Everything All at Once: How to unleash your inner nerd, tap into radical curiosity, and solve any problem
Page 11
That ugly scene drove home all the things the flight attendant must know. She knows about flight schedules, airplane operations, and the different technical styles of the pilots. She is trained in a wide variety of safety procedures, ready to deal with everything from an emergency landing (on the Hudson River maybe) to a passenger-turned-patient having a heart attack. Above all, she knows a great deal about managing people, all kinds of people, in a confined setting that often induces anxiety and restlessness. Managerial skill is a hugely important resource. If you’ve ever had a lousy boss—and I certainly suspect that you have—you know what I mean. You surely have been in a restaurant or business that was badly managed, and you felt it immediately. Perhaps you have been a bad manager yourself. That flight attendant may never have thought about writing a book called Management Tips from 35,000 Feet, but I’ll bet she could. And I’d read it.
Then I started to think a little more about Mr. Irate Flyer. Was I too harsh in my judgment of him? He’s a complete stranger, after all. Maybe he was having a truly bad day. Maybe he just received some terrible news. Furthermore, I’m sure I’ve been rude to people at times. I’ve been tired. I’ve been angry. This little episode reminded me of how easy it is to blow it, how easy it is to forget that we are all in this together. We are much more alike than we are different. We all have the same humanity and the same rights in the eyes of the Constitution. My dad taught me to treat other people with respect: We should work as hard as we can to view one another with compassion and to recognize the knowledge that others possess.
As the situation diffused and everyone got back to their in-flight activities, I thought more about what I had witnessed. The flight attendant had driven home an important lesson to me about what constitutes a skill—in addition to all the technical information that she needed to have, the safety precautions, and the logistical talent for navigating in such a small space, she needed people skills. Those aren’t measurable, they don’t really show up on a résumé or even in an interview, but those with people skills have a noticeable and lasting impact on their entire environment. Treating others with respect, patience, and understanding will not only encourage them to treat you well right back, but it also is the first step toward inviting connections, conversations, and collaborations that make everyone’s day a little bit better.
Everybody has skills and expertise that are hugely valuable, and we have a responsibility to treat everyone’s skills with respect. This means everybody, regardless of job title, education level, or social standing. Such open-mindedness fulfills the standards of nerd honesty, and it serves our brute self-interest, as well. But I’m writing this chapter at a moment when a lot of people, in the United States and throughout much of the developed world, are actively resisting the expertise of other people—especially those whom they perceive to be “the elite.” There’s a terrible misconception these days about the authority that comes with the kind of knowledge that scientists represent.
I regularly hear angry comments about climate scientists and sympathetic politicians. People believe that some of these experts want new regulations so that they can grab more power, apparently trying to dazzle us with big words until they exploit us. In reality, they’re just doing their jobs. Some of the most disturbing attacks have been directed against climate researchers like Michael Mann of Pennsylvania State University. Many people have been led into thinking that those scientists want to change the tax structure for their own benefit, rather than doing it so that we can create an energy economy that is sustainable, cleaner, and more efficient than the one we have now. The deniers and conspiracy theorists have lost sight of the basic truth that everybody knows something you don’t. In fact, they’ve weirdly turned the idea on its head. One too-common line of argument goes like this: Who are these “experts” to tell me what is true about climate? They think they know things I don’t know—well maybe I know more than they do!
Now this is important: Expertise must be earned. Other people know things you don’t because they have learned, worked, and lived in ways you haven’t. Climate experts are experts because they have spent a lifetime studying, asking questions, and seeking honest answers. I want to go on the record now to make really clear that the actual goals of climate scientists are to make everybody’s lives safer and healthier. Opening yourself to other people’s knowledge can be difficult, even unsettling, especially if those other people are very different from you. It can be frustrating to feel like other people know more than you, and it’s human nature to feel uncomfortable and vulnerable in the face of confusing information that doesn’t make sense to you yet. My angry airplane passenger couldn’t see that the flight attendant was trying to take care of him, because he was too immersed in his own assumption that he was being neglected while somebody else got better treatment.
We nerds, scientists, and fellow travelers have a two-part responsibility here. First, we have to fight back against people who actively try to devalue the knowledge that we have fought so hard to gain. I believe we have to defend scientific ideas, and even more importantly, we have to defend the scientific process, the principle of being open to new information. We have to actively promote the philosophy that everyone knows something you don’t. That means getting involved with local schools, working on educational projects, speaking openly with friends and family, and engaging with politicians. We also need to have sympathetic discussions (I mean instead of loud arguments) about how we know and believe what we know in science, especially about human-caused climate change. I feel that the “how we know” is a key to moving a discussion along.
