039: Knowing What You Don’t Know with William Poundstone

Pete Mockaitis
Bill, thanks so much for appearing here on the How to Be Awesome at Your Job Podcast.

Bill Poundstone
Yes, it’s good to be with you.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m super excited to be having this conversation. You’ve got so many interesting books and we’re going to zero in on the latest, but first I wanted to note, Wikipedia informs me that your cousin is Paula Poundstone.

Bill Poundstone
She certainly is, and she was very funny even as a kid.

Pete Mockaitis
Fantastic. I’m wondering, so what are your family gatherings like? You’re sharing thought provoking insights into the nature of the human experience in work and life and she’s cracking jokes. It must just be a hoot.

Bill Poundstone
Yeah, it’s always very unpredictable. It’s not just us, every member of the family is quite a character.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that’s a good time. When I was a child, I had two gerbils and one of them I named after Paula Poundstone, so that was named Paula.

Bill Poundstone
Oh wow. That’s great. The strange thing is Paula’s sister, Peggy, was actually named after a dog that her father had. I guess kind of runs in the family there.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s funny. It’s like the circle of life the names of animals and all that.

Bill Poundstone
Exactly, and even gerbils I think would count in that.

Pete Mockaitis
Agreed. You’ve got so many interesting, varied books, from the Fortune’s Formula to Head in the Cloud and Rock Beats Scissors or Smashes Scissors.

Bill Poundstone
Yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
What would you say, is there any like particular theme or thread that sparks you to write a particular book?

Bill Poundstone
I guess it’s if I get really engaged by the topic. I do sort of like the idea of trying different things and not mining the same territory each time.

Pete Mockaitis
Understood. Today I really want to chat about your latest book here, Head in the Cloud: Why Knowing Things Still Matters when you can just look it up, you can just Google it readily. I’d love to just start right there. Why does knowing things still matter?

Bill Poundstone
I think that’s an issue that we’ve all sort of asked ourselves nowadays since obviously it is so easy to look up information, and you have to sort of reevaluate the whole issue, how important is it to be well-informed and educated? Most of what has been written about this is kind of people saying well, I think it’s important to know this, that, and the other thing. That’s just someone’s opinion. I thought it would be interesting to do a more data driven approach to this particular topic.

Pete Mockaitis
You’re talking my language.

Bill Poundstone
Yes. What I did in the book is did a long series of national surveys of people to find out first of all, what do people know about various topics? It could be current events. It could be science. It could be sports. It could be movies, almost anything and see how that correlates with all sorts of other things that are going on in their lives.

I look at things, everything from household income, to whether they report they’re happy, to politics, to personal behavior. You find that there are an awful lot of the correlations there. You also find that you can Google any single fact, but what you can’t Google is what you don’t know, what you should be looking up, because maybe you’re too ignorant to know that there’s something that you don’t know.

In a sense I think that’s maybe the most important thing we get from education and from just being informed. The whole idea that you get some sense of what you don’t know and what you have to look up or go to someone else to really fill yourself in. That’s a pretty valuable thing.

Pete Mockaitis
Understood. I’m curious to hear with these correlations, like what are some of the most strong and striking correlations, that they’ve got a great adjusted R-squared or however you’re kind of assessing that. What are real strong like this kind of area of knowledge correlates very strongly to this kind of life outcome?

Bill Poundstone
One of the things that surprised me was sports trivia. It correlates very strongly with both household and individual income. When I say correlates strongly, people who know a lot of sports you generally find their income is more than twice that of people who know almost nothing about sports.

Now, I tried to figure out why this is and this is true even when you adjust for education and age. The way I report most of this, if you look at someone who is thirty-five years old, has a four-year college degree, even then you find this big difference in income based on how much you know about fairly easy sports trivia. I think it comes down to the fact that even if you’re not a sports fan, you learn a lot about sports just by paying attention to people at the water cooler, just associating with people.

If you’re a good business person maybe, you’re going to absorb a lot about sports just by osmosis, even if it’s not something that you’re really interested in. There were other things I looked into, such as how good you are at spelling. It really did not have that same degree of correlation. I think in that case, spelling isn’t necessarily something you learn just by associating with other successful or educated people, but sports seems to be a good example of that.

Pete Mockaitis
I see, so it’s like the sports analogy, your hunch is that because you are associating with an array of people who you have the access and interest and knowledge of sports, that just sort of correlates to your income because it’s like it correlates to those who are surrounding you.

