I try to think about topics like desire, causation, and evidence and often find myself in puddles of confusion. I’ve recently wondered how, when someone can see various perspectives on a topic and can’t decide which has most merit, they can resolve these internal debates. I also wondered if this ever played out on a longer timescale with many people; whether people used to find things confusing that are now pretty clear, and whether we can learn anything from the process of coming to clarity.
I’m still not really sure on this second point, though, I didn’t look that hard. My guess is that, even when ideas are vague or contradictory, most people don’t think of them that way, instead feeling confident that their ideas are whole and true. I’m biased to think that human overconfidence transcends culture and time.
In this piece, I try to summarize what I’ve learned as I’ve looked into the question. Because my goal was really to find ideas that might help me gain clarity and think through complex ideas faster, I frame these insights as self-help-esque advice. I will warn, though, that although these ideas are interesting and perhaps important, the advice I turned them into is probably on average not helpful at all.
I say this because when large studies make people try out interventions that seem obviously helpful, they often have no effect, and the effects that are there are surprisingly small. Take this study comparing gym attendance across 10’s of interventions. Besides controls, all participants received a baseline of $0.22 for every day they went to the gym, were texted reminders, and planned their workout schedule. On top of these three components, 52 supplementary interventions were tested, with only 5 having an additional benefit. To give you an idea of what these interventions were like, here are some of the things that I would have expected to help that didn’t: giving participants $1.08 instead of $0.22, texting participants advice they themselves made for motivating exercise, and framing the $0.22 change as a loss instead of a gain. The best intervention increased gym attendance by only half a day per week compared to controls who received none of the three baseline components (Milkman et al. 2021).
In defense of writing advice as if it will be helpful when I would guess that it’s not, I think that people latch on to self-help ideas, and advice may serve as an interesting framing of any topic. Additionally, while I don’t think these ideas are perfect or good, they could serve as starting places, inspiration, or things to try when you’re stuck. Inspiration may be helpful in itself, even if the advice is not necessarily helpful.
In my journey thinking about clarity and confusion, I read some of Galileo’s Dialogues Concerning the Two Chief World Systems (1632) (with the help of ChatGPT) and Howard Gruber’s Darwin on man: A psychological study of Scientific creativity and absorbed random tidbits about the history of math. My main takeaway was that thinking is more constrained by historical context than we assume.
Goal-orientation and pursuit
It might seem like lots of discoveries happen accidentally. Even if some inventions and theories have a good dose of luck involved, it seems to me that thought accomplishments require effort and time. In the case of Darwin, his thinking about natural selection had occurred 20 years before he published On the Origin of Species, which might make it seem like it takes decades to come up with good and hearty ideas. Behind the scenes, his ideas had actually only taken a couple years of extensive thinking to form, overlapping with lots of other projects Darwin was working on. Honestly, that sounds kind of short to me, but it also reminds me that I might not be able to think through something in a couple months. I’m not sure I’ve ever spent years thinking about a particular question.
Throughout history, it’s common for a discovery to be made by multiple people independently at roughly the same time. This was the case for Darwin and Alfred Wallace, for example, who both wrote about natural selection within about twenty years of each other. While there was a component of serendipity, as both were exposed to ideas about transmutation and experienced firsthand interesting variation in organisms while traveling, it seems to me like other people at the time may have also been exposed to similar ideas. Partly, I would guess, those people did not come up with ideas about natural selection because they were not trying to.
Understanding and questioning other people’s ideas
While you might be able to make very original things that no one has ever thought about before, thought accomplishments seem to often be built upon knowing about and understanding other ideas. Further, to move beyond older ideas to newer ones, an air of questioning is necessary.
Before some digging, I might’ve guessed that Darwin’s thoughts came out of the blue in a context where everyone else believed that species had been created exactly as they currently are. In reality, related ideas available in his time enabled him to create his theory. He had been exposed to Lamarckian ideas of transmutation as well as those of his grandfather but wrote later in his autobiography that he was unphased by them. Other somewhat novel ideas, though, like that geology has slowly changed over very long timescales or that artificial selection could be used to increase the frequency of desired traits, shaped Darwin’s thinking.
Many ideas intuitive to us now took thousands of years of civilization to produce, pointing to the surprising difficulty to think beyond the ideas available to us. Strikingly, while many people today find negative numbers quite intuitive, mathematicians of the past worked overtime to avoid solving equations with negative numbers, as they believed them to be nonsensical. Before negative coefficients were accepted in algebra, Omar Khayyam in 11th century Persia had to treat what we now write as one general cubic equation as 13 distinct cases. In my reading of the history, which is not thorough, it doesn’t seem that they understood of the possibility of using negative numbers and simply preferred positive ones; instead, it seems that they hadn’t realized negative numbers could be a useful and coherent concept at all. Questioning the status quo is an integral part of coming up with new ideas.
Evaluating other people’s ideas is not the same as building your own ideas
So far, I’ve emphasized the importance of other people’s ideas. It might seem like what’s required for creating new insights is to critique other people’s work. Unfortunately, these are not synonymous.
