Intuition Pumps And Other Tools for Thinking

Imagine you’ve written a chess program, and you feed its source code to two different compilers. Then play the two compiled versions against each other on the same computer. Even though the two versions “think all the same thoughts in the same order” (they have to—they have exactly the same source code), one may always beat the other simply because

Every increment of design in the universe begins with a moment of serendipity, the undesigned intersection of two trajectories yielding something that turns out, retrospectively, to be more than a mere collision.

There is no such thing as philosophy-free science, just science that has been conducted without any consideration of its underlying philosophical assumptions.

What is all this noise for? It’s not for anything; it’s just there so that every other process has that noise as a potential source of signal, as something that it might turn, by the alchemy of the creative algorithm, into function, into art, into meaning.

The molecular biologist Sidney Brenner recently invented a delicious play on Occam’s Razor, introducing the new term Occam’s Broom, to describe the process in which inconvenient facts are whisked under the rug by intellectually dishonest champions of one theory or another. This is our first boom crutch, an anti-thinking tool, and you should keep yo

Sturgeon’s Law is usually put a little less decorously: Ninety percent of everything is crap. Ninety percent of experiments in molecular biology, 90 percent of poetry, 90 percent of philosophy books, 90 percent of peer-reviewed articles in mathematics—and so forth—is crap.

Sometimes you don’t just want to risk making mistakes; you actually want to make them—if only to give you something clear and detailed to fix. Making mistakes is the key to making progress.

Philosophy—in every field of inquiry—is what you have to do until you figure out what questions you should have been asking in the first place.

Try to acquire the weird practice of savoring your mistakes, delighting in uncovering the strange quirks that led you astray. Then, once you have sucked out all the goodness to be gained from having made them, you can cheerfully set them behind you, and go on to the next big opportunity.

Attributed to William of Ockham (or Occam), the fourteenth-century logician and philosopher, this thinking tool is actually a much older rule of thumb. A Latin name for it is lex parsimoniae, the law of parsimony. It is usually put into English as the maxim “Do not multiply entities beyond necessity.” The idea is straightforward: don’t concoct a co