Useful Skepticism

It’s fairly easy to be skeptical of something - in fact, like entropy, it’s kind of the default state. Entropy happens because there are more disordered states than ordered ones (Update: ok, maybe it has to do with quantum entanglement but I'm not reworking the analogy!) Skepticism happens because there are more ways something could fail than ways it could succeed (usually). So it’s easy to find a story to be skeptical, if you want to.

But it’s not enough to just be skeptical and contrarian. If you’re an investor, you have to be contrarian and right. If you’re an entrepreneur or engineer, you don’t get a lot of credit for just saying “no” - you also have to find a solution you’re not skeptical of, and then build something useful eventually. Big companies are filled with "that won't work" engineers. (another variation is the "we are already doing it" engineers - but both of these are fundamentally stories about why they can be skeptical and not get something done).

So it’s good to challenge our own skepticism. Instead of "how can this fail?" we should aask questions like “how could this work?”, and if it does, is it worth the effort to build it. Once we have a strong idea, we can examine the problems we see and ask about potential solutions to them. But only once we have that idea - if we look at the problems first, we'll never do anything.

And it’s good to examine your own biases. I’ve been doing this a lot personally with crypto. I’m pretty inherently skeptical about a lot of that field (update: I initially wrote this before the "current" crash, so...yeah), but I also recognize that my younger self would happily be playing with all the tools and looking for interesting things, so I’ve been trying to keep myself in that mindset. When I look at solutions in this space that have problems (most of them do), I try to ask “can that problem be solved? If it is solved, does this do something useful for a user that hasn’t been done before?” Mostly of the time I’m still skeptical, but some of that exploration has led me to find things that are at least more interesting to ponder further, and more than a few related ideas that are probably worth doing.

Skepticism is a very useful tool, both in life and in engineering. But it also has the potential to get in our way and to create bias in our thinking if we aren’t careful about using it. It should be one tool of many, not the only way we approach challenging ideas.