Everyone will unconsciously impose their own understanding on others and form "natural" ideas, which results in information asymmetry and cognitive bias. In the futures market, the information is complex and there are many angles. Investors need to be open-minded to accommodate multiple "voices".
Concept A
During my graduate studies, there was a required course "Advanced Statistics". The teacher was a doctor from a prestigious university, but whenever he taught the class, the students always looked confused. Because he spoke too fast. He often said helplessly, "It's easy to know here" and "It's too simple, we can get it by omitting the intermediate steps." After a few classes, I learned well. I asked for the course materials first, and previewed and understood before going to class. I used this to make up for the parts he had omitted, and I could barely keep up. Once while chatting with a teacher, I couldn't help but ask: "Do you know the curse of knowledge?"
"The curse of knowledge" is a psychological concept. Wikipedia explains it as follows: "The curse of knowledge" It is a cognitive bias that occurs when a person communicates with other people and unconsciously assumes that the other person has background knowledge (that he or she already has). A more popular statement is: Once you know a piece of information (have learned something), it is difficult to imagine a situation where you do not know the information (have not learned the thing). It's like the information you already know has "cursed" you.
"The Curse of Knowledge" comes from research conducted by Elizabeth Newton at Stanford University in 1990. In this study, she divided participants into two roles: tappers and listeners. Each tapper will get a list of 25 famous songs that Americans are familiar with (roughly equivalent to our "Jasmine" and "The Marching Minutes"), and what each tapper has to do is pick one from them. , and express the rhythm to the audience by tapping on the table, and then let the audience guess the song title based on the tapping rhythm.
As simple as it sounds, before guessing the song title, the tapper predicts that the listener will have a 50% chance of guessing it right. However, in the experiment, listeners only guessed 2.5% of them, or 3 out of 120 songs.
The tapper felt incomprehensible to this result: Isn’t this a very simple task? Why can't you hear it? The audience, like "I" in the advanced statistics class, fell into a state of trying but at a loss.
There are melodies and melodies in the minds of the percussionists. When they use themselves to save others, they feel that this information exists for granted. But for the audience, this information does not exist. All they hear is a monotonous and mysterious "ta-da-da" tapping sound like Morse code. The knowledge the tappers already possess (the song title) makes it impossible for them to imagine what it would be like to lack that knowledge. When they struck, it was impossible to imagine that what the listener heard was a sound of percussion that was not actually a piece of music.
The "curse of knowledge" comes from the thinking process. Whether you are making decisions for yourself or imagining other people's ideas, you always start from your own perspective. All ideas and decisions are based on your own emotions. Emotions, knowledge reserves, and perspective understanding, these "invisible" information appear in the entire thinking process in an imperceptible way, and change or even determine the final decision.
Everyone will unconsciously impose their own understanding on others and create "natural" ideas. As everyone knows, what we see is only an extremely small part of the vast world, and many other people's situations are beyond our imagination. This creates a huge information asymmetry, which in turn produces cognitive biases. It can be found that once we know something, it is difficult to imagine what it would be like not to know it. Our knowledge (cognition) “curses” us.
B’s inspiration for investment
Futures investment is different from other industries. Many feelings need to be understood by oneself.
When I first entered the industry, I couldn’t understand what was discussed in department meetings, and even regular training sessions were difficult to understand. Sometimes I feel like the knowledge and experience they already have is like a barrier and I am excluded. During working hours, they communicated in short sentences and cooperated tacitly; at the end of the day, they communicated excitedly, but I was always unable to get a word in. Because I was the first staff member recruited into the team with no relevant experience at all, there was a big barrier between me and other members at the beginning.
Fortunately, I am thick-skinned enough to ask questions in time when I don’t understand something. I write down every knowledge point in my notes and read them frequently. It took more than a year to slowly integrate into the team. Later, many new people came in one after another. Some newcomers are too shy to ask questions and let things go when they encounter problems they don't understand. In the end, not only are they unable to progress and grow, but they also cause dangerous accidents.
Old employees have rich experience and knowledge. When they explain things, they will unconsciously fall into the "curse of knowledge" and omit the parts that they think are not important or are so conventional that they do not need to be explained. But for newcomers, In other words, this part is the missing chain and the knowledge gap that needs to be filled. Even in a large company with complete rules and procedures, it is impossible to have an operation manual that is all-inclusive and comprehensive.
We should recognize our own shortcomings, accept our own shortcomings, and then catch up, instead of falling into shame about our lack of knowledge, or even trying to hide these deficiencies.
If you don't do something, the gap will get wider over time.
After working for many years, I also started to offer some training courses and even gave speeches at some large conferences. At the beginning of the lecture, someone said that my thinking was jumping. I suddenly realized that I had also fallen into the "curse of knowledge." These jumping parts are what I think others should be able to think of or should have, like the melody in the tapper's head. Now, before every lecture, I will first understand the audience level, and then modify the lecture plan in a targeted manner.
In addition, because I understand the subtle nature of the "curse of knowledge", when listening to lectures and reading other authors' articles, I no longer easily deny any seemingly absurd or logically jumping point of view, but The purpose is to think about why they came to such a conclusion. If they feel it is particularly important, they will send an email to ask. In this market, there is a lot of information and many angles. Everyone has their own unique advantages. With an open mind, to be compatible with multiple voices, to think more flexibly instead of easily denying it, this may be another form of "always have a heart of awe".