Unresolvable questions and the search for understanding

Researchers want answers, and ideally, they want good, solid answers that will stand up to examination and challenge. Unfortunately, some questions do not have any fixed answer. The absence of clear answers, however, does not preclude important learning, and researchers can benefit from being able to delve into such uncertainties in search of many interesting ideas, even if no specific answer can be found. 

In the late 1950s, a philosopher named W.B. Gallie demonstrated that there were some things could never be fully defined—he called them “essentially contested concepts.” In the late 1960s, design theorist Horst Rittel argued for a class of “wicked” problems (which included but was not limited to design problems) whose members had no definitive formulation, among other characteristics.  For both Gallie and Rittel, a crucial factor was the social element: different people view things differently. Gallie relied on a sporting example derived from cricket (I believe—I’m working from memory) to demonstrate how different views about the sport made it impossible to define the “best.”.  Gallie’s example is particularly salient for me because I enjoy the sporting fan’s common questions regarding which players are best and what teams should do—one of my favorite authors is Bill James, the baseball analytics guru—and yet, as a philosopher and researcher, the more I look at such questions, the more complexity there is to see. And ultimately, given that I accept the ideas of Gallie and Rittel, I see these questions as unanswerable.  Despite believing these questions are unanswerable, I still see the debates that they produce as interesting and often informative.

Not to mention that I am somewhat interested in basketball and the NBA playoffs, and a lot of current discussion revolves around an unanswerable question that is, nonetheless interesting, and perhaps even informative, to explore. That question is the question of LeBron James. How great is he? Is he the greatest ever, the GOAT (Greatest Of All Time)? Or is he “just” top five? You don’t have to read much to find people discussing LeBron’s “legacy.”

Before LeBron, Michael Jordan was generally regarded as the greatest of all time (GOAT). Some argued for Bill Russell with his 11 championship rings and multiple MVP awards, or, perhaps, for a few others, but Jordan was the most common choice as GOAT. LeBron, however, has been doing amazing stuff that no one else in basketball can do, and his accomplishments are piling up. He is currently having another spectacular postseason, at least in terms of individual performances, although his team is facing a 1-2 deficit to Boston in the conference finals.  It is these performances that spark the debate: “look at that performance,” says one side, “he’s the best ever.” The other side says “well, it doesn’t mean much if he loses. Jordan won all six times he went to the finals!” 

This is the simplistic version of the argument, of course, because on closer examination this simple argument will reveal complexity that cannot be eliminated—complexity of the sort that contributed to the claims of Gallie and Rittel that some things cannot be completely defined. The simplicity of saying “Jordan won all six times in the finals; LeBron only won three and lost five,” might be fine for chatting at the bar during a game, but it certainly isn’t enough for serious research.

Firstly, we note that we can’t just reduce the argument to who has more rings, because by the “rings” standard, neither Jordan nor LeBron is all that close to the top of the list. By the rings standard, Bill Russell is the greatest, followed by a bunch of his teammates and Robert Horry. And, with all due respect to Robert Horry and Russell’s Celtics teammates, they are not all-time greats—no one is suggesting that Sam Jones, with 10 rings, is the second-greatest player ever. Trying to reduce the debate to a single dimension distorts the question: a player’s performance is much more complex than that single dimension.  This problem of multidimensionality makes it difficult to evaluate many things—what is intelligence? what is creativity? what is a “good employee”? how do we evaluate students’ learning?

Once an issue is understood to be multidimensional, it becomes increasingly difficult to make any certain decision. Beyond championship rings, there are many statistics that allow a comparison between two basketball players—points scored, rebounds, assists, etc., etc.  But the more dimensions added to the evaluation, the greater the likelihood that there will be contradictory indications. If one player had better stats in every possible category than any other player, there wouldn’t be difficulties. But that’s not the case, and that leads to complexity and uncertainty: how do you choose to weight different dimensional in an overall evaluation? If Jordan has more points but LeBron has more rebounds, who is greater? What’s more important for evaluating greatness?

Focusing on won-loss records can give an example of this problem of evaluation. MJ won more rings than LeBron, and that matters. But LeBron advanced to the finals more times, and that’s worth something, too: after all, if LeBron is criticized for losing in the Finals, shouldn’t MJ be criticized for losing in the Conference Finals? How do we compare those different achievements? Or, at the other end of the playoffs, we can see that MJ lost in the first round three times, while LeBron has never lost in the first round. If MJ were clearly greater, shouldn’t he have a better record in the first round? There are lots of stats and sometimes Jordan’s are more impressive (30.1 pts/gm vs. “only” 27.2 for LeBron), sometimes LeBron’s are (7.4 rebounds/game, 7.2 assists/game vs. 6.9 and 5.3 for Jordan).

The search for detail in comparing the two may not lead to any conclusive answer about which is better, but it can help us see the question more richly, and this can inform us about basketball and about processes of evaluation.  And, in a way, what we get out of the examination is potentially more valuable than an answer: it doesn’t really matter who is “the greatest”—whether we say that Jordan is the greatest or LeBron is the greatest or Russell, Kareem, Bird, Magic, Wilt or whoever. It doesn’t really matter who gets called the greatest, or who really is the greatest (if it makes sense to reduce such complexity to such a simple question). But, although the question itself cannot be answered, what is learned in the process of trying to answer that unanswerable question can give us insight into the more general process of player evaluation, and that has practical value to basketball organizations or to fantasy players.

