Rolf Dobelli quotes Charlie Munger on the "man with the hammer tendency"

"If your only tool is a hammer, all your problems will be nails," said Mark Twain - a quote that sums up the déformation professionnelle perfectly.  Charlie Munger, Warren Buffett's business partner, named the effect the "man with the hammer tendency" after Twain: "But that's a perfectly disastrous way to think and a perfectly disastrous way to operate in the world.  So you've got to have multiple models.  And the models have to come from multiple disciplines - because all the wisdom of the world is not to be found in one little academic department."

~ Rolf Dobelli, The Art of Thinking Clearly, "Those Wielding Hammers See Only Nails," pp. 275-276

Rolf Dobelli on déformation professionnelle

Here are a few examples of déformation professionnelle: Surgeons want to solve almost every medical problem with a scalpel, even if their patients could be treated with less invasive methods.  Armies think of military solutions first.  Engineers, structural.  Trend gurus see trends in everything (incidentally, this is one of the most idiotic ways to view the world).  In short: If you ask people the crux of a particular problem, they usually link it to their own expertise.

~ Rolf Dobelli, The Art of Thinking Clearly, p. 276

Rolf Dobelli on the limits of expertise and value of expanding our circle of competence

If you take your problem to an expert, don't expect the overall best solution. Expect an approach than can be solved with the expert's tool kit.  The brain is not a central computer.  Rather, it is a Swiss Army knife with many specialized tools.  Unfortunately, our "pocketknives" are incomplete.  Given our life experiences and our professional expertise, we must try to add two or three additional tools to our repertoire - mental models that are far afield from our areas of expertise.  For example, over the past few years, I have begun to take a biological view of the world and have won a new understanding of complex systems.  Locate your shortcomings and find suitable knowledge and methodologies to balance them.  It takes about a year to internalize the most important ideas of a new field, and it's worth it: Your pocketknife will be bigger and more versatile, and your thoughts sharper.

~ Rolf Dobelli, The Art of Thinking Clearly, p. 277

Dr. Shiva Ayyadurai on the coronavirus and scientific establishment

In the entire dialogue of the coronavirus, everyone must recognize the central focus is "find that virus," "fight that virus," "kill that virus."  Vaccines and pharmaceuticals.  It is not about immune health.  And the reason is the history of the centralized medicine favors a pharmaceutical approach which is everything is a nail and everything must be a hammer.  Everything must be a virus, everything must be a vaccine, everything must be a pharmaceutical drug.

~ Dr. Shiva Ayyadurai, "Citizen Science vs. the Scientific Establishment," 35:15 mark, YouTube, April 7, 2020