the universe revealed: puzzles vs mysteries

Guaranteed to blow a thinking person’s mind with its simplicity:

Malcolm Gladwell (author of The Tipping Point and Blink) has another amazing article in The New Yorker. I proclaim it article of the (10 day old) year. He attempts (and surprisingly, largely succeeds) to defend Enron’s ex-CEO Jeff Skilling by asserting that Skilling should not have been legally liable because he disclosed Enron’s sketchy bookkeeping in mammoth amounts of financial disclosures. Basically, Enron’s “deception” was hidden in the open and so they didn’t lie. Though the article is about Enron, it really isn’t.

The mind-blowing point is when Gladwell explains the difference between “puzzles” and “mysteries” using a distinction made by national-security expert Gregory Terverton. In a nutshell:

A puzzle is something that requires more information to solve. The example in the article is that bin Laden’s whereabouts are a puzzle—all we’re lacking is information. The more information we have (for example, what city he is in narrows down our search monumentally) the easier it is to solve the puzzle. My example, think Wheel of Fortune: each letter revealed makes the puzzle easier to solve.

A mystery is something that would require analysis, judgment and experience. Fundamentally, a mystery has to do with uncertainties. As Gladwell puts it, mysteries don’t have “a simple, factual answer.” His example in the article is “what would happen in Iraq, post-toppling of Saddam Hussein?”100 different people have 100 different assessments of what post-Iraq would be like. Simple, factual answer? No way. My example: think about the show, House MD. While information (in the form of tests and investigation the patient’s personal lives) is absolutely needed and gathered—it’s the rigorous analysis and experience of House that always cracks the nut and “solves” the case. And true to form, there is almost always very strong dissent that his diagnosis and/or treatment is the wrong and sometimes dangerous course of action—because these patients’ disorders are not puzzles, they’re mysteries requiring judgment. Medicine is founded on the puzzle premise, which is why House is unique (and good television)—he also solves mysteries.

This is interesting, because I believe we attempt to turn everything in our lives into puzzles even those which are mysteries. An example would be any kind of major life decision: we cling to the notion that everything can be solved by one more piece of information. We delay decisions by weeks or months, claiming that we’re waiting to find out about X or Y. Instead, what we should be doing is spending serious time doing some soul-searching (another word for soul-searching: analysis) about what we really want, etc. From my own personal experience, most things I’ve struggled with didn’t have easy, simple factual answers but were of the mystery variety. But I always pinned my hopes of a clear decision on something a few weeks off or some other milestone– I would have been better off doing the analysis (soul-searching) immediately, because in most cases my decision would have been the same regardless of the new information. But as Gladwell states, we don’t like mysteries because they’re not simple, and like most things in life—we take the easy way out.

This article is a –must- read!