"Diversification is protection against ignorance. It makes little sense if you know what you are doing." -Warren Buffett
Remember the old joke about the Jewish man stranded on a desert island who builds two synagogues?
He attends one synagogue every week, and the other synagogue is the one he never goes to. (Rim shot.)
I pity you if you haven’t heard this joke before,1 but I suspect most of you have. Pointedly, the punchline has nothing to do with whether or not this man made a good decision, only the lack of surprise that a solitary Jewish man on a desert island would want to keep his options open.
I recently heard someone tell this joke for the millionth time, and it sparked my thinking: Does Jewish life have too many options or too few? And for our purposes, can Moneyball inform our thinking about this?
So buckle up, folks!
Let’s go trick-or-treating.
Diversification Bias
Pretend that a child is trick-or-treating one Halloween and must consistently choose between two candy bars, Milky Way and 3 Musketeers.2
Situation A: A child visits house number one and is told they can pick one candy bar of the two. Child A then visits house number two and is given exactly the same choice as the previous house.3
Situation B: A child goes to a single house, sees large piles of each candy bar, and is told they can pick two candy bars in any combination (i.e., they can pick two of the same or one of each.)
What would be your guess for how children would make their selection? This choice was placed before a group of children in an experiment conducted by Daniel Read and George Loewenstein to demonstrate something called the “diversification bias” or “naive allocation.”
When one goes trick-or-treating, they ultimately come home with a bag full of candies from different houses. As a result, a child “optimizes” picking candy by accumulating as much of their favorite candies as they can and then chowing down later. If I like Milky Ways the most, I should keep picking them, no matter how the choice is presented to me, because I have no idea what kind of candy each home will offer.4
However, what Read and Loewenstein find is that children in Situation A choose the same candy bars 52% of the time and different candy bars 48% of the time, but children in Situation B choose different candy bars 100% of the time.5 While each child accumulates the same amount of candy, children diversify when presented simultaneously. As Shlomo Ben Artzi and Richard Thaler argue in a later paper, people have “naive (or confused) notions of diversification”6 and often diversify for diversification’s sake, even if the choice at that moment makes no difference in the long run.7
Returning to our original question, this heuristic does not establish that diversification is always wrong or always right, only that we are inclined to want more options, even if that’s not necessarily the best strategy. At the same time, strategies in the Jewish community vary around diversification:
In some sectors of Jewish life, options tend to be abundant (whether or not people actually need each of the options provided.) Small, medium, and large communities often contain a variety of synagogues, as well as multiple camps and day schools. At the same time, most of those communities do not have multiple options for a kosher supermarket, funeral home, or JCC.
Recently, some sectors of Jewish life have lost options as one organization explodes in size while others shrink, like children’s book publishing (PJ Library), teen engagement (BBYO), or Israel trips (Birthright.)
Over the past several decades, the number of rabbinic programs for non-Orthodox students has increased while the total number of students in those programs has decreased.8
Pointedly, I am describing a trend, not evaluating it. But since the Jewish landscape contains contradictory approaches, it’s worth getting on the balcony and asking how intentional we are about any of these decisions.
Wherever You Go, There You Are
One day at Owings Mills High School, my class was doing research in the library. My friends and I, who never lacked an enthusiasm for sarcasm,9 saw a book on the library shelf called Wherever You Go, There You Are. We laughed at what seemed like a really stupid title (without actually looking inside the book.)
Like so many times, I thought without thinking.
This was an ironic choice, considering that Jon Kabat-Zinn’s fantastic book was one of the foundational texts in what today we refer to as “mindfulness.”10 Perhaps if I had opened the book instead of laughing, I might have learned an important set of mental strategies twenty years ago instead of in 2014, when I finally read the book.
If our tendency is to choose as many options as possible regardless of whether or not we should, Wherever You Go, There You Are is a powerful antidote to this temptation. While choosing Halloween candy is a low-stakes decision, we repeatedly learn that if we make poor choices on frequent low-stakes decisions, we will likely make poor choices on infrequent high-stakes decisions.
This becomes particularly important in interpersonal relationships.
