Hunches

About thirty years ago there was much talk that geologists ought only to observe and not theorise; and I well remember some one saying that at this rate a man might as well go into a gravel-pit and count the pebbles and describe the colours. How odd it is that anyone should not see that all observation must be for or against some view if it is to be of any service! —Charles Darwin

Imagine you're contacted by the FBI and asked to help solve a difficult murder case. You have full access to the evidence they've collected so far. What approach would you take in trying to structure your investigation, locate a suspect, and build your case?

If you're anything like me, you'll begin by going over all the facts you have so far and freely imagining scenarios that would be consistent with all the available evidence. As your brain is busily generating scenarios, going through all the permutations of different possibilities, you'll begin ruling out all the scenarios that are patently ridiculous and prioritizing the rest by likelihood, maybe without even being consciously aware of it. Otherwise, you would be swamped in a heap of every possible scenario your mind could concoct.

Many people seem to believe that hunches are unscientific, and that science is hostile to or incompatible with hunches. Nothing could be further from the truth! A scientist's finished work, a published paper, should be as free as possible of hunches and speculation, but the scientific process would be starved and impotent without hunches to feed it.

Creativity plays a much bigger role than generating an array of hypotheses to test. It's imbued into every step of the process: it takes nothing short of genius to design a scientific study that properly controls for every possible way the evidence could be tainted. It takes an active imagination to visualize all the ways your swarm of preconceptions could sneak into the data and morph it into an unintentional deception (maybe even a profitable one). A scientist is like a werewolf waiting for the moon to transform it, trying to outsmart itself and keep the inner beast chained through the night. It takes cunning, not just a dry, emotionless commitment to scientific rigor, to be a good scientist. You might say science is an art, not a science.

But hunches alone will be just as worthless: pure emotion-laden preconceptions. The true value of hunches is when you give them enough slack to guide the scientific process, but not enough to compromise it. Intuitions are quick and powerful tricks the brain has developed to come to reasonably good answers. The scientific method is a system to check those reasonably good guesses and flesh them out in such a way that you (and others) can check your brain's work. I like how Robert Pirsig describes it:

When I think of formal scientific method, an image sometimes comes to mind of an enormous juggernaut, a huge bulldozer…slow, tedious, lumbering, laborious, but invincible.

Put hunches and scientific controls together, and you have a recipe for optimal problem solving, steadily ratcheting your way from existing knowledge to new knowledge.

Voices

Say this world is not so shallow

When you can't beg steal or borrow.

Save your breath your soul is hollow,

And it's all too much to swallow.—"The Remedy", Abandoned Pools

He with nothing to say shouts loudest. Or something like that. Think of politicians, picketers, and advertisers. Some of them might have something worthwhile to sell you, but not the ones that get your attention and flood the airways. Why is that?

Extremes Get Attention

There are always radicals and moderates, but do you hear much about the moderates? Moderates are easy to ignore because they don't seem to have much to say. Even if the radicals are a small minority, they dominate and set the tone for everyone.

It's Easier to Talk than to Do

This is the real reason for some of the most insistent, shrill-voiced dogmatists. They have to make huge changes, see it as life or death, and rightly notice that it's too big for one person to tackle. Then they wrongly deduce that it's everyone else's problem. And that if they just shriek loud enough, the whole world will eventually see the error of their ways, and change.

Take hardcore environmentalists for example. They believe we're destroying the world at breakneck speed, and if we would all just reduce-reuse-recycle, we can live sustainably for the foreseeable future. But in general, they don't see eco-friendly living as an opportunity for personal improvement, they see the alternative as a plague of rampant pollution that needs to be decried and regulated away. Their sense of urgency comes from the fact that I can undo all of their efforts thrice over without even trying.

In all likelihood, though, any extinction-scale dangers would be too sudden to avert. Real life isn't like the movies. I see reason to be at least a little skeptical of anyone who has a life-or-death message to sell me on.

Implications

So, if the voices you can hear are the ones worth ignoring, where does that leave you? It seems like a non-starter, but I think there are some insights to take away.

First off: shut up! If people who give unwelcome advice aren't worth listening to, and you notice yourself giving a lot of advice, what does that say about you? One of Douglas Adams' characters in Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy had a theory about humans that "if they don't keep on exercising their lips, their brains start working".

Incidentally, that's part of the reason I haven't posted here in a long time (the other part being how long it takes to write anything worth reading). I get uncomfortable when I notice myself frequently using terms like "most people", "we tend to", and "too often". But I digress...

The other big insight is one of self-empowerment: trust yourself. Most of the things being pumped into your head from the outside are probably tainted, anyway, and the fact that other "smart people" have accepted them doesn't always mean that much. If someone wants you to change, the burden of proof is on them to convince you why. It's okay to be comfortable where you are, tune people out, and change slowly.

And yes, I notice both of those are "self-undermining" messages, but I'm comfortable with that...