Bill Poundstone
Yeah, exactly. By the same token, I mean with a lot of these topics, you realize that even at a given level of education, whether it’s high school or whether it’s PhD, there are some people who continue to learn things throughout their life. They pay attention to what other people are saying, to what’s in the news. If you are that kind of person who absorbs that, you tend to report yourself as making more money, being happier, generally being healthier even. It does have this kind of very broad-based effect.

Pete Mockaitis
Indeed. Now I guess I’m curious, like what kinds of knowledge do you say this correlate most with career performance or progression or seniority? Have you looked into any of that?

Bill Poundstone
Well, I haven’t looked into that except in the terms of income, and as I said quite a few things do. Generally speaking, it’s actually easier types of general knowledge. The way I explain it is the kind of things that you might get in Jeopardy and even in the first board of Jeopardy. They aren’t the really hard questions but if you know that kind of information, that correlates a lot with income.

When you get to really hard things like if I ask very difficult questions in quantum physics, well the only people who are going to know that are quantum physicists but there isn’t then this big correlation because everyone who knows that tends to be in one particular group. If you ask simpler questions like, what gas makes up most of the air? Of course the answer is nitrogen.

Pete Mockaitis
Nitrogen, yes.

Bill Poundstone
Yes, but actually the majority of Americans say oxygen. I guess you just hear more about oxygen since we have to have oxygen to breathe, but it’s a simple science question. I believe it should be taught in schools, but an awful lot of Americans don’t know that. That’s something that correlates a lot with income. Now, again it’s not that you’re going to use that in your work, but I think it is an index of people who pay attention, who continue lifelong learning.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, that’s an interesting way to put that. An index of people who pay attention and are continuing their lifelong learning. I guess I’m curious, what is that implication for us in our lives and for professionals? Are there particular practices that we should engage in to accumulate more knowledge that will be helpful to us in careers?

Bill Poundstone
Yeah, definitely. A big part of the book I’m looking to how people get information in the digital age. Because there are so many media options nowadays, and of course a lot of pundits take the idea that you can customize your news feed. If you’re interested in one particular topic, you can make sure you get lots of information about that topic, and you really don’t have to pay attention to things that really don’t interest you.

Now, in theory this sounds really great, but what I found was that in practice the people who get very broad-based knowledge tend to do a lot better in their careers, in life satisfaction, in health and pretty much everything. I looked in fact at how specific types of media correlate with how well-informed people are. One of the things I found was that podcasts scored very highly.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh yeah.

Bill Poundstone
The people who say that they listen to podcasts regularly are much better informed than people who get their news mainly from television, mainly from the internet. It is interesting. I think part of the reason for that is that a podcast really has a beginning, a middle, and an end. Most people who listen to it are willing to devote that time and listen to the whole thing.

It’s a little different from something like television where you’ve got a channel changer in your hand, and you’re constantly changing the channel whenever something doesn’t interest you. A podcast you might even say is … I compare it to the food you’d get at a spa versus the food you’d get at an all-you-can-eat restaurant.

Television is more like an all-you-can-eat restaurant because if something comes on and you’re not interested in it, you change the channel. You just kind of gorge on the particular topics that really appeal to you. With the podcast, you’re kind of a captive audience for that forty minutes or whatever and you get what the producer thinks is really an interesting story, something that’s really going to benefit you. It tends to work as I find out, because they are much better informed.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that’s great news for me a podcaster.

Bill Poundstone
Yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s much appreciated, so a variety of news sources and podcast in particular are great. That’s really striking a chord with me is, I think about one of the smartest people I know his name is Kevin and we were always neck and neck at high school, who is the smartest guy? It’s him. It’s Kevin. It’s not me.

He will devour maybe six different news sources just about every day, and sure enough you say that’s a pretty common find across folks who are very sharp and well-informed and are high income earners. They are collecting information from multiple sources and not pigeonholing themselves into one little nook.

Bill Poundstone
Yes, very definitely. You find that correlation too that the more news sources you regularly consult, the generally better informed you are, and again tend to be higher income and have other good life outcomes.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Now you had a couple of more very intriguing bullets in your book preview that I just have to ask about. Why is it that we’re okay with spelling errors on menus? You had cnn.com or the CNN news app, my gosh, maybe I don’t tolerate those, but we’re not so okay with spelling errors on a résumé.

Bill Poundstone
Yeah. This is something that when I started doing this book, I had several friends telling me that this was something they were really curious about. My friends tend to be kind of literary people and it really annoys them when they see these awful spelling errors on menus, like instead of mesclun, mescaline on a menu. You get all these outrageous things and you figure, who is making this?

