I’ll sound like a huge nerd for saying this, but one of the few things I look forward to all year is the Edge Annual Question, edited by literary agent and intellectual impressario John Brockman.
At the end of each year, Brockman asks 100+ of the world’s smartest people one question and publishes their answers together on the Edge website in January.
Past questions have included What are you optimistic about? (2007), What is your dangerous idea? (2005), and What do you believe is true even though you cannot prove it? (2005).
The great thing about these questions is they compel experts to comment beyond the limits of their expertise; the Annual Question draws people out of their safe zones of expertise.
Many of the respondents stay fairly close to their home domain (e.g. in 2007 many people were optimistic about discoveries within their specialization), but even then they’re saying something they’d be unlikely say officially in a journal or at a conference.
Let me put it more to the point: These questions reveal the real people behind scientific discoveries; they reveal why people become scientists in the first place; they demonstrate why it’s important to make science more accessible to non-specialists: because even a Nobel Prize-winner in one discipline can be just as ignorant of other disciplines as the rest of us.
The 2008 Question is What have you changed your mind about? Why?
This year’s theme resonates very closely with my own interests (I’ve devoted most of my life to continuously changing my mind), so I can’t help responding to it.
My first thought is that no specific change-of-mind stands out: the few things I’ve not changed my mind about are more noteworthy (if I can figure out what those are) than the countless things I have changed my mind on.
But on second thought I’ve undergone a big change in the past year: from being generally unsure of anything, towards an attitude of greater confidence in my ideas and beliefs — or at least the means by which I arrived at them — not despite my constant mind-changing, but because of it.
The great value of scientific knowledge is that it’s always changing — even the foundations (if we can call them that) are not beyond doubt and change, which is precisely why it’s so trustworthy: it has survived.
By a casual survey, the most often mentioned thing among this year’s Annual Question responses was the acceptance that it’s ok (and often beneficial) to change one’s mind. (See the responses of Richard Dawkins, Paul Davies, Jamshed Bharucha, Paul Ewald, PZ Myers, Randolph M. Nesse, Karl Sabbagh, and Colin Tudge.)
I have always been skeptical about everything — at one point even skepticism itself — and this has been a difficult (yet extremely rewarding) problem to overcome. Much of the past few years have been rough on me, with many long hours of painful thinking, writing, research, questioning, observing, criticizing, and starting all over again, trying to articulate some general principles for living that incorporate the need for continual skepticism and change without self-contradiction.
A few thoughtless people tried to tell me that my whole attitude is wrong — that I “think too much” — as if I haven’t already criticized myself enough in that regard — but they don’t see that I’m unable to live any other way.
So about six years ago I started to focus my energy on accounting for this disposition and explaining the importance of changing one’s mind — or at least keeping it open — and cultivating a personal, generalist discipline for doing so more effectively.
This is obviously a difficult thing to do: in a sense, the whole history of philosophy culminates at the same problem, which has never been satisfactorily addressed by some of the greatest minds of all time. So just who do I think I am? How immodest am I to even attempt this? (These questions have added an emotional aspect to the difficulty of working out these issues.)
I started to pull through my philosophical crisis a little over a year ago (thanks to some of the books by many of the Edge Annual Question respondants) — not in the sense that I was recovering or resigning from it, but in the sense that I was actually succeeding and addressing my lifelong need to make sense of the biggest (and smallest) problems of life.
Yes: I know it must sound immodest and bold — perhaps even crazy. This amounts to claiming that I have done (or am close to doing) what people like Nietzsche and Wittgenstein already tried to do but couldn’t.
Well, working out the philosophical problems turned out to be a lot easier than explaining the purpose and value of doing so.
Just as those people who advised me not to think too much couldn’t really empathize with my disposition, I have trouble empathizing with theirs: I don’t know how to make my ideas and intentions resonate with their approach to life. (For example, I can’t understand why something like the Edge Annual Question would be uninteresting for many (most?) people — though at least I recognize that it is, and try to find some common ground with them.)
Meanwhile, the people with enough expertise to appreciate my project are limited by too many professional assumptions (and a deficit of free time), and have little reason to give my ideas much consideration. (So far I haven’t written much that is addressed to experts, which would consume time and resources that I can’t afford yet.)
I think that being modest about my work has not helped me share it with others.
Until very recently, I’ve hesitated to tell people about my philosophical work because I had nothing to show for it — nothing presentable in writing — and I thought I would sound like a crackpot (my worst fear!).
But I couldn’t put anything publicly in writing until I stopped changing my mind and rejecting my own ideas — which I did incessantly, almost daily, for many years.
Now that I’m satisfied with the form and content of a few introductory pieces (published on this blog and at Open Conceptual), I feel a lot more comfortable divulging the immodest aims of this enterprise.
I considered working this change-of-attitude into a “New Year’s Resolution” post (which I spent — or wasted — much of last weekend trying to write), but the results seemed embarassingly self-indulgent, which made me seem even more immodest than I already am.
But to hell with that. I’m starting to change my mind about modesty: maintaining an appearance of modesty may be the one thing I can’t pull off.
