The Courage to Conjecture (#29)
The way I go about with ideas is often to “find” one. If I want to do something, I start by looking for what others have done and see if I can do something similar. If an idea didn’t work, I toss it out and find another one.
This process assumes that knowledge comes from observation. By seeing what works, I’ll be more likely to succeed.
But that is flawed. It leads to a cycle: tireless trying new approaches with little process. If one approach doesn’t work, I can’t tell why because I can’t articulate why it would work in the first place.
Instead, I’ve come to learn that ideas come from conjectures. Looking for examples can be one of the ways to come up with ideas, but that’s not necessary. I can just guess based on what I already know — it doesn’t matter if I know little — and then use empirical tests, through trying myself or experiences from others, to improve my guesses.
Great ideas come from bold conjectures. Let’s take a look at early Greek philosophers even though they seem to know nothing compared to us.
To explain earthquakes, Thales of Miletus said the earth floats above water. To which Anaximander questioned, what, then, supports the water? By criticizing this logical problem, Anaximander suggested a counter-observational theory: the earth is floating freely in space, and it can keep its place because of equal distance from other things. He further said the shape of the earth is a drum-like cylinder; some walk on one side of its flat surface, while others walk on the other.
These look like complete myths, but bold conjectures are more valuable than mundane ones, even though they were proven wrong.
Notice how inspiring they are to our modern theories. The idea of the earth floating above water resembles Wegener’s theory of continental drift. And the earth is indeed in a sense “floating freely” in space. Anaximander wrongly believed it was a drum rather than a globe, which may be blamed on his observations (because, starting from his theory, a globe would be better in keeping equal distance from other things).
I realize I’m often reluctant to come up with my own ideas, let alone bold ones. I wonder where such tendency comes from.
Cultural influence and upbringing seems to be a big one. There’s a fear of sticking out and feeling humiliated. A Chinese saying goes, “The shot hits the bird that pokes its head out.” In collectivist culture, a child who does not behave well would get finger-pointed from family and strangers; A student who does not follow what the teacher prescribes would be punished in front of the whole class.
Not just from social pressure, because even in my private notes and journals I find myself unconfident in coming up with my own thinking, which seems to be strongly influenced by schools in China that emphasize standardized testing.
I was trained and incentivized to arrive at “the correct answer.” When test score is everything, it would be inefficient (and irrational, unfortunately) to think for myself.
I’m still figuring this out. But the thing I want to remind myself is don’t be afraid to guess.
I’m no longer playing the high-stake once-in-a-lifetime game Gaokao (a.k.a Chinese college entrance exam) where failure is almost fatal (in conventional thinking). I’m playing the long-term game called Life which favors progress through iterations.
Errors are expected; our ignorance stems not from our stupidity but that truth is hard to come by. It’s through error correction that one makes progress, and only by expressing my ideas, written or spoken, can they be improved for the better.
The examples of Greek Philosophers, and the whole piece actually, were inspired by Karl Popper’s essays from Conjectures and Refutations.
On this Week
Strong Opinions weakly held
This popular phrase, also called “strong opinions loosely held,” seems to align well with Popper’s epistemology. It was attributed to Paul Saffo who wrote a short but clear essay in 2008:
Allow your intuition to guide you to a conclusion, no matter how imperfect — this is the “strong opinion” part. Then —and this is the “weakly held” part— prove yourself wrong. Engage in creative doubt. Look for information that doesn’t fit, or indicators that pointing in an entirely different direction. Eventually your intuition will kick in and a new hypothesis will emerge out of the rubble, ready to be ruthlessly torn apart once again…
… More generally, “strong opinions weakly held” is often a useful default perspective to adopt in the face of any issue fraught with high levels of uncertainty… Try it at a cocktail party the next time a controversial topic comes up; it is an elegant way to discover new insights — and duck that tedious bore who loudly knows nothing but won’t change their mind!
Rice and Collectivism
What makes East Asian culture a collectivist one? Robert Sapolsky writes,
The standard explanation for East Asian collectivism is ecology dictating the means of production—ten millennia of rice farming, which demands massive amounts of collective labor to turn mountains into terraced rice paddies, collective planting and harvesting of each person’s crops in sequence, collective construction and maintenance of massive and ancient irrigation systems.
A fascinating exception that proves the rule concerns parts of northern China where the ecosystem precludes rice growing, producing millennia of the much more individualistic process of wheat farming. Farmers from this region, and even their university student grandchildren, are as individualistic as Westerners. As one finding that is beyond cool, Chinese from rice regions accommodate and avoid obstacles (in this case, walking around two chairs experimentally placed to block the way in Starbucks); people from wheat regions remove obstacles (i.e., moving the chairs apart). — Determined: A Science of Life without Free Will
Steven Pinker on relativism
And ultimately even relativists who deny the possibility of objective truth and insist that all claims are merely the narratives of a culture lack the courage of their convictions. The cultural anthropologists or literary scholars who avow that the truths of science are merely the narratives of one culture will still have their child’s infection treated with antibiotics prescribed by a physician rather than a healing song performed by a shaman. And though relativism is often adorned with a moral halo, the moral convictions of relativists depend on a commitment to objective truth. Was slavery a myth? Was the Holocaust just one of many possible narratives? Is climate change a social construction? Or are the suffering and danger that define these events really real—claims that we know are true because of logic and evidence and objective scholarship? Now relativists stop being so relative. — Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters
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Until next week,
Weichen
Thumbnail photo by Catherine Kay Greenup on Unsplash