Some night when it is clear enough to see a lot of stars look up and let your imagination wander. Even if you don't know the constellations - perhaps especially if you don't know them - your mind starts assembling patterns. Even though the background image is close to being random for this purpose, you find patterns. For good and for bad this apophenia is deeply wired into our species. It takes a lot of work to logically confront it and know when it can get us into trouble. Often it is something to ignore. Of course there are many types of information we shouldn't be ignorant of.
As I age one of the more delightful realizations is that my state of ignorance is not only intact, but is becoming sharper and more refined .. it is slowly becoming something of a wisdom.
Most people think of ignorance as being unaware and unschooled, but there may be another way to look at it. With the explosion of information that continues to accelerate, we have to be mindfully ignorant of most of it - even in areas we specialize in. We can be conscious of our ignorance and use it to guide us.
Thoroughly conscious ignorance is a prelude to every real advance in knowledge
- James Clerk Maxwell
The richest questions I ask are not those that directly produce an answer, but rather a deeper set of questions and puzzles. If science is asking an increasing number of questions and getting some results along the way a much larger product of the sport is a set of questions that is growing at an even faster rate. We have to be ignorant of most of it, but this ignorance can be finely developed. With practice one gets a sense of what are the new questions that are most ripe for asking. This new level of questioning often involved connecting some dots and discovering new patterns that are newly emergent. If we are deep enough with our questioning and are working in a rich set of questions there are times when our own questions unfold and lead to new questions. There are few delights that beautiful other than solving that original question and finding where it leads.
This creative form of selective ignorance and curiosity is a fantastic way to deal with our natural apophenia. There are a lot of useful tools - curiosity, an open skepticism, a bit of statistics and logic and an education of what others have learned in your field and how they have come to learn it. At some point you learn how to learn and the training wheels come off. At that point you begin to realize how ignorant of the universe you are, but you see a pathway to find local areas that can be illuminated.
When I was a teenager I was under the impression that learning science involved learning facts to be recited on a test or used to calculate something. At the same time two of my mentors were patiently helping me build tools that would get me to a place where I would realize that view is completely wrong and there was great sport in recognizing what you didn't know.
About the time I got my Ph.D. I began to realize the way to solve a problem was not to tally up what I knew about it, but rather to think about areas where I had no idea what was going on. It lead to a delightful state of confusion for awhile, but when you get good at picking your problems you can often find challenges that have a shot at being answered. These are the areas that produce the new and often richer questions that you - and perhaps no one else - has imagined.
In the meantime the answers that come along the way can be terrifically useful. They may not be what drives the person who originally discovered them, but they have done much to support and advance civilization. Not a bad byproduct.
Physics is like sex: sure, it may give some practical results, but that's not why we do it.
- Richard Feynman
This sort of approach works in many disciplines for uncovering fundamental problems that may have been elusive or unknown. There are some similarities to how Jobs et. al. worked at Apple on clarifying the major issues. It gets you beyond the textbooks and conventional knowledge.
But back to physics for a little fun... these insights and new questions rose from many chains of questions that led to new unimagined questions ... only by using a refined selective ignorance and relentless curiosity combined with connecting dots here and there is progress made. (this, by the way, is how real science works - it is nothing like the Hollywood version)
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