The beauty of error

Author: Liu Jiaolian

BTC rebounded to 98k overnight, and then fell below 97k. The US stock market seems to have hit a new high. Jiaolian talked about it in the internal reference last night (11.29), "Stable growth with low volatility must be a sleight of hand".

I saw a post about how Einstein recruited talents, which I found quite interesting and inspiring.

It is said that in 1933, Einstein first arrived at Princeton, a top university in the United States. The first thorny problem he needed to solve was to find a group of talented young people as soon as possible to form a research team.

Friends who have applied for jobs or interviewed job seekers in the workplace should have more or less understanding of recruitment. Usually, a test paper is issued to test the basic knowledge of job seekers first. Then, through the interview, some questions are thrown out for job seekers to think about and give solutions, and through direct interaction, the other party's ability to analyze and solve problems is understood. If all these are passed, it will be handed over to the big boss and HR to look at the character and integrity, and then the offer can be prepared.

But the method used by Einstein was unexpected. Traditional recruitment methods can only screen out talents who are proficient in existing knowledge, but cannot identify geniuses with pioneering thinking that is different from ordinary people.

This kind of talent in the traditional sense, to put it bluntly, is still a cost-effective competition. There is a joke that Guan Yu and Zhang Fei are dissatisfied with Liu Bei's monthly salary of 3,000, and are ready to switch to Cao Cao to get a 5-fold high salary. Liu Bei's words successfully dissuaded them. What did Liu Bei say? Liu Bei said earnestly: You are talents with a monthly salary of 3,000 here, but you go to Cao Cao to get 15,000, and the work you do is almost the same, so you are not considered talents. And if Cao Cao finds out that you are not talented, what do you think he will do to you?

What Einstein is looking for is not cheap cattle and horses, but truly outstanding talents. He values ​​the following three abilities:

First, critical thinking. The ability to raise hypothetical questions and critically analyze solutions.

Second, creativity. The ability to think outside the traditional framework and propose innovative solutions.

Third, curiosity. The ability to eagerly explore ideas in depth and challenge established norms.

Einstein's research methods often combine learning and discovery, conducting thought experiments and in-depth knowledge of the basic principles of physics.

He believes that true understanding comes from starting from the conceptual level, questioning widely accepted truths, and exploring other angles.

So how did Einstein identify talents with these abilities?

He designed a creative recruitment process.

First, he prepared some papers with hidden errors in his office in advance.

Then, he asked the applicant a question and asked him to give an answer.

Here comes the key. Einstein didn't really care about the applicant's answer. He took out the paper he had prepared in advance, which of course gave a beautiful but wrong answer.

What Einstein wanted to know was how this applicant, who was confident in his answer just now, would react to this different answer?

Some people, in addition to being shocked, carefully read the answers prepared by Einstein, and then, with sharp eyes, found the hidden mistakes in them and pointed them out loudly to Einstein. As you can imagine, they probably said, look, the answer to this paper is obviously wrong, it violates such and such a law!

Even after discovering the mistakes in the reference answers, they will be more proud of their answers and feel that they have already won the interview!

But I'm sorry. For such people, what Einstein did was to politely send them out of the office.

So what kind of people does Einstein want? Let's look at an example.

In 1939, Einstein picked out the first candidate he liked. He was John Wheeler. Unlike others, Wheeler did not simply deny the wrong reference answer, but spent 3 hours exploring other possibilities implied in it.

Another person who caught Einstein's eye was the famous father of the atomic bomb, Robert Oppenheimer. When he saw the wrong reference answer given by Einstein, he couldn't help but say that this broke all the rules we knew, but, but, it was too beautiful.

Yes, what Einstein was looking for was not those who were always "right", but those who could see beauty in mistakes. Such people can be fascinated by exploring those so-called impossible ideas until these ideas become possible.

Einstein's philosophy is simple: if an idea is not absurd at first, then it is a hopeless idea.

Since Satoshi Nakamoto proposed the idea of ​​BTC (Bitcoin) in 2008, many people felt that they understood it in seconds when they saw BTC. Not only did they understand it in seconds, but they also saw through it. Not only did they see through it, but they also saw the unreasonable errors and absurdities in it. So they said proudly:

BTC is an absurd idea.

BTC is a Ponzi scheme.

BTC cannot be a currency.

BTC cannot have value.

BTC will return to zero.

BTC does not conform to the theories of financial textbooks and economics textbooks.

BTC's decentralized consensus mechanism is impossible because it violates the FLP Impossibility Theorem.

And so on.

These people only see the unconventional mistakes, but lack a pair of eyes to discover the beauty of mistakes.

They cannot see the inner beauty of BTC.

If beauty is wrong under the scrutiny of traditional eyes. Then it is not beauty that is wrong, but the traditional aesthetic vision.

Maybe they are not wrong. They are just - too ~old~~

Not old in terms of physical age, but old in terms of psychological age.

The world belongs to the old and the young, but it will eventually belong to the young.

So these people personally sent themselves out of the BTC office and missed this once-in-a-millennium wealth train.