Speaker 1
And Michael, like you point out, a lot of companies have been talking about how evidence-driven and how data-driven they are. I think a key difference is that what a lot of companies do is have a hippo who's going to make a decision. And hippo is my new favorite business acronym. It stands for Highest Paid Persons Opinion. And it's how most companies make most of their decisions. There could be some analysis that the data nerds did. But then they tee it up to the hippo. And the hippo essentially says, look, if the evidence aligns with my prior beliefs, with my intuition, with my big hippo gut, great, we'll follow the evidence. If not, we're going to go my way. After all, the reason I'm up high on the org chart is because of my experience and my intuition and my judgment. If the evidence doesn't agree with that, we're not going to follow the evidence. Whether or not, if that explicit, I think that's what happens at a lot of companies. And the geeks is hard at trying to say, no, actually, that's not what we're doing. I've got a quote that I love from Richard Feynman at the start of the chapter about science. And Feynman says, look, if your guess is wrong, it doesn't matter who you are. It doesn't matter how many Nobel Prizes you have around your neck. It doesn't matter how august you are, how successful you've been. If your guess doesn't line up with the evidence, if it doesn't line up with reality, it's wrong and you need to walk away from it. That's really what I mean. That's what, for me, that's at the heart of science. And it's important to spend a little bit of time on why science works so well, why it is so powerful. And I think the key part of the answer is it is the best corrective we have ever come up with, the best corrective we humans have ever come up with to our own overconfidence. Michael, I love my ideas. I'm pretty sure you like your ideas a lot too. And if that's the end of the line, we will stand or fall and defend those ideas to our death. Science is a way to correct that overconfidence. And what's critical is that we cannot be left to the job of refining or stress testing our own ideas. That's completely inappropriate. All we will do is reinforce how amazing our ideas are. The group, however, is really good at assessing our ideas.