If you are primarily motivated to make money, you just need to get as much information as you need to do your job. You don’t have time for deep dives into abstract matters. You certainly don’t want to let people know how confused you are by something, or how shallow your knowledge is in certain areas. You want to project an image of mastery and omniscience.

On Wall Street, as in some other areas of the modern economy that I could mention, this attitude leads to a culture of knowingness. People learn to bluff their way through, day to day. Executives don’t really understand the complex things going on in their own companies. Traders don’t understand how their technological tools really work. Programmers may know their little piece of code, but they don’t have a broader knowledge of what their work is being used for.

These people are content to possess information, but they don’t seek knowledge. Information is what you need to make money short term. Knowledge is the deeper understanding of how things work. It’s obtained only by long and inefficient study. It’s gained by those who set aside the profit motive and instead possess an intrinsic desire just to know.

The heroes of Lewis’s book have this intrinsic desire. The central figure, Brad Katsuyama, observes that the markets are not working the way they are supposed to. Like thousands of others, he observes that funny things are happening on his screen when he places a trading order. But, unlike those others, this puzzling discrepancy between how things are and how things are supposed to be gnaws at him. He just has to understand what’s going on.

He conducts a long, arduous research project to go beneath the technology and figure things out. At one point he and his superiors at the Royal Bank of Canada conduct a series of trades not to make money but just to test theories.