Having doubts is crucial for better investigations. How you address those doubts and to what extend you address them dictate the success and practicality of your investigations. Some doubts are more easily solvable than others, but doubts are usually not really the direct focus of your investigations but of supplementary materials that can potentially change the course of of your methodology. It can affect how you value your work and what areas you think would be worthwhile to focus on in your future work.
I firmly believe that having doubts is better than not having them. It’s one of the core component of thinking outside of the box so to speak. Everything in moderation suggests that there can be a breaking point in having too many unrelated doubts that would hinder your own progress as you get lost in the sea of possibilities. Doubts essentially guide us in whether we think of our own pursuits as something that’s fruitful or futile. How we deal with the importance of certain doubts vs others is an art in and of itself.
Gosh yes having doubts is ultra important as you say, but I don’t think they’ll you much good unless you act on them, and a lot of the time acting on doubt means picking an appropriate time and place to investigate them.
Look let’s say you’re working for a space elevator company and your job is to design the cars that will climb the elevator cable, but you have some doubts about whether the basic science behind the cable design has been done well. Now it’s completely fine to just do your job and not worry much about these underlying doubts, but eventually that’s going to be a pretty demotivating way to exist, particularly if you are doing the work you are doing because you really care about it. So from a purely practical perspective, it’s going to help you do your work to spend a little time investigating the basic assumptions underneath the thing you’re working on.
It’s a similar situation, I think, with investigating the foundations of reasoning itself. If this underlying thing isn’t quite right, then everything we do on top is going to be skewed. We know this, and our doubts correctly implore us to make some time and space to investigate. The demotivating thing, it seems to me, is when we do have the doubts but do not make time and space to investigate.
But yes the goal is not to paper over all doubts forever, but to actually resolve the thing that is unresolved.
Yes doubts are useless if you don’t look to answer them yourself. Most of the time, they can’t be fully confirmed based on your own investigation because the collective knowledge is a lot more exhaustive than your own ability and time spent on looking at a few sources for answer. We all more or less share the same access to the same information that are available to us. Like they say about a new startup idea, it’s probably been done already. Only very rarely you see something brand new that’s not done before, and usually those are very domain specific because there just aren’t enough people looking into that specific subject.
It takes time for new research and findings to make it into textbooks and curriculum despite the fact universities are churning out new research all the time. What we learn in school are knowledge that have already been distilled and organized into digestible forms that allow students to easily pick them up. If you want to learn things outside of what school provides, you have to do your own novel research, just like the research they do in universities and research labs. They have monetary incentives to drive the work and keep the cogs churning. Most people don’t really have the time and dedication to produce the same quality of work from their own research and investigations.
Society is structured in a way where people either work or relax. When people do work, they are incentivized to put in the minimum amount of effort for the maximum amount of pay and corporate hierarchy status. The incentives therefore aren’t directly aligned with quality but with resources gains of the individuals and the corporations they form. The pace that modern society is advancing at definitely is very sub-optimal, which is only limited by our own human conditions.
Having doubts is crucial for better investigations. How you address those doubts and to what extend you address them dictate the success and practicality of your investigations. Some doubts are more easily solvable than others, but doubts are usually not really the direct focus of your investigations but of supplementary materials that can potentially change the course of of your methodology. It can affect how you value your work and what areas you think would be worthwhile to focus on in your future work.
I firmly believe that having doubts is better than not having them. It’s one of the core component of thinking outside of the box so to speak. Everything in moderation suggests that there can be a breaking point in having too many unrelated doubts that would hinder your own progress as you get lost in the sea of possibilities. Doubts essentially guide us in whether we think of our own pursuits as something that’s fruitful or futile. How we deal with the importance of certain doubts vs others is an art in and of itself.
Gosh yes having doubts is ultra important as you say, but I don’t think they’ll you much good unless you act on them, and a lot of the time acting on doubt means picking an appropriate time and place to investigate them.
Look let’s say you’re working for a space elevator company and your job is to design the cars that will climb the elevator cable, but you have some doubts about whether the basic science behind the cable design has been done well. Now it’s completely fine to just do your job and not worry much about these underlying doubts, but eventually that’s going to be a pretty demotivating way to exist, particularly if you are doing the work you are doing because you really care about it. So from a purely practical perspective, it’s going to help you do your work to spend a little time investigating the basic assumptions underneath the thing you’re working on.
It’s a similar situation, I think, with investigating the foundations of reasoning itself. If this underlying thing isn’t quite right, then everything we do on top is going to be skewed. We know this, and our doubts correctly implore us to make some time and space to investigate. The demotivating thing, it seems to me, is when we do have the doubts but do not make time and space to investigate.
But yes the goal is not to paper over all doubts forever, but to actually resolve the thing that is unresolved.
Yes doubts are useless if you don’t look to answer them yourself. Most of the time, they can’t be fully confirmed based on your own investigation because the collective knowledge is a lot more exhaustive than your own ability and time spent on looking at a few sources for answer. We all more or less share the same access to the same information that are available to us. Like they say about a new startup idea, it’s probably been done already. Only very rarely you see something brand new that’s not done before, and usually those are very domain specific because there just aren’t enough people looking into that specific subject.
It takes time for new research and findings to make it into textbooks and curriculum despite the fact universities are churning out new research all the time. What we learn in school are knowledge that have already been distilled and organized into digestible forms that allow students to easily pick them up. If you want to learn things outside of what school provides, you have to do your own novel research, just like the research they do in universities and research labs. They have monetary incentives to drive the work and keep the cogs churning. Most people don’t really have the time and dedication to produce the same quality of work from their own research and investigations.
Society is structured in a way where people either work or relax. When people do work, they are incentivized to put in the minimum amount of effort for the maximum amount of pay and corporate hierarchy status. The incentives therefore aren’t directly aligned with quality but with resources gains of the individuals and the corporations they form. The pace that modern society is advancing at definitely is very sub-optimal, which is only limited by our own human conditions.