This is the second entry in an evergreen exploration of scenius — the communal form of the concept of genius.
Individuals immersed in a productive scenius will blossom and produce their best work.
Kevin Kelly
This essay discusses ways to unconceal and apply wisdom beyond words, and why it matters.
Part 1 discusses balancing structure and serendipity, increasing the role of the subconscious to improve our thinking, and the benefits of variance.
Fellow Partners,
There is wisdom beyond words. The verbal and non-verbal both flow from the same source — the body. But because we think and communicate almost entirely in the worlds of words and reason, much disrupts our ability to simply listen, read, and respond to the world around us.
How much time do we each spend just waiting for our chance to speak?
How often do we really practice the sacred art of listening?
Our verbal and logical postures and mannerisms are so set...so practiced...so habitual...that we can rarely see past them.
Exploring the world of intuition reveals this.
Are you feeling ok?
Why spend time on such a seemingly esoteric topic?
First, wisdom is competence with regard to the realities of life. The more wisdom we can acquire, the better we can calibrate ourselves on how the world really works, and what we can wisely do about it. That thought is compelling. Why wouldn't one seek as much wisdom as they can find?
Wisdom is competence with regard to the realities of life.
Gerhard von Rad
Second, we inhabit a world where far less is known and far less is knowable than we comfortably admit. For all his wisdom, Socrates concluded that he knew nearly nothing. Paths with the potential to unconceal truth should be explored.
Rolling the dice
Why do we even need to ask these questions? Hyper-rationalism has crowded out serious consideration of nearly any form of knowing that does not fit into the narrow constraints of words and reason.
To understand how we got here, consider a brief history of how we know what we know, using the example of a common six-sided die.
For most of human history, the results of a dice roll were attributed to the supernatural. The introduction of Arabic numerals to the West via Fibonacci’s work in the 1200’s paved the way for mathematical thought to tackle uncertainty. Renaissance gamblers like Gerolamo Cardano began to use probabilities to analyze games of chance in the 1500’s, and Pascal and Fermat subsequently laid the groundwork for modern probability theory in the 1600’s.1 Around the same time Newton gave us the Principia Mathematica and we began to understand that movement is governed by three laws of motion.
The emerging understanding from probability theory and Newton’s laws helped us see that a fair six-sided die is most likely to have a one-in-six chance of any side turning up when rolled. No longer were the results of the dice games considered divine mysteries. Humanity moved from passively accepting an uncertain future to actively seeking to understand, quantify, and manage risk, transforming it from a mysterious enemy into a catalyst for progress and innovation.
This was all well and good. But we took it too far. As we have discussed elsewhere, we began to believe that all systems could be understood like dice. This led to rationalism, including seeing businesses as mechanical systems where we can swap people in-and-out, like cogs.
I don’t know anyone who enjoys being treated like a cog. Nor do I know any phenomenal businesses that treat people this way. It is a cancer of the corporate world that many still try. Businesses-as-machines was partially true, but missed the broader reality.
Against hyper-rationalism
The crux of the problem is that rationalism was so successful that it led to hyper-rationalism — the jump from the view that many things could be explained by math, to the view that all things could be explained by math. (We are, by the way, seeing the same gospel promises from the current generation of A.I. evangelists.)
That businesses should take seriously the intuition of their leaders and the various realities of their employees was not controversial a few short decades ago. But math can’t handle those things, and for many, math has become religion.
Intuition appears to be something that, while inevitably fallible, is often more reliable, much quicker, and capable of taking into account many more factors, than explicit reasoning, including factors of which we may not even be consciously aware. It also underlies motor, cognitive and social skills, and is the ground of the excellence of the expert. The attempt to replace it with rules and procedures is a typical response to something [we do not understand] — a response that is, alas, powerfully destructive.
Iain McGilchrist
How does this intersect with our investment partnership? Many ways, including very practical realities such as appreciating the limits of the abstractions of accounting, which directly leads to thoughtful questioning on how well calibrated we can ever be on a company's performance and potential solely expressed through numbers.
We inhabit a world wherein the majority of value is created by people and the intellectual property they develop. For the most part neither of these appear accurately in a company's accounting of their assets, because modern accounting generally follows a set of rules designed for a time when the majority of wealth was created by physical assets (e.g. buildings, factories).
The appropriate response to this kind of friction — this kind of “we don’t have all the data we need” problem — is to broaden our toolkit for dealing with the abstractions and distortions that are an inevitable part of trying to understand a messy and broken world.
How do we do this?
One way is to take more seriously the potential need for and value of intuition.
How can we do that?
One way is to spend time in community with wonderful thinkers and investors pursuing scenius, with the specific intent to acquire wisdom beyond words. As one person put it: “The gold beyond the veil.”
That is what I was up to recently. And this is what I learned.
Note: This gathering was hosted under Chatham House Rules, so the material below omits some acknowledgements of authorship.
