He only needs one word: Lollapalloza.
CrossFit workouts almost always look easier on paper than they are to do. Anyone who has done more than a couple CrossFit workouts has probably looked at a workout on the whiteboard or CrossFit.com and said or thought, "Doesn't look so bad." But they're always bad. No matter how they look on paper. Staring at a CrossFit workout before doing it is a little like F. Murray Abraham's Salieri looking at a Mozart score immediately after hearing it played. "On the page, it looked, nothing. The beginning, simple, almost comic. But..."
Charlie Munger's 'lollapalooza' effect explains why.
Munger gave a talk that focused on the causes of psychological misjudgement. He lists 24 factors total, but what's truly interesting for CrossFit is what he went on to describe as the 'lollapalooza' effect that occurs when several of these psychological factors combine. He asks, "What happens when the situation, or the artful manipulation of man, causes several of these tendencies to operate on a person toward the same end at the same time?"
And his answer is that, "the combination greatly increases power to change behavior, compared to the power of merely one tendency acting alone." The difference, though, isn't just one of addition, but multiplication. Sometimes exponential multiplication.
Munger notes that "When you get these lollapalooza effects you will almost always find four or five of these things working together."
What does that have to do with CrossFit? Take a look at a CrossFit workout. Any will do. Doesn't look that bad, does it? They're short. They might tax the upper body heavily and then give the upper body a 'rest' while the lower body gets taxed. One example: 'Diane' 21-15-9 repetitions of deadlifts and handstand pushups. Deadlifts work the lower body, & handstand pushups mostly upper body, right? So, when a person does one she's basically resting the parts of the body required to do the other.
Only it doesn't work that way.
Here's a personal example. About two weeks into CrossFit, I came across a workout called 'Helen.' I had been running a lot, & 400 meter repeats were a major staple of my (pre-CrossFit) routine. I was very light weight (from all the running), and about the only lifting I'd been doing was weighted pullups. So this workout looked easy: 3 rounds of 400 meter run, 21 kettlebell swings, and 12 pullups. Simple. I thought I'd kill it.
On days when I had just 400 meter repeats, I could manage 1:15s for 10 rounds with 60 seconds of rest in between. So I planned on running 'easy' 1:30s for the runs to conserve energy. I had already learned the (in)famous CrossFit 'kipping' pullup. So, 12 pullups would take just a matter of seconds. I chalked 30 seconds including the transition from the swings to the pullups back to the run. And I'd never done kettlebell swings. Might be tricky, I thought. But I tried them & they weren't that hard. Should take 45 seconds, tops.
So, adding these together (without a 'lollapalooza' effect), even with generous time for transition, I should finish in under 8:30. Simply adding the time I 'should' have been able to do the exercises with minimal transition time should yield a time of about 7 minutes. Probably less, because the last three 400 meter repeats are a lot harder than the first three.
I did the workout. My goal was 8:30. Thought it'd be easy. I did finish. But not in 8:30. It took nearly 10 minutes. And almost killed me. It felt like I stood bent over with my hands on my knees staring at that dumbbell (didn't have a kettlebell) for longer than 8:30 my last round.
I hadn't been that tired in years. Not since high school. Maybe ever. And certainly not from doing 400 meter repeats. I didn't need math--my legs could tell me--that there was a Mungeresque lollapalooza effect with that workout.
As far as I know Munger's never heard of CrossFit. The program is infinitely scalable, but Charlie's disdain for manual labor leads me to believe he's unlikely to try it. But I'm sure he'd be interested in seeing the physical example of his lollapalooza effect in it. Here's Munger's favorite example of a psychological lollapalooza effect:
"McDonald-Douglas airliner evacuation disaster. The government requires that airliners pass a bunch of tests, one of them is evacuation: get everybody out, I think it’s 90 seconds or something like that. It’s some short period of time. The government has rules, make it very realistic, so on and so on. You can’t select nothing but 20-year-old athletes to evacuate your airline. So McDonald-Douglas schedules one of these things in a hangar, and they make the hangar dark and the concrete floor is 25 feet down, and they’ve got these little rubber chutes, and they’ve got all these old people, and they ring the bell and they all rush out, and in the morning, when the first test is done, they create, I don’t know, 20 terrible injuries when people go off to hospitals, and of course they scheduled another one for the afternoon.
"By the way they didn’t meet the time schedule either, in addition to causing all the injuries. Well...so what do they do? They do it again in the afternoon. Now they create 20 more injuries and one case of a severed spinal column with permanent, unfixable paralysis. These are engineers, these are brilliant people, this is thought over through in a big bureaucracy. Again, it’s a combination of [psychological tendencies]: authorities told you to do it. He told you to make it realistic. You’ve decided to do it. You’d decided to do it twice. Incentive-caused bias. If you pass you save a lot of money. You’ve got to jump this hurdle before you can sell your new airliner. Again, three, four, five of these things work together and it turns human brains into mush. And maybe you think this doesn’t happen in picking investments? If so, you’re living in a different world than I am."
My Favorite? Helen. (And not just because that's my mom's name). My favorite thing about CrossFit, other than the fact it works? That the people running it are interested in gathering data. Munger told people to figure out how psychological effects really work in practice. Greg Glassman and others at CrossFit are into collecting data. "Science is about measurement and prediction. Without measurable, observable, repeatable data concerning the fundamental physical units of kinematics (mass, distance, and time or MKS) there is no science of human performance."
