#think-elegant: choose vigor over rigor
This is the first article of a series sharing some effective principles to sharpen one’s mind #think-elegant series —to help us beautifully formulate problems, define the unknown and come up with innovative solutions for problems. For interested readers, please read my writing rules for better understanding of following contents.
“Choose vigor over rigor” is firstly seen in the book “An Introduction to General System Thinking” by a renowned system thinker Gerald Weinberg. It also echoes with the following quote:
There’s no sense in being precise when you don’t even know what you’re talking about. — John von Neumann
You can never apply anything you can not remember. An example would be the Law of Conservation of Energy stating that energy cannot be created or destroyed in an isolated system. There are elaborated forms to more rigorously stating the law with a formal deduction process — a more rigorous form exclusive to professionals with in-depth understanding of physics. However, from a practical perspective for a larger population, they want laws or rules in a more vigorous and forceful form that are easy to remember and thus to use in daily water cooler conversations.
Another example would be the “10X” introduced by the book “The 10X Rule” by Grant Cardone. The 10X Rule says that 1) you should set targets for yourself that are 10X greater than what you believe you can achieve and 2) you should take actions that are 10X greater than what you believe are necessary to achieve your goals. The 10 here in 10X should not be taken literally as a 10 multiplier — it is a symbolic way to neatly capture the basic idea of the desired massive improvements in most situations.
At last, let’s enjoy the beautiful quote of John Platt discussing the logical box and the mathematical box:
“Today we preach that science is not science unless it is quantitative. We substitute correlation for casual studies, and physical equations for organic reasoning. Measurements and equations are supposed to sharpen thinking but… they more often tend to make the thinking non-casual and fuzzy. They tend to be come the object of scientific manipulation instead of auxiliary tests of crucial inference.
Equations and measurements are useful when and only when they are related to proof; but proof and disproof come first and is in fact strongest when it is convincing without any quantitative measurements.
Or to say it another way, you can catch phenomena in a logical box or in a mathematical box. The logical box is coarse but strong. The mathematical box is fine grained by flimsy. the mathematical box is a beautiful way of wrapping up a problem, but it will not hold the phenomena unless hey have been caught in a logical box to begin with. — John R. Platt”