Second, we have to embrace that kind of openness ourselves. We have to do more than just pursue the most interesting, nerdiest projects and developments because we think they’re cool. We have to think hard about how we apply our pursuit of progress. It can be not just cool but also life-improving and accessible for everyone. I’ve heard too many climate “debates” that consist of deniers saying climate change is a hoax and the ostensibly pro-science people responding that the deniers are either thoughtless idiots or amoral evildoers. Look, I am very familiar with how frustrating it can be to talk with people who reject scientific evidence, but I’m pretty sure that nobody has ever changed his or her mind as a result of being called an idiot.
We need to defend important institutions like the EPA by explaining exactly what they do and why. We need to hold accountable the leaders of the climate-denialist movement, the enemies of the idea that everyone knows something you don’t. We need to expose what they do not know and discredit them. At the same time, we need to find ways to spread information and real evidence in a way that inspires confidence and trust. Wherever possible, we must work to vote the troublemakers out of office, exposing their corruption and offering a clear alternative that will actually protect and uplift us all. And who is this “we” I’m talking about? It is all of us. A meaningful response to climate change will take more scientific research and engineering solutions. It will also take lobbying, public outreach, community organizing, get-out-the-vote drives, and corporate support.
All those actions will benefit hugely from exchanges that, on the surface, may look like hardly anything at all: talking to Karl the janitor about his work or watching a flight attendant soothe a difficult passenger. A true nerd aspires to pull in these kinds of insights all the time.
I’m still working on all this, just as even the best and nerdiest among us still are. I observe human behavior, trying to become a more adept manager at the small businesses I’m involved in. I do my best to hire the best people for each job, but beyond that, I empower the people I work with to do as much managing as they can handle. If someone else is managing a project or job, then I don’t have to. That person will soon know more about it than I ever will, and will become a new source of expertise. In the end, trusting and respecting people leads to better teamwork. People get more done and have more fun. When I’m working at The Planetary Society, it means we are more likely to build s
olar sails and explore new worlds. When I’m working on my Netflix show, it means I am more likely to entertain my viewers, impart some information, and expand their imaginations.
Embracing the idea that everyone knows something you don’t is part of getting a great many people working together for the common good. It is yet another part of the path to positive change.
PART II
Nerd Ideas into Nerd Actions
CHAPTER 11
The Joy of Constraints
I’ll never forget my first week of high school physics, when Mr. Lang drew an ellipse on the blackboard. An ellipse is a squished or stretched circle; it is, approximately, the shape of an auto racetrack or an especially symmetrical egg. An ellipse is, theoretically exactly, the shape of Earth’s yearly path around the Sun. But the shape my teacher drew wasn’t readily recognizable. His ellipse was tilted with respect to the X and Y axes, as well as with respect to the floor, the chalk tray, and, well, everything. He singled me out and issued this challenge: Could I make sense of the shape and figure out a way to describe it mathematically? Could I write the equation for a tilted ellipse?
Numbers and equations are used to describe every aspect of the world around us. To do so, though, they need to do more than match the idealized forms of a textbook; they must be able to capture all the complicated, sloppy details found in reality. Equations should make sense without reference to graph paper or coordinate systems. Surely I, as a good student, could figure out how to describe a simple ellipse that had been tilted just a little. So I had at it. Being in a pretty good place with my algebra skills, I thought, well, I’ll just add in some tilted terms for the Xs and the Ys, some sines and cosines, maybe. I gave it a go. Well, such an equation can become ponderous for anyone, let alone an 11th grader trying to prove himself at the beginning of the school year. Mr. Lang saw where I was going with this. He stopped me with these words: “Nye, the ellipse isn’t tilted; you’re tilted.”
There was a lot of wisdom packed into those few brief words. Mr. Lang was telling me to look at the problem differently. At first glance the problem seemed fantastically difficult, but he was suggesting that the difficulty lay with how I was looking at the problem more than with the problem itself. The secret was to stop thinking about the other objects around the ellipse (the blackboard, the room, myself) as having anything to do with my tilted figure. I could get around the frightening tilted aspect of the drawing on the blackboard simply by looking at it differently. If I reimagined the drawing as existing within a tilted world, it turned back into a perfectly normal ellipse and then I could solve it with ease. Rather than come up with a complicated solution to a complicated-looking problem, I needed to step back and reassess the actual problem at hand. All I had to do was tilt my head, literally.
My shaky algebraic and trigonometric skills prevented me from undertaking the complicated solution I’d initially considered, and that constraint forced me to find what was ultimately a much better solution. We usually talk about constraints as if they are bad things. They prevent us from doing something—often exactly the thing we most want to do. But I’m going to argue here that constraints can be useful, beautiful even. Constraints help guide the decisions in your life, from the smallest to the most profound. Because of those constraints, there are certain approaches to problems that will not work. Constraints help you figure out what to not do and, more to the point, what ideas to leave out. They help you make decisions about the things you buy, the things you eat, the job you take, the person you marry (or don’t). They make the world scientifically and mathematically comprehensible. That’s what Mr. Lang helped me understand on that seemingly uneventful day.
