This is sort of a difficult concept to articulate, but I’ll give it my best shot.
Someone’s explanation for why a course of action is the best one doesn’t necessarily need to be true for it to be the best course of action.
I’ll give some examples to explain.
I feel like cooking is rife with these types of situations. Chefs say a lot of things that sound true but probably aren’t at all. I think this owes to the fact that cooking is one of those rare categories where we don’t really need to understand (and therefor test) the science behind it, because the end result (the food/flavor) speaks for itself.
You can try two different ways of doing something, and you know which one is better because of the taste.
Why one worked better is another question.
I remember watching a video of Gordon Ramsay explaining how to make the best scrambled eggs. In it, he suggests that you need to take the eggs off long before they are done cooking, because they will “continue to cook on the plate”.
I’ve heard this same explanation many places, and I’ve always been incredulous.
The moment the food leaves the pan, it is no longer being heated and therefor will instantly begin cooling. In my experience, with eggs, that change is very rapid. In fact, in most cases, you can hear boiling/frying aggressively on the pan, and the moment the eggs leave, it is silent.
Now, of course it’s conceivable that there are chemical changes occurring within the food while it remains at a high – albeit dropping – temperature.
However, while the claim that it will “keep cooking on the plate” may be true in absolute terms, I have a sneaking suspicion that a single second in the pan and on the stove will account for more “cooking” than the entirety of the time after it’s on a plate.
Now, I feel as though lesser minds, at this point, will resort to one of, in my opinion, the dumbest arguments ever conceived: “well he’s an experienced chef so he’s obviously right and you’re obviously wrong”.
First of all: no. Chefs don’t always agree with each other, first of all.
And second: to my point, even if they are wrong, that doesn’t mean they aren’t following the best course of action to make the best food.
A chef doesn’t need to understand why something works. He just knows that it does. He has training and experience that tells him the right timing for things.
In this particular example, it may just be that eggs need to be less cooked than one would believe. If telling someone to take them off the stove before they are fully cooked since they’ll “cook the rest of the way on the plate” gets them to take them off at the right time: good job!
Chefs aren’t scientists and in the rare event that experiments are performed, the goal is generally to determine which method yields the best subjective results. The goal is never to determine the chemical changes in the food or what kind of scientific processes are happening behind the scenes.
And as such, you’re bound to run into tons of situations like this.
Another situation (and the one that made me think of this) that might be more relevant to people is picking stocks in the market.
The vast majority of people are terrible at it, and will consistently underperform the overall market.
Funny enough, my understanding is that trained stock brokers actually do even worse on average than the average layperson.
But consider this: they presumably understand market forces much better. They can value a company and justify the decision to buy or sell a given stock, and the justification is likely accurate.
And yet they do worse than someone who knows nothing.
Based on this, I would posit that someone’s reasoning for picking stocks really shouldn’t matter at all. Only their results matter.
If you were using a monkey to choose which stocks to buy, I would also follow the monkey’s advice if he was consistently right.
I’m being a little facetious there but the point stands. If I had a crazy cousin who had some nonsensical formula for picking stocks and he was consistently returning 30% returns with this formula: I’d follow his formula. Even if it didn’t seem to make any sense, it might tap into something that actually has predictive value, if only by accident.
I think the important lesson to learn here is that things might work – and work well – but still be completely wrong in their premise. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t use them.
It doesn’t even necessarily mean you need to understand the real explanation. Sometimes you just gotta go with it.