Abracadabra

“Abracadabra.” think about this word the next time you speak. It translates from Hebrew as, “I will create as I speak.” We are creating our thoughts as we speak; we are writing to our hard disk (our brain) as the sound leaves our mouth. Furthermore, the way we speak with others has a significant impact on how much thinking we do (yes, how much) and on what we think.

But I am getting ahead of myself.

There are four modes of communicating: preacher, prosecutor, politician, and scientist.

Let’s start by talking about the first three modes – we’ll discuss the scientist mode last.

If you are in preacher mode, you are fully convinced of your belief and are trying to get others to embrace your gospel. A politician is trying to win the approval of others with a message he may or may not believe in. A prosecutor is trying to build an argument to convince you to change your mind.

We all spend some time in each of these modes. As a CEO I spend plenty of time in preacher mode when I communicate IMA’s corporate values to employees. I go into prosecutor mode with my kids when I try to change their minds on the virtues of doing homework and cleaning their rooms.

In general, I am not a big fan of politicians and thus I was going to take the easy route and write something insulting about them – how they’re liars, intellectually dishonest, and always changing their minds on issues with the prevailing winds of public opinion. But then I realized that we don’t have to be politicians to be spending time in politician mode. We all go there, including yours truly. When I had job interviews a few decades ago I am sure I was in politician mode as I told potential employers what they wanted to hear. Most of us have behaved as politicians on first dates – we want our date to like us, so we can get a second date. If I hadn’t turned on my politician mode on my first date with my wife, I’d still be living with my parents.

Each one of these modes is important to our survival as a species, and they are important to our own daily lives. Steve Jobs, in addition to being a visionary, had the talent of being able to convince others to do what seemed impossible. Apple employees called it “Steve’s reality distortion field.” Jobs was in preacher mode. Our court system runs on the ability of lawyers to get judges and jurors to change their minds. But so do our common social and interpersonal interactions.

I don’t want to be dismissive of the aforementioned modes, but it is important to note that we do very little learning in these modes. If you carefully think about the three modes we have discussed so far, each one is outer-focused – you already know what you think and are trying to change someone else’s mind to your way of thinking.

And then there is scientist mode.

Before I learned about this framework, I had a different name for it: student of life mode. However, “scientist mode” has its own appeal. A scientist treats ideas as hypotheses that need to be tested. Ideas are just malleable starting points (as opposed to hardened truths) for further investigation.

What stands between other modes and the scientist mode is our ego. I keep coming back to Epictetus when he says, “It is impossible for a man to learn what he thinks he already knows.” Our ego tricks us into believing that we already know a lot more than we actually do. New information that potentially could have turned into new knowledge, a new way of thinking, bounces off of the ego’s impervious surface.

To let go of our ego, to quote Adam Grant, author of Think Again, we need to put curiosity above conviction and humility over pride. We don’t need to believe (or defend) every thought that enters our mind. We don’t want to let our thoughts and ideas automatically become our identity.

Identity tends to be unmalleable, which is both feature and bug. The feature can be used to our advantage – we can carefully craft our values and the positive traits we want to embody. We think of them as our identity and with time they will indeed become (harden into) our identity. We can tell ourselves, “I am a person who is…” For instance, a person who is kind to others, who is honest, who is net positive to society, who is healthy, etc. If you think and behave according to values set by your identity, eventually you’ll rise to them. I discuss identity in greater detail in “I Don’t Eat Pork.”

Only carefully crafted values should be part of our identity. Once our ideas become us, it is hard to change our mind on them. That could a bug as well. If we let our identity become “I believe the world is flat,” it will be difficult to change when we discover conflicting evidence. Ideas need to spend most of their time living in the state of hypothesis.

Adam Grant, in Think Again, tells a story about the first time he met Daniel

Kahneman, the Nobel laureate and co-father of behavioral economics. He was giving a speech and noticed Kahneman in the first row. He was shocked and flattered. After the speech Kahneman came up to him, smiling, and said,

“That was wonderful. I was wrong.” Not a reaction Grant expected. Puzzled, Grant asked something along the lines of “How can you be happy about being wrong?” Kahneman explained (I am paraphrasing), “No one enjoys being wrong. But I do enjoy having been wrong. This means I am now less wrong now than I was before. This means I’ve learned something.”

Finding joy in having been wrong is a skill that we all need cultivate.

