Pragmatists vs Ideologues - do what works!
/By Duncan Anderson. To see all blogs click here.
Reading time: 4 mins
Summary: IMO the meta goal of businesses is to improve humanity. To do this ‘do what works’. Ie be a pragmatist, not an idealogue.
Jingle: be perfectly pragmatic, not reasonably idealistic ;P (yes, this is intended to be logically inconsistent).
"Everything works somewhere, nothing works everywhere."
"All models are wrong, some are useful."
“Being a true expert involves not only knowing stuff about the world but also knowing the limits of your knowledge and expertise.”
Pragmatist = does what works
Idealogue = tries to fit a theory into place. ie not do what works but attempt to get a theory to work.
IMO this doesn't mean you don't look at the ideas / theories out there, but you don't follow them, you learn from them.
They say that managing an economy is blending together many different ideologies in a positive sum way!
Adherence too closely to one doctrine is dangerous! Adherence too closely to one doctrine is just… what the doctor didn’t order!
IMO trying to figure out how to improve education is not ‘adaptive learning vs one speed learning’, ‘teacher centered learning vs student centered learning’, ‘direct instruction vs problem based learning vs socratic discussion’, ‘testing vs no testing’. IMO done well it's a diverse meal of many ideas prepared well, in the right amount and tastily put together. AKA a positive sum blend of ‘what works’!
My checklist to not be an idealogue:
Does it work? (Have the changes we have made worked (improved things)?)
If you have put changes in place you must be able to say if things are better or not? It’s almost always impossible to exactly measure something eg with one number. But at least directionally you should be able to say ‘better / same / worse’ and why.
If you have launched a product / new gov policy / etc and it isn’t improving things then it’s like your product is bad / policy wrong not that the market doesn’t get it.
Can I name 3+ theories / ideologies for this problem space?
Economics example: supply side economics, demand side economics, modern monetary theory
Education example for maths questions: procedural => conceptual, conceptual => procedural, proceptual, problem based introduction, CRA (concrete, representational, abstract).
Where do the 2-3x most relevant theories to the problem space “help vs hinder” and “work vs don’t work”?
What is the prevailing orthodoxy (ie system used)?
Economics: eg central banks are all mainly targeting inflation and this became the standard orthodoxy in ~1990
Education: eg IMO there was a big push for standardised testing starting early 2000s and this is now going the opposite direction.
++++++++++++++++++++++
From Farnam Street and Lee Kuan Yew
Lee Kuan Yew, the “Father of Modern Singapore”, who took a nation from “Third World to First” in his own lifetime, has a simple idea about using theory and philosophy. Here it is: Does it work?
He isn’t throwing away big ideas or theories, or even discounting them per se. They just have to meet the simple, pragmatic standard.
Does it work?
Try it out the next time you study a philosophy, a value, an approach, a theory, an ideology…it doesn’t matter if the source is a great thinker of antiquity or your grandmother. Has it worked? We’ll call this Lee Kuan Yew’s Rule, to make it easy to remember.
Here’s his discussion of it in The Grand Master’s Insights on China, the United States, and the World:
My life is not guided by philosophy or theories. I get things done and leave others to extract the principles from my successful solutions. I do not work on a theory. Instead, I ask: what will make this work? If, after a series of solutions, I find that a certain approach worked, then I try to find out what was the principle behind the solution. So Plato, Aristotle, Socrates, I am not guided by them…I am interested in what works…Presented with the difficulty or major problem or an assortment of conflicting facts, I review what alternatives I have if my proposed solution does not work. I choose a solution which offers a higher probability of success, but if it fails, I have some other way. Never a dead end.
We were not ideologues. We did not believe in theories as such. A theory is an attractive proposition intellectually. What we faced was a real problem of human beings looking for work, to be paid, to buy their food, their clothes, their homes, and to bring their children up…I had read the theories and maybe half believed in them.
But we were sufficiently practical and pragmatic enough not to be cluttered up and inhibited by theories. If a thing works, let us work it, and that eventually evolved into the kind of economy that we have today. Our test was: does it work? Does it bring benefits to the people?…The prevailing theory then was that multinationals were exploiters of cheap labor and cheap raw materials and would suck a country dry…Nobody else wanted to exploit the labor. So why not, if they want to exploit our labor? They are welcome to it…. We were learning how to do a job from them, which we would never have learnt… We were part of the process that disproved the theory of the development economics school, that this was exploitation. We were in no position to be fussy about high-minded principles.