On Objectivity
Life is too short to surround yourself with people who aren’t completely and totally open-minded about everything. I mean everything. Like, as they receive new information, they are willing to discard prior notions that they’ve held for years or even for their entire lives.
I’ve seen this concept expressed over the years in different ways.
My first exposure was through Munger: “Any year that passes in which you don't destroy one of your best-loved ideas is a wasted year.”
Later, once I started writing a lot more, I came across Faulkner’s “Kill Your Darlings.” Sometimes you might spend weeks writing something only to end up deleting all the pages — I’ve learned to think of this as the writing before the writing, it was the writing that had to be done and then deleted so that the highest-quality writing could emerge. Twenty pages of dross in the trash yield one page of fine dining. But the maxim applies for both Darlings on the page and Darlings that remain trapped in your mental.
Third is F. Scott Fitzgerald’s quote: “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.”
This is true objectivity to me, true open-mindedness, and it is rare.
As far as Munger’s quote, what I’ve realized is that the more you read, and the more fully you embrace taking risk and living life to the fullest, the more you will end up shedding old beliefs. It’s inevitable amidst an onslaught of experience and wisdom.
If you sit on the couch and watch television and scroll social media and criticize others all day, like, your beliefs will remain stagnant. Because you’re stagnant. Plus, humans are cursed with confirmation bias: we filter all new information in a way that conforms to our prior beliefs rather than in a way that updates them.
We hate being wrong. We do everything we can to avoid damage to our precious ego. Many careers are a confidence game where people want to look smart and appear as experts, and any admission that they were wrong in the past feels to them like permanent reputational damage. In reality, it doesn’t work like that at all, but one can understand the reason why people operate this way. One of the oldest truths is that all error comes from ignorance. That truth applies here.
One of the only good traits I have working in my favor is objectivity, with the credit due entirely to nurture rather than nature. Trading markets for a living tends to humble anyone but long/short equity in particular forces the inculcation of objective thought.
In long-only investing, you could see a stock at $100, do the work and decide “it’s overvalued at $100, but at $80 I’m interested.” In long/short, there is no “I’m not interested.” If it’s clearly not a long, then by deductive reasoning, it’s probably a short. Don’t be lazy. Do the work.
So you end up with this whole universe of names where you’ve objectively laid out levels: at $100 it’s fairly valued, at $80 I’m long, at $120 I’m short. Let’s say a year goes by, you buy it at $80 and it trades to $120. If you’re being totally objective and honest with yourself, not only should you exit, but you should flip short. This ability to wage war against one’s priors without letting ego get in the way is what separates the good from the great. Ultimately, this all goes back to Fitzgerald’s principle: the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time, the bull case and the bear case, the long and the short, all of which helps prevent you from getting overly emotional.
This trait, with years of practice, carries over to other areas of your life and you quickly realize that the vast majority of people are permanently glued to one side. They simply cannot hold two opposing ideas in their mind at the same time.
Look at politics, for instance. Look at religion. Look at how people are totally unable to evaluate a message independent of the messenger. Look at how every single person is either good or bad, when the truth is that every single human on this earth is not all good or not all bad — the good ones have flaws, the bad ones have merits, and we are all just some unique blend of virtues and vices. In the duality of man, we demand order where only chaos exists. This concept has been expressed by James Allen far better than I could ever hope to:
“A man may be honest in certain directions, yet suffer privations; a man may be dishonest in certain directions, yet acquire wealth; but the conclusion usually formed that the one man fails because of his particular honesty, and that the other prospers because of his particular dishonesty, is the result of a superficial judgment, which assumes that the dishonest man is almost totally corrupt, and honest man almost entirely virtuous. In the light of a deeper knowledge and wider experience, such judgment is found to be erroneous. The dishonest man may have some admirable virtues which the other does not possess; and the honest man obnoxious vices which are absent in the other. The honest man reaps the good results of his honest thoughts and acts; he also brings upon himself the sufferings which his vices produce. The dishonest man likewise garners his own suffering and happiness.”
Once you train your mind to operate this way — objective and open-minded to all ideas and all people — it becomes increasingly difficult to endure closed-mindedness in others.
The most obvious example today is Trump. He is a man like any other. Sometimes he’s right, sometimes he’s wrong. He has some good qualities and he has some bad qualities. No different than you or I. Yet I would argue that 90% of this country is simply unable to view him that way. I wrote about this concept in On Stories and it applies here: on one side, you have the group that will never give him an ounce of credit for the good ideas. On the other side, you have the group that will never give him an ounce of blame for the bad ideas. Both of these groups are wrong.
It’s not just Trump, you could argue the same principles took place with Biden or any former president, but for whatever reason Trump incites strong emotion in people to the point where you have grown men that are spending their entire lives thinking and talking about him. This is mostly from the negative side, since anger and hatred are more powerful and all-consuming emotions than any of the positive ones. It just strikes me as an awful way to live your life, and if I had to find an explanation for the irrational thought patterns from both sides of the aisle, people are generally both tribal and deeply insecure by nature and thus feel an everpresent need to belong.