Intellectually Honest Debate

I was in Israel with a group of friends. One of my friends offered to show us the biggest Yeshiva (orthodox Jewish college) in the center of Jerusalem, where he had studied years before. It’s called Mir Yeshiva. We went there at 10 o’clock on a Thursday night. Our friend guided us into the “library.” If you go to a library on any campus in the US, it will have two things: a lot of books and a lot of quiet. This library had a lot of books (which were packed against the walls), but it had all the quietness of a bar on Saturday night when ladies drink for free (minus the ladies and the music).

What we saw before us was an enormous room with several hundred students sitting in groups of two and three around modest wooden tables, debating. As my friend explained, the louder they argue the better they learn. This was the time-honored process of learning through arguing. Students would pick a sentence or a verse in the Torah and argue about its meaning for hours (sometimes days).

I was mesmerized by what I saw. This was such incredible dedication to learning. Remember, we were there late on a Thursday evening. I cannot think of better gymnastics for the brain than this. It doesn’t really matter what subject you want to learn – the Torah, investing, or physics. This sort of dynamic, confrontational process of getting at the truth will uncover every weak and unpolished angle of your understanding of any subject. These Torah students, though far removed from having a debate about science, spent the bulk of their days being in scientist mode.

These students were involved not just in a debate but in an intellectually honest debate, which we’ll discuss next. But before we do that, I’d like to note an interesting fact I learned at Mir Yeshiva: Students when they enter yeshiva do not have a graduation date (there is no “class of 2025” type of thing). They graduate when they are done, and even after they graduate, they continue to study Torah for a few hours a day. This goes against the common and practical modern Western tradition of going to college, studying and passing tests, graduating, and then going off to a job. Somewhere between graduating and going to work we tend to feel that we have exited the learning state, and so we stop learning. I really like this Mir Yeshiva idea of not having a graduation from learning; it’s the ultimate embodiment of being a student of life – you are a perennial student of life for life.

Back to debating. When you are debating you can be in scientist mode or prosecutor mode. If our goal is, by means of a carefully crafted argument, to convince a car rental clerk to give a free upgrade, then we are in prosecutor mode. If our goal is to learn but not to change someone’s mind, then we are in scientist mode. But again, our ego often takes over and the debate, instead of turning into a pursuit of the truth, only hardens our beliefs (what we already know).

If you are on a search for truth, debating in prosecutor mode can actually be dangerous, because by debating you may end up hardening ideas that you did not really have the chance to fully think through. In other words, what you end up believing is formed by this sequence: An idea randomly entered your mind; you did not think it through from different angles but debated it in prosecutor mode, and this idea became part of your core beliefs. This doesn’t sound scary until you realize that if the opposite idea had entered your mind first, you might have ended up believing the opposite.

If you are debating in scientist mode, you have strong ideas that are loosely held. For a scientist the truth is out there, whether he or she believes in it or not. Just like gravity, truth doesn’t care if you believe in it or not. Just climb the tree carelessly without believing in gravity. After a few broken extremities, gravity will have confirmed its existence. As Seneca puts it, “Time will discover truth.”

You may as well try to discover it before time does. Gravity existed long before Isaac Newton discovered it. Scientists are in some ways archeologists of truth.

To have an intellectually honest debate or conversation you have to enter it with a willingness to learn. Here are the rules for an intellectually honest debate:

Be honest with ourselves. Make sure we are in scientist, not prosecutor mode. As Dostoevsky says in The Brothers Karamazov, “Above all, don’t lie to yourself. The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to a point that he cannot distinguish the truth within him, or around him, and so loses all respect for himself and for others. And having no respect he ceases to love.”

Acknowledge alternative viewpoints. Charlie Munger summed this up very well: “I’m not entitled to have an opinion unless I can state the arguments against my position better than the people who are in opposition. I think that I am qualified to speak only when I’ve reached that state.”

Acknowledge our assumptions. Once your assumptions are disclosed it is much easier to have an intellectually honest discussion, because now you can debate each assumption separately.

Acknowledge our own biases. If you disclose your bias, then your debating partner will be able to attach an appropriate weight to your opinion.

Admit where your arguments are weak. This goes to the core of intellectual honesty. This will only make the search for the truth more expeditious.

Address the argument; don’t attack the person. This relates to my Dale Carnegie discussion in the chapter “Dale Carnegie – Better Late than

Never.” We are debating ideas, not character. Don’t sink to the level of some of our politicians.

A great example of thinking and debating like a scientist was unsurprisingly generated by two giants in the world of science, Albert Einstein and Niels Bohr

– both received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1922. They were involved in one of the longest-running scientific debates ever – it lasted almost 30 years. The debate began in 1927 at the Fifth Solvay Conference on Electrons and Photons in Brussels, which was attended by a total of 17 Nobel laureates.

