Primal Intelligence: You Are Smarter Than You Know by Angus Fletcher

The job for commonsense is to sound the alarm when our current plan isn’t working. When there is no alarm, we can move on with confidence. Our bias is toward action unless commonsense steps in. It can also select a new plan when needed. Anxiety is healthy as it warns us when we are entering uncertain territory. You gotta be anxious to act sensibly. While it can keep you appropriately vigilant, too much can sabotage commonsense.
Your standard operating procedures (SOPs), are tried and true and can be relied on. Update them with care. Learn from the past and don’t second guess the future. Don’t jump the gun and chase conditions that aren’t real yet. There examples here of people like Warren Buffet who were able to tune their anxiety as the became successful.
Now it’s time to apply these four primal intelligences. The four powers are: Intuition that sparks plans, Imagination the shapes plans, Emotion that sustains plans, and Commonsense that selects plans.

There are three big ideas that can promote innovation. 1. Turn an exception into a new rule. Examples are paper money, Mesoamerican corn, the Moog synthesizer, and relativity. If something is weird, embrace it. When you see an exception, double down.
2. Leverage Conflict. An exception is by nature in conflict with a rule. It has no place in logic. Logic’s predominance in our modern schools and businesses has left us emotionally uncomfortable with conflict and not equipped us to benefit from it. Embrace tension and push your imagination to make a new rule. Darwin was good at this.
3. Eat your enemy. Do it metaphorically by consuming the best aspects of your enemy’s or competitor’s thinking. What is special about your rival? Be curious, not judgmental. Japan did this to American industry after World War II. The more you consume the intelligence of your rivals, the more you accelerate your own innovation.

As we age our resilience brittles. We suffer impacts from which we don’t recover. We need to become antifragile. One way is to recall positive surprises we have encountered in life. This shows us that life can be beautiful rather than tragic. This will strengthen your long-term purpose. Optimism is this can succeed not this will succeed. Can lives longer than will as it allows for loses along the way.
The other way to become antifragile is to get good at inventing your own answers to open-ended problems. School isn’t good at this. Sometimes it helps to think like others. Imagine what your creative friend would do. Trust yourself to invent an original answer. Plan in order to get better at planning so you can better deal with the unexpected. Be sure to have backup plans. Getting stronger from setback and smarter from failure will help make you antifragile.

The Optimization Trap happens when you are following reliable data and something changes so that your data is no longer reliable. AI has this problem as it’s always following the large data that it has been feed. This is why humans are better as they can spot when the environment is changing better than AI. The top humans can decide when it’s time to switch plans, and which new plan to select. Match the newness of your plan with the newness of your environment.
Special operators are taught to attack into an ambush rather than running or hiding. This gives you the initiative and presses your opponent to make bad decisions. When fundamentals change, junk your most successful plans. Expert bias happens when experts make recommendation based on knowledge that doesn’t include the latest environmental changes. Commonsense is flexible. It uses familiar plans in familiar situations and novel plans when things are novel.