The Road to Tannu Tuva, Pt. 2
January 29, 2019·0 comments
The methods we trust to find truth often guarantee we'll never find better answers. Ritual and heuristic thinking masquerade as rigorous discovery but actually protect us from inconvenient alternatives. The uncomfortable question isn't whether our models work, but whether their success blinds us to what we haven't yet tried.
• The smoke ring was never about smoke. It's a chemical reaction between gases and meat proteins that can be replicated with charcoal, salt, or even a microwave. Yet for generations, chefs treated it as a marker of proper technique, building entire philosophies around preserving it.
• Ritual masquerades as method. When an abstraction becomes sacred, it stops being a tool for discovery and becomes a cage. People optimized their cooking to match the ritual, not to find better results.
• The models that predict perfectly are often the ones we should trust least. Sommerfeld's equations predicted fine structure with stunning accuracy using logic that was already outdated and mechanistically wrong. He got the right answer for reasons nobody understood.
• In fields where human behavior is the variable, we have enough statistical flexibility to prove almost anything works. Investors, policymakers, and researchers can construct dozens of models from the same data set, each seemingly validated by the numbers, yet contradicting the others entirely.
• The danger isn't ritual or heuristic thinking itself; it's when we stop questioning them. Once we believe a method is proven, once we treat our priors as self-evident, we stop exploring. The search for better answers ends not because we found them, but because we're satisfied we already have them.
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