What Do Mavericks Need to Understand?

Partly motivated by my writing last night, where I take an interest in how maverick thinkers can actually buck against conventional wisdoms too unwieldy for a single person to have been responsible for them, I’m here tonight to meditate on how humans organize to do things that are too complicated for any individual human to do, such as the generation of a conventional wisdom.

One adage that does full dramatic justice to how little any of us know: No single person knows how to make a pencil–with all its requisite synthesis, harvest, and refinining of graphite, wood, paint, metal, and rubber. This, of course, is not even to speak of *insert your imagination going wild*.

Industry

So with respect to industry, I can make sense of this in theory, that someone’s responsibility is to decide “We at Firm X, we build cars, got it, Firm X?” and someone else’s responsbility is to say “Yeah, I’ll build the wheels. Amy, Doug, and Whitney, you come with me.” and someone else’s responsibility to say “Yeah, I’ll build the seats. Luis, Peng, and Nadia come with me”. Then once they get into their little corners of the factory. It might fall to Amy to procure the rubber and it might fall to Peng to get the foam, etc. etc. on down the line until all the people at the end nodes of the tree have their work done and pass their work back up the line where they hand the CEO, the person who decided they would build cars, the built car.

I can see it taking literally a lifetime to build a car from scratch by yourself, if you had to do everything from harvesting the raw materials to filling it with refined, unleaded gasoline right before whipping it down to I-15. So an interesting other adhesive in this whole process sticking together is the trust that people have on each others’ goods and services, trusting that their work won’t be made obsolete by someone else’s incompetence (no matter how fancy the leather upholstery is on the seats, if the person accidentally ordered styrofoam instead of a cushion, then the whole thing is kind of ruined). It might be too much to expect the line worker to develop some sense of ownership in the product they’re helping to make since they’ll be paid every two weeks anyways. But it’s certainly the case that the manager can fire the person the first time they bring styrofoam and so the incentive will be to not mess up on the job, if you want to keep it.

Academy

With respect to academy, I can also sooooort of get it. Kuhn argues in The Structures of Scientific Revolution on p. 19 that scientists have the comparative advantage of building off a paradigm without having to do any of the legwork of justifying or explaining the paradigm:

The more rigid definition of the scientific group has other consequences. When the individual scientist can take a paradigm for granted, he need no longer, in his major works, attempt to build his field anew, starting from first principles and justifying the use of each concept introduced. That can be left to the writer of textbooks. Given a textbook, however, the creative scientist can begin his research where it leaves off and thus concentrate exclusively upon the subtlest and most esoteric aspects of the natural phenomena that concern his group.

This takes a huge load off of scientists’ backs and they get to lean in to their comparative advantage and contribute the increased fruit from such devoted specialization to the economy, constitution of knowledge, whatever you want to call it. Textbook writers can specialize in translating this body of knowledge into whatever is accessible to the layperson, and others can specialize in making use of this knowledge.

So why am I feeling friction between this and my idea that a maverick thinker does need to understand something in terms of its atomic parts?

I think it’s because on first reading, you could interpret Kuhn as saying “scientists need to stick to the rigid paradigm, not questioning its axioms and first-principles and, in good foot soldier fashion, carry out their research duties” and that “textbook writers are the ones who distill research and hold any high-school educated person’s hand as they build from the ground up to make sense of it all”. I see value in doing both of these things, in doing primary research and reframing to deepen understanding.

I think of the videos I watch of academics at statistics conferences struggling to define a p-value, one of the building blocks of all statistics and the analysis it’s used to carry out in other fields. I think of Richard Feynman, a scientist’s scientist, and his devotion to making science clear for inexpert audiences. Didn’t he both win a Nobel and understand the science in simple terms? Maybe he’s hopelessly outnumbered by other laureates who exhibit no such need for pedagogical prowess in order to succeed in plundering paradigms.

So what question am I trying to answer here? I’m trying to answer whether one person could be expected to understand things all the way down, or whether there need to be scientists and textbook writers and policy makers and these people must be different. I’ve always envisioned philosopher-kings and intellectual-politicians; the practitioners of researched truths should themselves understand the researched truths, no? But I don’t think you can believe that the best scientist would be the best policy maker without taking some fundamental departure from specialization and comparative advantage. By the same reasoning, you couldn’t have the person best equipped to understand and thus disrupt climate science be the same person who is also best equipped to understand and thus disrupt political science and other sciences merely because that person understands math really well or is especially critical.

The idea that I find most scintillating now, at the end of writing this post, is that you can’t really compare the best of one field to the best of another field because they themselves are simply different paradigms, parametrizations of how a person sees the world, how they interpret data, what questions they ask, and so forth.