Many years ago, as my husband and I were about to begin our daily run, our young neighbor offered my husband some advice. "I know how to win every race," he excitedly told my husband. "Just start first and stay there."
Truly great advice to win every race. A lot harder to implement than it is to say.
And I find that what I hear when people talk about complex problems is answers with the same level of maturity and reality as the advice my young neighbor gave my husband.
It has me wondering how we have evolved to so many people believing that there are simple answers to complex problems.
And the people in the public eye that challenge us to think about the complexity of the problems that confront us, and ask us to listen to a well thought out long term plan, are blasted as intellectual elitists who don't understand the common man.
Sound bites can't solve poverty. Emotional speeches won't solve the problem of violence in society. Climate change won't stop impacting every day people because some don't believe it is real.
Part of the challenge is that to solve a problem that has never been solved, you have to try a solution that has never been tried.
And new ideas and new solutions are always met with skepticism.
Add to the skepticism that typically a change in direction means that someone who has garnered the ability to make lots and lots of money will need to change direction as well to keep their income stream secure, and you have a massive misinformation campaign about why new ideas won't work.
And then the back and forth arguing begins, and the media focuses on the emotions and not the facts, and pretty soon the level of debate has sunk to "You're ugly and your feet smell'. And nothing positive gets done.
How in the world can we break this cycle of inaction? It starts with each of us refusing the simple answer. It starts with each of us demanding civil discourse, and solutions supported by data.
It starts with accepting that every hypothesis can be proven, and every hypothesis can be disproven. The larger data set is the data set that deserves more analysis. And as the data supporting a position grows, your acceptance of the position as valid should grow.
The other critical factor is that complex problems don't have "silver bullet" solutions. A solution set is necessary to solve a complex problem, and the timelines for successful solutions are often multi-generational. Problems we think we have solved crop up again when we stop working on them, but we have also made tremendous gains and have had great success where data based problem solving has been used.
Think about the medical field if you are skeptical. Disease management, disease eradication, organ transplants, growing bones and skin in a laboratory; the list is long and impressive.
I believe we can solve social and economic issues as well if we are disciplined and rational enough to take a scientific approach.
But to do that we have to go back to teaching scientific method and analysis to our children instead of teaching them test taking skills.
We have to start somewhere. One planet, one people, one lifetime to get it right. And if we start now with trying to really solve some of our biggest problems instead of trying to score points off of each other and self-proclaim ourselves the winners, just think of the amazing progress we can make.
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