Against Teleology

i've entitled this video against teleology because it's really about something he calls the teleological fallacy the fallacy of thinking that you ought to know where you're going that typically people do know where they're going they know what their plan is they know what aim they're looking for and that that's what we ought to be doing moreover we succeed by having a plan knowing what our objective is having a plan gaining our objective and sometimes that makes a great deal of sense let's say i'm thirsty and i want a drink of water so i think i formulate the plan ah get a drink of water i look around and say well do i have any water at hand and i say yes i go get my water bottle and yay i achieve my objective so it's not an unreasonable thought but when we move beyond getting a drink of water or making some dinner or doing something like that to larger scale human actions it can be highly misleading because although in the very short term yes much of what we do if not all of it is directed at some end there might be larger scale things where it's not appropriate to think of it that way at all that's not what people are doing and it's not what they ought to be doing so really there are two forms of the teleological fallacy we might say first is the assumption that people do act for ends that they do act with an objective a goal a telos in mind and the second is the normative version of that they ought to that's the way to succeed in life and in business and in all sorts of other endeavors have a clear objective go for it that's not he says how we succeed that's not how we ought to live it's not how we do live thomas aquinas puts the assumption this way an agent does not move except out of intention for an end it echoes the first slide of aristotle's nicomachean ethics where he says every art every action every inquiry aims at some good well is that really true they assume it's true and really the assumption lasts throughout most of the history of philosophy it continues to be pervasive today it's something that has a lot of power and when we think about simple actions like getting a drink of water or making dinner it's entirely plausible but actually lots of people don't really have a goal in mind i've always been puzzled by the interview question where do you see yourself in five years i don't know so all throughout my life i've never known well i mean in a certain sense i have i've got a very boring career path in a certain sense yeah being a professor well okay five years from now i expect i'll still be a professor so there's certain things like that but in most respects i don't know if somebody says what's your five-year research plan what do you expect to be working on in five years thinking about my history well the answer is probably what i'm trying to work on now i probably still won't be finished but put that kind of thing aside it's like well i don't know i'll follow the ideas where they lead i don't have a plan and indeed i think in education it's best not to have a plan i suspect students who come in knowing exactly what they want to do and never deviating from the plan that's one way to do it and look there's nothing necessarily wrong with that but the kind of student i was was the sort who went to college having no idea what he might major in and just plan to follow ideas where they led him and the same thing i think is true for a lot of other people even when i went to graduate school in philosophy i didn't have any set thing in mind that i was planning to study i wanted to take courses from interesting people see what was interesting even when i got to the dissertation stage i remember mapping out six possible dissertations some on fields like social choice theory some in philosophy of mathematics which is what i ended up working on some in modal logic and modal metaphysics some on a variety of other topics they were not very uniform they were just things i found interesting things i thought yeah i'll work on that for a few years and so in general taleb saying that's the way to do it don't be a tourist don't map it all out in advance be a fliner that's a french term that just means an idler somebody who's just wandering about looking for interesting things and he says that's a better way to do it now why well because having a plan makes you fragile saying here is my goal i want to go for that goal here is my plan here's my way to do it that's something that makes you fragile because all of a sudden it forces you to predict the future it forces you to say many moves ahead here's what i want to do here's how i'm going to do it now if there aren't first of all complex systems involved and secondly if it's not too many moves ahead not a problem i can say i'd like a drink reach for the water bottle there you go notice i could predict what happened there i didn't face the danger of black swans i wasn't facing unpredictable events i was pretty sure that if i reached over here and picked up the water bottle there it would be so in some cases not a problem to have a goal have a plan but the more complex the system the further away the goal the more a plan is going to tie you down and make you miss opportunities the key thing is that a plan is something that makes you narrow your focus and you're going to miss all sorts of opportunities as a result of the narrowing and then because of the complexity of these systems because of black swans and just the general unpredictability of all the interdependencies things are going to go awry people have said you know you have a plan for the fight but it goes away the minute you take the first punch and people have said the same thing about battle yeah the moment the shooting starts the plans go out the window and people simply have to adapt well i think that's true in much of life you can have as complex a plan as you want but then you get into the actual situation and often things turn to be complicated in ways you did not anticipate so the plan makes you fragile it makes you miss opportunities for growth there are all sorts of situations around you where the upside is greater than the downside and you're likely to be blind to them so planning makes you blind having an objective having an end having a goal at telos is something that can make you blind to opportunity he says be an opportunist don't be somebody tied to a plan here i'll throw in a personal