How many right answers does the world have? If you grew up on exam questions, you probably assume there’s exactly one. Real problems aren’t like exam questions, though. The answer isn’t fixed in advance, and there’s no way to check whether the one you found is the correct one. All you get is a handful of plausible answers.
Which means the answer-finding skill we were all trained in isn’t enough for a messy real problem. So how do you solve one?
Today I want to introduce one answer to that question: pluralism.
Hasok Chang and pluralism
The book is Hasok Chang’s Is Water H2O? It walks through how chemists worked out the structure of water during the scientific revolution of the 18th century, and uses that story to ask how new discoveries happen.
The chemists of the time put forward a pile of competing hypotheses, and a few of those survived all the way to us. But science didn’t move forward by keeping the one correct hypothesis and throwing the rest out.
Chemistry advanced, oddly enough, by combining right hypotheses with wrong ones. The correct hypothesis had plenty of holes in it, and the wrong one was what filled them. Both kinds mattered on the way to the knowledge we have now. The book puts it this way.
The phlogistonists may not have produced especially persuasive or fruitful explanations, but had they survived, the questions at least would have stayed alive. (5.2.3.3)
Even a theory that looks wrong is good for something. Keeping many kinds of theory, many ways of thinking, and putting all of them to work is what pluralism means.
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The intellectual peddler and pluralism
So what is pluralism? People usually hear it as “you’re right, I’m right, everyone’s right.” It isn’t that. The pluralism in this book is closer to “look at it this way, then look at it that way, and you’ll find out more.” Right and wrong isn’t the point.
What’s the advantage? You can’t know what’s correct until you’ve discovered it, and you can’t know how the discovery will happen either. The book explains:
Because the path of scientific progress can’t be predicted, it’s better to keep many directions of inquiry open and hope that one of them leads us to the right answer. (5.2.4)
Until you’re sure something is right, a new idea can only look unfamiliar, strange, and wrong. Which means the unfamiliar, strange, wrong-looking things are exactly what you have to examine if you want to discover anything.
As a way of practicing pluralism, the author proposes proliferation. Proliferating means growing alternative systems instead of the fashionable or mainstream one. Instead of a whole society thinking in one direction, you keep several hypotheses and several ways of thinking around and usable. Something like tending a garden with many species living in it.
You know the person whose bag is full of things they don’t need right now, carried around just in case? In Korean we call that a bobusang, a peddler. The item is useless today, but carry it long enough and a day comes when it saves you. A pluralist habit of mind looks a lot like that peddler to me.
Mental models and latticework thinking
Pluralism starts from the premise that no single explanation can account for the world. The same goes for how we read reality and make decisions: one point of view isn’t enough to lean on. Mental models are the practical version of this pluralist thinking.
A mental model is a way of looking at the world. You can see the world as a place where each person moves according to their own interest, or as a place that moves by inertia, or as a place where things happen at random. Each of those views is a mental model, and using them lets you get to what the problem actually is much faster. Someone carrying a hammer, a wrench, a saw, and a screwdriver can fix more things than someone carrying ten hammers.
There is no perfect mental model. Each one is an abstraction of the world, so none of them reflects the world exactly. That’s why we need the pluralist approach: abstract the world in several different ways and look through each of them. Charlie Munger said something similar when he talked about latticework thinking.
Munger’s latticework thinking is a way of thinking that draws on many perspectives. Learn the core mental models from economics, psychology, biology, mathematics, and other fields, he says, and weave them together when you think. That’s the foundation for seeing a complicated reality in three dimensions and judging it accurately.
I’ll cover what the latticework model is, and what you gain from learning it, in the next post. Subscribe so you don’t miss it!
Want a practical tip that makes you smarter every week?
I cover persuasion, marketing, writing, and the other skills modern life asks of us.
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Sources
- Is Water H2O?, Hasok Chang (link)
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