talking on Bluetooth on the phone when you’re driving is incredibly dangerous. People say, “Yeah, but what about if someone’s in the front of the seat talking to you?” That in fact doubles your odds. If someone’s in the front seat with you, talking while you’re driving, you’ve doubled the chances of your getting into an accident. Just doubled. Just that, but the difference is that that person, when you are dealing with unusual traffic conditions, he or she will shut up.

Right, they can see it.

They can see it. The person on the phone who’s talking on Bluetooth doesn’t shut up. You’re still getting the input. That’s why it’s so dangerous.

That’s really interesting. I never thought of that.

Yeah. Well, I didn’t think about it until I researched it.

Still curious? Check out our full conversation on The Knowledge Project (Part 1, Part 2) and Hemingway, a Lost Suitcase, and the Recipe for Stupidity.

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