The Power of Explanations

The subject matter that I plan to cover in this blog is vast, and at times it may seem like a bit of a slog.  So before I dive into the weeds I want to explain why I think the effort will be worth it.

Like it or not, life is a game, and you will be able to play more effectively if you know what the rules are.  There are literal rules like speed limits and zoning laws, and unwritten rules like that you should stand for the national anthem and compliment Aunt Martha's cooking even though it is actually atrocious.  Beyond these literal rules is a set of more foundational rules which are sometimes referred to as "the laws of physics", though they actually go far beyond what most people think of when they hear the word "physics".

I will spend a fair bit of time talking about the laws of physics and other science-y things, but that is not really the point.  What this is really about is *how to figure things out*.  It turns out that there is an effective process for figuring things out *in general*.  It is called the "scientific method", and it is almost certainly not what you think it is.

When most people think of science they think of *scientists*, professionals with unkempt hair, white coats, and limited social skills, hovering over mysterious liquids bubbling in beakers and fulminating in test tubes, dusty chalk boards covered with inscrutable math and obscure terminology.  Science is foreign, alien, inaccessible.  This turns out to be an unfortunate accident of history.  At its core, science is a single very simple idea that anyone can learn and apply to their everyday lives.  Not to keep you in suspense, that simple idea is this:

== Find the best explanation that accounts for everything you observe, and act according to that explanation until new observations or a better explanation comes along. ==

That, in a nutshell, is the scientific method.  But of course, that's kind of like explaining golf by saying, "Swing the club so that it knocks the ball into the hole."  In a way, that's really all you need to know about how to play golf.  But that knowledge by itself obviously won't make you a great golfer because it doesn't tell you *how* to swing the club so that the ball goes into the hole.  Likewise, the description of the scientific method doesn't tell you how to find a "good explanation" or even how to recognize one.  "Good explanations" are the science equivalent of a "good golf swing", except it is easy to *recognize* a good golf swing; if the ball went in the hole, it was a good swing.  Recognizing a "good explanation" is a bit more subtle.

One of the most remarkable things about the scientific method is that following it actually *reveals* what a "good explanation" is, so that it does become as self-evident as a good golf swing.  But that will be a very long row to hoe.  For now, let me just motivate this with an example.

When I was a child I was, to put it mildly, not the most popular kid in school.  I was bullied a lot, a fate suffered by many a nerd like me.  It was painful and frustrating in no small measure because I felt helpless.  After all, it was just *obvious* that there was nothing I could do about it.  The bullies outnumbered me.  They were bigger than me.  They snuck up behind me.  They conspired against me behind my back.  And so I spent long lonely days feeling sorry for myself.

Then, when I was 10, my family moved.  It was an event that I eagerly anticipated because I could finally leave all those bullies behind and start fresh.  To make a long story short, and which should come as no surprise, within a short period of time I found myself being bullied in our new home as much as I had been in the old.

It was at that point that I had an epiphany.  I started to ask myself *why* these kids were bullying me.  I had assumed that this was just something that happened.  Kids bullied other kids, and out of sheer bad luck, or maybe because I was an immigrant and didn't speak the language very well yet, I had drawn the short straw.  But by the time we moved to our new town I was fluent in English, so there was no obvious reason for me to become the target of bullying again.

So *why* was this happening *again*?

Now, I don't want to give my younger self too much credit here.  When I first asked that question it was rhetorical, just another way of feeling sorry for myself that fate seemed to be aligned against me.  And I don't remember exactly how it happened, but one day, perhaps out of desperation, I decided to seriously entertain the possibility that I might be wrong, and that there might be some other explanation besides bad luck for what was going on.

In retrospect, of course, it is obvious: the reason I was bullied is because I was constantly behaving like a jerk.  Most truths are obvious in retrospect.  But at the time this was far from obvious to me.  In fact, it seemed like the opposite was true, that this was obviously *not* the correct explanation.  For one thing, I didn't think there was anything wrong with my behavior.  I was doing exactly what I had been taught by my parents to do, which was to excel academically, and to put on active display the fact that I was the smartest kid in the room.  My parents loved it when I acted this way, so why shouldn't my peers?

