Phil Fernbach
speaker
299 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2025
last heard 20 Oct
Phil Fernbach’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Oct 2025 with 1.
Appearances
I think we both should. But what this highlights is just how complicated the world is. Whoever thought, you know, there's this ingenious mechanism in this object that we use every single day and we never think about.
I think this reflects a really deep fact about the nature of the mind and what thinking is actually for. Thinking evolved to make us more effective at acting in the world. The world is extremely complex. And to be able to choose effective actions in the world really requires acting in environments that are very different from one another. We almost never see the same exact situation arise twice.
And so our minds have to be really effective at generalization. They have to understand that this situation is similar to this situation in some way to be able to act effectively. So storing a huge amount of detail about the world and the way that it works is actually counterproductive.
What we really want to do is throw away all of the irrelevant detail and just retain the deeper principles, the deeper generalizable structures that are going to allow us to choose effective actions.
That's exactly right. The world is so complex. When you start digging into the details of almost anything, you realize how complicated it is and that you don't necessarily appreciate that complexity off the bat. I remember hearing a story about a rock, paper, scissors tournament. Do you know the game rock, paper, scissors? Yes, yeah. Very simple game, right?
It seems like there's nothing to learn and nothing to understand about that game. How could you have a tournament? You just throw randomly. Right. Well, actually, it turns out that there's a group of people who have gotten really good at rock, paper, scissors. And what do they do? They master the details of how the human mind chooses—
what to throw and how it engages in pattern matching and other kinds of things. And they can identify certain kinds of patterns in what a more novice rock, paper, scissors player will do and take advantage of that.
That's exactly right. It's a funny kind of dumb example, but something where when I first looked at it, I said, there is no way that somebody could develop any level of expertise in that area. But it turns out, no, there is actually something to be learned there.
Yeah, this is a super fascinating example. So hyperthymesia is also called highly superior autobiographical memory. And these are people who literally remember everything that's ever happened to them. And so you could talk to a person with hyperthymesia and say, what happened to you at 10.30 in the morning on August 15th, 1985. And they can relate to exactly what occurred.
They basically have perfect recall. So before I described how our minds are very good at throwing away irrelevant detail. If you have hyperthymesia, it's the opposite. You retain everything that's ever happened to you. It sounds like a superpower, but it actually makes life really difficult. And there's an amazing short story by the Argentinian writer Borges, which is called Funes de Memorias.
And it describes exactly this, a man who falls off a horse and develops perfect autobiographical memory so that he remembers every little detail of his life, and it drives him crazy. And that's because the purpose of thinking, the purpose of cognition is really not to store detail. It's to throw the detail away to be able to generalize. And that's such an important function of cognition.
If you have this hyperthymesia, it actually makes life really difficult.
In fact, it would be futile to try to know everything. The world is just way too complex. We've already talked about that. There's just no way that an individual can know enough about the world that it would be effective to store all the details about everything. That's just part and parcel of what it means to be a human being.
It is a problem that we don't appreciate the extent to which we don't understand.
This is a crazy story. So this guy... was under the impression that he would be invisible to the cameras if he put lemon juice on his face. You remember when you were a kid, you could create invisible ink by putting lemon juice on the paper. So he thought for some reason that this would apply to making him invisible to the camera.
So he actually went in to try to rob a bank with no mask, no subterfuge whatsoever, just lemon juice on his face. So his image is broadcast on the news. Within minutes, the police arrive at his door to arrest him, and he is completely incredulous. How could they have possibly known it was him because he had the lemon juice on his face?
And in fact, it turned out that he had tested the method by taking a Polaroid of himself and And making sure that his face was indeed invisible to the Polaroid camera. It's never been discovered why the Polaroid didn't show his face. But one possibility is that he missed because his eyes were filled with lemon juice.
it's been well documented that people tend to be very overconfident in their capabilities in terms of beating the market. Um, and that can lead to really disastrous outcomes. Like people take on too much risk. Um, and it actually turns out that the more people actively trade, the worse they do.
And active trading is sort of a, an indicator of being overconfident in your ability to, to beat the market. Um, this is a paper that I wrote with, um, Dan Walters and, um, What we found in this paper is that one reason for the overconfidence, the reason that people feel that they can beat the market, is because they tend to remember the good outcomes and forget the bad outcomes.
So if I make a trade and I do great on it, that one's gonna stick in my memory more so than when I make a trade and it does poorly. That's not to say that if you have a really disastrous trade that you're not gonna remember that. You certainly would. But on average, you're going to tend to inflate the good over the bad.
Showing 241–260 of 299 · page 13 of 15
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