“To a man with only a hammer, every problem tends to look pretty much like a nail.” -Proverb
1: B. F. Skinner was a renowned Harvard psychology professor.
He “may have been the best-known psychology professor in the world,” Charlie Munger writes in Poor Charlie’s Almanack: The Wit and Wisdom of Charlie Munger.
The reason for his reputation? He proved that “incentives are superpowers” by conducting experiments using animals. His findings were “both counterintuitive and important,” Charlie notes.
B.F. taught rats to press a lever to receive food pellets. He instructed pigeons to turn in circles, walk in figure eights, and play ping pong.
How? By rewarding these behaviors. “With incentives,” Charlie observes, “he could cause more behavior change, culminating in conditioned reflexes in his rats and pigeons.”
“He made obvious the extreme stupidity, in dealing with children or employees, of rewarding behavior one didn’t want more of. . . He demonstrated, again and again, a great recurring generalized behavioral algorithm in nature: “Repeat behavior that works.”
2: But things didn’t end well for B.F.
Why? Ultimately, he “tried to explain everything with incentive effects,” Charlie writes.
B.F. did not recognize the power of other parts of psychology. He believed everything in the world was driven by incentives “to the point of thinking he could create a human utopia with it,” Charlie writes.
Another example: When Charlie Munger was at Harvard Law School, the professors talked about “an over-focused, Skinner-like professor at Yale Law School. They used to say, ‘Poor old Eddie Blanchard, he thinks declaratory judgments will cure cancer.'”
To a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
Here’s the thing: Being smart does not exempt us from this wrong-headed tendency.
Man with a hammer “works marvelously,” Charlie notes, “to gum up all professions and all departments of academia and, indeed, most practical life.”
Including for-profit companies. “It’s really terrible in business,” Charlie writes. “You’ve got a complex system, and it spews out a lot of wonderful numbers that enable you to measure some factors.
“But there are other factors that are terribly important, yet there’s no precise numbering you can put to these factors,” he notes. “Well, practically everybody 1) overweighs the stuff that can be numbered because it yields to the statistical techniques they’re taught in academia, and 2) doesn’t mix in the hard-to-measure stuff that may be more important.”
To a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
3: Charlie contrasts this approach with how we train pilots.
Pilot training utilizes a six-element system.
The pilot’s “formal education is wide enough to cover practically everything useful in piloting. Their knowledge of practically everything needed by pilots is not taught just well enough to enable them to pass one test or two; instead, all their knowledge is raised to practice-based fluency, even in handling two or three intertwined hazards at once.”
The pilot is trained to think forward and backward. They learn “when to concentrate mostly on what they want to happen and also when to concentrate mostly on avoiding what they do not want to happen.”
“What is most important in their performance gets the most training coverage and is raised to the highest fluency levels,” Charlie explains.
What else is prioritized? Checklists and on-going training. “Even after original training, they are forced into a special knowledge maintenance routine: regular use of the aircraft simulator to prevent atrophy through long disuse of skills needed to cope with rare and important problems.”
The antidote to man-with-a-hammer syndrome is having a complete mental tool kit.
We “don’t have just a hammer, we’ve got all the tools,” Charlie summarizes. We “use those tools checklist-style, because we’ll miss a lot if we just hope that the right tool is going to pop up unaided whenever we need it.”
As a result, we “find a lot of answers that we won’t find any other way.”
More next week!
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Reflection: How can I avoid the trap of relying too heavily on a single approach or tool in my personal and professional life? What areas of my thinking might benefit from a more diverse “mental toolkit”?
Action: Identify one complex problem I’m currently facing and deliberately approach it from at least three different angles, considering factors that may not be easily quantifiable but are nonetheless crucial to finding a comprehensive solution.