How can I get accurate information?

From Shane Parrish’s book “Clear Thinking”

How can I get accurate information?

“When it comes to getting information that’s accurate, there are two principles you should know: the HiFi Principle and the HiEx Principle. The first will help you find the best intel possible from within any given situation, and the second will help you find the best intel possible from outside of it.” (p. 164)
The hifi Principle: Get high-fidelity (HiFi) information—information that’s close to the source and unfiltered by other people’s biases and interests.”

Be careful about reading or listening to abstractions or summaries.

“The quality of your decisions is directly related to the quality of your thoughts. The quality of your thoughts is directly related to the quality of your information. Many people treat all sources of information as if they’re equally valid. They’re not. While you might value getting everyone’s opinion, that doesn’t mean each opinion should be equally weighted or considered.”
“A lot of the information we consume is in the form of highlights, summaries, or distillations. It’s the illusion of knowledge. We learn the answer but can’t show our work.”
“Consider what happens when you consult a nutritionist. They take their years of experience and knowledge and compress it into a list of foods to eat and behaviors to implement. If you just want the answer, they will tell you what to eat and how much. This is an abstraction; it’s like you’re back in sixth-grade math class, copying answers from the person beside you. Sure, you got the right answer, but you don’t know why it’s the answer. You lack understanding, and information without understanding is dangerous.”
“It’s natural to think these abstractions will save us time and improve our decision-making, but in many cases they don’t. Reading a summary might be faster than reading a full document, but it misses a lot of details—details that weren’t relevant to the person summarizing the information, but that might be relevant to you. You end up saving time at the cost of missing important information. Skimming inadvertently creates blind spots.” (p. 165)
“Information is food for the mind. What you put in today shapes your solutions tomorrow. And just as you are responsible for the food that goes into your mouth, you are responsible for the information that goes into your mind. You can’t be healthy if you feed yourself junk food every day, and you can’t make good decisions if you’re consuming low-quality information. Higher quality inputs lead to higher quality outputs.”
“The desire for abstractions is understandable. The amount of information that bombards us daily can feel overwhelming. But the further the information is from the original source, the more filters it’s been through before getting to you. Living on a diet of abstractions is like living on a diet of junk food: it has less nutritional value—less information content, which means you’re not learning as much.”
“Real knowledge is earned, while abstractions are merely borrowed. Too often decision-makers get their information and observations from sources that are multiple degrees removed from the problem. Relying on these abstractions is a prime opportunity for the ego default to work its mischief. It conjures the illusion of knowledge: we feel confident about what to do without really understanding the problem.”
“You can’t make good decisions with bad information. In fact, when you see people making decisions that don’t make sense to you, chances are they’re based on different information than you’ve consumed. Just as junk food eventually makes you unhealthy, bad inputs eventually produce bad decisions.”

How can I get better information?

“How do we get better information? The person closest to the problem often has the most accurate information about it. What they tend to lack is a broader perspective. The person working on the line at McDonald’s knows how to fix a recurring problem at their restaurant better than a person merely analyzing some data. What they don’t know is how it fits into the bigger picture.” (p. 166)
“My friend Tim Urban has a good metaphor to explain this concept. In the restaurant business, there are chefs and there are line cooks.[2] Both can follow a recipe. When things go according to plan, there is no difference in the process or the result. But when things go wrong, the chef knows why. The line cook often does not. The chef has cultivated depth of understanding through years of experience, experimentation, and reflection, and as a result, the chef, rather than the line cook, can diagnose problems when they arise.”
“History shows that the greatest thinkers all used information that they collected personally. They earned their knowledge the hard way either in the trenches of experience or through careful study of exemplars. They looked for raw, unfiltered information, and ventured out into the world to interact with it directly.”
“Leonardo da Vinci is a great example. He kept journals throughout his life, and they contain notes about how he went about getting the right information. He wrote things like, “Get the master of arithmetic to show you how to square a triangle,” and “Get a master of hydraulics to tell you how to repair a lock, canal and mill in the Lombard manner.” Great thinkers understand the importance of high-quality information, and that other people’s abstractions are often limited in their usefulness.” (p. 167)
“Similarly, any information you may get from a secondhand source has likely been filtered through that source’s interests. Since your interests are likely different from theirs, their summaries, highlights, and descriptions are likely to leave out relevant information that could help you with your decision.” (p. 168)

Try running an experiment.

