Unit 2 Fruitful Questions

The other night at the dinner table, my three kids--ages 9,6 and 4--took time out from their food fight to teach me about paradigm shifts, and limitations of linear thinking and how to refocus parameters.

Here’s how it happened: We were playing our own oral version of the Sesame Street game, “What Doesn’t Belong?,” where kids look at three pictures and choose the one that doesn’t fit. I said, “OK, what doesn’t belong, an orange, a tomato or a strawberry?”

The oldest didn’t take more than a second to deliver his smug answer: “Tomato because the other two are fruits.”I agreed that this was the right answer despite the fact that some purists insist a tomato is a fruit. To those of us forced as kids to eat them in salads, tomatoes will always be vegetables. I was about to think up another set of three when my 4-year-old said, “The right answer is strawberry because the other two are round and a strawberry isn’t.” How could I argue with that?

Then my 6-year-old said, “It’s the orange because the other two are red.” Not to be outdone by his younger siblings, the 9-year-old said, “It could also be the orange because the other two grow on vines.”

The middle one took this as a direct challenge. “It could be the strawberry because it’s the only one you put on ice cream.”

Something was definitely happening here. It was messier than a food fight and much more important than whether a tomato is a fruit or vegetable. My kids were doing what Copernicus did when he placed the sun at the center of the universe, readjusting the centuries-old paradigm of an Earth-centered system. They were doing what Reuben Mattus did when he renamed his Bronx ice cream H?agen-Dazs and raised the price without changing the product. They were doing what Edward Jenner did when he discovered a vaccination for smallpox by abandoning his quest for a cure.

Instead of studying people who were sick with smallpox, he began to study people who were exposed to it but never got sick. He found that they’d all contracted a similar but milder disease, cow pox, which vaccinated them against the deadly smallpox. They were refocusing the parameters. They were redefining the problems.

They were reframing the questions. In short, they were doing what every scientist who’s ever made an important discovery throughout history has done, according to Thomas Kuhn, in his book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions: They were shifting old paradigms.

But if this had been a workbook exercise in school, every kid who didn’t circle tomato would have been marked wrong. Every kid who framed the question differently than

“Which is not a fruit?” would have been wrong. Maybe that explains why so many of the world’s most brilliant scientists and inventors were failures in school, the most notable being Albert Einstein, who was perhaps this century’s most potent paradigm-shifter.

This is not meant to be a critique of schools. Lord knows, that’s easy enough to do. This is, instead, a reminder that there are real limits to the value of information. I bring this up because we seem to be at a point in the evolution of our society where everyone is clamoring for more technology, for instant access to ever-growing bodies of information.

Students must be online. Your home must be digitally connected to the World Wide Web. Businesses must be able to download volumes of data instantaneously. But unless we shift our paradigms and refocus our parameters, the super information highway will lead us nowhere.

We are not now, nor have we recently been suffering from a lack of information. Think how much more information we have than Copernicus had four centuries ago. And he didn’t do anything less Earth-shattering (pun intended) than completely change the way the universe was viewed. He didn’t do it by uncovering more information--he did it by looking differently at information everyone else already had looked at.

Edward Jenner didn’t invent preventive medicine by accumulating information; he did it by reframing the question.

What we need as we begin to downshift onto the information highway is not more information but new ways of looking at it. We need to discover, as my kids did, that there is more than one right answer, there is more than one right question and there is more than one way to look at a body of information. We need to remember that when you have only a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail.

获益匪浅的问题

不久前的一个晚上在餐桌旁，我的三个孩子--年龄分别为9岁、6岁和4岁--暂时停止争抢食物，腾出时间教我认识什么是范式变换、什么是线性思考的局限以及如何重新看待相关的各种因素。

事情是这样的：当时我们在玩自己那套只动嘴的“哪个不是同一类？”的芝麻街游戏。本来玩这游戏时，孩子们要看三张画并挑出那张不属同一类的画。我说：“来吧，哪个不是同一类，桔子，西红柿，还是草莓？”

老大很快就说出了自以为非常得意的答案：“西红柿，因为其他两种是水果。”我承认这是正确答案，尽管有些纯粹主义者坚决认为西红柿是一种水果。对我们这些从小就被迫吃拌在色拉里的西红柿的人来说，西红柿永远是蔬菜。我正准备再出一道三种东西为一组的题目时，我4岁的孩子说：“正确答案是草莓，因为另外两种是圆的，草莓却不圆。”我怎么能驳

斥这种论点呢？

接着，我6岁的孩子说：“不属同一类的是桔子，因为另外两种是红色的。”9岁的孩子不想让弟妹占上风，说道：“不是同一类的也可以是桔子，因为其他两种长在藤上。”

老二把这看作对他发出的挑战。“可以是草莓，因为只有草莓会放在冰淇淋上。” 毫无疑问，这里正发生着什么事儿。这事儿比争抢食物还乱，比西红柿是水果还是蔬菜重要得多。哥白尼把太阳视为宇宙中心，重新调整了地心说这一长达数世纪的范式，我的孩子们正做着哥白尼当年做的事。鲁宾·马修斯把他的布朗克斯冰淇淋改名为哈根达斯，在不改变产品的情况下提高了价格，我的孩子们正做着鲁宾·马修斯做过的事。爱德华·詹纳放弃了寻找治疗天花的特效药，从而发现了能预防这一疾病的疫苗，我的孩子们正做着爱德华·詹纳做过的事。

他不去研究得了天花的患者，而去研究接触天花却从未染上此病的人。他发现他们都患了一种类似天花但比较轻微的疾病：牛痘；牛痘使他们得以防止染上致命的天花。

他们在重新看待相关的各种因素。他们在重新认识他们的问题。他们在重新表述他们的问题。总之，据托马斯·库恩在他的《科学革命的结构》一书中所言，他们正做着历史上有过重大发现的科学家都曾做过的事：他们在改变旧的范式。

但假若我们的游戏是学校里做在作业本上的练习，那么没有把西红柿圈出来的孩子全都会被批为答错。凡是没有把问题解读为“哪个不是水果”的孩子都是错的。也许这种情形说明了为什么世界上最杰出的科学家和发明家中有那么多的人读书时是不及格的学生。其中最引人注目的是阿尔贝特·爱因斯坦，他也许是本世纪最有影响的范式改变者。

这样说，并不是想对学校评头品足。天知道，发一通议论太容易了。这样说，不过是想提醒大家信息的价值实在是有限的。我提出这一点，是因为我们的社会似乎发展到了这样一个阶段，人人都大声要求得到更多的技术，大声要求即刻享用不断增多的信息。

学生们必须联机。你们家必须用数码与环球信息网连通。企业必须能即时下载大量资料。但是，除非我们改变范式、重新看待相关的各种因素，否则，信息高速公路就不会给我们带来什么结果。

无论是现在还是最近，我们都不缺信息。试想我们拥有的信息比四百年前的哥白尼多了多少。但他作出了足以震撼地球的（权作双关语）惊人之举，完全改变了人们对宇宙的看法。他作出此举不是靠发现更多的信息，而是靠用不同的眼光来看大家都看到过的信息。爱德华·詹纳不是靠积累信息发明预防药物，而是靠重新表述问题。

当我们开始驶入信息高速公路时，我们所需要的不是更多的信息，而是看信息的新方法。我们应该像我的孩子所做的那样，去发现有一个以上的正确答案、有一个以上正确的问题、有一个以上看一堆信息的方法。我们应该记住：当你只有一把锤子时，你往往把每个问题都看作钉子。