Uncommon Ways to Reason: A Roadmap for Smart Kids

By F. Peter Boer

This book is a primer on how to transit the potentially superb but treacherous educational system that has evolved in twenty-first-century America. For those aspiring to become professionals and leaders, it provides detailed descriptions of some important career paths. It identifies the intellectual tools to develop superior reasoning power, to recognize misleading information, and to adjust to changing circumstances. It discusses what to study and why. It describes powerful concepts that are often missed in a standard curriculum, such as options, scale, and feedback. This book is not about fixing the educational system but about dealing with it as it is.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Sep 22, 2015
• ISBN: 9781514408094

F. Peter Boer

Dr. F. Peter Boer has viewed the education process from the perspective of a student, a graduate, a parent, a teacher, and a senior advisor. He has been formally affiliated with seven prestigious universities over a fifty-year career. A Princeton graduate and a Harvard PhD, he is the author of seven books and a hundred papers on science, technology, and finance. He has taught technology finance and environmental engineering at Yale University and is a member of the National Academy of Engineering. His real-world experience blends the perspectives of a board director, a top corporate executive, an R&D manager, and a scientific professional.

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Copyright © 2015 by F. Peter Boer.

Library of Congress Control Number:   2015915252

ISBN:   Hardcover   978-1-5144-0811-7

             Softcover    978-1-5144-0810-0

             eBook          978-1-5144-0809-4

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

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Rev. date: 10/21/2015

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CONTENTS

Preface

Managing the Educational Challenge

Leadership: Communication and Competence

Plan of the Book

Regarding References

Chapter 1: A Plague of Misinformation

Media

The Tabloid Mind-Set

Against Elites

Group Think

Diet Advice: Where Junk Science Reigns

Misinformation about Climate Change

Chapter 2: Recognizing the Nature of Education

Distinguishing Knowledge from Reasoning

Preparing for Decisions

Education as an Asset

Be Prepared to Write Off Some Personal Assets

Apprenticeship

Chapter 3: Getting Past the Universities

Liberal Education

Engineering, Science, and the Research University

Governance

Supply and Demand

Professionals

Leaders

Misinformation and the Rise of For-Profits

Good Intentions: Loans and Grants

The Tuition Game

Internal Balance

College Athletics

Disruptive Technology

Credentialing

Grade Inflation

Chapter 4: Verbal Reasoning: Why It Is Indispensable

Vocabulary

Grammar

Foreign Languages

Analogies

The Role of Analogies in Decision Making: Fight or Flight

The Role of Analogies in Creativity

The Role of Analogies in Performance

Rhetoric

Writing

Philosophical Reasoning

Classical

Religion and Faith

The Enlightenment

Legal Reasoning

Legal Reasoning and the Scientific Ethic

Defenses against Questionable Reasoning

Falsifiability

Occam’s Razor

A Skeptical Attitude

Chapter 5: Quantitative Reasoning: Context and Uncertainty

Get to a Comfortable Reference Frame

Use Mental Arithmetic

Times Tables

The Impact of Modern Technology

Extrapolating and Forecasting

A Lesson from the Polyurethane Business

Experts

S Curves and Limits

Managing Uncertainty

Statistics

Reproducibility

The Power of Options

Chapter 6: The Power of Scale

Scale and Lion Society

Hunter-Gatherer Bands

Villages

Towns and Cities

Scale and the Rise of Rome

Internal Economics

Linear Systems and Their Limits

The Special Case of Increasing Returns

Military Scale

The Power of Networks

Scale and Metcalfe’s Law

Micronetworks

Secondary Attributes of Networks

Ancient, Medieval, and Renaissance Networks

Networks and Technology

Chapter 7: The Power of Feedback

Physical Systems

Hooke’s Law

Thermostats

Keeping Airplanes in the Air

Explosions, Chain Reactions, and the Mother of All Bombs

Electronic Circuitry

Biological Systems

Ecosystems

Modeling Global Climate

Supply, Demand, and the Business Cycle

Chapter 8: Career Paths in Medicine

Medical Education

Career Options

Chapter 9: Career Paths in Science and Engineering

Science

Choosing the Right Problem

The Science Career Path

Choosing the Right Team

Life as a Graduate Student

Engineering

Computation

Chapter 10: Career Paths in Law and Finance

Law

Careers in Law

Accounting

Careers in Accounting

Issues in Accounting

Careers in Finance

Chapter 11: Education through Life

Three Seismic Shifts—1945, 1968, and 1991

1945

1968

1991

Infrastructure

The Advent of Molecular Biology

Commoditized Computing Power

Exploring History, Culture, and Geography

Wealth, Power, and Fame

Chapter 12: Pitfalls in Reasoning

Utopianism

Monasteries

Celebrity

Conspiracy

Summing Up

Endnotes

To Ranch, Nick, Kate, and Bradford.