anecdote there are people who like to take vacations where everything is mapped out for them they like to be part of a tour group i know some people for example who are planning i don't know if this is still on but we're planning anyway to go to prague next year and they were going as part of a group they were going to have a tour guide get on buses go around and see prague and do various activities and so on i can imagine nothing worse not than going to prague i'd love to go to prague but i don't want to go and be part of some group where every minute is mapped out for me i want to go and say okay yeah how long will i stay here i don't know hey let's find a place to stay is this place full yeah this one oh but here's the place okay cool and then we stay there for a while what do we want to do today hey this looks interesting let's try that yeah that was great let's do more of that or maybe that wasn't so great let's do something else anyway i don't want a plan i want to just wander around and do what's interesting now i'm not saying have no plan at all when i've done my favorite vacations i've had a kind of plan i've said well here's the general route i want to take through scotland or here's what i want to do to see various national parks but then i go i don't have any reservations i don't have any set schedule i just go and say hey this is cool i really like being around jed burl let's stay an extra day or this place around edinburgh is wonderful let's stay some more or yeah we're planning to go and tour the lake district but now we're out of time oh well next time anyway adapt the plan to what's working well and just do that as your spirit takes you now the point is that's not just a good plan for a vacation for a certain kind of person anyway it's a good plan for life don't map out your career in fact i'm reminded of the phrase from alexander solzhenitsyn that has played a role may be too great a role in my own life nothing is more boring than a man with a career why because a man with a career has a plan has a goal has a plan is trying to get there what a wasted time don't do it instead seize opportunities as they come you can't anticipate what opportunities will become available to you and so whether it's just that sort of personal thing or whether it's a professional opportunity whether it's a business investment whether it's a product line try to be in everything everything that is to say where the potential for gain is greater than the potential for loss don't try to plan those things out life can't be planned that way be an opportunist realize you may meet the person who is going to lead you to wealth or be the love of your life or whatever when you least expect it be open to those kinds of things so the important thing is you don't need to know where you're going in fact it's not always a good thing to know where you're going because knowing where you're going is going to keep you on a certain path and not make you notice that some turns would be highly productive and present tremendous opportunities for you so better to explore but not really have a very clear idea of where you're going i think there are a couple of really important points that telev makes one is that having a plan having a goal that's long term makes you tied down not only in a way that makes you miss opportunities but builds in an important assumption that is a very dangerous assumption it's not only the assumption that a black swan will not come along to disrupt everything it's not only the assumption that with complex systems like life there's just a lot that can happen that will make you change your plan or give it up or give up the objective instead it's that you have to anticipate that your preferences tomorrow will be the same as your preferences today but that may not be true at all in personal life it may not be true it may be that right now you have a set of priorities but then something happens and it changes your sense of priorities it might be that in an organization opportunities arise that make that organization suddenly say wait what we thought was a trivial sideline turns out to be a core business there are all sorts of businesses that started doing one thing and then shifted and became something else entirely dupont for example started out as an explosives maker that's not what it is today 3m just as a kind of curiosity had someone invent what became the sticky note that turned out to be a huge aspect of the business and so you can't really anticipate where big payoffs are going to be trivial example the videos i've been doing for the last few months the most successful by far has been a video on stag hunts talking about the role of stag hunts and the contrast between stag hunts and prisoners dilemmas in game theory who would have thought why does that have five times as many views as the other videos i've done the last few months i have no idea and it gets lots of likes so they're not just people interested in deer hunting but that's not something i could have anticipated just like huh and i'm sure many people have felt that way in fact i know from the history of music that lots of musicians write something and they think it's going to be great turns out nobody much likes it there are other things that they sort of treat as well minor things and it turns out people love them and that's what their fame rests on that one hit wonder for example might have been the song that they didn't think they should even do on the album and so you can't anticipate what might succeed and you're not only going to be blind opportunities but you're going to assume by planning that what you want today is exactly what you'll want tomorrow that may not be true at all in other words it's not just that the world might change in ways you don't anticipate you might change in ways you don't anticipate i want to make a couple of other key points the first one pertains to the significance of this teleological fallacy and what happens when we reject it in the world of business in organizations it means we should distrust certain things that are taken often as axiomatic or fundamental in business one of them is the idea of planning the strategic plan the mission statement that goes along with that the structuring of the business around the mission after all what is a mission statement it says this is our objective this is our goal uh well that