My Plan
I mentioned in my last post the necessity of fighting theory-induced blindness – the tendency to accept limitations as facts.
Since then I’ve realized that what I’m really doing this summer is learning to sidestep it.
As students, we are still blank slates in many ways. We have never held a long-term position in our intended field. As such, we haven’t acquired a wide and deep appreciation of the tools, problems, and conventions of the field, or the blind acceptance that comes with it. Once an engineer has used a piece of CAD software for years, it will be awfully difficult for him to rethink the entire idea of digital modeling. He may however, be in a great position to suggest logical improvements to the existing system, which is also valuable. EDIT: This can be seen as “zero to one” improvements in contrast with “one to n” improvements.
My target this summer is finding those problems that the experts can no longer see. As an unemployed college student, I need to use all the resources available to me, most importantly my ignorance. As a total outsider, I can learn about a field with zero preconceptions, consciously maintaining a questioning mindset and critical eye. Most importantly, I can talk to the world experts in any industry or field.
By having conversations with experienced people, I simultaneously tap into two important sources of ideas: those born of ignorance and those born of experience. My own ignorance, coupled with a questioning attitude, enables me to see problems they have long since accepted. Their experience and knowledge, coupled with the right set of probing questions, can reveal to me limitations I did not know of.
This is a false dichotomy, but they represent the endpoints of an important spectrum. Here are some concrete examples of the two kinds of ideas.
Daniel Kahneman (referenced last article), winner of the 2002 Nobel Prize in Economics, coined the phrase “theory-induced blindness.” He credits his best ideas to his utter ignorance of economics. Kahneman was a psychologist researching visual perception and attention when he had an important conversation with his colleague Amos Tversky, an economist. Tversky was explaining the idea of expected utility theory, which says that a person presented with various options or gambles will choose the option with the greatest statistical expectation. Kahneman’s background as a psychologist and (more importantly) his ignorance of economics enabled him to question this theory that stretched back to a 1738 paper by Bernoulli (yes, the Bernoulli). His moment of doubt gave rise to his famous “prospect theory” and much of modern behavioral economics.
On the other side of the coin, sometimes familiarity with a system of field is a necessary prerequisite to transformative ideas. A good example is Ambri, the battery company born of research conducted at MIT by Donald Sadoway. Their batteries use liquid metal to store large amounts of energy for large amounts of time with minimal loss. Sadoway was a world-renowned battery researcher and all-around MIT genius, which clearly gave him the chops to propose such a radically new idea. It required a person with his vast experience and skill to develop those ideas.
Again, I’m also aware of the fact that this is a totally false dichotomy. There is an unlimited number of problems to be solved in the world, and they are born of an infinite set of circumstances. All I know right now is that I am embarrassingly, comically ignorant of the industries that enable my quality of life. I can spend a long time changing that for a tiny subset of these industries, or I can use that ignorance to my advantage to explore, then question, then change.
That’s the plan.