That post about Musk where the cook/chef analogy was found is from four years ago.
The first link in the chain ( • First Principles: The Building Blocks of True Knowledge (Farnam Street)) was more recent, 16 August 2019, it from Barry Ritoltz’s "The Big Picture: which is a investing / financial site which leans towards cognitive bias in financial decision making.
Coincidentally there is a second link there to a post about Musk : Is Elon Wrong About LiDAR? (Scale)
Yup. I do a lot of cooking at home. In fact, right now, 100% of it. Baking is very much a science, with little wiggle room for innovation, other than flavoring. Much of it is a chemical/organic reaction. Cooking, on the other hand offers a lot of space for experimentation, although there are still flavors and textures that compliment each other, and conversely, DON’T work together at all. . . I don’t measure much when I am cooking, or at least with any real precision. . . when I bake, I have to really pay attention. . . .
That doesn’t necessarily break the analogy. Knowing that baking is essentially chemistry and the menus must be followed very precisely is knowledge of principles and is on the right side of the cook/chef spectrum.
Because a baker is a baker, not a cook or a chef, and are thus not on the same spectrum.
A recipe can be thought of generally as step-by-step instructions. Turn-by-turn driving instructions are also step-by-step. The driver who has no local knowledge and needs to follow turn-by-turn instructions can be thought of as cook-like.
The driver who knows the city very well can reach any point in the city from any other point can be thought of as chef-like. This driver is creating his own instructions based on knowledge of the subject.
Thought of that way it can be said that a car GPS turns cooks into chefs, without the knowledge. What’s really happening of course is the GPS can create recipes (turn-by-turn instructions) on the fly from any point.
EDIT: At the beginning the terms have to be defined. A cook is someone who has little knowledge and needs a recipe to follow, a chef is someone who has a deeper understanding of cooking and can create recipes.
Of course in reality it’s not that simple.
4 posts were split to a new topic: Noise: How to Overcome the High, Hidden Cost of Inconsistent Decision Making
I’m a big believer in letting junior officers find their own solutions to problems but when operations get critical I agree with KC. This would sometimes confuse mates who would say “Why are you so flexible sometimes but so rigid other times? It makes no sense.”
It makes perfect sense. When operations are not critical I can spend time guiding the decisions or let them fail knowing the consequences won’t be deadly. But during critical ops it has to be done by the book.
I like having options which is why I read two books a week but you can’t read enough to be expert in everything.
We raised a lot of money for our first ski blog (before gCaptain) and the way we pitched it to investors worked near flawlessly but was highly unconventional. I and read the idea in a book and followed the recipe. Thousands of other also read the book but few had our success.
Years later I was advising a hot new startup that was scheduled to pitch to a few more of the top venture capital firms. I gave them the book and laid out the plan.
What they did next caused me to loose my preverbal shit. These were highly intelligent guys and they found things in the plan they could improve upon. I advised them not to.
Basically what I said was “There are probably hundreds of better ways to pitch this idea but I KNOW for a fact this way will work”.
They didn’t listen. Instead they poured weeks of research into a new plan that seemed watertight. Neither me nor any of the other advisers could find a single flaw in their new plan.
But it failed.
The next round they followed the recipe and raised millions.
The problem was that neither me nor them fully understood why the recipe worked. It just did but they were unwilling to take that leap of faith until they ran out of options.
A few years later they were going for round two and wanted to use the same recipe again. I advised against it. Now that they had experience and years to reflect on the plan they could make tinker with it and amalgamate it with other ideas from other books. They did and raised the second round.
So that’s always my game plan. I follow the book until I’m experienced in the process then, and only then, I start to combine ideas from other books.