Elon Musk's decision-making logic: Looking at the world through physics, the time of human existence is insignificant

Author: Frank Wilczek

Source: CITIC Publishing House, Principles of All Things

Each of us is constantly faced with decisions large and small every day, some decisions can be decided by intuition and inertia, even if there is a mistake, the result is harmless, but some decisions are crucial and need to be decided carefully.

As a complex organism mixed with rationality and sensibility, in the decision-making process, we are always affected by some interfering factors, such as emotions, comparisons, prejudices, experiences and so on. How to improve the correctness of decision-making, the following three kinds of thinking can give some reference answers.

01

Hun ball thinking

One of the big problems in decision-making is the emotional aspect. Many times we take into account the feelings of others and hesitate when we should act. But there is a category of people who are not affected by emotions at all, act firmly towards their goals, and even look a little muddy.

In the early years, Buffett was a prime example. The founder of the company he bought, who wanted to keep a small part of the stake as a family memorial, was ruthlessly rejected by Buffett.

There is also the side of the ball, and there is Google founder Larry Page. In 2001, despite the objections of other executives, he directly announced in front of more than 130 colleagues that he had fired all the project managers without any prior notice.

In order to better understand the sphere of thinking, we must first understand a very interesting mechanism inside the brain.

Decades ago, cognitive neuroscientist Michael Gazzaniga pondered the question: "If our brains had systems that work independently, did that mean that the brains had a unified consciousness?" ”

Through long-term research, Gazzaniga finally discovered that the external information received by the brain is a discontinuous fragment, like a separate picture. So how is coherent consciousness formed? Gazzaniga's research points to a narrative system in the left side of the human brain, which he named the "interpreter."

The "interpreter" will make up the story, and the fragmented information will be composed into a logical story. It's like playing a picture in a row and turning it into a movie. But in the process, in order to make the story seem self-explanatory, it may also falsify the facts and impose non-existent causal connections.

Therefore, the unified consciousness in the brain is a script that has been processed by the "interpreter" art. The vast majority of people are unconsciously dominated by this "interpreter." Our consciousness and sensations are actually "illusions" processed by the brain.

Because of this, the smarter people tend to be, the more people who feel they can understand the world, the easier it is to deceive themselves. However, people with a ball-like mindset do not succumb to the script arranged by the "interpreter".

The balls do not deceive themselves, do not care about things, dare to die, have no heart and no lungs. Thanks to these seemingly unreasonable shortcomings, they have a certain "super rationality".

It can be said that the hunky ball thinking has the "innate immunity" of the brain. Specifically, "Hun Ball Thinking" includes the following 6 characteristics:

1. Do not maintain your own correctness

Jobs is a typical example, he is notoriously capricious. At company meetings, Jobs often scolded others for their useless ideas.

Even if he denies some ideas, if he later thinks that the idea is really good, he will still adopt it, and will never maintain his authority and correctness.

2. Don't care what other people say

In the case of Buffett, he believes that the most important asset of his investment career and the most important point of his personal qualities is the internal scorecard, which is the score he gives himself. The corresponding external scorecard is a score given to you by the outside world.

It's not that we don't need evaluation feedback, but we need to figure out which evaluation should be used as a criterion for self-challenge. Buffett believes that it is more important to listen to his own heart than to listen to the outside world.

3. Not subject to the emotional fluctuations of others

This is not to say that the hun ball children's own emotions do not fluctuate, but that the hun ball children are not easily affected by the emotional fluctuations of others, which is also a quality that good athletes must have.

The famous Korean Go player Lee Chang-ho has a nickname called "Stone Buddha", which means that he has no expression when he plays chess. At a competition, the reporter took more than a hundred photos of Lee Chang-ho, washed them out, and when he looked at them, he was all an expression.

4. Don't be afraid of cruel honesty

Extreme honesty is one of the most efficient forms of communication, albeit often cruel. Dalio felt why he wasted his time on these things, so he established a corporate culture of "extreme honesty and transparency" within bridgewater.

5. Don't empathize with your own encounters

Hun Balls have almost no feelings of self-pity, which allows them to remain extremely optimistic in the face of difficulties.

Elon Musk's SpaceX was relieved by a group of people at the bar after a rocket crash, and although Musk was also worried about his financial situation, he was very optimistic and set a new goal - to relaunch the rocket in 6 months.

