> A policeman sees a drunk looking for his keys under a lamp post, starts looking with him. After a while he stops, asking the man whether he's sure this is where he lost them. Turning around, the drunk says he has no idea, but this is the only place he can see anything. The anecdote gave its name to the streetlight effect. It seems to come from an older tale about the Sufi sage Nasreddin, an Islamic cultural figure: > One day, Nasreddin lost his ring in the living room. After looking for a while, he goes outside looking for it. Questioned by his wife about this, he answered the room was too dark for him to find anything, when there was so much light outside. We overfocus on the obvious at the expense of what makes sense; on the consensus at the expense of reasoning; on copying instead of creating; on pre-baked statistics rather than noisy signals; on surface-level thinking rather than basic logic; on why we're right, instead of why we're wrong... The list goes on. I've summarized my own observations of this effect in the following aphorism, which I shoved down the hears of people around me for a solid ten years: >Some people buy expensive cars to be like the rich. The rich buy cheap cars. This is why most people have a hard time drawing; not for lack of ability to hold a pencil, but for the failure to open their eyes to the world and unsee the stereotypical shapes they've learned in order to focus on light, contrast and color. Your brain is constantly feeding you stereotypes which help you navigate the world efficiently; after all, best to mistake a stone for a bear for an instant, than the reverse (Taleb 2012). You couldn't possibly spend one hour looking at every animal to determine if you must run away or not. I submit that in a world where information is the dominant currency, developing thinking habits that limit the impact of this tendency of ours becomes increasingly valuable. Maybe this is what the following quotes imply, or at least this is how I interpret them. >"If I had an hour to solve a problem I'd spend 55 minutes thinking about the problem and 5 minutes thinking about solutions." *— Albert Einstein* In order to think, one has to make space for thinking. >"Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe." *— Abraham Lincoln* It often happens that I'm stuck on a problem, before realizing that my definition of the problem is everything but clear, regardless of how clear I *felt* it was. Looking at the neighbor's car won't help you much navigate life. So next time you lose your keys, define a perimeter where they might be, then start looking, regardless of where the light is. > "The first rule of fishing is to fish where the fish are." >*— Charlie Munger†*