Everything is Obvious 10/10

Parts 7, 8, 9.

• MK: there’s not a lot to summarize here, but I’ll try.

• Friends, whether close or not, consistently believe themselves to be more similar than they really are. This means that even if my friend is close to me, I will still have trouble reliably predicting his/her agreement or disagreement with certain topics. Same goes with the knowledge of certain information that I’d assume another person possesses.

• MK: this is a powerful observation. Say, when writing, one usually assumes the level of understanding by the reader of a certain topic. It’s very easy to misjudge the actual knowledge and/or the logical reasoning behind this knowledge. One shouldn’t go far than any boardroom to find that similar people in similar circumstances given the similar information come up with radically different decisions – entirely because of the diversity and the characters of the participants.

• MK: this affects me personally, too: deep inside I have a fear of using cliches because their extensive use to me is a sign of shallowness and simply being not interesting enough. However, on a rational level the observation above confidently states that one’s cliche is news to someone else - and not because that someone else is not intelligent enough, but because of the sense of familiarity with the certain information that starts looking like a cliche while not being it. Hope this will help someone deal with this gentle issue. Definitely self-censorship and self devaluation are not the answer.

• When in doubt about someone’s motivations and opinions, people tend to project their own personalities on others to fill in the blanks. This creates an illusion of understanding: people simply have their own beliefs reflected back at them.

• A question of predictability in business: how much efforts should be put to reduce uncertainty (since it can’t be eliminated, but rather just slightly capped) vs accepting it? Are these wonderful “Observe-Orient-Decide-Act” loops a panacea or just a short-term remedy?

Thanks for reading. The end.