Safeguard: Run an experiment. Try something out to see what kinds of results it yields.
“An experiment is a low-risk way of gathering important information. For example, if you want to know whether people will pay for something, try to sell it before you even create it. That’s what my friends at Tuft & Needle did. They were one of the first companies to ship foam mattresses directly to consumers’ homes. They shared an incredible story with me over coffee one day, about their early days. In order to validate their idea, they set up a landing page, bought some Facebook ads, and started taking orders. They didn’t even have a product or a company yet; they just wanted to see if people would buy foam mattresses from them. After a few days of receiving orders, they had all the proof they needed that people would buy their product. They refunded all the orders and officially started their company. While this example may be a bit unorthodox, there are many ways in which experimenting can help determine whether there’s sufficient demand for a product or service.”

Safeguard: Evaluate the motivations and incentives of your sources. Remember that everyone sees things from a limited perspective.

“Evaluating people’s motivations and incentives is especially important when you don’t have the ability to go and confirm something for yourself. If you absolutely must rely on someone else’s information and opinions, you have a responsibility to think about the lens through which they view the situation. Everyone has a limited perspective into the problem. Everyone has a blind spot. It’s your job as the decision-maker to weave their perspective together with others to get closer to reality.” (p. 172)
“It helps to think of each person’s perspective as a lens onto the world. When you put their glasses on, you see what they see and have better insight into what they might be feeling. But those glasses have blind spots, often missing important information or confusing fact with opinion. By trying on all the glasses, you see what others miss.”
“When you’re getting information from other people, you need to keep an open mind. That means withholding your own judgment as long as possible. People often undermine the information-gathering process by subjecting others to their judgments, beliefs, and perspective. The point isn’t to argue or disagree, however. Judging people and telling them they’re wrong only shuts them down and prevents a free flow of information. When you’re gathering information, your job is to see the world through other people’s eyes. You’re trying to understand their experience and how they processed it. You can learn valuable information even when you don’t agree with their view of the world. Just ask questions, keep your thoughts to yourself, and remain curious about other perspectives.” (p. 173)

When you ask people for information, don’t ask them what to think, ask them HOW to think.

Safeguard: When you get information from other people, ask questions that yield detailed answers. Don’t ask people what they think; instead, ask them how they think.
“Our goal in decision-making is not just to gather information, but to gather information relevant to our decision. That requires more than building an inventory of data points; it requires understanding the why and how behind those data points—the principles that good decision-makers use in this area.”

What questions should I ask experts?

“Getting at those principles requires asking the right kinds of questions. There are three I’d recommend:
Question 1: What are the variables you’d use to make this decision if you were in my shoes? How do those variables relate to one another?
Question 2: What do you know about this problem that I (or other people) don’t? What can you see based on your experience that someone without your experience can’t? What do you know that most people miss?
Question 3: What would be your process for deciding if you were in my shoes? How would you go about doing it? (Or: How would you tell your mother/friend to go about doing it?) Notice how different these questions are from the typical, “Here’s my problem. What should I do?” Remember: the questions you ask help to determine the quality of the information you get.

Make sure you ask the right people or experts.

“We’ve talked about the importance of getting high-fidelity information. The second principle for getting accurate information is getting high-expertise information:
the hiex principle: Get high-expertise (HiEx) information, which comes both from people with a lot of knowledge and/or experience in a specific area, and from people with knowledge and experience in many areas.
“When someone close to the problem isn’t available to you, look for people who recently solved a similar problem. The word “recent” is an important nuance here. When you want specific advice from an expert, look for someone who recently solved the problem you’re trying to solve. Asking someone who solved your problem twenty years ago how they did it is not likely to offer specific and effective insights. You want a current expert—and no, I don’t mean the talking heads on TV. They’re rarely actual experts.” (p. 175)

Getting accurate expert’s opinion can save you time and energy.