Politics gives people that, the us versus them, the reassuring notion that you’re not alone in this cruel world and that you have a team you’re part of.
Yet when viewed objectively, it all just seems kind of pathetic.
Why can’t you just be your own man? Who are you, really? What do you actually believe? Where is your own capacity for critical thought? There is zero chance that your own personal beliefs align 100% with either of these sides, yet that is the way you’re conducting yourself, a sheep, a partisan pawn. And if there is one more sad insight on this topic that I’ve come to appreciate, it’s that people are driven far more by hatred for the other team than by love for America. Doesn’t matter who is in office. It could be their guy, it could be the other guy, they will still spend all time and energy shitting on the other team instead of on building, on positivity, and on cooperation. It is a nasty side of human nature that I wish didn’t exist, but it always has and it always will.
Anyway, I don’t want to dwell on this issue; it’s all so tiresome and it has really reduced my interest in all social media. From your own experience, reflect: how many times have you seen an argument take place where one person says hey, you know what, you actually changed my mind — thanks! Like, the number is literally zero. Over decades! Decades and decades of witnessing these silly arguments and the number is zero. After realizing this error, which like all errors came from ignorance, you realize that it is completely pointless to argue with people online and you lose interest in that practice entirely.
The biggest mental block I personally still struggle with is separating message from messenger.
I have a hard time evaluating a statement on its own merits — I want to know who it came from, what is his background, his experience, what gives him the right to say this, what credibility does he have where I should take this message seriously. I don’t react negatively or with anger or search through his past for hypocrisy, those practices I tossed to the side because really, who gives a fuck. Loser behavior. But I do view all messages filtered through the lens who the messenger is, and I’m not certain how right or wrong I am in continuing to do so; having read a lot of philosophy and history, there are intelligent arguments on both sides.
On one side, there’s the maxim itself: separate the message from the messenger. I think this is more correct than not from the standpoint of open-mindedness and objectivity. A truth is a truth no matter who utters it.
On the other hand, there’s the principle of it’s not what you say, but how you say it. This statement is also true. And at the same time, a lot of the Greeks and Romans, the ancient thinkers and orators, they stress listening not just to what the speaker has to say but his tone, his delivery, his background, and all of that. The message, the messenger and the delivery of the message all matter.
The furthest I’ve come on this debate is to limit it to feedback I personally receive. If someone says something to me, or about me, good or bad, I evaluate the message standalone. It might not happen until later: I have to be alone, and I have to be certain that I’m completely free from the influence of emotion. Only then can I objectively parse out what words are true and what words I can safely discard. This idea was the basis of the following tweet, which got pretty good engagement:
Similarly, here is a wonderful excerpt from Pascal on the ways in which an idea can be pre-influenced and thus sway the recipient’s objectivity:
“How difficult it is to submit anything to the judgment of another, without prejudicing his judgment by the manner in which we submit it! If we say, ‘I think it beautiful,’ ‘I think it obscure,’ or the like, we either entice the imagination into that view, or irritate it to the contrary. It is better to say nothing; and then the other judges according to what really is, that is to say, according as it then is, and according as the other circumstances, not of our making, have placed it. But we at least shall have added nothing, unless it be that silence also produces an effect, according to the turn and the interpretation which the other will be disposed to give it, or as he will guess it from gestures or countenance, or from the tone of the voice, if he is a physiognomist. So difficult is it not to upset a judgment from its natural place, or, rather, so rarely is it firm and stable!”
Q’s with no A’s. If I figure it out, I’ll let you know.
Above all, the way I strive to be now is just firmly rooted in the middle. Disengaged, detached, observing, thinking, quick to listen and slow to judge. I read a lot and I embrace risk, and as a result of doing both those things, I find myself rapidly discarding old beliefs. I expect this to continue and I’m confident that everything I believe right now, five years from today, there’s a strong chance it’s all in the trash. I don’t argue with anyone about anything, and I try and practice what Montaigne prizes highly in a man: “…he should be taught to yield to the truth, and to lay down his arms as soon as he discovers it, whether it appear in his opponent's argument, or to himself in his own second thoughts.”
The odd thing about reading a shitload of history and philosophy in particular is that in a sense, you come away dumber. The more you consume, the more you confidently say “I have no idea” about a given topic, or “damn, this is way more complex than I gave it credit for.” Once again, all error comes from ignorance.
I wrote about some of this in On America, the notion that all debates which have persisted for hundreds of years are loaded with valid points on both sides, or else the grand laboratory of cumulative human experience would’ve solved the issue by now.
Even beyond that, the more I read, the more I see that all the insights I've ever had which I considered clever and original, or insights from others which they view as clever and original, like, either Seneca, Plutarch or the Bible got there first.
The end result?
I talk a lot less. I suppose that’s the first step in descending from Mount Stupid.
I will leave you with a quote from Bertrand Russell that sums it all up:
“The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and wise people so full of doubts.”
Pray for the closed-minded,
GB