May they make great decisions.

PREFACE

A Reformation is coming, and its message will be the same as it was 500 years ago: Don’t outsource your future to a big institution. You need to figure it out for yourself.

—Peter Thiel

Managing the Educational Challenge

This book is a primer on how to transit the potentially superb but treacherous educational system that has evolved in twenty-first-century America. It identifies the intellectual tools to develop superior reasoning power, to identify misleading information, and to adjust to changing circumstance. It discusses what to study and why. It is especially targeted to those aspiring to become professionals and leaders. This book is not about fixing the educational system but about dealing with it as it is. Always remember that to rise to the top, one must differentiate oneself from others with generally similar credentials.

Because both terms (professionals and leaders) are enormously broad, I will define them more carefully in the body of the book. Let me say without apology that the book is targeted to the top tier—those with the potential and ambition to rise to the few top ranks of their profession and their institution. Such young people are very fortunate and possess important advantages: good genes, good parenting, good education, good test-taking skill, and often money. Realistically, they are in a situation where there are multiple good options and multiple bad options. (Nevertheless, they are fully at risk of making poor decisions based on lack of information and misinformation.)

Fixing the educational system is an objective that is unattainable in our time and is tied intimately to the economy, laws, and culture of the country. Its evolution cannot be controlled. It will evolve as such things evolve: short-term trends will tend to continue, market failures will create crises, and crisis will force restructuring. Restructuring is a neutral word that obscures basically unpleasant processes, such as extinction, bankruptcy, merger into stronger institutions, job reductions, mission adjustments, and reorganization. Universities, and notably the older and more prestigious institutions, have been fairly insulated from such processes for many centuries, but today’s student must contemplate a less sheltered and more dangerous academic world. To quote the Economist,¹ Like all revolutions, the one taking place in higher education will have victims. May the reader be not among them.

The antidote to institutional guidance is self-reliance. I was fortunate to learn this lesson early. My mother, who had a master’s degree in chemistry, died when I was fourteen. However, she had already placed me on an institutional track that would lead to admission to a fine college. My father, an MD, was committed to his family and intellectually gifted but as an immigrant didn’t understand the fine points of American society. As an advisor, he was not helpful. So to select the goals and finance the path, I thought I was better off on my own, and I accepted the challenge of sorting out the options quite early. Even so, in hindsight, I know I missed a lot of important information about how the world fits together; this book is intended to fill some of these gaps.

This book takes a longitudinal view: education begins early in life. But education must continue in a constantly changing world. The body of available information grows inexorably. It must be sorted into the irrelevant, the merely interesting, and the potentially transformative. Other information becomes obsolete. For these reasons, education must be managed long after the last academic degree has been earned.

Parents inevitably control the first stages. Their goals may be simple and sound: Gain admittance to excellent primary schooling, and use that as a springboard to excellent secondary schooling. Build an academic record strong enough for admission to a superior college program. Use that base in turn as a springboard to an advanced degree.

This structure may be caricatured by the mother who aspires that her infant child grows up to be a doctor (although that is not an unreasonable objective). Or it may be that a daughter will be trained to follow in her father’s footsteps to take over the family law or accounting firm. Or the family may believe the child should make the choice at some point in the education process, to fit his/her own talents and interests.

Since the first steps are about the same, the initial strategies are obvious: a location with access to great public schools or admission to a great private school. Execution can be financially challenging to aspiring parents though. Private school tuitions are expensive, and admission can be an issue. While great public schools are free, their locations are usually characterized by expensive real estate. Some parents must work abroad or in locations where neither good public nor good private schools are even available. Sometimes charter schools are excellent but often not. In these circumstances, catch-up strategies can succeed because children are resilient, but they can also go badly astray, especially where peer groups do not support educational values.

The above outline frames a sound general strategy for parents, but the devil is as ever in the details. The most important detail is that, gradually but inevitably, the child takes over from the parents. This process is unpredictable but not generally unhealthy. The child is likely to be influenced by peers, teachers, traditional media, social media, and books. There will be huge gaps, since these advisors may not be in touch with the realities of professional progression or the dynamics of the institutions. For example, our hypothetical mother probably does not understand the negative aspects of the medical profession—admission barriers to the best institutions, the economics of group practice, reimbursement from insurance companies and government agencies, medical malpractice, and the like. But on the positive side, there are many upsides and opportunities for medical doctors that go beyond directly caring for patients—in prestigious research institutions, hospitals, pharmaceutical firms, government agencies, and universities. These institutions provide professional career paths too. Importantly, many of these also provide significant opportunities for leadership that are enhanced by medical credentials. It is predictable that a young person thinking about his educational strategy would be initially unaware of these opportunities unless they are outlined by a mentor or a family friend who understands the broader medical community.