“Experts can increase the accuracy of your information and decrease the time it takes to get it. Getting even one expert’s advice can cut through a lot of confusion and help you quickly formulate and/or eliminate options.”
“I learned the value of expert advice firsthand when I began coding at an intelligence agency. It was a very different experience from coding as I’d learned it. In school, it was possible to basically just Google things and piece them together. People had solved these problems long ago and the solutions hadn’t changed much. My job at the intelligence agency was much harder. Not only were we prohibited from Googling anything we were coding for security reasons, but even if we’d been allowed to, it wouldn’t have helped: we were trying to do things no one had ever done before.”
“A few months in, I got stuck on a problem. Really stuck! As a kid I’d always taken in a lot of different perspectives on a problem, but in the end, I always thought if I just put my head down and worked harder, I’d figure it out eventually. Days went by. Then weeks. I couldn’t understand what was happening. Finally, with my head down, I approached someone who had worked on a similar problem before and explained what I was stuck on.”
“Let me look at your code,” he said. In less than twenty minutes he diagnosed what was wrong: there was a subtle difference between what the documentation said would happen and what would actually happen in certain edge cases. Since most people wouldn’t run into those edge cases, the problem wasn’t documented anywhere. This person had faced and overcome the same problem, though, and it had taken him a long time to solve. He was happy to share his hard-earned knowledge. While I was a bit frustrated that I’d wasted weeks out of stubbornness, this exchange kick-started our relationship, and I learned a lot from him over the years.” (p. 176)
“Even one expert’s opinion can be more helpful than the thoughts and guesses of dozens or hundreds of amateurs. But how do you recruit one to work with you? I’ve experienced expert advice from both sides: getting and giving. I reach out to experts all the time for insight, and I have thousands of people who reach out to me for advice. Let me share what I’ve learned on both recruiting experts and working with them.” (p. 177)

How to get experts on your side.

“Many people don’t want to reach out to experts for help, either because they don’t think it’s an option, or because they’re afraid of being a nuisance. Sometimes, if we know the expert, we’re embarrassed. Maybe they’ll discover we know less than we actually do! If you have any anxieties of this sort, the first thing to understand is that experts love sharing what they’ve learned when they know it’ll make a difference. Helping others achieve their goals is one of the things that make life and work meaningful.” (p. 177)
“Remember: the goal isn’t to have someone tell you what to do; rather, it’s to learn how an expert thinks about the problem, which variables they consider relevant, and how those variables interact over time. If you present a problem, and an expert simply tells you what to do, they’re just giving you an abstraction. You might get the answer right, but you haven’t learned anything. And if things go wrong, which they inevitably will, you won’t have a clue as to why. You’re the line cook masquerading as the chef. If you ask them how they think about the problem, that’s when you start deepening your understanding.”
“So let’s talk about how to approach an expert in a way that will set your request apart and get people excited to help you. Here are five tips:
“Show that you have skin in the game: When you reach out to an expert, make them aware of the time, energy, and money you’ve already invested in the problem. Let them know you’ve done the work and that you’re stuck. When I see requests from someone who shows they’re invested in solving a problem, and who demonstrates they’ve done their research to craft a pitch around a very specific issue I can help with, I’m happy and eager to respond. Contrast that with emails that say, “Hey Shane, what do you think of this investment opportunity?” Which would you be more excited to answer?”
“Get precise on your ask: Be very clear what you’re looking for. Are you looking for them to review your plan and provide feedback? Are you looking for them to introduce you to people who can solve the problem? Whatever it is that you want, just be clear.”
“Show respect for their time and energy: Explicitly stating that the person you’re reaching out to is an expert whose time and energy you respect goes a long way to secure their goodwill. You should also demonstrate your respect for them, though. For instance, do not ask for fifteen minutes to pick their brain; instead, ask if they offer one-off consulting sessions and how much they charge for them. Experts are expensive and most of the time for good reason. If you’re paying $1,000 to $2,000 per hour for something, it forces you to get clear on what you want before you hop on the call. Paying for someone’s time not only compensates them for the value they bring to the table but forces you to make sure you’re not mumbling through the call and wasting their time and yours.”
“Ask for their reasons and listen: As mentioned previously, don’t just ask experts what they think, ask them how they think. Use them as a resource to train yourself how to evaluate things so that you can start embodying an expert way of operating. You don’t have to agree with what they’re saying, but remember: your goal is to learn from them how to think better, not to have them solve your problem for you. Follow up: If you want to build a network and make this more than a transactional request, follow up to report on your progress no matter what the outcome is. Whether their advice helped you in this case or not, following up and keeping them updated on your progress primes them to help you in the future. When they see that you took their advice seriously, they’re going to want to help you again.” (P. 179)