The answer, in most cases now, is that it used to be a restaurant would have to take its menu to a copy shop and there would be a proofreader there, an English major who would actually make sure that everything was spelled right. Now, they print out their menus daily on a laptop. It’s the sous-chef that’s maybe doing this and spelling isn’t his strong suit. That’s how you get these really bad spelling errors. I’ve had friends tell me that they would not go to a restaurant that had poor grammar or spelled …

Pete Mockaitis
[inaudible 00:13:18].

Bill Poundstone
Exactly.

Pete Mockaitis
Certainly not.

Bill Poundstone
Yes, it’s kind of extreme, but I know people like that. I thought it would be interesting to test that in experiment, and it was very easy to do. I did a survey where I showed people what I said was a menu for a new restaurant that was about to start up. I asked them a bunch of questions about the restaurant and the menu. Would you go to this restaurant? Do you think the prices are fair? Does the food seem interesting, appealing?

Now, what the people on the survey did not know was that I showed them one of two different menus. I made one menu that was scrupulously correct, and the other I put in every incredibly bad error I’ve ever seen in a menu. I mean practically every line had some ridiculous spelling error or grammar error. The people got these two menus, one of the two randomly.

What I found was that there was really no difference in how they answered these questions. The people who saw the misspelled menu said they were just as likely to visit this restaurant, were just as likely to think that the food looked good, to think that the prices were fair. In every case it was well within the statistical error bars. All I can figure from that is that people really do figure we give restaurants a lot of slack when it comes to spelling and grammar. It really doesn’t seem to matter to them.

Pete Mockaitis
Wow, but résumés it’s not the same.

Bill Poundstone
Yeah. Résumés are quite different thing. In that case, you find that there are very big differences. People do expect you to really get the spelling and grammar right on your résumé, because that’s kind of a detail thing. It’s kind of your public face to an employer. In a situation like that, it is very important.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, fair enough. Tell us, so we talked about different news sources and podcasts, and you’ve got a particular view on how we ought to navigate clickbait and media spin to be well-informed. What is that prescription?

Bill Poundstone
Yeah. What people don’t realize is that companies make a lot of money off your attention. They want you to click on their new story or whatever and read it so they can show you ads. They don’t necessarily have your interest at heart. They’re trying to make an honest buck I guess. What I’ve found is that originally, I do a lot of research online. As a writer, I’m always sitting in front of a screen.

I was spending increasing amount of time looking at these kind of clickbait news stories, which mostly are disappointing and I figured I’ve got to discipline myself. I can’t do that. I tried different things. I started by thinking I should just set my page to go to Google’s News service, because I like that. It’s not too bad for the ads, and every time I have to look up something, since there’s always the search bar at the top, there’s no reason not to go to Google’s News service.

When you do that, you do scan it and you do end up clicking on some of those ads. What I found works best, at least for me, is to set the browser so that it opens to a blank page. Now you’ve still got the bar at the top, so if you’re doing a search you can do that but you’re not going to be distracted. I kind of have a rule that I don’t do any recreational reading on the internet between 9:00 and 4:00.

Unless we do it in the morning, unless we do it in the evening, but I do have this time when I really get to maintain my focus. I found that it does save me a lot of time. It makes me more productive without really penalizing me. I can still make topical dinner conversation because I have had several hours of day to look at the news, but I’m not doing it all the time.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s fantastic. I imagine maybe now it’s a good habit and discipline ingrained within you, but I would imagine during the beginning portions of establishing this habit, it was challenging. Is that fair to say? How did you overcome it?

Bill Poundstone
Yeah, it was, but I’m pretty good at if I have to do something cold turkey, I just do it. I didn’t find it that hard once I really realized that this is what I want to do. Again, I’m quite engaged by my writing so as long as I’m looking for something that’s work related, it is interesting and I’m not constantly wanting to go and look at Yahoo Celebrity News or something like that.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes. I think that’s good and important, and it kind of reminds me a little bit of is it Odysseus who strapped himself up so that he could hear the Siren song, but not be lead into their temptations that would annihilate him.

Bill Poundstone
Exactly, and that’s another reason for having broad knowledge that you can make wonderful classical references like that.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh thank you. I’m tickled that the great author compliments me in such a way. Well, thank you for that. That feels good. I’m smiling. Well shock, that was fun. Anything else that you want to mention about that book? I might want to shift gears and get a quick nugget about your Rock Breaks Scissors book, if we can.

Bill Poundstone
Yes, sure. That’s fine.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, sure. Tell us, so this book is all about kind of outguessing, outwitting, and anticipating. I’m sure you could say a lot about that, but tell us what are some of the top tips or best practices when it comes to doing some smart anticipation of other’s moves?

