#97 – Natural-born scientist

May 14, 2023

Great scientists share many of the same characteristics as children. They’re both tinkerers, driven by curiosity, broad and multi-disciplinary thinkers. They both have a sense of awe and wonder at the natural world and don’t care about social approval. Consumed in both the natural world as well as abstractions explaining the world, they question everything and just want to figure things out.

Children do science in the most pure sense of the word before they’re bombarded with anti-rational memes that suppress their creativity.

As Carl Sagan put it, “Every kid starts out as a natural-born scientist, and then we beat it out of them.”

Let’s hear Albert Einstein’s experience of the place that’s supposed to create more Einsteins.

“[O]ne had to cram all this stuff into one’s mind for the examinations, whether one liked it or not. This coercion had such a deterring effect [upon me] that, after I had passed the final examination, I found the consideration of any scientific problems distasteful to me for an entire year. […] It is, in fact, nothing short of a miracle that the modern methods of instruction have not yet entirely strangled the holy curiosity of inquiry; for this delicate little plant, aside from stimulation, stands mainly in need of freedom; without this it goes to wreck and ruin without fail.”
— Albert Einstein, quoted in Paul Arthur Schilpp, 1959, Albert Einstein: Philosopher-Scientist, p. 17

As counterintuitive as it may sound, teaching (i.e. coercive instruction) is the barrier. Learning happens because of curiosity and interest. It cannot be forced.

When people are allowed to find and solve problems they find interesting, the progress they make is explosive.

The weekly roundup

1. An epistemological take on screens

The Ration Card

Screens

An idea becomes generally accepted as true in two ways: It is true and has survived repeated criticism and maintains its position as true, or, it has not been criticised and has been accepted widely enough that people assume it’s true. But why assume something is true just because it’s been widely accepted…

a year ago · 4 likes · Roshan Ali

2. Podcast I’m listening to

3. Naval on managing time and the unscheduled life

4. Ayn Rand on the last days of the world

“. . . Hank, what’s wrong with the country?”
“I don’t know.”
“I keep thinking of what they told us in school about the sun losing energy, growing colder each year. I remember wondering, then, what it would be like in the last days of the world. I think it would be . . . like this. Growing colder and things stopping.”
“I never believed that story. I thought by the time the sun was exhausted, men would find a substitute.”
— Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged

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