Reading Galileo, what struck me was the frequency of factoids that seemed totally irrelevant to whether the Earth revolved around the sun or not. Galileo’s Dialogues Concerning the Two Chief World Systems (1632) spent a good chunk of time critiquing Aristotle, who believed that the Earth was the center of everything. To get through to his audience, who at the time apparently followed Aristotle’s beliefs(?), he poked holes in the Aristotilean view of the solar system, which included the idea that the heavens were made of a special element that caused them to be perfect and unchanging. To this end, Galileo mentions repeatedly that sun spots come and go from the Earth’s surface, evidence that the heavens do, in fact, change. As a modern reader, it’s obvious for me to tell the difference between refutations of Aristotle and evidence of a sun-centered solar system. While it might be important for audiences to see the problems with their current beliefs, the evidences you will provide them on that front are not the same as the evidences for a new belief.
Looking at the problem from many perspectives
From what I can tell, answering a question with novel insight often involves relating ideas that other people may not have seen similarities between. Asking people what they think about the question you’re working on is likely not enough to make these connections. Instead, you’ll likely need to learn about topics that seem tangentially related or wander into seemingly irrelevant topics with your question in mind, both of which could be done with a social bent. From Darwin’s wikipedia: “Despite the grind of writing and editing the Beagle reports, Darwin made remarkable progress on transmutation, taking every opportunity to question expert naturalists and, unconventionally, people with practical experience in selective breeding such as farmers and pigeon fanciers. Over time, his research drew on information from his relatives and children, the family butler, neighbours, colonists, and former shipmates.”
As you explore and learn about the world, keep in the back of your mind the questions you’d like to answer. I’m not sure if exploration should be focused on things you think might be relevant or if it’s better to expose yourself to as many seemingly irrelevant concepts as possible.
You may not have gotten it right, and you may not be able to get it right
Your place in history constrains what you will be able to know. Darwin wasn’t sure about how life started nor did he know the source of phenotypic variation. Even with these large gaps of information, he was able to make an influential theory that answered many other questions.
Galileo, interestingly, got something totally wrong in Dialogues: he said that the Earth’s tides were caused by its rotation. This contradicted other ideas he expressed in the book; for instance, the characters discussed why we don’t feel any effects of the Earth’s movements.
While the world may feel static, keeping in mind the drastic changes it’s undergone may help you let go of mistakes, whether they’re yours or someone else’s.
I try to think about topics like desire, causation, and evidence and often find myself in puddles of confusion. I’ve recently wondered how, when someone can see various perspectives on a topic and can’t decide which has most merit, they can resolve these internal debates. I also wondered if this ever played out on a longer timescale with many people; whether people used to find things confusing that are now pretty clear, and whether we can learn anything from the process of coming to clarity.
I’m still not really sure on this second point, though, I didn’t look that hard. My guess is that, even when ideas are vague or contradictory, most people don’t think of them that way, instead feeling confident that their ideas are whole and true. I’m biased to think that human overconfidence transcends culture and time.
In this piece, I try to summarize what I’ve learned as I’ve looked into the question. Because my goal was really to find ideas that might help me gain clarity and think through complex ideas faster, I frame these insights as self-help-esque advice. I will warn, though, that although these ideas are interesting and perhaps important, the advice I turned them into is probably on average not helpful at all.
I say this because when large studies make people try out interventions that seem obviously helpful, they often have no effect, and the effects that are there are surprisingly small. Take this study comparing gym attendance across 10’s of interventions. Besides controls, all participants received a baseline of $0.22 for every day they went to the gym, were texted reminders, and planned their workout schedule. On top of these three components, 52 supplementary interventions were tested, with only 5 having an additional benefit. To give you an idea of what these interventions were like, here are some of the things that I would have expected to help that didn’t: giving participants $1.08 instead of $0.22, texting participants advice they themselves made for motivating exercise, and framing the $0.22 change as a loss instead of a gain. The best intervention increased gym attendance by only half a day per week compared to controls who received none of the three baseline components (Milkman et al. 2021).
In defense of writing advice as if it will be helpful when I would guess that it’s not, I think that people latch on to self-help ideas, and advice may serve as an interesting framing of any topic. Additionally, while I don’t think these ideas are perfect or good, they could serve as starting places, inspiration, or things to try when you’re stuck. Inspiration may be helpful in itself, even if the advice is not necessarily helpful.
In my journey thinking about clarity and confusion, I read some of Galileo’s Dialogues Concerning the Two Chief World Systems (1632) (with the help of ChatGPT) and Howard Gruber’s Darwin on man: A psychological study of Scientific creativity and absorbed random tidbits about the history of math. My main takeaway was that thinking is more constrained by historical context than we assume.