6. Always seek great meaning

The eternal search for great meaning is the biggest difference between a person who thinks of a ball and a real ball. As Emerson said, "For a man who is bent on moving toward a goal, the whole world will make way for him." ”

Ashley Vance, the author of "Iron Man in Silicon Valley," once commented on Musk, which I think is a good description of people with a ball of mind. He wrote:

Musk is a sentient and righteous man, he presents joy and sorrow in an epic way, and what he feels most deeply is his mission to change the fate of mankind. As a result, it is difficult for him to be aware of the strong emotions of others, so that his humane side will be covered up, making him appear cold and ruthless, and will not care about the thoughts and needs of individuals. But it is likely that only such people can turn the whimsy of space networks into reality.

02

First principles

In 2014, Elon Musk left a 5-minute talk at the USC Business School, summarizing his thoughts on work and life into five main points, one of which talked about his decision-making style:

"Don't follow the trend, from the perspective of first principles, don't use analogy to argue, but through the most essential elements to deduce." This way you can tell what you should be doing and what is just following in someone else's footsteps. Of course it's hard, but it's the best way to do it. ”

This isn't the first time Musk has mentioned in public the framework of thought he highly recommends: first principles. In a previous interview with TED, Musk gave a more specific explanation of this concept, saying:

There's a good frame of mind, that's a physics thing, a bit like first-principles reasoning, the first-principles way of thinking is to look at the world from a physical point of view, and it's very important that we use first-principles thinking instead of comparative thinking to think about problems.

In our daily lives, we tend to compare what others have already done or are doing, and we do it. The result of thinking about decisions in this way is that only small iterations can be produced.

The way of thinking about first-principles thinking is the way of looking at the world from the perspective of physics, that is, peeling back the surface of things layer by layer, seeing the essence inside, and then going up from the essence layer by layer. This consumes a lot of brain power.

How does first principles play a role in practical decision-making? Taking Musk's vacuum capsule high-speed rail as an example, if you use comparative thinking or empirical thinking to design new train products, most people's ideas are to improve the existing functions to make the power stronger and the fluid mechanics better.

However, if the first principles are used to analyze product demand, it is necessary to return to the essential purpose of the means of transport: to transport more goods from point A to point B, which is the purpose of the original manufacture of transportation tools such as trains, and it is not necessary to use traction to achieve upgrades.

Under the support of the first principle, Musk proposed to use the model of magnetic levitation and low vacuum to create a vacuum capsule high-speed rail.

Musk also gave an example in the interview: During Tesla's development of electric vehicles, it encountered a problem: the cost of batteries remained high. At that time, the market price of energy storage batteries was $600 per kilowatt-hour, and the market price was very stable, and there would not be much change in the short term.

But Musk thinks from a first-principles perspective: What material is the battery pack made of? What is the market price of these battery raw materials? How much does it cost if we buy these raw materials and combine them into batteries? The answer is that it only costs $80 per kWh.

From the most essential point of view, study what materials the battery is composed of, and then calculate the price of these raw materials added together, so as to get the lowest price of the battery, through this way of thinking, Musk made the commercialization of electric vehicles possible.

The starting point for most people to think about the problem is that the current situation of this matter is an established fact, and I can't change it, but Musk's idea is that if it works on a physical level, then I can do it.

Looking at the world from a physical point of view, looking at specific decisions, you can start from the nature of things, not be bound by past experience, and avoid excessive analogy with similar things around you, you can see the essence of things most quickly through the heavy fog, which is Musk's decision-making logic.

03

Grayscale cognition, black and white decision-making

From obtaining information to taking action, the brain needs to go through four steps of "perception-cognition-decision-action". When intuitive thinking makes decisions, it often skips the middle two steps and goes directly from perception to action.

On the other hand, if you want to make good decisions, the two links of cognition and decision-making are crucial.

We all know that gray is somewhere between white and black, and when we want to describe it accurately, we need to add a percentage to it. Grayscale cognition is said to be in the stage of evaluating options, first do not rush to make black and white judgments, maintain a certain gray level, this gray level is best to have a value.

On the contrary, black and white decision-making means that we must have a black-and-white choice when forming the final decision, and we cannot be ambiguous. But in reality, we are just easy to confuse the two, black and white in the cognitive link, and hesitant in the decision-making link.

Let's look at an interesting example that can help you gain a deep understanding of the problems that arise in the cognitive and decision-making process.

In the mid-1990s, copper prices fell sharply. A copper mine in the United States under the Canadian inmate Mining Company was struggling to operate, and the head office wanted to close it, but also faced resistance from many sources.