Bill Poundstone
Yeah. The whole premise of the book is that humans basically are incapable of being unpredictable. It’s very hard to do that even when you try. How this book actually started, I went to MIT where there was the very famous mathematician Claude Shannon there. He was still a professor at the time I was there actually, and he created this legendary machine known as the outguessing machine. He called it actually a mind-reading machine.

What it did, it just challenged you to play this little game where you were supposed to basically make up a random sequence of coin tosses like head, tails, tails, head, head, tails, something like that. The machine would sort of pay attention to your inputs and predict which choice you were going to make heads or tails.

Pete Mockaitis
Whoa.

Bill Poundstone
Now, it had to start out guessing randomly, but very quickly it was able to detect these unconscious patterns in your choices.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh my God, that’s so creepy.

Bill Poundstone
Yes. It was able to predict what people would do. When Shannon made this, he was working at Bell Labs. At the time Bell Labs was like Silicon Valley today. It was where all sorts of smart people were always coming in, kind of taking tours. This outguessing machine was like the sword in the stone. Everyone who came there who had some reputation for being smart was taken into this room and said you’ve got to play this machine if you’re so smart, and none of them could beat the machine. They all had these unconscious patterns and they were not able to be unpredictable.

Pete Mockaitis
The machine wins if it’s like guessing at better than fifty percent or how do we determine what [inaudible 00:21:09]?

Bill Poundstone
Yes, just about sixty-five percent.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay.

Bill Poundstone
It was really a pretty amazing statistical thing, but of course nowadays that same principle is used in all sorts of contexts. It’s used by big data, the whole idea that Amazon predicts what product you’re going to buy next. It can be used in many other ways.

In the book I do everything from showing, for instance, how to detect fraud in accounting. I spoke with a very brilliant man, Mark Nigrini who has pioneered this. He found that say if you have an embezzler in your company and he’s making up fraudulent numbers, fraudulent financial transactions, if you get enough of those numbers like say several hundred numbers, you can run a computer analysis on it and see if they include any of these telltale signs that are earmarks of made-up numbers.

To give you an example, usually when someone is just making up numbers, they tend to like descending sequences of digits like three, two, one or four, three, two. They don’t like repeated digits like double zero or double five. If you have enough numbers, this is really very effective in telling whether these are honest numbers or something people have made up.

In the book, I even go into cases like Bernie Madoff. He actually had three people whose job it was to make these fraudulent financial transactions that would supposedly fit the claimed returns. If you look at them you see many of these same earmarks.

Pete Mockaitis
Wow, that’s fascinating. I guess I’m wondering, so in practice if we’re looking to do some prediction, it sounds like you’re saying we’ve got to lean on some computer science to get to the bottom of it. Are there any kind of practical day in, day out things we can do?

Bill Poundstone
No, there’s all sorts of things you can do even without the computer science.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh good, do tell.

Bill Poundstone
I look into things like playing tennis, where you can serve backhand or forehand and you try to do it unpredictably. What you find if you actually look at tennis players, they tend to alternate too much. It’s like backhand, forehand, backhand, forehand, when this really should be random. I’ve talked with tennis players who actually are aware of this and use it to their advantage because they are able to predict not with certainty but with greater than fifty-fifty accuracy on that.

The other thing they do, they want to make sure that their own serves are random. A guy I spoke to had a very ingenious idea which was that he used one of those fitness apps which gives you like your pulse and everything, and whether the current pulse is even or odd can give you a random decision of which way you’re going to serve. He’s found that very effective.

Pete Mockaitis
It’s so funny, as soon as you said that I was thinking okay, you’ve got to have an earpiece that just like makes tones for forehand and backhand, but that’s even simpler.

Bill Poundstone
Yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
Very fun. Okay. Well, this has been a treat. Anything else you want to put out there, or should we shift gears into the Fast Faves segment?

Bill Poundstone
I’d say let’s do the Fast Faves.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, perfect. Could you start us off by sharing a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Bill Poundstone
Actually I’ll give you one that’s in the new book, Head in the Clouds. I wouldn’t say inspiring, but you’ve probably heard this one, “If you repeat a lie often enough, people will believe it.”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay.

Bill Poundstone
Now, why I like this is that this quote has been so often attributed incorrectly to Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels, that I found that fourteen percent of Americans now believe that Goebbels said it, even though he didn’t.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s so Meta.

Bill Poundstone
Yes.

 

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, interesting. Thank you. How about a favorite study or piece of research or experiment you find yourself thinking about a lot?