How do I know if someone is a real expert or someone imitating an expert?

“Getting HiEx information requires that you get help from real experts. But there are many people who claim to be experts (or whom other people claim to be experts) who really aren’t.”
“Safeguard: Take time to distinguish real experts from imitators. Not everyone who claims to be an expert is. Take the time to know the difference.”
“Think of all the money managers who borrow their talking points from Warren Buffett. They might sound like Buffett, but they don’t know how to invest the way Buffett does. They’re imitators. Charlie Munger once commented on this: “It’s very hard to tell the difference between a good money manager and someone who just has the patter down.”
“But what if you’re not an expert yourself? How do you tell the difference between an expert and an imitator? Experts are usually enthusiastic about their area of expertise. That’s why they’re good at it: they spend even their spare time mastering and refining their knowledge and skills, and it shows. Imitators are less concerned with being great and more concerned with looking great. That concern makes it easy for the ego to take over.”
Here are some things to look for:
“Imitators can’t answer questions at a deeper level. Specific knowledge is earned, not learned, so imitators don’t fully understand the ideas they’re talking about. Their knowledge is shallow. As a result, when you ask about details, or first principles or nonstandard cases, they don’t have good answer.”
“Imitators can’t adapt their vocabulary. They can explain things using only the vocabulary they were taught, which is often full of jargon. Because they don’t fully understand the ideas behind the vocabulary, they can’t adapt the way they talk about those ideas to express them more clearly to their audience.”
“Imitators get frustrated when you say you don’t understand. That frustration is a result of being overly concerned with the appearance of expertise- which they might not be able to maintain if they have to really get into the weeds with an explanation. Real experts have earned their expertise and are excited about trying to share what they know. They aren’t frustrated by your lack of understanding; they instead love your genuine curiousity about something they care about.”
Experts can tell you all the ways they’ve failed. They know and accept that some form of failure is often part of the learning process. Imitators, however are less likely to own up to mistakes because they’re afraid it will tarnish the image they’re trying to project.
Imitators don’t know the limits of their expertise. Experts know what they know, also know what they don’t know. They understand that their understanding has boundaries, and they’re able to tell you when they’re approaching the limits of their circle of competence. Imitators can’t. They can’t tell when they’re crossing the boundary into things they don’t understand.” (p. 180)
“A final note on distinguishing experts from imitators: Many of us learn about a subject not by reading original research or listening to the expert for hours, but by reading something intended to be highly transmissible. Think again of the difference between reading an academic article and reading a newspaper article about it. While they know more than the layman, popularizers are not experts themselves. Instead, they are good at clearly and memorably communicating ideas. As a result, popularizers often get mistaken for experts. Keep that in mind when you’re in the market for an expert: the person with real expertise is often not the person who made the subject popular.” (P. 182)

How can I get accurate information?

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