Ponder Questions
A Harvard assistant dean of admissions:
You had to look for people who could come into a very competitive environment, who could still find self-esteem and who in some way, shape or form was still the best at something.
How do you figure that out?
It was never the answers they gave. It was the questions they asked. The questions give a much better clue to how a person thinks. Answers can be learned, can be rote. But it’s the questions. (more)
I know many folks who consider themselves intellectuals. I guess they think that in part because if you asked them “What have you been up to lately?,” they’d tell you about books, articles, blogs, or twitter feeds that they’ve been reading. Or perhaps TED talks they’ve watched. This is why I prefer the question “What have you been thinking about lately?” And I’ll usually be a bit disappointed if the answer isn’t about a question they’ve been trying to answer.
Yes perhaps if they just mention a topic, that really stands for some questions about that topic. But often people thinking about a topic are mostly trying to find more supporting evidence for things they already believe. Less often are they taking what I consider the most productive intellectual strategy: focus on an important question where you don’t know the answer.
Once you start to think about a question, you’ll probably soon start to break it down into supporting sub-questions. Instead of asking “How can we get world peace?” you might ask “What most goes wrong when the United Nations intervenes?” or “Why do citizens on the losing sides of wars support them?” And hearing about your interesting sub-questions might just make my day. That is why I, like the Harvard admissions dean above, will be especially eager to hear that you’ve been thinking about interesting questions.
What -- oh, I guess someone should publish some papers on that. It is obvious, but that doesn't excuse the lack of publication. :-)
A simple example is the money market funds which contained mortgage-backed securities. As long as people trusted that their contents were genuine, they "recycled" money from investors to mortgage lending. As soon as people stopped trusting them, boom, 2008 crash.
The economy consists entirely of trust. There is actually nothing in the economy *except* trust. (Well, theft & fraud I guess.) Money is only valuable because people trust that others will take it. Contracts are only meaningful because of trust. Nobody will buy anything if they don't trust the seller to some extent.
I think this should be obvious, but it is probably necessary to put a bunch of empirical evidence into print.
My questions are too big. Like "How do we cause a more, rather than less, democratic outcome after the next governmental collapse?" Or "Since economies are based on trust, how do we prevent the powerful sociopaths who rise through the economy by betraying that trust from destroying the economy?"
Questions are lovely and all but if you don't have a place to start getting a handle on the answer, they're not helpful.