Niels Bohr was a Danish-born scientist who was one of the co-creators of quantum physics. Though Einstein also helped create quantum physics, for a long time he could not accept its probabilistic nature.

Quantum physics (also known as quantum mechanics or quantum theory) studies the behavior of atomic and subatomic particles. To understand Einstein’s problem with quantum physics, we need to understand that classical physics – which Einstein helped to eclipse in the early 20th century – was a simple, elegant masterpiece. And most importantly, it was deterministic science, meaning you could determine with incredible precision, through the use of mathematics, what would happen to object A if certain forces were applied to it by object B.

Enter quantum physics. This new science did not have the certainty, simplicity, or elegance of classical physics. Where events in classical physics are solid and continuous, in quantum physics they are fuzzy, discontinuous, and uncertain. Even Einstein’s post-classical physics could not account for the behavior of atomic and subatomic particles… but quantum physics could.

Quantum physics had busted out from the beautiful constructs of classical physics, but – and this is an incredibly important “but” – it worked! If it were not for quantum physics, I might not be writing this book, because the microprocessor would not have been invented. (I honestly don’t know how anything could have been written before word processors, because I rewrite the same sentence a dozen times. But I digress.)

The Einstein–Bohr debate was not a private debate; no, it was a very public discourse with papers written, presentations given, and lectures held. Bohr and Einstein were intensely searching for the truth. Their disagreements were always about ideas, and their arguments were supported by experiments, formulas, and models.

Einstein, though he never arrived at full agreement with Bohr, changed his mind several times and agreed with a lot of Bohr’s arguments. In the end, he still could not accept quantum physics’ probabilistic nature and lack of elegance, and till the very end of his life Einstein was still looking for an alternative to quantum physics through his unfinished unified theory.

The debate forced Bohr to backtrack on several issues as well.

During this great debate and when it was over, Einstein and Bohr remained friends, and their admiration for each other had not withered.

Science and society as a whole were the beneficiaries of this intellectually honest debate that had the sole objective of uncovering the truth. The Einstein–Bohr debate should be the gold standard for intellectual honesty and honest debate.

Here is another example. Intellectual debate is deeply embedded in the Jewish legal system. By Jewish law, a court will not accept a capital punishment verdict if it was delivered by a unanimous decision of 23 judges who decide upon capital cases. Yes, you read that right. There has to be at least one dissenting opinion for the death penalty verdict to be accepted. The court wants to make sure there was at least one voice in the proceedings that forced judges to confront the opposing argument. In other words, the court wants to make sure the decision was not merely tribal, but was debated.

When I have a conversation with someone that turns into a debate, I ask myself, what mode do I need to be in and what mode I am actually in? What mode is the person I am debating in? Also, I have stopped debating or even discussing politics or religion with others. For most people (not you or me, of course) political and religious views are hardened into their identities.

The only thing that it is worse than being in scientist mode and debating with someone who is in prosecutor mode, is debating someone who is in politician mode. At least if they are in prosecutor mode you may learn something. If they are in politician mode, they’ll just agree with you so you’ll like them. You’ll get a temporary ego boost, but you won’t get closer to the truth.

There is a time and place for each mode, but we need to keep reminding ourselves that we only truly learn when we are in scientist mode. That is usually the most difficult mode to maintain. Our ego, our desire to be right, constantly shifts us from scientist mode into one of the other modes. If we want to keep learning, being students of life, then we need to program (or reprogram) ourselves to spend a large chunk of our life in scientist mode.

I discovered that I spend more time than I thought in prosecutor mode with my kids. I finished writing the bulk of his chapter on a plane ride from Denver to Chicago. Jonah (20 years old) and I went to pick up Hannah (15 years old) from summer camp. I shared the chapter with Jonah on the plane. In Chicago, Jonah, Hannah and I spent hours walking the Magnificent Mile, sightseeing and talking. A few times our conversation turned contentious. Jonah would remind me, “Dad, are you in scientist mode?” In that moment my initial reaction would be to say “Yes.” But I’d pause, think about it, and realize that somewhere in the conversation my ego took over and what supposed to be a scientist-mode conversation turned into a prosecutor-mode one. I need to keep reminding myself that in scientist mode my goal should be not to prove but to improve myself.

This incident in Chicago gave me another idea for how to train myself to stay in scientist mode: I’ve shared this chapter with my family, my friends, and colleagues at IMA and asked them to let me know when I cross into prosecutor mode in our conversations. This may work for you, too, dear reader.