The Art of Clear Thinking by Hasard Lee
Today it represents one of the great human achievements where, despite nearly one hundred thousand flights taking off per day, U.S. airlines haven’t had a single fatal crash in more than a decade.
I didn’t have time to think through each option, so I fell back on the mantra, "There’s no problem so bad you can’t make it worse."
Though we have talented pilots, the mantra that we bet our lives on is that a good pilot uses superior judgment to avoid situations that require the use of superior skill. Clean and clear decision-making will nearly always beat talent alone. The ability to make a correct decision with incomplete information and a limited amount of time is not just for fighter pilots, though—it’s a universal skill.
The average person, despite physically generating only one hundred watts of electricity—about what a light bulb uses—now consumes over twelve thousand watts of energy. That energy powers the technology that amplifies our decisions.
The most important part is being deliberate in making decisions and then debriefing afterward on how to improve. It’s this iteration that over the last fifty years has developed United States fighter pilots into the most capable air force in the world—one that hasn’t lost a U.S. soldier to enemy aircraft since April 15, 1953, and hasn’t lost in an air-to-air engagement in over fifty years.
Next was analyzing the situation. Developing a proper understanding of the problem is the first step to solving it. Our instinct is often to bypass this critical step and begin acting. It’s a cognitive bias for many people and organizations, whereby we believe that the sooner we start fixing a problem, the sooner we’ll solve it.
Because power laws can have such an outsize effect on outcomes, it’s important to be able to quickly identify them and understand their implications. For a multitude of reasons, people consistently fail to account for them, which often leads to a skewed assessment of the problem they’re facing and results in a poor decision.
Today, Google—founded by the former Stanford students Larry Page and Sergey Brin—is worth over $1.5 trillion. There’s no way to tell whether Excite would have gone on to be as successful as Google if George had bought the students’ algorithm that day. However, passing on it is now considered one of the worst business decisions in history, one that eventually contributed to the company’s collapse. The root cause is that George didn’t understand power laws on a deep enough level and how they related to the problems he was facing. He didn’t see how the exponential growth of the internet would radically alter the system within which he was working. Hiring teams of journalists to review websites was a linear solution.
Updated: Jul 31, 2023
Pioneered by Robert Metcalfe, one of the early inventors of the Ethernet, the power law, known as Metcalfe’s Law, states that the value of a network grows exponentially with the total number of users.
Updated: Aug 04, 2023
In biology, for instance, Kleiber’s law demonstrates that an animal’s metabolism doesn’t scale linearly with its size but rather adheres to a power law. For example, a cat, despite weighing over one hundred times more than a mouse, only requires thirty-two times the energy to sustain itself. It’s a form of economies of scale whereby a doubling of the size doesn’t require a doubling of the energy consumption. This law surprisingly holds true throughout much of the animal kingdom—the same is true for a cow, which is one hundred times heavier than a cat, and a whale, which is one hundred times heavier than a cow.
The long-tail power law forms the basis for the economist Vilfredo Pareto’s famous 80–20 rule, where he noticed that 20 percent of the people in Italy owned 80 percent of the land.
For example, named after George Zipf, Zipf’s law shows that the most frequent word used in a language will occur twice as often as the second-most-frequent word, three times as often as the third-most-frequent word, and so on. In the English language, the is the most frequent word used and accounts for nearly 5 percent of all words, followed by of, which accounts for just over 3.5 percent, and then and, which accounts for 2.4 percent. It’s a surprisingly consistent law that holds true throughout nearly all languages. The takeaway for a new speaker is that by just learning the top 135 words of a language, they can speak half of all the words used by a native speaker.