Seeking Ideas at the Right Level of Abstraction

My next post will be about the future of a career in science.

Before getting to that, it is worth sharing this caveat from an excellent website called Commoncog, which writes about Better Business and Career Decision Making.

?? Cedric Chin offers this important piece of wisdom to young graduates deciding which career path to take: Seek Ideas at the Right Level of Abstraction.

Before starting his career, Cedric wrote a personal essay outlining his rationale for his career choice. The piece was logically coherent and tightly argued about the macro trends that would affect his career path. These trends were all correct, but his conclusions for his own career turned out to be spectacularly wrong.

When Cedric talks to juniors from his alma mater, National University of Singapore, he found incredibly smart analytical students presenting macro-level arguments similar to his approach when he wrote his essay.

He counsels that these are wasteful attempts at thinking, because the arguments operate at the wrong level of abstraction for the decisions these students need to make.

The trends were simply irrelevant. It didn’t matter if all their points are true. What matters is that one is able to take advantage of any of the macro-level shifts.

Cedric quotes Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger’s Noah Rule, after the biblical story, “predicting rain doesn’t count, building an ark does.” Gesticulating about the coming thunderstorm is not useful when one has no carpentry skills to speak of.

The suggestion is that young graduates with no experience should operate at a much lower level in the system. If you want to make a decision about your career, you should probably pay attention to the local trends first.

It’s a great article and also a great website to check out.

Now where macro trends can be important is where one is in mid-career where these macro-trends do matter, because they dictate where the next opportunities lie. At this stage of one’s career, one is also potentially in a position to take advantage of these macro-trends.

Furthermore, when it comes to applied science, working at the forefront of discovery and technology, it does matter where one chooses to expand the frontiers of human knowledge and its application. New knowledge, like a galaxy, expands fastest at its leading edges. That is where we one can stake out new ground.