Bill Poundstone
Well, I think my favorite one from the new book is the Dunning-Kruger effect. This basically shows that for all of us, the less you know about a particular field the more you think you know about that field or the more you think that it’s easy and you would be competent at it. They tried this in all sorts of things like from how you think you performed on your driving test to whether you think you’re a good cook, whether you think you’re a good driver.

They even gave people a test of NRA gun safety and the people who were worst at it actually thought they were much better than they were. It’s kind of funny because we all know this stereotype of the overconfident airhead. The sad truth is in some ways all of us are that overconfident airhead.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, that’s fascinating. I’m going to ask a bonus question. Tell me this, that’s a cool name that describes a cool phenomenon. I’m wondering, I’ve observed the phenomenon in the more that we hear about an issue in the news or in conversation, the more we tend to hear about it or think that thing is important due to its repetition. There’s got to be a cool name for that. Is there a cool name for that?

Bill Poundstone
Yeah. That’s a version of priming.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay.

Bill Poundstone
If you’re reminded constantly of an idea, you think more about it, and you spot that idea more. A good example is if you buy a new car, suddenly you see other models of that car on the highway seemingly more than you did before. If you learn a new word, suddenly you notice that word in the newspaper or wherever. It’s a well-known effect and it is something that’s very important.

Pete Mockaitis
The priming, it means I’m thinking about it and I recognize it. I guess I’m wondering about sort of the value or importance we ascribe to something like you mentioned Khloe Kardashian. If we hear about the Kardashians a lot, I think some people tend to think that the Kardashians matter when in fact they don’t. Well, all people matter, but you know. I mean like on the stage of human events and things like that.

Bill Poundstone
Kardashian lives matter, we agree on that.

Pete Mockaitis
#Kardashians.

Bill Poundstone
Yeah. It’s true and you tend to connect everything with the Kardashians, so it’s just your mind works in certain ways and you really can’t help it.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, fair enough. How about a favorite book?

Bill Poundstone
Well, that’s a tough one because I have so many. Looking at my library here, I’ve got a huge number of books and I’m going to have to buy a new bookshelf pretty soon. One I sometimes face is Herman Melville’s The Confidence-Man. It’s not one of the most popular Melville’s but I always found it quite intriguing. It’s kind of an allegory about how everyone is sort of an unreliable narrator, and you see a lot of parallels in life. It’s funny too, so it’s quite a good book.

Pete Mockaitis
Thank you. How about a favorite tool, whether it’s a hardware, software, or gadget or a piece of technology for example Evernote or Instapaper or something that you think is just great?

Bill Poundstone
Well, for the latest book I’ve been doing a lot of statistics, and there is an app called Wizard for statistics that’s very simple, very visual. It kind of keeps some of the math out of your way when you don’t want it to be in your way. It really makes statistics a lot of fun, and since I was doing a lot of statistics in this book, it was really very helpful.

Pete Mockaitis
Thank you. I might need that. How about a favorite habit, a personal practice of yours that’s really boosted your effectiveness?

Bill Poundstone
In terms of effectiveness, certainly this idea that I open my browser window to a blank page has helped a lot. Another one just a health thing, now everyone is saying of course that sitting is the new smoking, which is not great news for writers who tend to sit all the time. I do make it a habit now to get up every half hour, walk around a little. I found that that actually helps me think too.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh lovely, thank you. How about a sort of favorite nugget that you have produced, if you’re given a speech or it’s in one of your books you find people taking notes or retweeting or getting a lot of Kindle highlights.

Bill Poundstone
I have something on my webpage that seems to intrigue people endlessly. My family is supposedly related to Tecumseh the famous Indian leader. He’s famous of course for this so-called Zero Year Curse, where supposedly American presidents elected in the year ending with double zero would die in office. It actually worked from Lincoln through Kennedy. It didn’t work with Reagan but someone did try to shoot him. I do get somehow that fascinates people that I’m related to him.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. How about best way to find you if folks want to learn more or check out your stuff, where should they go?

Bill Poundstone
Yeah. I would go probably to my website william-poundstone.com.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Do you have sort of a parting challenge or a call to action for those seeking to be more awesome at their jobs?

Bill Poundstone
Well, I would say seriously consider listening to podcasts and maybe Public Radio. Both of those scored very well in terms of keeping people well-informed.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, perfect. Well Bill, thanks so much. This has been a real treat. I wish you tons of luck with your writing and the book sales, and the new interesting pathways you choose to explore.

Bill Poundstone
Well, thank you.