How We Hacked Business School

It sounds like you've mastered a number of important business skills. You understand the voice of the customer, market trend analysis, designing a product that customers want to buy and pay more for without raising costs, business model innovation, and effective advertising.

I don't think your educators are self-aware enough to have intentionally Miyagi'd you, but I'd say the system worked anyway. It speaks well of you that you'd rather give away this advantage than exploit it.

This was painful to read. But I'm going to try to condense and reframe your story in a way that's more engaging and easier to follow.

In business school, in-class conversations constitute a significant portion of your grade. These are scored roughly by your ability to provide insights, which can be categorized into three types: prior knowledge, inductive reasoning, and deep deductive reasoning. We started by noting down which students received '3's, then Goodharted on this objective.

We found that the most effective way to score high was not to search for insights but to question everything. If someone says, "let's assume for now..." and the rest of the class is nodding along, well let's check that assumption! Most of the time, our assumptions will be right, but even if they're wrong 10% of the time, we can expect to find a nonobvious insight.

This simple trick, to question everything, ended up being the best insight I made in class. Reverse-engineering what really counts as "smart" was also crucial. We realized that contributions were not graded proportional to their labor but to the magnitude of the conceptual phase shift they induced.

We identified at least three common types of Level 3 contributions: Expertise, Deductions, and Implication. Each required doing a piece of invisible work that no one else had done yet. Effective contributions require some work to achieve, but not because effort is intrinsically useful. Work is incidentally useful because of a selection effect.

We also realized that the average layperson doesn't just lack the sense of what knowledge is at each rung - they're oblivious to being on any ladder at all. Discovering insights is accidental, “lightbulb moments” out of nowhere. But by knowing a ladder exists, and that climbing it requires subverting your misconceptions, you can sometimes guess the expert "A → Opposite-of-A" conclusions without being an expert yourself.

This became our strategy in class. We learned to simulate expertise by spotting and articulating the right phase shifts. This led to the same insights a true expert might offer. Over time, many students started exhibiting the verbal “artifacts” of good contributions, without understanding the mechanics of why they worked.