Love the Problem, Not Your Solution
If asked about the most common pitfall that trips up inexperienced philosophers, close to the top of my list would be: Falling in love with your solution. Management advisor Ash Maruia has previously labeled this pre-disposition for the solution as the “Innovator’s Bias” and the following (and previous) words are mostly copied verbatim from one of his recent blog posts (2017) – I am trying to find a middle ground between plagirism and extensive quotation. According to Maruia, this so-called innovator bias is a sneaky troll: rearing it’s ugly head, not just during the early stages of research, but thorough its lifecycle, often when you least expect it. At each step, the most insightful theories come from a deep understanding of problems before solutions. Ideas are cheap When we first get hit by an idea, this is what we most clearly see and what we spend most of our energy towards. But most initial hypotheses fail — not because we fail to develop them into full-fledged theories o...