I don't remember what made me suddenly treat the question as a serious one.  All I know is that I did this, and when I did, everything changed.  Not right away, this was a process that played itself out over a period of many, many years.  (In many ways it is *still* playing itself out.)  But for whatever reason, I started to entertain the possibility that I might be *wrong* about bullying just being my fate and being powerless to stop it, and started to look for alternative explanations for why it was happening.  And one of the possibilities that I considered was that maybe it was something I was *doing* (or failing to do) that attracted the bullying, and so maybe I could make it stop by changing *my* behavior.

There is something I want to emphasize here, and that is that the correctness of this explanation is only obvious (if it is obvious) in retrospect.  From the perspective of an adolescent undergoing both bullying and puberty simultaneously it was anything but obvious.  But there was one thing that made me seriously consider it, and that is that it *explained* something that was otherwise *mysterious*: why I was subjected to bullying after we moved to a new town.  That I might end up in a bullying-by-dint-of-fate situation *once* seemed plausible, but twice?  That seemed unlikely.  Also, there were a lot of other explanations that didn't seem likely.  Maybe it was something about the way I looked?  No, there was nothing abnormal about my appearance.  Maybe it was my poor command of English?  Possible in our first home, not in our second (by then my English was fluent).  Maybe it was because we were Jewish?  Maybe, but there were other Jewish kids who didn't seem to get bullied nearly as much as I did.

The upshot, of course, is that I started thinking about what I might be doing to attract bullies, and eventually, after many long and painful years and a lot of false starts, I mostly figured it out.  The bullying stopped.  I made friends.  But more importantly, I realized that this process of asking *why* something was happening was like a superpower.  I started finding more and more places where it could be applied in everyday life.  I leveraged that power into a successful career, a 25-year marriage (and counting), and a life mostly devoid of bullies.

Now, I am *not* going to say "if I can do it, anyone can."  Apart from figuring out the power of asking "why", a *lot* of my life's circumstances just aligned for me by dint of fate.  I had a stable and loving family, which I now realize is a rare privilege in today's world.  I was (and still am) white and male and free from obvious physical defects.  All of those things give you a leg up when you're coming of age in America, especially in the South.

Also, just like playing golf, learning to apply the scientific method properly is not easy.  This is not because it requires a lot of hairy math.  Being good at math doesn't hurt, but it's not necessary (I'm not particularly good at math).  But, like golf, it is a *skill* that takes time and effort and practice to acquire.

The good news is that you can practice anywhere any time.  You don't need to go to a golf course.  You don't need a set of clubs.  All you need is your brain and a willingness to do the work.  Whatever your circumstances, whether you are rich or poor, privileged or challenged, male or female, healthy or not, you can *improve* your situation by learning to apply the scientific method.  And if enough people do it, we can improve the situation in the world *in general*.

There is, unfortunately, one more fly in the ointment: the scientific method can be very effective in helping you accomplish your goals.  Where it is less helpful is deciding what your goals actually *are*.  That part is still ultimately up to you, and it can get very tricky because of an interesting quirk of human psychology: people often don't know what they want.  Worse, people sometimes think they know what they want, but they turn out to be *wrong*.  I'll give you an example from my own life experience: when I was in graduate school my career goal was to become a college professor, or at least that's what I thought.  I had an idyllic vision of what this lifestyle would entail.  Seminars on the quad.  Wrestling with intellectual challenges and creating technological breakthroughs for the betterment of society and to the adulation of my peers.  Nobel prizes.  A cushy retirement in a three-bedroom house adjacent to the campus.

The reality, I learned later, is that being a college professor is nothing like that.  The life of a professor is governed more by economics and politics than scholarship.  Thankfully I did not learn this lesson the hard way, because I never got a tenure-track position, though it was not for lack of trying.  I just happened to get incredibly lucky and finish my Ph.D. during a recession when no one was hiring, which turned out to be one of the best things that ever happened to me.  But it sucked at the time.

Which brings me to the punch line, an aphorism I have dubbed Ron's Second Law (we'll get to the First Law later): the hardest part of getting what you want is figuring out what it is.  It turns out that the scientific method can be helpful even here.  That will be a very advanced topic.  We will eventually get to it, but it will be a while.  I'm not saying this to be cagey, only because there will be times where this is going to feel like a slog, and I want you to have some idea where all this is leading so you can make a more informed decision about whether or not it is worth investing the effort.

Ultimately there is no way to know whether all this will work for you except to try it.  All I can tell you is that it has worked spectacularly well for me.  So let's get started.