Theory and Practice, Error and Insight

I am torn between worlds—between theory and practice, and between error and insight.

For nearly a decade, my plan was to eventually get a PhD, only working on the applied side until one day I would have enough savings to plunge into academia. But then, my wife brought me back to reality: no amount of savings would ever be enough for the terrible economic decision that is a PhD. She was, of course, right. I bowed to her wisdom and pivoted, deciding to continue on the applied side of the Behavioral and Decision Sciences.

As such, I should be spending my spare time marketing to clients to grow my business. But instead, I find myself continually exploring the mysteries of the field, speaking with fellow nerds, and writing for an audience that shares my academic curiosities. It’s a bad habit. But I can't help what I am interested in.

But it's time to face the truth—my focus on academic content is taking away from my ability to reach clients, and my world needs to be divided in two. I need a place to be a nerd, and a place to focus on getting clients.

So here on Substack, I declare my fiefdom for all those nerdy things that aren’t quite appropriate for LinkedIn. Here you’ll find explorations of all my core interests: motivation, decision-making, expertise, epistemology, context—plus whatever else strikes my fancy.

While I navigate the clash between theory and practice, I am also trying to navigate a second clash; the clash between error and insight. I was trained in the tradition of Kahneman and Tversky with its focus on cognitive biases and the limitations of human thinking. My first boss after my master’s program had even done his post-doc with Kahneman himself. But as time has gone on, I have grown disillusioned with many aspects of that school of thought and have found myself drawn to Naturalistic Decision Making (NDM), a field that studies how people make complex, real-world decisions under uncertainty. The field so intrigued me that I ended up joining a NDM company and now work with the founder of the field, Gary Klein

This tension between two approaches—the study of human limitation versus the study of expertise—has plagues my thoughts for the last year. Kahneman and Klein once tried to resolve this tension, spending six years to write a brilliant paper, "Conditions for Intuitive Expertise: A Failure to Disagree." Despite their efforts, they couldn’t reconcile their perspectives, concluding that they agreed on the science, but couldn’t merge their perspectives for reasons of personal preference—Kahneman likes errors, and Klein likes brilliant flashes of insight. They concluded that it would be up to future researchers to merge their two fields. "A psychology of judgment and decision making that ignores intuitive skill is seriously blinkered," they wrote in their paper, "but a psychology of professional judgment that neglects predictable errors cannot be adequate."

I’ve named this blog after that paper because, like the difference between Kahneman and Klein, I suspect that most of what makes my views unique is merely one of perspective, not of science. My posts are often "contrarian-lite" not because I seek controversy, but because I often see things from a different perspective than many in my field. I rarely write to explain, but instead to persuade by putting things in a different light, and highlighting what others might overlook.

I also believe in Henrik Karlsson's idea that "a blog post is a very long and complex search query to find fascinating people and make them route interesting stuff to your inbox." Part of my goal here is to connect with others who may disagree, or fail to disagree, with the perspectives I bring. Kahneman was a brilliant psychologist, but in many ways it is his collaborations with others that I most aspire to emulate. I believe that science, even the hard sciences, are fundamentally social.

So, what can you expect here? A book review written for behavioral scientists, an essay on how narratives can be superior to scientific models, an exploration of the psychology behind a philosopher-saint, among many other topics. This is the place where I get to elaborate on ideas that I have never found a good medium for, and hopefully change the way you think about science and people.

If you’re curious about my professional work, feel free to visit my personal site, BehaviorChange.Expert, where I talk about the two companies I work for—Nuance Behavior and ShadowBox. You can also check out my Medium Blog, where I write more applied content. But if you’re here for the nerdy stuff—the ideas that don’t have a home elsewhere—subscribe to A Failure To Disagree to see if this blog is indeed appropriately named.