"It is very difficult to find a black cat in a dark room," warns an old proverb. "Especially when there is no cat."
I was passed a book containing that quotation by a colleague recently. The title of the book is Ignorance, by Stuart Firestein. I'm not sure what made my friend think of me, but I tried not to be too offended.
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| Maybe he thought of me because of the science. |
Anyway, remember that when I say "colleague," I mean another Marine Corps officer who, like me, is now suddenly thrust into a position that is essentially identical to being a college professor. Except we run through the woods sometimes and do pull-ups. And shoot pistols. And all our students do too. So, other than that, pretty much just like any college campus.
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| Maybe there are some subtle differences. |
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| For the most part, it's not that different. |
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| This place is just like any graduate-level school. |
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| Okay, sometimes we make bombs. But only once or twice a year. |
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| It usually looks more like this. |
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| Or this. |
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| This is more difficult to explain. |
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| See? Just like a regular school. |
Getting back to my point. So this book, Ignorance, How It Drives Science, is pretty intriguing. The underlying thesis is that it is the things we DON'T know that drive science, rather than the things we already know. And furthermore, we don't know a lot more than we DO know. Facts, data, and accumulated knowledge serve mainly to show us where the dark rooms are, where those black cats may be hiding. The book takes it a bit deeper, talking about uncertainties and the "unknowables" in life. Heady stuff.
Donald Rumsfeld makes a clumsy attempt to explain it:
My job, at the moment, is to teach Marine officers to plan operations. We try to teach them to think, essentially. Again, I'm not exactly a professional educator. But I've been pretending to be one for three years now, and I'm thinking that the way we approach our military education programs could benefit quite a bit from this line of thinking.
Many of my superiors and even my peers might view it differently. They might think we are showing them HOW to do something. That we have this amphibious warfare and military planning thing pretty much figured out. Just follow the recipe, and--Voilà! One perfect military operational plan. The truth of the matter is that this isn't even remotely the way planning works.
I'm certainly not against studying history. There's nothing new under the sun, as they say. It's cool in the military these days to brag about how much military history you read. General Mattis said he was trying to build a 5,000-year-old mind, so that way you aren't surprised. There's some value to that, I admit.
But this idea that the important thing is finding and embracing ignorance is so much more exciting! And so applicable to today's Marine Corps. We have new equipment, newly developed tactics and procedures, and lots of new challenges. I think many of our problems stem from the fact that we want to behave as if we know exactly how these things can and should be used. As though we have it all worked out, and the young captain needs merely to read and follow along in the manual.
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| The problem is, this is not in the manual. |
If combat taught me nothing else, it definitely showed me that most people are completely full of shit. There are plenty of things we don't know, plenty of problems that need solving. And the best Marines are the ones who can come up with a way around the unexpected, rather than the Marines who can recite the manual or who know the names of the most Civil War generals. Let's empower those young minds and see what they can come up with.