A similar structure exists in every occupation—science, law, banking, or accounting. One must earn grades, be admitted to prestigious institutions, find mentors, endure long hours that can interfere with family life, pass examinations, and proceed through the various gates that lead to the top of the field. One must consider the exit strategies, since not every young legal associate will make partner in a prestigious law firm. Also, no single advisor can be familiar with the structure of each profession; and with each profession, there are subprofessions—for example, surgery and pathology in medicine, bankruptcy and patents in law. Such subprofessions have fundamentally different structures and processes and tend to evolve in ways that increase the separation between them.

The second most important consideration is that the world changes. A young person must inevitably make forecasts, if only the default forecast that change will be minimal. And indeed for some institutions, such as the traditional university, change has been relatively slow. In other areas, especially those driven by technology, change can be rapid, and career skills rapidly become obsolete. I was personally determining my career choices in the second half of the 1950s, a time when rocket and nuclear technology associated with the Cold War was a dominant issue, when primitive computers were still reliant on vacuum tubes, and when the role of DNA had been discovered, but the genetic code had yet to be broken. A good forecast was impossible, but my instinct that science and technology had great potential was spot on. There is a learning to be had from such hindsight: Keep options open, and renew them as the real world begins to deviate from consensus forecasts. Don’t lock in and be mugged by reality.

This book proposes to outline some better ways to think about the issues. It values hard data and skepticism. It discusses pitfalls in public discourse that can cause sound policy to go astray.

My thinking derives from four different quarters. The first, based on my training as a physicist, is to use quantitative estimates to approximate the real impact of new developments and their limits. By real impact, I mean timing, magnitude, and cost. The second is to retain a skeptical attitude toward plausible propositions. The third is to respect the cultural roots embodied in a traditional liberal arts education. The fourth is to draw on my personal observation of success and failure over five decades in the business, academic, and governmental communities.² In particular, many cultural institutions have an antipathy to business. But as Yale economics professor Robert Shiller recently noted, We will have to face the reality that the art of living in the world requires at least some elements of a business education.

To a large extent, this viewpoint is uncommon and is my justification for this book. Professional physics training is rare, and only a fraction of physicists have participated in thinking quantitatively about real-world economic problems. While physicists can readily access higher mathematics, many of the principles can be grasped using common sense and basic arithmetic and be applied readily to practical matters.

Leadership: Communication and Competence

Education for leadership has additional issues. First, formal education is not strictly necessary. Some children start to become leaders on the playground or the athletic field. Others develop people skills through participation in campus organizations. Crisis situations can thrust leadership upon people who least expect it because they possess the skills or experience the group needs most at the time. That skill may be variously communications, navigation, military science, or finance.

Two common traits of successful leaders are the ability to communicate and broad competence. There is an ancient tradition that a liberal education is a superior way to enhance these characteristics. Ironically, the term liberal in this context did not mean politically liberal but was derived from the education required in classical antiquity for a free man to participate actively in civic life. Grammar, rhetoric, and logic formed the original core, to which were added philosophy, mathematics, and science.

Today the term rhetoric has become a pejorative, but its near relative, communications, is respected. Poor English—whether misspellings, bad grammar, or misuse of words—tends to discredit, sometimes to the point of ridicule. George Washington, who had no formal education, understood this fact and depended on a personal secretary to review his communications. Winston Churchill was a master writer and speaker, which—with a sense for history—helped make him perhaps the greatest of twentieth-century political leaders.

Competence is more difficult to define, but clearly, understanding an action in terms of its historical, cultural, and economic impact goes a long way in preventing serious mistakes. In particular, a weakness in understanding foreign culture and history has been a major gap in American education and thereby a major problem for American political leaders. The typical educational compromise in America has been to combine a subprofessional undergraduate education in a single discipline, often called a major, with distribution requirements aimed at a broad understanding of science and the humanities. These have sometimes been softened to the point that exposure to the more rigorous aspects of science and math is minimized. Engineering degrees have been an exception; the humanities aspect has been minimized (at some cost), but the newly graduated engineer is professionally employable with undergraduate credentials and in at least his early career earns a premium above his liberal arts counterpart.

The American system of liberal education, however, may have reached saturation. In the pursuit of institutional growth, professional educators have extended liberal education to a far larger population than matches the nation’s professional and leadership requirements. So it should be no surprise that, in a competitive job market, the less able fraction of any cohort fails to find desirable employment. Tuitions have risen relentlessly, and serious student debts burden too many young people seeking to join the workforce. Small liberal arts colleges are failing to sell a value proposition to an increasingly skeptical public, and some are beginning to close.

This predicament came about as a result of good intentions, unintended consequences, and new opportunities for the unscrupulous. In competing for tuition revenues, some institutions, especially for-profits, are misleading students about the realities they face. But the cause and cure of our educational predicament is not the core subject of this book. The subject is how to develop enough intellectual balance to transit the educational system, which still offers every individual superb training, to personal advantage.

