The “don’t optimize” counsel is an effect of what my friends and I like to call the myth of the expert. Unfortunately, in most fields the number of people who really understand what’s going on is very limited. For every true expert, there are scores of pseudo-experts who are able to perform in the field, have assembled loads of knowledge, and in the eyes of those who are not experts are indistinguishable from the true experts. These pseudo-experts can function but do not really understand the area in which they claim expertise.
True experts do not have rigid rules; they understand what’s
going on, and so they do not need rigid rules.
Pseudo-experts, however, don’t understand, and so they tend to look at what the experts are doing and copy it.They know what to do but not why it should be done.Therefore, they listen to the true experts and create rigid rules where none were intended. One sure sign of a pseudo-expert is writing that is unclear and difficult to follow. Unclear writing comes from unclear thinking. A true expert will be able to explain complicated ideas in ways that are clear and easy to understand. Another common characteristic of pseudo-experts is that they know how to apply complex processes and techniques and have been well trained but do not understand the limits of those techniques.
In trading, a good example would be someone who can perform complex statistical analyses of trades, runs a simulation that generates 1,000 trades, and then assumes that she can draw conclusions from those trades without regard for the fact that they might have been drawn from only two weeks of short-term data. These people can do the math but do not understand that the math does not matter if next week is radically different from the last two weeks.
Don’t confuse experience with expertise or knowledge with
wisdom.