Kabat-Zinn argues we need to "look at other people and ask yourself if you are really seeing them or just your thoughts about them.”11 The first time I read it, the power of the statement cut like a knife because I immediately knew that I spend too much time interacting with others through the prism of how I think about them versus how they see themselves. And I suspect I’m not alone. Providing some comfort, Kabat-Zinn remarks that how we look at other people is similar to how we interact with most of the world, asserting that “Without knowing it, we are coloring everything [in our world], putting our spin on it all.”12
This also applies to innovation; a number of insecurities and biases lie at the heart of why people are inclined to insist upon their idea being the only “right” one even if there are a number of equivalent alternatives. Perhaps we need to be more mindful before we immediately assume that the current options must exist inexorably into the future or if dissatisfaction alone is a sufficient reason for creating a new, self-labeled innovative alternative.
In other words, does the Jewish world really need more of X organization, or do you want to create another so you can run it?13 On the other hand, if there is a causal relationship between options and engagement, why do some parts of a sector get starved while others get most of the funding? A more mindful approach may be the best way to unpack a difficult question. Kabat-Zinn argues that in a world where we think too much on autopilot, “perhaps it’s time [for people] to pay closer attention, to be more in touch, to observe the choices we make and their consequences down the road.”14
As we learn each week, our minds are pre-disposed to move fast to help us get through the world, sometimes to the detriment of our decision-making. Wherever You Go, There You Are is a reminder that slowing down results in better decision-making and heightened awareness. And if we cannot allocate our resources evenly, we’re better off allocating our attention intelligently.
Opening to Our Lives
64,565
A study published in JAMA estimates that 519,981 completed rapes were associated with 64,565 pregnancies during the 4 to 18 months that bans were in effect in the states that banned abortion since the United States Supreme Court overturned Roe vs. Wade.15
45% of those pregnancies took place in Texas.
Unconscionable.16
What I Read This Week
Fear is a Framing Problem: Spending time on mindfulness is a perfect time to think about fear. This article sparked my thinking.
Church Attendance and Voting: This article is an important analysis of one of the most misunderstood constituencies in the American electorate.
Sofia Coppola’s Path to Filmmaking: Amazing how one film can obscure the career of one of the best directors in the world. I learned so much from this article about Coppola’s artistry.
How to Guarantee a Life of Misery: It takes all of my strength not to quote Charlie Munger every week. Sometimes, I decide not to resist.
Beware Zombie Leadership: You will be hearing more about this idea.
Not because the joke is hilarious (it’s not.) Just because it’s a cultural experience.
Remember on Seinfeld where George thinks someone stole his candy bar, and it takes him an hour to create a candy bar lineup? Still kills me.
Spoiler: They were all Twix!
Some may even give me a toothbrush!
Daniel Read and George Loewenstein, 46.
Important: In each case, the authors use the word “diversification” to describe how people spend money or make economic choices. This bias has no connection to diversity as we tend to use it today.
While I think the trends I am describing are accurate, I won’t speculate on the reasons why. But I do think that this last example is a great example demonstrating how the bias behind a trend might look different depending on how you look at it:
If you were ordained or currently work at a rabbinical school that has existed for decades, a new program may seem like the Not Invented Here (NIH) Syndrome run amock. Are any of these programs so different to warrant creating new ones? To an incumbent, they may want to ask the upstarts, “Do you really think you’re so special that what you are doing is so different from us?”
However, if you want to create or study at a new rabbinic program, the established programs may look like the kind of giant hairballs that provide less and less value as they become more and more bureaucratic. The upstart may ask, “How long do I need to put up with the bureaucratic nonsense of a legacy institution before I just throw up my hands and start something new?”
I’ve never run a rabbinic program, so I don’t have a strong feeling on this subject. But it’s important to see that the same problem could be seen through very different lenses.
My favorite example?
A bunch of students we deemed lazy took over the animal rights club so that they could pad their college resumes (without really caring about animal rights.)
We responded by creating the Carnivores Club.
What did we hold?
Meat-ings.
(Get it?)
FYI: I did not put that on my college resume. But I did put Mr. Jaguar (that’s to see how closely Danny Jacobs is reading. He should have totally won. Happy 40th, buddy. You’re a slightly older man than me.)
While I’m sure everyone who reads this newsletter has heard of mindfulness, it was fascinating to go online and look at different definitions.
Ibid.
Ironically, I would say there always seems to be a new Jewish organization focused on bringing mindfulness into Judaism (but I could be wrong about that.)
Jon Kabat-Zinn, 59.
Sorry: At Moneyball Judaism, we are pro-choice.