On Aspiration
There are questions that get settled by becoming someone else, rather than finding answers. How can we think about them better?
There’s a kind of question that gets settled not by finding the right answer, but by becoming someone for whom the answer is obvious.
When that happens, you generally leave the conversation. That’s partly because the thing that convinced you wasn’t an argument you can hand to someone else, partly because it seems difficult to express. This essay is an attempt to go back and describe the process from the inside.
The pros-and-cons list of Darwin
My latest encounter with Darwin was through Russ Roberts’ “Wild Problems”.
- Roberts tells the story of a young Darwin, who’s trying to decide whether to marry.
[roberts delivers the story well, so let’s keep that…]
The pros and cons of marriage, as Darwin can articulate it, clearly leads to the wrong conclusion, which Darwin is wise enough to notice:
[darwin’s conclusion: marry, marry, marry]
He has clarity, and power to let his wishes surface and override the list. Roberts relays a few more “tools/tricks” that can be used this way.
The tricks that Roberts tell, and the case of Darwin well exemplifies, are for “unconvering” / “letting surface” etc. Darwin, once he writes down “Marry. Marry. Marry.” can go back to his daily life, and do his best to realize that outcome.
There are also cases where, after surfacing, the work that needs to be done first is a different kind of work than going out there and working effectively towards what one (now knows) that they want.
A spreadsheet of financial projections into my future: keep working 5 days a week? work 4 days?
It’s a complex world and many choices are “reasonable”. [Link to tiberius? https://claude.ai/chat/412e682c-a861-41dd-bea2-54dea46a578b]
making sense of the situation where we have a reasoanble choice, and want to have another reasonable choice: Callard’s example
- there’s another case: “make the list/calculation, surface the result”
- accept/embrace the result as what is
- but also hold the perspective that wants it to be something else