The Wonderer, the Skeptic, and the Punk
A manifesto of sorts
This newsletter is, at its core, about wonder. It started when I got the term “cognitive wonder” stuck in my head after reading a science fiction book review—it captured the type of wonder that comes from a complex idea that changes how you think about some part of the world.
At first, I tried to make “wonder” the North Star of every article. It didn’t work. When I tried to write about cognitive biases, connecting it to “wonder” felt contrived and pretentious.
I’m glad that failed. By writing about what interested me, natural patterns appeared. One recurring theme has been scientific skepticism: being critical of pseudoscience and other easy answers.
Skepticism seems the opposite of wonder. Being critical and pointing out what’s wrong has a negative, cynical vibe, the opposite of the sort of starry-eyed optimism we associate with wonder. But wonder and skepticism are both connected to our structured understanding of the world.
Islands of Knowledge
For me, the quintessential example of cognitive wonder was when I first encountered evolution by natural selection as a teenager. Evolution was something I “knew about” but didn’t really understand. I thought it was a brute fact about the universe that species change and “get better”. My concept was more akin to Pokémon evolution than biological evolution.
Then I learned how it actually works. If individuals have different traits that impact their ability to survive or reproduce and traits are passed down, then the population will gradually move towards traits that help individuals reproduce more. Evolution is a natural, inevitable consequence of these interacting processes.
This shifted my understanding from an odd fact about the world to seeing why it had to be true, connecting it conceptually to other things I knew about like inheritance, reproduction, and competition.
That kind of understanding opened the door to new questions. I looked at every living thing and wondered: what selective pressures produced this feature? Spiders use their webs to catch food, but understanding evolution meant realizing there’s a deeper story about the environments and pressures that gradually shaped that behavior. Without knowing that story, I could see the gap such a story would fill.
Curiosity arises from noticing such gaps. When we lack a structured understanding, there’s no gap to notice. It’s when we understand enough to notice the shape of what’s missing that curiosity kicks in.
Understanding isn’t just about adding to our pile of knowledge, but about building a structured understanding that then reveals what we don’t know. As it is put by John Archibald Wheeler:
We live on an island surrounded by a sea of ignorance. As our island of knowledge grows, so does the shore of our ignorance.
Wonder has been characterized as coming up against things on the edge of our understanding—in other words, wonder arises from walking along the shore of our ignorance.
Enter the Punk
There’s another thread I need to add.
I spent my formative years listening to punk rock (my formative years might continue to today). A central part of the punk ethos is a rejection of authority, subtly captured in songs with titles like “Fuck Authority” and the eloquent lyrics of bands like Rage Against the Machine:
This introduces another tension. To be a “scientific skeptic”, one needs, well, science. And scientific knowledge comes from scientific experts—authorities, as they’re sometimes called.
The punk rock ethos pushes against accepting claims just because an authority makes them. But the skeptic in me recoils from those who say they “do their own research”, by which they usually mean getting health advice from online “gurus” and science from whoever says something outlandish enough to get on a big Youtube channel.
The way through this tension is to adopt the punk Do-It-Yourself ethos without being an idiot about it. Doing it yourself doesn’t mean rejecting expertise. It means building enough of an understanding of the world to judge credibility, recognize junk, and know when trust is warranted.
There’s no way to navigate the world without relying on others as information sources. But trust shouldn’t be blind. The more you understand, the better you’re able to assess whether an expert is competent and constrained by the evidence.
Understanding more also allows you to better connect to whatever the expert is telling you. If it’s an isolated fact, accepted because of an assertion from an authority, you don’t really understand it. You don’t know how we came to this knowledge or the limits of it. It’s disconnected from the rest of what you know.
To extend the island and shore analogy, facts like this mean we aren’t adding to our island, but being told there’s some rock sticking out of the water off the coastline. Without structure, “neat facts” about science don’t stick and don’t aid our understanding or support our independence.
Sometimes isolated facts are necessary. I don’t need to personally become an expert in the research behind every medical recommendation my doctor makes for me and my kids. I trust them because I understand the training, norms, and incentives that shape their recommendations. But the bigger my island is, the more I can at least see the possible connections to the isolated rock the expert has informed me of.
Learning isn’t about piling up new facts. It’s about gaining the right abstractions and relationships to grasp the connections between our concepts. Having connections between the ideas is what grows our little island of knowledge.
A rich, well-connected island of knowledge lets you accept or reject claims on whether they fit with what you already understand about the world. It gives you the foundation you need to assess experts and their claims, and avoid accepting things from dubious authorities.
Cultivating deep understanding is punk rock.
Finding the shore
One theme I’ve been pleased to discover running through my writing is this: The world is full of hidden wonders.
Almost anything you encounter you can dig deeper into. You can wonder how everyday objects work, or contemplate the biological processes of a plant or bug you see outside. Each has a million little mysteries you can discover.
I’m particularly interested in the easy-to-miss features of our own experience. Despite how much they shape our experience, it’s commonly thought we only have five senses. But there are others, like proprioception, that allows us to recognize the position of our body parts. These other senses are part of how we experience our world, but are easy to miss.
Finding and exploring these little invisible wonders expands our island of knowledge, leading to new questions that form new beaches on our shores of ignorance. Once you understand the different sensory mechanisms beneath our experience, you can ask how they work. How does something out in the world get converted to an electrical signal in the brain? How does the brain use that information? Understanding those questions allows us to ask further questions.
Finding the shores of ignorance isn’t trivial. We have to actively notice gaps in our everyday lives, something we often just don’t do. But we’re also often given shallow answers that paper over the gaps, actively hiding our ignorance.
Bad scientific “explanations” abound. There are “explanations” of complex behaviors that just amount to slapping a neuroscience label on them. Saying the temporal lobe is active during moments of insight doesn’t explain anything about insight.
We get bad explanations from vibe-based cultural commentary or amateur armchair philosophizing as well. These offer confident narratives without grounding in empirical data. The explanations don’t connect with what we know about the world, just with vibes the audience might share.
Good explanations offer mechanisms and tie those explanations to evidence. Vague theories are cheap. Theories that are supported by data and offer mechanisms—understandable parts working together to produce an outcome—are what expand our island of knowledge.
We should approach easy answers with skepticism. Does this actually connect with my island of knowledge? Does it actually provide a mechanism of action? We should probe it with the eyes of a wonderer—what questions do we have about this answer? And if an answer turns out to rely on labels, vibes, or authority alone, we shouldn’t be afraid to take the stance of the punk and simply snub our nose at it.
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I’m not a scientist, but I can recognize a good essay. Well done. I like your phrase, “structured understanding.” And thanks for introducing me to J. Archibald Wheeler and his island of knowledge. It occurs to me to ask whether every good scientist is also interested in epistemology. And whether every great scientist is also at least a dabbler in the arts. Why? Because they understand that the basis of both science and the arts is “I wonder whether X is like Y.”
I don’t think wonder and scepticism are opposites at all. I think scepticism is what protects wonder from collapsing into vibes. Without mechanisms, wonder turns into aesthetics. Without wonder, scepticism turns into cynicism. The balance you describe is exactly what keeps curiosity alive instead of being performative.