Invert, always invert
17th century. Rule Britannia. The United Kingdom has the strongest navy in the world, and with it, control of the seas, and naval superiority over French, Dutch, and Spanish. Smooth sailing above deck. Below deck however, an unknown foe lurks, upsetting the new order established. Sailors drop by the thousands. Not one bullet is fired. No cutthroats. No pirates. A hidden enemy. Man’s own body. By the 18th century, this foe had killed more British soldiers than from wartime skirmishes. It was an epidemic. Scurvy.
Scurvy is a disease that has afflicted humanity for centuries, with records dating as far back as Ancient Egypt and Greece, but it emerged as a major problem for maritime explorers when chartering the Indian and Pacific oceans in the 15th century. According to an article by Science History Institute, Scurvy killed more than two million sailors between the time of Columbus's transatlantic voyage and the rise of steam engines in the mid-19th century.
For the British Empire, scurvy became more problematic by the early 18th century, a problem so common that shipowners and governments assumed a 50% death rate for their sailors on any major voyage. The historian Stephen Bown notes that scurvy was responsible for more deaths at sea than storms, shipwrecks, combat, and all other diseases combined! I'll spare you the gruesome details of the effects of scurvy on those sailors, but it's far worse than your typical flu or fever.
Now due to the variety of symptoms that these men faced, it was easily mistaken for asthma, syphilis or other conditions, and so a different approach was needed. At the time, vitamin study was in its infancy, but by early 18th century, Johannes Bachstrom (Dutch physician) came up with the term?antiscorbutic?(“without scurvy”) and used it to describe fresh vegetables, thus becoming the first person known to suggest that scurvy might be a deficiency disease. In his 1734 book?("Observations on Scurvy"), he wrote that:
"Scurvy is solely owing to a total abstinence from fresh vegetable food, and greens, which is alone the primary cause of the disease."
History however is, at times, cruel. Long story short, Johannes' work wasn't well received and another physician, James Lind, took credit for the breakthrough by doing one of the first clinical trials and determined a link between vitamin deficiency and scurvy which made its way through the British Royal Navy.
The main point to bring out is that Johannes deserves recognition for first considering that instead of looking at what is attacking the body, find out what is missing from the body. His rationale was to look at the problem differently, through inverting the frame. This presented a new way of thinking about the solution, and it brings us to this piece’s core message – the concept of inversion.
Mungerism
Inversion is a mental model popularized by Charlie Munger, partner of Warren Buffet at Berkshire Hathaway, who famously said, "All I want to know is where I’m going to die, so I’ll never go there." This style of thinking was inspired by Carl Jacobi, a German mathematician who used inversion to solve arithmetic problems. For those that paid attention in high school, unlike me, you'd recall that proving theorems relies on assuming the theory to be true and working backwards to prove it - an ode to Carl. Now while inversion had its basis in arithmetic, other people have managed to take the concept further.
The inverted one
In football, Jose Mourinho incorporated inversion in his philosophy to a certain extent. Football is a game of two teams vying for the ball to score in each other's goals, the ball is therefore, the holy grail. Whoever has the ball, has a chance of scoring. Teams are always in a constant battle of achieving dominance over the ball, to improve their chances of scoring and ultimately winning the game.
This explains why Mourinho is such a divisive figure, he made a name for himself by building his teams around having less of the ball. When up against teams that play with the ball better, he simply asked his players to forgo the ball, “the team that has the ball, makes more mistakes", from a biography about Mourinho. Amusing enough, even critics label Mourinho as anti-football; inversion!
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"He wins his battles by making no mistakes" Sun Tzu
It goes to show that part of Mourinho's success is credited to upsetting the natural order. In his view, building a team around ball possession carries with it risk, and higher expectations. He succeeded by flipping the script.
Latinizing inversion
Michelangelo was asked by the pope about the secret of his genius, particularly how he carved the statue of David, largely considered the masterpiece of all masterpieces. His answer was: “It’s simple. I just remove everything that is not David.” The method began as an avoidance of direct description, leading to a focus on negative description, what is called in Latin?via negativa, the negative way. Via negativa?does not try to express what God is. It just lists what God is?not?and proceeds by the process of elimination. (taken from Nassim Taleb's book - Antifragile)
It turns out that the ancients had a name for inversion after all and while we saw how initially inversion was about the reverse or flip side of a problem, through via negativa, it can also become a case of considering addition versus subtraction. Building on this, we see that this application of inversion has merit across several facets of life.?
A few examples below:
Seeing what we know now, how can we incorporate inversion in our lives? We're always faced with problems, and we're often limited with the time available to make decisions. From this standpoint, we always need to upgrade our mode of thinking. Charlie Munger, in addition to other great thinkers, espouses a view around multidisciplinary learning, taking lessons and insights from one field to another. This allows for a sort of swiss army knife for mental cognition, enhancing your perspective on the world by appreciating different lenses - inversion being one lens in your arsenal.
For now, at least, I rely on Carl Jacobi’s words, "Man muss immer umkehren," well not quite like that, but the English version, “invert, always invert”.
Sami?
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