Goal-orientation and pursuit
It might seem like lots of discoveries happen accidentally. Even if some inventions and theories have a good dose of luck involved, it seems to me that thought accomplishments require effort and time. In the case of Darwin, his thinking about natural selection had occurred 20 years before he published On the Origin of Species, which might make it seem like it takes decades to come up with good and hearty ideas. Behind the scenes, his ideas had actually only taken a couple years of extensive thinking to form, overlapping with lots of other projects Darwin was working on. Honestly, that sounds kind of short to me, but it also reminds me that I might not be able to think through something in a couple months. I’m not sure I’ve ever spent years thinking about a particular question.
Throughout history, it’s common for a discovery to be made by multiple people independently at roughly the same time. This was the case for Darwin and Alfred Wallace, for example, who both wrote about natural selection within about twenty years of each other. While there was a component of serendipity, as both were exposed to ideas about transmutation and experienced firsthand interesting variation in organisms while traveling, it seems to me like other people at the time may have also been exposed to similar ideas. Partly, I would guess, those people did not come up with ideas about natural selection because they were not trying to.
Understanding and questioning other people’s ideas
While you might be able to make very original things that no one has ever thought about before, thought accomplishments seem to often be built upon knowing about and understanding other ideas. Further, to move beyond older ideas to newer ones, an air of questioning is necessary.
Before some digging, I might’ve guessed that Darwin’s thoughts came out of the blue in a context where everyone else believed that species had been created exactly as they currently are. In reality, related ideas available in his time enabled him to create his theory. He had been exposed to Lamarckian ideas of transmutation as well as those of his grandfather but wrote later in his autobiography that he was unphased by them. Other somewhat novel ideas, though, like that geology has slowly changed over very long timescales or that artificial selection could be used to increase the frequency of desired traits, shaped Darwin’s thinking.
Many ideas intuitive to us now took thousands of years of civilization to produce, pointing to the surprising difficulty to think beyond the ideas available to us. Strikingly, while many people today find negative numbers quite intuitive, mathematicians of the past worked overtime to avoid solving equations with negative numbers, as they believed them to be nonsensical. Before negative coefficients were accepted in algebra, Omar Khayyam in 11th century Persia had to treat what we now write as one general cubic equation as 13 distinct cases. In my reading of the history, which is not thorough, it doesn’t seem that they understood of the possibility of using negative numbers and simply preferred positive ones; instead, it seems that they hadn’t realized negative numbers could be a useful and coherent concept at all. Questioning the status quo is an integral part of coming up with new ideas.
Evaluating other people’s ideas is not the same as building your own ideas
So far, I’ve emphasized the importance of other people’s ideas. It might seem like what’s required for creating new insights is to critique other people’s work. Unfortunately, these are not synonymous.
Reading Galileo, what struck me was the frequency of factoids that seemed totally irrelevant to whether the Earth revolved around the sun or not. Galileo’s Dialogues Concerning the Two Chief World Systems (1632) spent a good chunk of time critiquing Aristotle, who believed that the Earth was the center of everything. To get through to his audience, who at the time apparently followed Aristotle’s beliefs(?), he poked holes in the Aristotilean view of the solar system, which included the idea that the heavens were made of a special element that caused them to be perfect and unchanging. To this end, Galileo mentions repeatedly that sun spots come and go from the Earth’s surface, evidence that the heavens do, in fact, change. As a modern reader, it’s obvious for me to tell the difference between refutations of Aristotle and evidence of a sun-centered solar system. While it might be important for audiences to see the problems with their current beliefs, the evidences you will provide them on that front are not the same as the evidences for a new belief.
Looking at the problem from many perspectives
From what I can tell, answering a question with novel insight often involves relating ideas that other people may not have seen similarities between. Asking people what they think about the question you’re working on is likely not enough to make these connections. Instead, you’ll likely need to learn about topics that seem tangentially related or wander into seemingly irrelevant topics with your question in mind, both of which could be done with a social bent. From Darwin’s wikipedia: “Despite the grind of writing and editing the Beagle reports, Darwin made remarkable progress on transmutation, taking every opportunity to question expert naturalists and, unconventionally, people with practical experience in selective breeding such as farmers and pigeon fanciers. Over time, his research drew on information from his relatives and children, the family butler, neighbours, colonists, and former shipmates.”
As you explore and learn about the world, keep in the back of your mind the questions you’d like to answer. I’m not sure if exploration should be focused on things you think might be relevant or if it’s better to expose yourself to as many seemingly irrelevant concepts as possible.
You may not have gotten it right, and you may not be able to get it right
Your place in history constrains what you will be able to know. Darwin wasn’t sure about how life started nor did he know the source of phenotypic variation. Even with these large gaps of information, he was able to make an influential theory that answered many other questions.
Galileo, interestingly, got something totally wrong in Dialogues: he said that the Earth’s tides were caused by its rotation. This contradicted other ideas he expressed in the book; for instance, the characters discussed why we don’t feel any effects of the Earth’s movements.
While the world may feel static, keeping in mind the drastic changes it’s undergone may help you let go of mistakes, whether they’re yours or someone else’s.