I talk a lot in this book about the power of considering everything all at once. When it’s time to act, though, you can’t process everything. You can’t strain literally every option through the filter of logic; it would drive you mad and take up so much time that you would never end up acting on anything at all. So we have to learn to make decisions with restrictions. We give more weight to some details than to others, and we constantly evaluate what information is most relevant and reliable. Some of the greatest technological triumphs (the Manhattan Project or the Apollo Moon landings, for example) took place under severe constraints. That’s what we do here in the land of nerds, whether we’re facing a small theoretical problem or a giant real-world one—we take the skills and resources available to us, look at all the angles, and do the best with what we have.
One of the marvelous things about the human brain is its ability to sort out incoming information quickly, or quickly enough to keep our species alive through the last few millennia. We can’t know everything about the things and happenings around us, so we have to rely on the knowledge at hand and choose a course. Is that a lion on the savanna stalking us for her dinner? We have only a brief time to decide what we might do: run, hide, or really run? Programming a robot to carry out a task like this would take a long time, but our brains sort out the sounds, smells, wind direction, and distance to the nearest climbable tree very, very quickly. It’s not clear why a robot would be running from lions. Perhaps the robot is actually powered by a delicious battery made of meat. The same basic skills come into play for soldiers on the battlefield, drivers in traffic, players on the ballfield, or shoppers in the supermarket. In every case, it’s about distilling a lot of possibilities into a single action.
A number of studies have been done in which college students were given different rules for submitting a piece of work. Some students got no firm date to complete the task, some got a negotiable completion date, and some got a firm deadline. Consistently, the students who were given the firm finish date did far and away the best. The imposed constraint that they had to finish on a certain date motivated them to budget their time and to focus appropriately on their work. Constraints help direct us to the solution or approach we need to get things done. Without constraints, we tend to lose sight of the important things, just like those unstructured college students did and still do.
There’s a great example of the power of constraints unfolding right now in my part-time hometown of New York City. In late October 2012, a pretty good-size storm named Sandy (the still-ferocious remnants of Hurricane Sandy) slammed into the New Jersey shore and parts of New York City, especially the southernmost, lowest-elevation parts of Manhattan. There were blackouts, flooding, significant losses in productivity, and enormous reconstruction costs. The extended shutdown of the economically vital city and surrounding region left an impact on the economy of the whole world. So the states of New Jersey and New York set about looking for engineering solutions that could prevent this kind of storm damage from happening again.
The constraints facing the architects were rigorous. The areas along the coast have to remain pleasant and livable. People have to be able to come and go, commuting, meeting, eating out, strolling waterfront parks, sitting at desks, typewriting books, etc. But when the next great storm hits, all the parks, sidewalks, roads, and subways lines in the areas that are in harm’s way have to be durable or flexible enough to get people to safety; then they have to return to being livable and workable again soon after the storm waters recede. Not trivial. Heavy rains and winds cause coastal flooding. Electrical substation switching systems shut down when they’re inundated, and subway tunnels filled with water become impassable.
You don’t have to know much about rivers and floods to think about possible ways to avoid storm damage. How hard could it be? You build a big, waterproof wall or levee. But here’s the thing: If the city of New York were to build a wall high enough to keep out a storm like Sandy, that barrier would have to be at least 3 meters high (about 10 feet). It would also have to be many kilometers, or miles, long. Technically you could do it, probably, but it would look awful and it would not fulfill the livability goal. A long, snaking seawall would isolate the city from the river. We have to rule that out, as a lot of the city’s business is on the river. By walling off the river, we’d be
cutting off an enormous fraction of the economy. Same problem with blocking the seashore from the businesses of the famed Jersey Shore.
If the concrete contractors were running the government all by themselves, they might say, “That’s just how it has to be.” The local importers, exporters, waterborne commuters, tour companies, etc., would need to relocate upriver to slightly higher ground. But in our democratic reality, the great-seawall solution had to be dismissed immediately. The nonnegotiable reality that New Yorkers, and people who do business with New Yorkers, absolutely would not accept a continuous seawall affected the whole project. It was a constraint. It made the architects and engineers sharpen their pencils, tap a few more keystrokes, and click and drag a few more computer-aided design lines.
The Denmark-based Bjarke Ingels Group, which got the contract to protect the Manhattan waterfront from future storms, went to all kinds of trouble in their design to satisfy all the practical and aesthetic demands. They created a plan for a series of contiguous designs to address a potential flood, as it would affect each neighborhood from downtown to uptown. On a map oriented with north at the top, the designers envisioned a 10-kilometer-long (6-mile) series of parks, tunnels, berms, and roadways elevated and reinforced to withstand the great wash of the floodwater that will accompany the inevitable next superstorm, as well as the ongoing rising of sea levels. Shaped like a horseshoe, the overall design has come to be called “the Big U.”