Dec 26, 2018 · 1h 9m · knowledge-project
#48 Adam Robinson: Winning at the Great Game (Part 2)
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gold bands on the timeline = statements, start to end. Hover to read, click to jump. CC turns on captions
In this wide-ranging interview, investor and educator Adam Robinson joins Shane Parrish to explore artificial intelligence, chess mastery, high-performance learning systems, and cognitive blind spots. The dialogue offers practical mental models for navigating technological disruption, refining decision-making, and mastering deliberate personal development.
How this conversation actually went
Every chapter scored 0–10 on four independent dynamics. Hover any point for the reasoning behind the score. Shane holds 11.4% of the talking time here. How this is scored →
Shane as informed peer 3.4 Guest teaching 5.3 Guest disagreement 1.5 Shane pushing back 1.2
speaking balance: gold is Shane, purple is the guest (3 minute bins)
Sharpest disagreement ▶ 5:40 Dismantling the utopian view of technological displacement
Adam directly rejects utopian assumptions about automation, emphasizing the psychological devastation people feel when stripped of their economic purpose.
Hardest push from Shane ▶ 14:10 Pushing on uninterpretable AI diagnostics as a benefitShane challenges whether human inability to interpret AI medical decisions is truly problematic if the outcomes are more accurate.
Biggest teaching moment ▶ 37:00 Paul Slovic's horse handicapping experiment breakdownAdam educates Shane and the audience on the seminal study demonstrating that increased information only inflates overconfidence without improving predictive accuracy.
Shane holds their own ▶ 1:01:36 Shane's toe-in-the-door framework for managerial feedbackShane articulates a nuanced model of organizational psychology from his direct management experience, demonstrating how leaders inadvertently shut down employee candor.
the scores for every segment, with the reasoning behind each
| Chapter | Topic | Shane as informed peer | Guest teaching | Guest disagreement | Shane pushing back | Why |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| School Grading Experiment: The Inherent Subjectivity of Academic Evaluation | 3 | 6 | 2 | 1 | Shane poses a broad opening question about habits that work in school versus real life. Adam responds with a detailed walkthrough of an experiment he conducted proving the inherent gender and formatting subjectivity of teacher grading. | |
| The Future of Work, Basic Income, and Automation | 4 | 5 | 2 | 2 | Shane suggests jobs are becoming increasingly procedural, which Adam agrees with before diving into the psychological devastation of automation and loss of economic contribution. | |
| AlphaZero and the Emergence of Alien Intelligence in Chess | 3 | 7 | 2 | 1 | Adam draws on his background as a rated chess master to explain how DeepMind's AlphaZero learned chess without human data, creating completely alien moves that baffled human grandmasters. | |
| The Existential Threat of Uninterpretable Self-Programming Artificial Intelligence | 4 | 6 | 3 | 2 | Shane questions whether unexplainable medical diagnoses from AI are actually positive outcomes. Adam cautions that self-reprogramming systems will optimize relentlessly beyond human comprehension or control. | |
| Evolution of Computing: From Pentium Chips to Quantum Computing | 3 | 5 | 1 | 1 | Adam recounts running early neural nets on Pentium processors in the 1990s and compares that speed constraint with the imminent leaps of quantum computing. | |
| Big Data Monopolies, Consumer Profiling, and Global Market Competition | 5 | 5 | 2 | 2 | Shane brings up the competitive advantages of proprietary datasets and antitrust dilemmas. Adam explores consumer profiling examples and highlights the geopolitical challenges of regulating national tech monopolies. | |
| Adam Robinson's Early Chess Journey and Meeting Bobby Fischer | 2 | 6 | 1 | 1 | Shane prompts Adam to share how he learned chess as a youth. Adam delivers an engaging narrative about compiling 700 of Bobby Fischer's games by hand and subsequently meeting Fischer on the streets of New York. | |
| The Competitive Mindset and Strategic Simplicity of Bobby Fischer | 4 | 6 | 1 | 1 | Shane and Adam discuss Fischer's meteoric leap from average twelve-year-old to teenage grandmaster, highlighting Fischer's play-to-win mindset and legendary tactical bait-and-switch against Spassky. | |
| The Illusion of Knowledge: Paul Slovic's Information Experiment | 4 | 7 | 1 | 1 | Shane introduces the role of information overload, referencing Paul Slovic's work. Adam details Slovic's horse handicapping experiment showing additional data increases overconfidence without increasing accuracy. | |