assumes that the business is supposed to go in this kind of linear path that may not be true not only because the future will not be as you anticipate you won't be as you anticipate and so a mission statement is a dangerous thing to have he said a theory is a dangerous thing to have well so is a mission statement because it ties you down to an objective so is strategic planning because it says here is our plan for achieving that objective and then if something happens that doesn't fit the plan i guess we better well we didn't anticipate that so maybe we need a new strategic planning team etc a huge amount of time can be wasted coming up with strategic plans now i've found that it can be wasted in a good way or a bad way the good kind of waste is in a sense where people write out the strategic plan then nobody much pays attention good in general i remember what built the pittsburgh steelers into the greatest football team in the history of civilization back in the 1970s it was simply the philosophy to get the best available athlete don't look for a quarterback don't look for a running back don't look for a defensive tackle just look for the best available athlete and then in the end just the law of averages is going to mean you're going to end up with great players in great in those positions that you need so don't try to fill a spot that you need instead look for great people invest in people as he says not in positions not in individual skills or talents invest in the people who can take advantage of opportunities for the same reason distrust focus groups and other market research they're looking at what people want today but your goal as a company should be to change what they want to get them to want something new that you're about to produce that nobody else is producing steve jobs used to say i don't want a focus group i don't want to find out what people want now they're going to want a slight improvement of what they already have no that's not interesting to really gain to have a significant upside i've got to come up with something new and that means creating a preference that does not mean john kenneth galbraith that it's somehow artificial or fake or to be suspected and that fulfilling it is not a good thing i'm going to show them that there is something they didn't even imagine that is awesome that they will want and it doesn't mean i'm manufacturing the want in a manipulative way i'm making their life better than they can now imagine there's another key point precisely because the future is unknown because there's the possibility of black swans positive and negative because complex systems are unpredictable the future and causal relationships within them are basically opaque well we've got to take advantage of our lack of knowledge how do you take advantage of a lack of knowledge the thing is you don't want to try to figure it out and anticipate and understand it we want to thrive in a world we don't understand you want to take advantage of your lack of knowledge so you want to place yourself in situations where there is a symmetry where you have a lot more to gain than to lose put yourself in those situations and wait because of the effects of randomness well those situations may come up and then you gain a lot if they don't come up okay you lose a little now that tells you something important don't pay a lot of attention to averages don't pay a lot of attention to track records because it's not a question of what the average payoff will be or the payoff of the typical investment you make of time or money or effort or anything else many of them may not pay off at all you're waiting for the one that does and so don't worry that nine out of ten of those investments of time or money or effort fail that's okay as long as there's not a big downside look for the one that has the big upside and stay involved in all of those things your approach to life in other words shouldn't be just as an opportunist even be a dilettante be somebody who reads lots of things is interested in lots of things you never know when one of those ideas will pay off and pay off big it might be that most of them never pay off that's fine don't worry about the average one don't worry about the typical one worry about the one that you might otherwise miss but that will pay off big spread your attention around the focus in modern life tends to be more and more on narrow areas narrow specializations it's become that way in academia people have very narrow research focuses and in fact i've had some people within my profession say here's what you do in academia you find a little area of logical space that no one's developed before that nobody's investigated and then you get into that area of logical space you make it your own you investigate it you advance some thesis that nobody's advanced before and then you defend it against all comers and i think what a way to live i can't imagine thinking of my life that way i don't want to find some weird little area of logical space and dig in and then fight off anybody who comes near it what is that no be broad-minded look at everything get interested in lots of things do lots of things and some of them will turn out to pay off for you sometimes professionally sometimes monetarily sometimes just personally and so don't worry about this now there is an important caveat because this is not something that applies to moral commitments or to personal relationships so don't you know don't say to your wife well honey i love you but uh it's just until something better comes along i'm an opportunist i'm looking for something else don't be an albert camus who writes letters to five women all within the same few days and it's all to different women and none of them are his wife don't be like that i mean the claim is not hey just be ready for anything make no commitments don't tie yourself down because that will make personal relationships love moral commitments impossible no don't ignore contracts don't ignore personal relationships and so forth but in the rest of life where you're not necessarily tied down that way don't tie yourself down that way don't tie yourself to a commitment to a specific goal or a specific plan for attaining

Channel: Daniel Bonevac

Views: 1,807

Rating: 4.9104476 out of 5

Keywords:

Id: UxuPGxWGOHk

Length: 19min 28sec (1168 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 18 2020