This is the last of my ski trip ponderings ... and it goes to the core of just what is science really? It's hard to know anymore with all the politicization that has characterized science on both sides of the liberal/conservative divide. It's almost like no one really wants to know what is true anymore ... they just want their side to win the day. And that is just sad. Pathetic really. Yet deep down, many of us still really want to know how the universe works in its myriads of functions.
Over time I have found that most of what gets in the way of my seeing the universe as it really is comes from me. Excitement, pride, preconceptions of what the universe should look like all get in my way, but the most common block is fear. Fear that I won't measure up, fear that I can't get the answer to open questions, fear that I will let others down, fear that I will shrink in the eyes of others and in my own esteem -- all of these can sit in between me and understanding. And I don't think I am alone in this.
When I scribbled "hold onto the doubt" on my statics exams back at OSU I was encouraging myself to breathe and let go of the fear so that I could sit beside the open question and really understand it. In a state of calm and with quiet contemplation, I could best answer the academic questions. It turns out that the same is true for real problems of life, health, innovation, and even leadership and personnel management.
Human curiosity is a powerful thing. It is, in fact, our curiosity that we need to engage and our fear that we need to hold at bay, or better yet release, if we are going to find what we are looking for. It is as if there are two forms of decision making in life: fear-based and curiosity-based. In fear-based decision making, we find ourselves wanting the answer as fast as possible. We don't really pay attention to, or care, what the answer is -- we just want something, because the open question makes us anxious and fearful. In curiosity-based decision making, we use one of the core traits of our species to pull apart, examine and wade into open questions. In my experience, this type of decision making yields much better solutions.
When you have groups of people working on a common problem then you must find a way for ideas to win rather than people, so it becomes a jousting contest between competing truths rather than competing egos or hierarchies. You really need to learn to like the people you're working with for this to happen ... and I've found that looking for a least one attribute that you can admire in everyone you work with can facilitate this. And I've come to the point in life that I want to genuinely like the people I spend my days with, if for no other reason than it makes life more enjoyable ... especially when you routinely work 11-12 hour days.
In the same way, my frustration with someone doesn't have to be with him or her fundamentally as a person. We can try to limit our frustration to just his or her behavior, because getting to the hard truths of life requires that people show affection and respect for one another at the same time they feel at ease showing complete disrespect for ideas that just aren't going to cut it. After all, we are social animals, and our brains work better in an environment where we are committed to one another and enjoy one another's company. That is the only environment in which it is safe enough for the small voice of real truth in each of us to clash with one another fearlessly and energetically.
The key to searching for the truth is to hold passionately to your beliefs while simultaneously not feeling entrenched in your position, to be able to let go of the need to defend it in order to save face. It's almost a Buddhist thing, where you're not necessarily free of ego and status, but you are able to sit with them and maintain some objective separation. It's about letting ideas win, not people. It's about finding what is right, not being right.
And, ironically, it has more to do with problem definition than it really does with problem solving. Holding on to the doubt means listening to the problem until the deepest truth presents itself. But that, of course, raises the question: How do you know when you've gotten down to the deepest truth? This is especially true in medicine, where we may have fifteen channels of measurement data giving us hard facts about any given patient but there might be five thousand other channels of data that we could possibly measure if we just knew how or perceived the need.
Before the Iraq War, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld famously spoke of the different bins into which states of knowledge can be cast. The hard facts are what he called the known knowns. We have plenty of these in medicine: temperature, heart rate, weight, respirations, blood pressure, blood chemistries and blood gases, etc. There are known unknowns, the things we know we don't know, like the calorie count of that burger I ate for lunch or the minute by minute fluctuations in renal glomerular filtration. The other two bins get more tricky. There is the bin of unknown knowns, which Rumsfeld has used to refer to things that you think you know but you do not. This is what I like to consider self-delusion. A cautious and honest mind might be lucky to largely avoid unknown knowns through self-questioning and asking others to set their eyes on your work. The final set, and perhaps the most important, is the unknown unknowns, the things you don't even know that you don't know. Intuition, which taps lightly into the irrational and, I believe, integrates a larger set of the rational than is available to our conscious mind, is a way of bringing in the unknown unknowns and of creating a broader model. Sometimes it can't be integrated at a conscious level. It appears to us as a "feeling."