Some questions that have no answer are still worth asking and examining.

"Sri Vision"

This is going to be quick.

Today my yoga teacher was talking about "sri vision"--which, I suspect, but do not know, may be her own use of the idea of "sri".
In any event she was speaking of it as a way of looking at things that notices their beauty and their goodness--an all-encompassing vision that looks at the whole, rather than analyzing and breaking the vision down into little parts.

It is very easy, she was saying, to focus in on details, on pieces, and to lose sight of the larger picture, and thus to lose sight of the beauty in that larger picture.

While the notion of "sri vision" is relevant in a number of different ways in the context of academic writing, I was thinking of it particularly in terms of the loss of enthusiasm and the loss of the sense of significance that can occur, especially if your ideas--or your presentation or ideas--is treated harshly and subjected to destructive criticism.

Which reminds me that my yoga teacher specifically mentioned constructive vs. destructive criticism--something that had slipped my mind until I wrote the phrase "destructive criticism"--the difference between the two, she suggested, was the presence of "sri vision"--a sense or and appreciation of the whole, and the beauty that is inherent in the work.

I don't know if one has a choice, but it seems to me that it would be better to use sri vision, and remain passionate about a project than it would be to become jaded and cynical. Wherever we look, we can see problems if we look closely enough. Can we see the beauty in things as well?

Little Pieces of Work

I was thinking about how we can break down tasks.
One of the things that I have heard reported by many writers is that they are daunted by the size of the project that lies before them. "Overwhelmed" is a word I hear a lot.

I know what it's like to feel overwhelmed by a project--a sense that the project is this massive monolith that cannot be moved. We have to learn to chip away at it.

Every big project is composed of little projects. As the saying foes: the journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. Not only does it begin with a single step, but it is carried to its completion by always taking one more step, until the journey is over.

Every big piece of work is made of simply taking he work one step at a time. It can be daunting to sit down in the morning and say "ok, now I'm going to work on my dissertation for the next three hours." But if we can see that three hour period as made up of a number of smaller tasks--a few fifteen minute tasks, maybe a few thirty minute tasks--then it may often be easier to engage in the work.

It's great to make optimistic plans. It's great to assume that you're going to be extremely productive. But it's also great to take reality into account. It's fine to make a plan that you're going to work on your dissertation for eight hours on Saturday--but if the reality is that on Saturday after Saturday you don't work eight hours, then you need to reconsider the plans you're making. So for me, instead of making big plans, I like to make small plans--or at least, I like to make small plans that break apart my big plans. This analytical process--this process of dividing a project--can be problematic in many ways, but I find that it really helps me get moving.

If I can set myself a task for fifteen minutes--that's easy. If I can see the need to write one paragraph on a specific subject, well, writing one paragraph is not a daunting task. If I can get myself to take action for fifteen minutes, that's better than planning on working three hours and getting nothing done. But even better is that if I can do the one thing in fifteen minutes, then I feel good about myself, and I feel good about working, and I can try something else for the next fifteen minutes, and if I get something done in that fifteen minutes I feel even better about myself.

If we keep our goals really small and really focused, then they are not overwhelming. It's not surprising that someone would be overwhelmed if they were thinking "I have to work on my dissertation." It would be a lot more surprising if someone got overwhelmed saying "I have to write one paragraph on subject X."

Of course if someone did get overwhelmed just trying to write one paragraph, we could break the task of writing that paragraph into different steps.

Back in the day when I still was relatively current on computers, I was a teaching assistant for a basic programming course. This was maybe 1993 or 1994--the course taught the computer language "pascal", which I knew fairly well, and was, for the first time, integrating html into the course material. As a programmer, it's easy to get used to thinking about the very small steps that make up a process. The more so, the more primitive the language. Html and Pascal both are high level languages in which single commands get translated to many different little commands for a given computer (actually, html isn't really that kind of language at all, but rather specific programs use html as sets of intstructions--but that's kind of beside the point).
In the class for which I was a TA, we had on one exam a question that asked the students to write pseudo-code for boiling water.
Most students answered something like this:
Fill a pot with water
put it on the stove
turn on the stove

Well, that is fine, but it leaves out a lot of detail. Take that first step, for example: "fill a pot with water." Where does the pot come from? where does the water come from? how does the pot get filled with water? If we wanted, we could break this step down into smaller steps:
Find a pot
pick it up
carry the pot to the sink
place the pot beneath the faucet
turn on the faucet
wait for the pot to fill

We might have to break some of those steps down, too.
There is complexity that we take for granted--we know where we keep pots in our kitchen, and we know how to fill them with water, so we take those little steps for granted.

But in writing a dissertation, we are not so familiar with the terrain. We need to be willing to take the project even the simplest, smallest step at a time. We need to be able to exploit that way of looking at the project: if we are feeling overwhelmed, just take the smallest task that we can find and work on it.

My one caveat: don't let that one next task always be to read something else--because there's always something else to read, but if you don't write, you won't get finished writing. That being said, the writing tasks can be broken up into very small pieces--write a paragraph on one subject, a page on another, two sentences on yet another. Whatever the size, it is more important to do a little work, than it is to make a big plan and do less. By breaking your project up into little pieces of work, you can focus your efforts.