大胆猜想，淘汰失败者Make Bold Guesses and Weed Out the Failures
Naval：更进一步说，这不只是科学。
当我们审视创新、技术和建造——比如托马斯·爱迪生和尼古拉·特斯拉所做的一切——这些都来自试错：提出创造性的猜想，然后动手尝试。再看进化如何运作：先有变异，再经过自然选择，它尝试大量随机突变，然后把不奏效的淘汰掉。
这似乎是所有复杂系统随时间自我改进的通用模式：大胆猜想，然后剔除那些不奏效的东西。
在所有知识的创造中，这一点呈现出一种美妙的对称性。它归根结底是一种创造行为。我们不知道它从何而来，它不是对观察结果的机械外推。
最后我用一个最著名的例子来收尾。我们谈过黑天鹅和烧开水，但更有趣也更简单的是火鸡的例子。
有一只火鸡，每天都吃得很好，被养得膘肥体壮。火鸡以为自己生活在一个仁慈的人家——直到感恩节来临。到那时，它就会迎来一场极其残酷的醒悟。这向你展示了归纳法的局限。
Brett：正是如此。而理论必须是被猜出来的。
我们所有伟大的科学家都说过类似的话。只有哲学家和某些数学家才认为，科学是这样一种归纳式的、寻找趋势的方法，从过去的观察外推未来。
爱因斯坦说过，他未必比大多数人更聪明，只是他对某些特定问题怀有强烈的兴趣。他充满好奇，也富有想象力。想象力对他至关重要——他需要去想象，什么东西有可能解释这些现象。
爱因斯坦并不是为了提出广义相对论而去研究过去的现象。他是在寻求解释物理学中存在的某些问题。归纳法在其中并不起作用。
Naval：好的解释依赖于创造力。当然，它们必须可检验、可证伪，而且难以被随意改动，还能做出冒险而精确的预测。对任何想弄明白如何把这些概念融入日常生活的人来说，这都是一个很好的指导点。
你最出色的理论将是创造性的猜想，而不是简单的外推。
Naval: Going even further, it’s not just science.
When we look at innovation, technology and building—for example, everything that Thomas Edison and Nikola Tesla did—this came from trial and error, which is creative guesses and trying things out. If you look at how evolution works through variation and then natural selection, it tries a lot of random mutations and filters out the ones that didn’t work.
This seems to be a general model through which all complex systems improve themselves over time: They make bold guesses and then they weed out the things that didn’t work.
There’s a beautiful symmetry to it across all knowledge creation. It’s ultimately an act of creativity. We don’t know where it comes from. It’s not just a mechanical extrapolation of observations.
I’ll close with the most famous example of this. We talked about black swans and boiling water, but the fun and easy one is the turkey.
You have a turkey that’s being fed very well every single day and fattened up. The turkey thinks that it lives in a benevolent household—until Thanksgiving arrives. Then, it’s in for a very rude awakening. That shows you the limits of induction.
Brett: Precisely. Now, the theories have to be guessed.
All of our great scientists have always made noises similar to this. It’s only the philosophers and certain mathematicians who think that science is this inductive trend-seeking way of extrapolating from past observations into the future.
Einstein said that he wasn’t necessarily brighter than most other people; it’s that he was passionately interested in particular problems. And he had a curiosity and an imagination. Imagination was key for him. He needed to imagine what could possibly explain these things.
Einstein wasn’t looking at past phenomena in order to come up with general relativity. He was seeking to explain certain problems that existed in physics. Induction wasn’t a part of it.
Naval: Good explanations rely on creativity. They are testable and falsifiable, of course, and they’re also hard to vary and to make risky and narrow predictions. That’s a good guiding point for anybody who is trying to figure out how they can incorporate these concepts in their everyday life.
Your best theories are going to be creative guesses, not simple extrapolations.