The Answers Lie: A New Theory of Error

1. The Answers Lie:  A New Theory of Error

3. If you know what you're looking for, inquiry is unnecessary.

4. If you don't know what you're looking for, inquiry is impossible.

5. Therefore, inquiry is either unnecessary or impossible.

6. Meno's Paradox from Plato's Dialogues

8. Once there was a man named Meno, who, before making his great discovery, toiled through long and short nights in relative obscurity. He was guilty of such eclectic and prodigious output that none was either able or willing to grasp his opus. His specialties ranged from Ichthyology to Linguistics to Geology, and he cross-pollinated many other a discipline along the way. Meno seldom worked from hypotheses. Instead he was goaded on by child-like frustration and wonder that led him hither and thither. He published a thick volume on Ornithology, with a focus on feather patterns, noting how like they were to scales on butterfly wings and on fish. Buried deep in one very long and fact-laden chapter was a variable equation that accounted for polka dots, chevrons, and eyespots -- a delightful surprise for the very few who ever managed to bushwack their way through a forest of detail.

9. The illustrations contained in the volume were drawn and colored by hand. Beautiful enough to stand alone as charming works of art, they were often used without permission on greeting cards and in tattoo parlors. Meno also authored a theory of fluid flow within heart cells, which he illustrated with computer-generated models of tiny hurricanes that, when one panned back, were revealed to be but the tips or tails of enormous donut-shaped magnetic fields. These images too found their way into odd places in the public domain, these too freed of their context and without reference to their humble maker.

10. If not esteem, one might look on with reverence at this man, who like a force of nature, had such a pure and "purposeless" passion for scaling, the sheer beauty of repetitive differentiation. No mad genius struggling with an unwieldy intellect, Meno was absolutely undeniably of mediocre intelligence. Constantly distracted by similarity and contiguity, he was hopelessly imprecise. But he made observations out of the laboratory where observations can never be precise, and Meno worked like profligate nature, like a thousand ordinary men. Every single act unconscious, in his habits, consciousness emerged. Eventually, a bias formed in his mind that compelled him, quite irrationally, to line up his data according to an arbitrary pattern, only a small part of which was really visible there. He found the answers lying a little left of the center upon which his peers had converged. They, with well-formulated questions and the best and most precise instruments and measurements, had been rather off. His flexible logic had let him range far afield of the others, loosed from the pull of that false center. 

11. Historians naturally went back to search for the signs of hidden genius in his habits and methods.  But when the search ended, no sign had been found. All that lay there were errors. In his earliest years, they were not the same kind of error made over and over again, but an extraordinary wealth of small errors of all kinds and touching on everything, reiterating endlessly. Then as he matured, he characteristically made a certain type of error, which seduced him further and further from the crowd.

12. The embarrassed historians straighten out his path and added a few essential steps that had been leapt over, such that the end was clearly inevitable at the beginning. They failed to understand that every author as unitary figure against the moonlight, does not walk upon a road, but leaps hilltop to hilltop, star to star, mapping new constellations as he goes.