Re: let's outgrow puzzles

[Hugh Haskell <haskell@ODIE.NCSSM.EDU>]

John Denker wrote:

> 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.

Not if the job is to solve puzzles. And what else has nature given us
but different types of puzzles. I have read many times, descriptions
of important scientific discoveries recounted in terms of
puzzle-solving. I have often looked upon my own very modest
scientific accomplishments in that same way. I try to solve the
puzzle because it is there. If that isn't doing puzzles for puzzles'
sake, what is?

> As a manager it is my job to
> help people outgrow their love of pointless puzzling.

At what point does puzzling cease being pointless and become
something "useful?"

>  * 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.

That depends on what puzzles you do. If the puzzles are the mysteries
of nature, the end result might just be a better world (not
guaranteed, though). I have some difficulty in imagining at this
time, just how an increase in our knowledge of elementary particle
physics, or of cosmology, will result in a better world. Maybe
someday, in a way we cannot presently imagine, but that seems like a
pretty chimerical goal to provide a motivation for doing science.

Maybe you got into science in order to make a better world, John, but
I suspect that was not the motivation for most scientists. It
certainly wasn't for me. I had no illusions about "a better world
through science;" I was drawn by a passion to understand what was
going on. Feynman said as much several times. Now, the skills and
ability I brought to my task certainly didn't match those Feynman
brought to his, but the reasons are the same. Albert Szent-Gyorgyi, a
Nobel laureate in Physiology/Medicine said:

"If any student comes to me and says he wants to be useful to mankind
and go into research to alleviate human suffering, I advise him to go
into charity instead.  Research wants real egoists, who seek their
own pleasure and satisfaction, but find it in solving the puzzles of
nature."

This is an oversimplification, of course, and their are lots of
successful scientists whose motivations match yours, but I suspect
their are more who match Szent-Gyorgyi's model.

> >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.

Some people like to do crossword or jig-saws, and some people like to
figure out how nature works. They are all puzzles, but not everybody
likes the same kind of puzzles, and society certainly doesn't reward
all types of puzzle-solvers equally.

> 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.

Are you saying that the end justifies the means? Is that concept
going to lead to a better world? And you don't think that there are
people who dive for pearls because of their beauty irrespective of
their value, or just because they are hard to get to? If that was
true there would never have been anyone climbing high mountains, or
trying to go up the hard way.

In the science arena, there are many results that are obtained by
ways that are later seen to be flawed. An example is Planck's formula
for black-body radiation. If what you say is true, why would anyone
ever have gone back to see if it could be found from more sound
reasoning. And Velikovsky. He actually made some predictions that
proved to be true, but his methods were so nutty that no one with any
scientific training takes him seriously. Go back in history, Ptolemy
proposed his theory of the solar system as a method to aid
computation, and not necessarily as "the way it was." Unfortunately,
others later forgot what Ptolemy said about his work, and forced
Copernicus to make the same disclaimer about his work. Should we have
stopped at one or the other, and said that "the results are good, I
don't care about his methods?" Finagling the epicyles and the
eccentrics to a deep enough level would have given adequate results,
but Kepler was driven by solving the puzzle of planetary motion in a
simple way, as he saw it, they way it really was. If Ptolemy's
results had been good enough, should we have discouraged Kepler from
his quest?

> 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.

"deeper sources of joy"??? What, exactly does this mean? Does this
mean that the joy experienced by a scientist who discovers the cure
for cancer, say, has a deeper sense of joy that the scientist(s) who
first discover the Higgs bosons? I think that is a questionable
proposition.

If I were in charge of hiring scientists for any project, one of the
characteristics that would be high on my list of things to look for
in the applicants would be a sense of the mystery of the universe and
an overpowering desire to solve those mysteries. I want the
"puzzle-solvers"--they are the ones most likely to get the job done.
(Of course, I'm not interested in the ones who only do cross-words or
jug-saws or whatever. I want the ones who are so good at those types
that they are bored by them and seek a challenge in much harder
puzzles--those mother nature has posed for us. I think that this
quest requires a child-like interest in puzzles--the puzzles of
nature.

Hugh


Hugh Haskell
<mailto://hhaskell@mindspring.com>

Let's face it. People use a Mac because they want to, Windows because they
have to..
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