Re: let's outgrow puzzles

[John Denker <jsd@MONMOUTH.COM>]

At 09:47 AM 10/5/99 +0500, DEVARAKONDA VENKATA NARAYANA SARMA wrote:
> WORTH THINKING ABOUT:  THE JOY OF THE PUZZLE
>     The joy of science, management, romance,
                    (1)       (2)       (3)
> baseball (and maybe everything else)
    (4)                 (5)
> is best explained as the joy of the puzzle.

It's worth thinking about that long enough to realize that it's not right.
  * If you derive joy from a puzzling romantic relationship, that's your
affair, and this isn't the place to discuss it.
  * There's a lot more to baseball than puzzling.
  * Management is about getting the job done.  Doing puzzles for puzzles'
sake is an obstacle to getting the job done.  As a manager it is my job to
help people outgrow their love of pointless puzzling.
  * A lot of people (including me) went into science because we wanted to
make the world a better place.  Doing puzzles for puzzles' sake does not
make the world a better place.

> Here's what the renowned
> English physicist John Ziman said on the subject:
>     "Scientific research is solving puzzles.
> The pleasure to be got from it
> is the pleasure of the crossword or jig-saw addict.

There's a lot more to it than that.

If all you care about is puzzling, you could have saved a lot of time and
money by skipping all scientific training and going directly to a career in
crosswords and jig-saw puzzles.

People should value a scientific result (or any other result) according to
the result, not according to the process that produced it.  As the saying
goes: people dive for pearls because they are valuable, not vice versa.

I think that the love of puzzles is a phase that everybody goes through.  I
expect people to outgrow it when they are offered other, deeper sources of joy.

______________________________________________________________
copyright (C) 1999 John S. Denker             jsd@monmouth.com