Conversations without words
We began our gathering by having conversations without words. It was pretty amazing how far we got. Expressions of joy, sadness, wonder, and so forth were easy to read. There was flow. It was clear when one was explaining something, or ending their communication. It was clear when another person wanted you to speak. Responses that progressed and evolved the conversation came naturally. There were no words to think about — our responses came from listening...feeling...intuiting (which, of course, required real listening).
The same was true for other non-verbal things we tried. The Jacob Collier-esque audience choir. Connecting sounds to moments (e.g. what did your childhood sound like?) Starting with a simple musical phrase and layering in more complexity — more notes, more phrases, varied volume. Allowing a song to emerge. Using the voice to converse, not make a point or win an argument.
I was impressed by how much win/win content emerged. Nothing else made "sense" to do. Just keep the conversation flowing.
It was easy to intuit how to add to the sound. It was clear that those additions, cumulatively, created the song. It was clear that the song grew in beauty as more people added to it...suggested new things...incorporated some of them...dropped some others. All without words. I often thought of my favorite instrumental jazz bands. We were riffing, evolving, emerging.
Frankly I was amazed that a group full of mostly "I can't sing" people could create so much beautiful sound.
There were times this all seemed deeply weird. By the end I found the lessons in it to be deeply practical.
Our ability to listen to each other, read each other, riff off each other, contribute to each other…to create, evolve, and emerge "in concert"…is simple and intuitive — if we make space for it. Taking away the words made this much easier to see.
I would suggest that many of the ways we compound trust within our investment partnership are closer to this dynamic than explicit verbal reasoning. Of course words and reason are necessary (and this essay relies on both). But trust — which may be the most valuable thing in the world — is never built purely through reason. There is much more to it. Please read that again.
Thoughts without words
These sessions were surrounded by breathwork — deep, constant breathing in a quiet space. This allowed thoughts to "sink in", digest. It also allowed energy to emerge. Calmness built to vigor. Vigor gave way to peace. Peace relaxed into silence.
There were about a dozen of us breathing together. No one was talking. But through this pattern, coherence emerged.
A musician was playing. He started the sound. We progressed it. He reacted to us. We evolved with him. Cohesion wasn’t the goal. But it happened anyways.
Words are not the final form factor.
This felt much like the "cognitive jam sessions" we often have within our partnership. We riff on observations, ideas, arguments — often finishing each others' thoughts and sentences.
This was that, just a different modality in search of other ways of knowing. New thoughts came to mind — including very practical ones — that had not emerged from conscious reasoning. The subconscious was doing its thing…enhancing and improving our thinking.
Intuition without words
We also applied our pursuit of intuition towards each other. We considered what impressions or "senses" we had of each other and our various pursuits. What images came to mind? What might they mean?
We have all had the experience of getting a good or bad impression of a person or place, and if asked, we could partially — but perhaps not fully — communicate that impression. This was that, with intention.
This was another instance of something that initially felt deeply weird, and by the end I found it to be deeply practical.
Many have experienced not being "at peace" with a decision, or feeling that something is "off" or "not quite right". It is surprisingly common.
In the middle of one night Miss Clavel turned on her light and said, “Something is not right!”
from the children’s book Madeline
If we consider our whole body as an incredibly complex sensing, reasoning, and intuiting system, this all becomes unsurprising. A conscious choice to consider its capabilities more broadly creates the possibility of broader routes to knowledge beyond our relatively narrow, extremely developed capabilities within the constraints of words and reason.
The heart has its reasons which reason knows nothing of.
Blaise Pascal
In Practise
We followed these explorations of intuition and broader ways of knowing with presentations and dialogue. Two days in the body, and a third bringing back the conscious, rational mind. This was a great (and intentional) setup — first consider and experiment with broader ways of knowing, then put them to work.
We discussed compressing complexity, constructing "win/win or no deal" ecosystems, the need for real assets given the zeitgeist of current monetary systems, the dangers of overly abstracting things to learn about them (see Korzybski's structural differential). We learned a brief history of equity...where the whole idea (and word) originated. We discussed symbolism, wisdom found in nature, values, and the value of simplicity. The importance of having uncomfortable conversations. And seeing things under the aspect of eternity.
All value creation is compression.
As in prior years we surrounded these dialogues with activity in beautiful settings. A walk in the garden, or down the beach. Cold swims in the North Sea. And so on. As before, increased variance between activities created greater energy within each activity.
The conclusions were the same as before, but expanded.
Play more. Foster more community. Foster more curiosity. Value variance.
And think with the whole body. Be conscious of the constraints of language and hyper-rationality. Seek to broaden paths that can unconceal truth.
Seek wisdom beyond words.
Find the gold beyond the veil.
Individuals are overrated. Communities are underrated.
All the best,
John
Founder and Managing Partner
For more detail and an excellent read, see Peter Bernstein’s book Against the Gods.