The Thought-Blackhole

After too much thought, I conclude that the free will vs. determinism dichotomy is an example of the “thought-blackhole” concept that I’ve been sketching: an idea that draws in thought and thinkers, but for which progress is impossible. All effort on a thought-blackhole is wasted.

A view of the Milky Way supermassive black hole Sagittarius A* in polarised light

What else could be a thought-blackhole? Well, it depends a lot on who you are. If your name is Terence Tao, then there are a lot of tough math problems that aren’t thought-blackholes to you. But anything that’s worth Terence’s time is a thought-blackhole to me!

The opposite of a thought-blackhole is a situation where one has thought-leverage. If you have thought-leverage, then a relatively small effort in thinking can have a super-proportionate positive impact on the world. Thought-leverage usually requires you to be part of a team that’s part of a well-functioning organization, for you to be using powerful tools and for you in particular to have specialized insight or skill for the specific problem at hand. And thought-leverage is going to be about something small. A key to thought-leverage is the ability for teams to reason about a large problem in a systematic way that allows them to decompose the whole into manageable parts. You’re going to crack a nut-sized problem, perhaps one that no one has cracked before. 

However, an individual may be unable to contribute to entire subjects, entire schools of the academy. I am going to remain eternally stuck if I ever try to take on the history of the longbow in France during the 30-years’ war, or actually, the history of war, or maybe even I’m going to be ineffective at “history” entirely full stop. But that’s not quite a thought-blackhole, because there’s no irresistible attraction for me to study longbow history. 

But what would you think if all your friends talked constantly about longbow history, and newspapers everywhere published articles on longbow history, relatives regularly fought over the dinner table at holidays about longbow history, friendships commonly ended over disagreements on longbow history — and yet, no one ever got closer to some kind of practically useful knowledge from all this? Like, say, no one could build a period-correct longbow, or even recognize one in a photograph?

OK, so substitute “longbow history” with a currently divisive but multi-decade political problem (I'm sure you can think of at least one). It would be enormously desirable to find an effective solution for that problem! Everyone seems to have opinions! Interested people and the problem itself seem to demand thought from me! But, for most matters of this kind, there’s no way I can think up anything novel and useful. Such problems are blackholes for my thought, sucking energy in, giving nothing in return. (Hopefully, there's someone out there with thought leverage on each specific, thorny political problem, who can translate effort into positive change in some way that's a lot faster and more effective than voting every so often and complaining to their friends!)

In summary, a thought-blackhole has these two defining properties:

• It has a gravitation-like attraction. One naturally falls into thinking about it.

• No amount of thought makes any material progress on the matter. 

After having identified that a topic is a through-blackhole for you, what should you do? Here are some suggestions:

• Consider why the topic is attractive to you.

• Be practical: figure out what you can do about the topic, however small. Then do that and move on.

• Be impractical: if it’s fun to think about, then go ahead! It’s appropriate to play computer games sometimes, and throwing time down thought-blackholes is not a priori less worthy entertainment.

• Join a gang. We have few problems that can be solved by the lone scholar, but many that could (in principle) be solved by gangs, scenius collectives and teams.

These steps may be difficult and perhaps may involve reaching levels of enlightened self-control that are not possible to continuously sustain. In particular, for me, the “move on” instruction can be difficult. If a thought-blackhole is bothersome, but keeps coming back, then the situation reduces to the therapy-based playbook on how to manage intrusive negative thoughts. 

A key part of the therapeutic strategy, for me anyway, is acceptance. Whether by free will or the determination of fate, it’s best to accept that sometimes I will spend my precious hours trying to unravel whether it’s free will or determinism that decides how I spend my hours.

Thanks to Alec Doane for his feedback on a draft of this essay and his advice on what to do about thought-blackholes.