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Focus on what’s really there

Speaking about myself here . . . .

I am a problem solver. If something is “wrong” I want to leap in and fix it. That’s my brain.

That’s my job, too: people walk in and say “I have a thorny problem, please fix it.” I fix it. They give me money. Pavlov would be proud: it makes me want to solve more problems.

But! Thar be dragons.

It’s not a universal good to “solve” a visible “problem.”

What might look like a problem might in fact be a surface manifestation of a deeper condition. The deeper condition might be good or bad. Altering the surface manifestation might have a feedback impact on the deeper condition.

And the “problem” you see might even be a “problem” here but, transported elsewhere, would be a “solution.” Maybe a solution to something you haven’t even thought about yet.

My problem-solving method always starts with brainstorming all the ways I can imagine to solve the problem. But what an act of arrogance that is! Do I really believe that the four ideas I have are the only options available? The universe is far more varied than that. There may be 104 or 4 million things I can do. That’s why Occam’s Razor is a useful heuristic but not an absolute truth.

So I see things that I think are isolated problems that are not isolated. They have hidden causal effects in multiple directions. Unidirectional, multi-directional causality. I see problems that are in fact themselves solutions. I see a necessarily tiny subset of actions as the only possible response to problems.

I should just give up. It’s hopeless, right?

No.

We work. We make things “better,” within our best understanding of “better.” This is what it means to be human. And then we die. In other words, the urge to fix stuff, make things better (even if temporarily) is what we do. So . . . LFG.

Just temper your arrogance. you cannot know everything.

This is where the Lindy Principle comes into play. Be especially careful when confronting ancient problems. A quick and obvious (to you) action that will magically resolve a centuries-old condition is unlikely to solve the problem you see. If you have an easy, obvious solution, odds are that it has been tried over time and failed. That’s the Lindy Principle: things that are flawed will break over a long time period because time and random probability will deliver stressors that will break it. And something that has survived a long time has had untold stressors thrown at it, without breaking.

In short, if your brilliant idea is so brilliant, it would have been discovered already. As a rule, use that to tamp down your ego. Yes, astonishing breakthroughs happen. And yes in retrospect they seem obvious and simple. But . . . why is it your idea that falls within the category of epoch-changing intellectual achievement?

I guess this rambling rant can be summarized into three bullet points:

  • There are no solutions, only trade offs.
  • Be humble. You’re not that fucking brilliant.
  • Help your fellow man make his life a little bit better. And the way to figure that out is to ask him—don’t imagine you know better than him.

And also this exercise is why the quest to write 1,000 blog posts is useful—regardless of the quality of the output. Publish, don’t polish.