| Expert Intuition, Mental Filtering, and Depth versus Breadth Learning | 5 | 6 | 2 | 2 | Shane offers his hypothesis on key variable distillation for information filtering. Adam builds on this with the Zen beginner versus expert mindset, advocating depth over superficial breadth in education. | |
| The Foundations of Effective Learning and Systematic Skill Rehearsal | 3 | 7 | 2 | 1 | Adam summarizes the central premise of his book 'What Smart Students Know', arguing that true learning requires active rehearsal of sub-skills under realistic retrieval constraints rather than passive rereading. | |
| Rehearsing Under Non-Optimal Conditions and Overcoming Communication Blindspots | 4 | 5 | 2 | 1 | Shane contextualizes study methods with physics problem sets. Adam reinforces priming oneself with unsolved end-of-chapter questions and recounts giving honest interview coaching feedback. | |
| Overcoming Personal Blindspots Through Objective and Stranger Feedback | 3 | 5 | 1 | 1 | Shane asks how to acquire feedback in complex interpersonal domains like management. Adam emphasizes testing communication on strangers and soliciting candid feedback on personal blind spots. | |
| Psychological Defensiveness and the Historic Purpose of Court Jesters | 5 | 4 | 1 | 1 | Shane shares an insightful observation from his own management career about how defensive reactions shut down constructive feedback. Adam relates this to the historical institutional purpose of the royal court jester. | |
| Unintended Life Lessons, Generation Z, and Positive Global Leadership | 3 | 5 | 1 | 1 | Adam discusses the powerful indirect lessons adults inadvertently communicate to children and expresses hope that Gen Z can rise above divisive political polarization with positive leadership. | |
| Podcast Conclusion, Show Notes, and Farnam Street Newsletter | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | Shane delivers the outro monologue promoting show notes, transcript availability, and the Farnam Street weekly newsletter. |
Statements from this episode (25)
Teachers Grade Identical Essays a Quarter-Point Higher With Female Names
“The number one positive factor on on your, on the essay was a female name at the top of the paper. It was worth an extra quarter of a grade. A equals four point O, B equals three point O, C equals three point O. It was worth a quarter of a grade. It was worth …”
Robinson: Stephen Hawking Estimated a 95% Chance AI Destroys Humanity
“Stephen Hawking,
Gave mankind a one in 20 shot of surviving AI.
A one in 20 shot.
And you can do the math, that means a 19 and 20 shot, we don't survive.
AI.
That's how serious it is.”
Robinson: AlphaZero surpassed all human chess knowledge within four hours
“And in four hours, that program leapfrogged all existing human knowledge of the game, and has a chess rating of, hard to estimate, like, 36, 3700, compared with 3300.”
Robinson: AlphaZero defeated top chess engine without losing a single game
“This pro, this computer program played a match against the reigning software, right, 3300. It beat it 72 to 28 in a 100 game match with no losses.”
AI Will Exponentially Exceed Human Intelligence in Hours in New Domains
“Now imagine that computer is unleashed not in the domain of chess, but in other domains. It'll totally recreate everything we know and then go beyond it in hours. So the scary thing with AI is this, that it will become exponentially smarter than we are in minu…”
Robinson: Top mathematicians cannot understand computer-generated proofs
“Right now, there are mathematical proofs done by computers that human beings can't understand. The best mathematicians in the world don't understand those proofs, and all they can say is, we can't find a mistake in it. It's probably right, but we're not real s…”
Robinson: Doctors cannot follow IBM Watson's diagnostic reasoning
“So even now, the computer Watson, IBM's Watson, can come up with a medical diagnosis, the challenge of which is to explain the diagnosis to the doctor, because the doctor can't follow the reasoning of the neural net, and all the thing.”
Adam Robinson: Quantum Computing Will Crack Any Encryption in Minutes
“Anything that's encrypted with quantum computing, you'll be able to crack that, whatever the encryption is, in, I don't know, seconds or minutes.”
Robinson: US Tech Giants Own User Data Unlike European Frameworks
“In the United States, You don't own your data. Google does, or Facebook. It's their corporate data. But in Europe, the individual owns his or her data.”