The copper mine, which has more than 1,000 miners, is almost the only local business, and if it is closed, it will undoubtedly have a huge negative impact on the local economy. In addition, the closure of the copper mine means that the local management team admits to making mistakes in decision-making, and they are reluctant to do so in order to preserve their reputation.

In addition to closing the copper mine, the mining company actually has two other options: one is not to smelt locally, transport the ore to Canada, and use the new furnace to refine; the other is to continue to mine north, because there may be many deposits in the north of the copper mine.

Company executives tended to close the copper mine, mine managers thought they should continue to operate, all parties quarreled, the meeting went on for several hours without progress, and everyone was frustrated.

The resistance to closing a copper mine is as difficult as the many problems we encounter in real life: various factors are intertwined, and the choices in front of us have their own advantages and disadvantages, which are difficult to clarify at once.

At this time, a young man named Martin suddenly asked a question: "What conditions must be met for this choice to be the correct answer?" ”

The lad, who had been brought in by a mining company and from a professional consulting firm, was keenly aware that everyone had made a mistake when discussing options, and that everyone was anxious to prove that their options were the best and trying to convince each other.

In fact, discussion is a process of forming a perception of things, and grayscale cognition requires people to comprehensively evaluate the possibilities of various options. If everyone clings to their own views and opposes other people's perceptions, and no one really thinks about the feasibility, costs, and benefits of each option like an analyst, the meeting will naturally not be able to go on.

Martin advocated listing every possibility as much as possible and analyzing them. This allows for a rational assessment of the merits of each option.

In fact, once we start thinking like this, the way we look at the problem shifts, because it pulls us back from a black-and-white battle of right and wrong back to the judgment of the facts themselves. In other words, there is no need to be black and white in the cognitive stage, and the discussion plan should not be turned into an offensive and defensive battle that sticks to the position.

When the personnel of the mining company changed from "black and white cognition" to "grayscale cognition", the situation immediately changed, and the feasibility of the three options became clear at a glance:

The option of transporting ore from sea to Canada sounds good, but as soon as the account is calculated, it will be found that the cost is far greater than expected, so it can only be abandoned; the option of expanding the mine is also attractive, but from a technical point of view, there is a huge rock wall between the old and new veins, and the cost of penetrating the rock wall is too high to be feasible; in the end, although the decision to "close the copper mine" is difficult, it is the only feasible option.

Compared with grayscale cognition, black and white decision-making is relatively simple, that is, to dare to make decisions, make black and white decisions, not ambiguous and hesitant. Policymakers are accountable for others. Just like fighting a war on the battlefield, the instructions must be clear and must not be ambiguous. This is the meaning and value of leadership.

Therefore, for the decision maker, his responsibility is to tell his partners whether to do it or not, when to do it, and how much resources to invest. In fact, with good grayscale cognition, black and white decision-making is not a problem.

From Bridgewater's decision-making approach, we can draw inspiration: the opinions of a group of professionals are weighted far more reliably than the opinions of one person. So, we can build an expert panel for ourselves to improve our winning percentage in the face of uncertain and complex decisions.

04

Walk with the principle of everything

Looking at the world through the basic theories of physics, in addition to Musk, there is another scholar, who is the Nobel Laureate in Physics: Professor Frank Wilczek.

Professor Wilczek once wrote:

From the mid-16th century to the present, in space, human exploration has expanded from the solar system to galaxies, nebulae, and the entire universe; from Galileo's several-centimeter-sized ball of gravity to elementary particles smaller than 10-15 meters. In terms of time, humans can both describe the evolution of the universe over 13 billion years and track the Higgs particle, which has a lifespan of only 10-22 seconds.

Finally, mankind has discovered that the complex world is composed of only a few very simple elementary particles, operating according to a few basic physical laws, and these most basic laws not only explain the laws of the universe, but also reveal or remind us to look at the world and think about the basic laws that everything should follow. This is also the logical core of making decisions.

The universe is extremely rich in time, and in the face of the length of time dating back to the Big Bang, our human life expectancy suddenly becomes worthless, but the conscious moments contained in a person's complete life are far more than the number of human lifespans contained in the history of the universe, and we are endowed with a rich inner.

Compared with the time of the universe, our human existence is insignificant, but the conscious moments of our thoughts and decisions give this life great meaning, and from this point of view, our life is extremely rich and vast.