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| F. Murray Abraham as Antonio Salieri |
CrossFit workouts almost always look easier on paper than they are to do. Anyone who has done more than a couple CrossFit workouts has probably looked at a workout on the whiteboard or CrossFit.com and said or thought, "Doesn't look so bad." But they're always bad. No matter how they look on paper. Staring at a CrossFit workout before doing it is a little like F. Murray Abraham's Salieri looking at a Mozart score immediately after hearing it played. "On the page, it looked, nothing. The beginning, simple, almost comic. But..."
 |
| Charlie Munger's Lollapalooza Principle Explains Secret of CrossFit's Success |
Charlie Munger's 'lollapalooza' effect explains why.
Munger gave a talk that focused on the causes of psychological misjudgement. He lists 24 factors total, but what's truly interesting for CrossFit is what he went on to describe as the 'lollapalooza' effect that occurs when several of these psychological factors combine. He asks, "What happens when the situation, or the artful manipulation of man, causes several of these tendencies to operate on a person toward the same end at the same time?"
And his answer is that, "the combination greatly increases power to change behavior, compared to the power of merely one tendency acting alone." The difference, though, isn't just one of addition, but multiplication. Sometimes exponential multiplication.
Munger notes that "When you get these lollapalooza effects you will almost always find four or five of these things working together."
What does that have to do with CrossFit? Take a look at a CrossFit workout. Any will do. Doesn't look that bad, does it? They're short. They might tax the upper body heavily and then give the upper body a 'rest' while the lower body gets taxed. One example: 'Diane' 21-15-9 repetitions of deadlifts and handstand pushups. Deadlifts work the lower body, & handstand pushups mostly upper body, right? So, when a person does one she's basically resting the parts of the body required to do the other.
Only it doesn't work that way.
Here's a personal example. About two weeks into CrossFit, I came across a workout called 'Helen.' I had been running a lot, & 400 meter repeats were a major staple of my (pre-CrossFit) routine. I was very light weight (from all the running), and about the only lifting I'd been doing was weighted pullups. So this workout looked easy: 3 rounds of 400 meter run, 21 kettlebell swings, and 12 pullups. Simple. I thought I'd kill it.
On days when I had just 400 meter repeats, I could manage 1:15s for 10 rounds with 60 seconds of rest in between. So I planned on running 'easy' 1:30s for the runs to conserve energy. I had already learned the (in)famous CrossFit 'kipping' pullup. So, 12 pullups would take just a matter of seconds. I chalked 30 seconds including the transition from the swings to the pullups back to the run. And I'd never done kettlebell swings. Might be tricky, I thought. But I tried them & they weren't that hard. Should take 45 seconds, tops.
So, adding these together (without a 'lollapalooza' effect), even with generous time for transition, I should finish in under 8:30. Simply adding the time I 'should' have been able to do the exercises with minimal transition time should yield a time of about 7 minutes. Probably less, because the last three 400 meter repeats are a lot harder than the first three.
 |
| It's not just me: CrossFit's 'lollapalooza' effect works on everyone. |
I hadn't been that tired in years. Not since high school. Maybe ever. And certainly not from doing 400 meter repeats. I didn't need math--my legs could tell me--that there was a Mungeresque lollapalooza effect with that workout.
As far as I know Munger's never heard of CrossFit. The program is infinitely scalable, but Charlie's disdain for manual labor leads me to believe he's unlikely to try it. But I'm sure he'd be interested in seeing the physical example of his lollapalooza effect in it. Here's Munger's favorite example of a psychological lollapalooza effect:
"McDonald-Douglas airliner evacuation disaster. The government requires that airliners pass a bunch of tests, one of them is evacuation: get everybody out, I think it’s 90 seconds or something like that. It’s some short period of time. The government has rules, make it very realistic, so on and so on. You can’t select nothing but 20-year-old athletes to evacuate your airline. So McDonald-Douglas schedules one of these things in a hangar, and they make the hangar dark and the concrete floor is 25 feet down, and they’ve got these little rubber chutes, and they’ve got all these old people, and they ring the bell and they all rush out, and in the morning, when the first test is done, they create, I don’t know, 20 terrible injuries when people go off to hospitals, and of course they scheduled another one for the afternoon.
"By the way they didn’t meet the time schedule either, in addition to causing all the injuries. Well...so what do they do? They do it again in the afternoon. Now they create 20 more injuries and one case of a severed spinal column with permanent, unfixable paralysis. These are engineers, these are brilliant people, this is thought over through in a big bureaucracy. Again, it’s a combination of [psychological tendencies]: authorities told you to do it. He told you to make it realistic. You’ve decided to do it. You’d decided to do it twice. Incentive-caused bias. If you pass you save a lot of money. You’ve got to jump this hurdle before you can sell your new airliner. Again, three, four, five of these things work together and it turns human brains into mush. And maybe you think this doesn’t happen in picking investments? If so, you’re living in a different world than I am."
My Favorite? Helen. (And not just because that's my mom's name). My favorite thing about CrossFit, other than the fact it works? That the people running it are interested in gathering data. Munger told people to figure out how psychological effects really work in practice. Greg Glassman and others at CrossFit are into collecting data. "Science is about measurement and prediction. Without measurable, observable, repeatable data concerning the fundamental physical units of kinematics (mass, distance, and time or MKS) there is no science of human performance."
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