Plan of the Book

The first chapter of the book will alert the reader as to the underlying reasons he or she is likely to be flooded with misinformation and the need to develop the skills to cut through the confusion. The second chapter will discuss the nature of the educational process and the difference between knowledge and reasoning. The nature of educational institutions is molded by these fundamentals.

Chapter 3 will give my views of the university system, which opens doors to great opportunities. However, its sprawling structure creates a huge pitfall for the unwary or naive.

The next four chapters are devoted to a discussion of the specific skills that one may acquire in the educational process and their role in enabling success. Unfortunately, it is not always clear why certain subjects are taught or even drilled. But the consequences of being ignorant of, or inadequate in, them may translate into lost opportunity, when it is too late to fill the gaps.

Chapter 4, Verbal Reasoning, will discuss key language and communications skills vital to leadership. The skills include spelling, grammar, analogies, and other tools of effective rhetoric. Equally important as skill is judgment, a critical frame of mind that dissects and weighs misleading advice. Chapters 5 through 7 focus on quantitative reasoning, not just the ability to make accurate calculations but also the importance of estimation and of properly factoring in uncertainty. I especially value three ideas that are not broadly taught in colleges, though one may encounter them in engineering or finance classes. They are scale, feedback, and options, which are concepts that apply to numerous disciplines and problems, from finance to science. These tools afford competitive advantage in evaluating decisions or proposals and in generating the best questions to ask before committing resources. There are many, many plausible ideas being offered that are just not robust enough to stand up to inquiry at this level. Importantly, many peers will not develop the tools to learn these uncommon skills.

The next three chapters outline a set of important and competitive career paths, upon which reasoning and knowledge will be put to use and where unseen opportunities will arise. The first career path, covered in chapter 8, is medicine. Health care will soon consume almost 20 percent of world economies, and it is full of scientific challenges, organizational complexity, and economic issues. Chapter 9 deals with career paths in science and engineering, which require intensive quantitative training but open opportunities far outside the disciplines themselves. The third career area, covered in chapter 10, deals with law and finance, where academic success involves very different educational processes and where the boundaries tend to be defined by the types of problems to be solved.

A legitimate question is what credentials I have on which to base my opinions on career paths. With regard to science, it is both my personal experience and the opportunity to observe the career paths of many hundreds of colleagues. With regard to medicine, I am the son of an MD and have observed my daughter progress through the ranks of academic medicine. I have also worked with several health-care companies, where many of my colleagues were physicians. With regard to law, my wife received a law degree during the early years of our marriage (at times, I helped her study) and practiced educational law in Connecticut. My son subsequently received a law degree and used it to establish a start-up in commercial transactions on the Internet. I am an engineer only by virtue of having supervised many engineers in my career path through research and development. I was elected to the National Academy of Engineering and taught a course in the Yale School of Engineering. My experience in finance is similar. As one progresses in a business career, one in time has financial officers as direct reports and learns a great deal about various kinds of financial statements. In time, I wrote books about R&D finance in John Wiley’s financial series and taught MBA students at Yale University. I encountered investment bankers in various deal scenarios as a board director of both large companies and start-ups.

The book will close with some reflections. Chapter 11 will focus on time, specifically the rapid change that defines the modern world and some of the lessons to be learned from trying to stay current and relevant to a changing technical and cultural environment. Chapter 12 will deal with human folly and common pitfalls in reasoning that may be built into our genes. These include yearning for utopia, yearning for celebrity, and superstition.

Regarding References

Given the nature of this book, I suggest that the notes be the basis of a reading list; many of the books quoted give very interesting insights into the subject matter and are worth reading themselves.

I have also relied extensively on Wikipedia to search and reference key facts. It is a very convenient and generally reliable practice for both the author and the reader. It will often allow the reader much faster insight into a scientific topic or historical event that interests her. However, Wikipedia references present two problems. First, it is constantly edited and updated, so what I saw today is not exactly the same article as the reader may see years later. Second, by the nature of its process, it can admit dubious facts (which in principle should be soon corrected) and can be itself a source of misinformation. This vulnerability is sometimes exploited deliberately, particularly with regard to active political figures.

The first problem is resolved by using the permanent link feature of Wikipedia, which references the archived version of the topic I actually used. The second problem can only be solved by the author’s discipline in selecting references he regards as authentic, and I take responsibility for these.

CHAPTER 1

A Plague of Misinformation

The amount of misinformation reaching young people (and not just young people) is at treacherous levels. The reasons for this flood are built into our democratic system, amplified by the new technologies now available.

I chose the word misinformation with care. Misinformation comes in several forms. There is false information. Sometimes it is purveyed by those who know it is false but as dangerously by sincere