The art of misdirection
Lebron, Pokhran and a pickpocket
If you have ever watched LeBron James play basketball, besides his nuclear athleticism, you may have come across his incredible no-look passes. LeBron looks one way and nonchalantly passes the ball the other way (to his teammate, of course). Ronaldinho was a master of the same, only he did it with a football instead. While there is an element of showboating that goes with a no-look pass, the main objective is to create confusion. You mislead your opponent to look elsewhere, while you do what is best for your team.
For the longest time, India’s attempts to become a nuclear nation were languishing because the United States was not big on other countries holding any kind of power. I’m sure the real reasons were far more elaborate, but let’s just go along with this one for now. (Take one for the sake of storytelling, America.) In 1995, India had to abort two nuclear tests because the US government got wind of these tests and used their magical American powers to create international pressure, to which India had to succumb. In 1998, India decided to run these tests again, but this time around, they paid extra attention in trying to hide their activities.
It started with the scientists wearing soldier uniforms, to prevent people in the town from getting suspicious about the sudden increase in population. The engineers and scientists carefully created the wiring and then covered up their work with bushes and dirt (to avoid being detected by satellites). In May 1998, the US found out about India’s successfully conducting its nuclear tests through CNN.
Attention is an incredible superpower to have. Lebron James wants the attention of the team he is playing against and once he has it, he hopes to control and divert it as he pleases. While testing nuclear weapons India would have liked no attention at all but as that was close to impossible they were hoping to control and redirect the attention that was thrown in their direction. From politicians distracting you with their failed promises to magicians misdirecting you to perform the impossible, capturing attention and diverting it has become somewhat of an art.
An expert on handling and redirecting attention is Apollo Robbins. He is a professional pickpocket and magician. While giving a ted talk on misdirection, Apollo asked the audience to close their eyes and try to remember the color of the shirt that he was wearing. Sure enough, some people got it right and others did not. He was wearing a maroon shirt with a black tie. He then briefly touched on our inability to notice and register what is right in front of us. To showcase the same, he decided to call a spectator on stage.
Demonstrating his incredible magic and pickpocketing skills Apollo managed to remove a watch and some cash from the spectator’s pockets. While the spectator on stage was clueless, Apollo made sure that the rest of the audience could see what was going on. After about two minutes of incredible pickpocketry (doubt that is a word), Apollo finally returned the watch and money he pickpocketed from the spectator and asked him to return to his seat. He then again asked the audience a simple question “What am I wearing”? “It was at this point I paused the video on Youtube, dumbfounded.
Yes, he was wearing a different shirt than what he was wearing at the start of the show. There was no tie and the shirt was now grey. Sure, enough like most people I watched it again, with the only intention to notice when the shirt change occurred. (Almost half the video in)
Misdirection as Apollo touched upon is often the ability to control and divert someone's attention in a manner that even if they are looking directly at the sleight, they notice nothing. In the video, Apollo kept us so busy with his sleight of hand that we forgot to notice that he had changed shirts. It was about keeping the mind busy and misdirected rather than then trying to hide something from the five sensory organs.
In the 1990s, Harvard psychologists Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris filmed two teams of students passing basketballs to each other. One team wore black t-shirts and the other wore white. In the middle of the video, a student dressed as a gorilla walked into the center of the room, pounded his chest, and walked out.
The psychologists then conducted an experiment where they made people watch this video and asked them to count how many times the players in white T-shirts passed the ball. At the end of the video, the viewers are asked if they noticed anything peculiar. Surprisingly, close to 50% of the viewers missed the gorilla.
Apart from highlighting our inability to multitask efficiently, the experiment touched on our tendency to miss something obvious which is right in front of us, simply because we don’t expect it to be there. Psychologists Arien Mack and Irvin Rock termed this phenomenon as inattentional blindness.
When watching Apollo Robbins steal someone's watch we don’t really expect him to change his shirt and hence we miss it. Similarly, we don’t expect a random man dressed as a Gorilla to walk in a video where we are instructed to count the number of ball passes.
Inattentional blindness serves as a gentle reminder that we can easily miss things right under noses. It reminds us that a lot of what we pay attention to is based on our expectations.
This is where checklists become so important. They make sure that we have a few basic things covered. In his brilliant book “Checklist Manifesto”, Harvard Professor and surgeon Atul Gawande mentioned that despite all the complexity that surgery may require, small details like not washing your hands, not giving antibiotics at the right time, etc can be costly. He then talked about how having a succinct two-minute checklist actually helped reduce death in surgery.
When surgeons with years and years of practice resort to checklists, it only makes sense that investors with far less practice in a field with far more luck, also resort to a checklist.
Brett Caughran a former fund manager shared a nice investment checklist on Twitter.
If you are intrigued by the idea of investment checklists I highly recommend you check out the book “The Investment Checklist: The Art of In-Depth Research” by Michael Shearn.
If you made it this far, thanks for reading! Do consider subscribing to the newsletter if you have not yet.