Most of applied science is explicit -- it's all about the math, the physics or the biochemistry -- but there is also the "inner voice" of scientific judgment, your confidence in what you know to be true. Then there's your Spidey sense, the confidence in your gut that you learn to trust beyond your horizon of hard data. It is based on the data you have, but is also encompasses confident extrapolations. As such, Spidey sense is the essential counterbalance to the rational minimalists who deconstruct and analyze every argument into its elements and miss the intuitive altogether. It is the part of our awareness that is reaching out to get a grip on the unknown unknowns.
Our screwups today are most frequently errors of omission. Science has been pretty good at discarding the fictions we once used -- the four humors, the music of the spheres -- to fill in the physical laws we didn't understand. So when we settle for self-delusion these days, it is usually because we have stopped short in our search for truth seeking and have accepted a subset of the universe as our model as being the whole universe. In medicine we might omit a test because we didn't think it was that important ... too small to matter. More frequently, we omit a test or an analysis from our workup plan to save either time or money or both because we think we can get by without it. These are willful omissions, and although they can sometimes wreak havoc, they are never as truly dangerous as the unconscious omissions, the failures of imagination, the true unknown unknowns that have not been considered. For we do not ever debate the things we have failed to recognize as being important.
So the take home lesson I think, if there is one, is that no one's scientific judgment is foolproof. I believe in a determinant universe, one that (a) exists and (b) is ordered by laws that cannot be changed at will. The search for truth about such a universe invariably involves building a model of all that we know, which is an adjacent or surrogate universe.
A careful balance needs to be struck between our confidence in the parts of the universe that we know and our suspicion of the universe that we don't know. Drawing on Rumsfeldian parlance once again -- your known knowns, your known unknowns and your unknown unknowns, on "unk-unks" -- I think the art of applied science or even being successful in business or life, for that matter, lies in how one finds the unk-unks and makes them "kn-unks," and how one respects the possibility for more to be found ... or never discovered.
In my experience, the older and/or wiser one gets, the better one is at judging the unk-unks, sensing them, getting a feel for how vast they may or may not be given the issue at hand, and somehow managing them. This is all done, of course, without actual conscious, explicit description of or an actual counting of them, since doing so would immediately thrust them into the kn-unk category. I have known many very smart people who tend to underestimate the unk-unks. They are aware of their intelligence, and their model of the universe is one in which intelligence will always prevail.
Consider the next big expedition to Mars ... the rover used to collect core samples of the Martian surface will subsequently launch them into low Mars orbit where they will be retrieved by another unmanned spacecraft and returned to earth. One of the main challenges of this mission will be keeping all of the equipment very, very clean, so that when it is brought back into our world and is unsealed, we don't find Earth-born bacteria or other life forms that we put there and conclude, wrongly, that Mars is alive.
When you look closely at the super clean spacecraft being assembled in a special clean room at Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, CA by technicians in head-to-toe white "bunny suits," you still find all sorts of microorganisms hanging out, waiting for a ride. So the challenge is big enough without the fact that biologists and physicists don't speak the same language. For biologists, microbiotic life is everywhere and very hard [if not impossible] to track. For physicists, microbes are just like any other particles bouncing and being blown through the air, and we should be able to track their motions. Bridging the gap requires that everyone recognize that each school is relying on a model of the universe that is NOT the universe per se. It is only when we recognize that our "truth" is only a model, and when we let our models compete with other models, that we get anywhere.
We humans are an innately curious species. Born through hips too narrow to pass a skull large enough to hold a fully formed human brain, we are born half-baked. Compared with those of other animals, very few of our behaviors are hardwired. We don't inherit genetic instructions for nest building, for instance, or for migrating south when the sun hits a certain angle in the sky. We come into this world programmed with very few instructions, save for one paramount piece of code: be curious.
Following that one command, each of us begins to construct his or her own understanding of the universe. I see it in my ten month old granddaughter and I see it in my colleagues nearing retirement. We all share the instinct, and we can all relate to it, which gives our curiosity-driven need to explore the added beauty that no one has to be forced to do it. People don't necessarily have to be incentivized with stock options and mega-salaries for curiosity-driven creativity to occur. The only essential is a work environment that is structured to encourage our innate drive to wonder, question and explore. Just as each of us built our understanding of the world during childhood, given the chance, everyone will follow the lure of their own curiosity and their own desire for mastery throughout their working lives.
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