Example: Those that understand bacterial resistance and strengthening in biology, but fail to understand that revolutions feed on repression, that people are strengthened and hardened by being repressed.
Insight: Many people can understand concepts and ideas in one domain and fail to understand or recognise it in another (biology and finance for example).
Insight: Humans often fail to recognise situations outside of the context with which they learn about them.
Insight: The failure to translate wisdom or ideas across contexts can lead to fragility in the usefulness of those ideas.
Insight: Due to domain dependence, we often forget that the knowledge or information we have about things may not translate into other real world situations.
Definition: Insights often do not translate well across fields [or WE fail to recognise similarities across contexts].
Example: Harry Markowitz, 1990 Nobel prize winner for investment "portfolio selection". We was incapable of applying he process in his own life.
Example: A presenter who is fantastic in front of small groups but gets nervous and struggles with the same presentation with big audiences.
Insight: We often struggle to transfer academic knowledge to our private lives.
Insight: In business, people often struggle to translate talents across departments, organisations, or contexts.
Definition: When we act in a certain way in one environment and a different way in another.
Example: In one restaurant the author's friends ate salmon and threw the skins, and at a sushi restaurant they ate the salmon skin and threw the salmon.
Example: University philosophers are in the business of questioning society and all the things we take for granted. However when it comes to their personal finance are happy to allow a portion of their salary be paid into a pension plan and invested in the stock market without question each month, and trust that experts will invest it to their benefit - they have the domain dependence of skepticism.
Key Insights & Principles
Learning & Decision Making
We often fail to transfer information and knowledge across contexts.
We tend to act in a certain way in one environment, and a different way in another.
Recognising the similarities between contexts, or how information can translate or be useful across contexts is highly valuable.
Aim to apply knowledge across different contexts.
Actively search for similarities between different domains.
