Thomas Gilovich, a psychologist, writes:
“The world does not play fair. Instead of providing us with clear information that would enable us to ‘know’ better, it presents us with messy data that are random, incomplete, unrepresentative, ambiguous, inconsistent, unpalatable, or second-hand.”
The current pandemic is staring us in the face as what amounts to a “wicked” learning environment, where the results we get from experimenting are unstable, non-repeatable, and, at times, just random. It is easy to conclude that, yeah, it’s a pandemic, something that happens once or twice every 100 years. So, what does that have to do with learning?
Sports or games tend to be easier learning environments. You play backgammon and you learn the rules. There are random occurrences introduced by the throw of the dice, however, they happen within the confines of a given ruleset. Football players learn certain patterns in games, they even get to know how their opponents play. But they are not suddenly running with the ball outside the pitch or allowing everyone to use their hands.
Outside of sports and games, I believe that much of our learning takes place in wicked environments — major life decisions, raising children, starting or not starting a business, starting a business but pivoting, investing in the stock market, investing as a VC in young…
