Slowly, Surely
His mind is lumbering. To an outsider he might even seem slow and simple. But I assure you this is as keen a mind as you’ll meet (he is a scientific giant and has been privately nominated for the Nobel prize). What is so remarkable about his relative slowness, and a large contributor to his greatness, is the elementary fact that he is wrong much less than those around him. This may seem an understated complement but it is not. He is like a hunter that catches prey by just sitting there and waiting, rather than darting around for the next meal. He knows it will come to him.
In working with this man I have realized several things. The first realization is how insanely (over)confident most people are about things they believe. After spending countless hours in meetings and debates with our man, I feel like an alien observer when I go to the bar or the restaurant. I never realized how much I did it until I was caught several times. People state opinions on this and that, but most of which is really plain nonsense. This brings me to the second realization which is that when our man makes mistakes, they are always data-driven mistakes. And so while this leads to many blind alleys (to quote Einstein: everything that counts can’t be counted, and everything that can be counted doesn’t count), on average this methodology bears more fruit than other approaches, such as a completely intuition-based approach (in reality both are necessary: intuition to drive inquiry; analysis to interpret results). The third realization is that tangled webs of evidence are always distilled back to first principles – frequently undergraduate-level science principles that everyone learns but few take to heart. These basic principles are sometimes the most powerful and broadly applicable. A little bit of science can go a long way.
Concrete examples in a later post…