Robinson: User Data's True Value Comes from Aggregate Cross-Referencing
“The value of your data is when they cross-reference it with other people, right? The value emerges not just because Shane is using Google, but lots of other people are, and they're able to do, use statistics and machine learning to find patterns so that they u…”
Robinson: Spent two weeks watching Bobby Fischer prepare for Spassky match
“Yeah, I got a chance to spend time with him at the, there used to be a resort called Grossingers in the Catskills. If you saw the movie Dirty Dancing with Patrick Swayze back in the day, it was where they, Muhammad Ali had trained, I guess he was, I don't know…”
Robinson: Bobby Fischer progressed from good player to world elite between ages 12 and 15
“Fisher learned the game of chess at the age of six. And by the time he was 11, sorry, by the time he was 12, he was a good twelve-year-old chess player. Not a great twelve-year-old chess player. He was a good twelve-year-old player. That's six years later, rig…”
Robinson: Fischer played the same openings for 16 years before switching in the World Championship
“Fisher set up The Russians for, let me just figure this out, 10 to 20, for 1617 years, played exactly the same moves, so everyone knew exactly what he was going to do, and in the world championship, only, he did something different.”
Robinson: Slovic Study Proves Extra Information Increases Overconfidence Without Improving Accuracy
“Their accuracy was still only 17% with 40 pieces of information, but their confidence almost doubled to 31%. It went from 19% to 31%. So they are now almost twice as confident as they ought to be, which is to say they're overconfident. So all the extra informa…”
Robinson Predicts Global Markets Using Copper-to-Gold and Bond Ratios
“Which is why, by the way, in my investment analysis, when I look at global markets, I reduce all global markets down to a handful of variables, like copper versus gold, or investment grade bonds versus, versus corporate bonds, right? LQD, IEF, that ratio I tol…”
Robinson: Liberal arts breadth fails to teach thinking compared to deep mastery
“If you learn a little bit about a lot of things, you'll be able to generalize and kind of think about anything. Well, no, you won't, because you've never learned how to think. At Oxford and Cambridge, the belief is learn one thing really well, and then you can…”
Robinson: U.S. schools should focus solely on reading, writing, and math for eight years
“I think U.S. Schools would be much better off if they focused on teaching students simply how to read well and write well and rudimentary mathematics. Get that down for the first eight years. Make sure they're really good at that. And then introduce other A su…”
Robinson: All mnemonics reduce to pictures, patterns, stories, or rhymes
“Create a picture, a pattern, a story, or a rhyme out of it. All mnemonics come back to picture, pattern, story, or rhyme, but they don't tell us that.”
Robinson: Flashcards and rereading notes are totally ineffective for learning
“We, you know, we create flashcards, which are totally ineffective and we keep rereading our notes.”
Robinson: The key to learning is breaking skills down and rehearsing them
“The key to learning any skill, really, if there's anything I said today, like, that was super important, the key to learning any skill, rehearse it. Break it down into sub-skills, and the rehearse Each of those skills.”
Robinson: Attempt Chapter Questions Before Reading to Prime Problem-Solving
“Try the sample questions at the end of the chapter before you read the chapter. Now, because what that does is it primes you. Now, now all of a sudden, whoa, how would I, there's no way I can answer those questions. Let's, now you're primed as you read the cha…”
Robinson: Translate Notes into Your Own Words Rather Than Rereading Them
“When you take notes in school, they're probably verbatim just because you've got to keep up with the teacher, right? But then translate those notes into your own words, because that's what you're going to have to do on the test. Don't reread your notes. Transl…”
Parrish: Defensive managerial reactions permanently shut down employee feedback
“I found when I was managing people, they would always put their toe through that door, but it wouldn't be a foot, it would be a toe, and how you responded to that first sort of, here's something you could do better, or this criticism, or whatever you want to c…”
Robinson: Medieval court jesters were institutionalized truth-tellers, not entertainers
“In in the Middle Ages, there was an institution designed by kings to provide feedback, and it was called the court jester, and the function of the court jester was not to amuse the king. The function of the court jester was far more serious than that. The cour…”
Robinson: Gen Z is more globally homogeneous and label-free than prior generations
“Young people, the younger generation, under 20, Gen Z, the youngest generation, is free from many of the labels that everyone over the age of 25, like male versus female, or Republican versus Democrat, or American versus non-American that bedevil political and…”