CHAPTER 3-1 GETTING AND ELIMINATING IDEAS How can you arrange the Thanksgiving holiday so that the family will avoid the usual painful hassles which lessen the pleasure of being together? Where can you get good advice about how to market your new voice-transcribing computer system? How should the Soviet Union make the transition from a planned and centrally-controlled economy to a market-based economy? You need good ideas to efficiently manage the myriad physical and organizational aspects of your daily business. You also need ideas about alternatives for your personal or professional life as raw material for cost-benefit evaluation. And you also must know how to eliminate from consideration ideas that are unpromising, so as not to waste valuable time making unnecessary analyses. This chapter is about both creating and eliminating ideas. HOW TO GET IDEAS Creating a set of alternatives usually requires only that you do a workmanlike job of collecting the obvious possibilities, without ignoring any important alternatives. Example 1: A family building a new house considers how to deal with the heat of summer. They need evaluate only a) a central air conditioning system; b) window air conditioners; c) fans; d) desert coolers; e) move away and build the house in a cooler climate; f) build the house underground; g) swelter. They can collect all of these ideas plus a few other variations by asking friends and commercial heating-and-cooling agencies. Example 2: What should the U. S. do about an American clergyman seized and held hostage in Libya? The President orders up a menu of alternatives from the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the State Department, and the National Security Council. A satisfactory list is likely to contain only rather obvious possibilities, though an unorthodox alternative or two may also be included. Example 3: If you are the president of General Motors, what should you do about foreign auto imports? You can a) produce abroad, b) diversify into non-auto products, c) leave the automobile business, d) improve quality, or e) automate; that's about it. The key step in developing a good list of alternatives is to search widely enough so as not to miss any obvious possibilities. Overlooking, and therefore never even considering, an obvious important possibility is the most frequent defect in the process of idea collection. This pitfall usually can be avoided by sitting down with pencil and paper, and then discussing the situation with others who have general and specific knowledge of the matter at hand. The vital point is to actually carry out a systematic search. You must stop, look and listen rather than simply proceeding with existing alternatives, or limiting yourself to that set in hand plus perhaps one other idea that struck your mind by happenstance. Happenstance imagination is wonderful, but it should be supplemented by system to help you avoid overlooking the obvious. Keep on looking for a better idea, too. The third-floor attic of our house was to be renovated to make it a study. The contractor was delayed several months by other jobs. During those months, my wife, the carpenter, and I found several important ways to make the renovation much more valuable, ideas that we would not have had if the contractor had come on time. Another example: the four shelves of the little plastic cart that carries my writing tools, clip board, message pads, and other miscellany around my work room next to me were slipping out of the side rails. What to do? One day I thought of extending the little lips on the rails by using tape. No good. Two days later: tape on the shelve edges. No good. Next day: old nails under the the shelf edges to make them protrude more. No good. Then pulling in the side rails with string or wire. No good. Then a week later: pushing out the sides of the shelves with sticks. No good. Then a yardstick ruler down each side of the cart to make the rails extend further inwards. Might work. So I made a note to buy some pieces of wood. But I put off getting them. And two days later I went into the basement and noticed two old metal curtain rods. Perfect! They are stiffer than wood, and easily extendable to the exact length. And that did it This example also shows how the "prepared mind" matters. The curtain rods came into my mind as a solution to the cart problem because my thoughts were directed toward the problem, and I had identified various possible lines of solution - push in, pull out, build up edges, stick something under or through the edges, and so on. Ideas don't enter unless your mind is open for business. Ideas evolve, as the cart solution did. Once I collected a sample of the little yellow gummed date-stamp slips in the back of the University of Illinois library books. Some had been there since the system began early in the 20th century, and the old ones still remained even though the system had been computerized. They all look basically the same, but there are dozens of small variations in placement and language of the instructions. When the stock was about to be reprinted, the person in charge at the time had undoubtedly ordered a small improvement. And the improvements added up over the years to a more efficient little slip. Too many people think that progress comes from Newtons and Einsteins, people who are supposedly geniuses. Certainly they are important. But the small creative contributions of many many of us are indispensable to progress. Often the greatest benefit of a new idea is to provoke re- examination of the present situation plus a review of the options. This often causes a shift to something other than either the present alternative or the idea that struck you by chance. A frequent pitfall in creating ideas is not having a clear idea of the main problem. Developing a terrific set of alternatives to handle an irrelevant situation may evoke others' admiration for your imagination, but it does not improve your situation or induce much continued demand for your services. Expensive and varied experience helps you produce a long and good list of alternatives. But long experience sometimes closes the mind to new ideas. If that idea was any good I would have seen it already, you think. Imagination is the second element in producing ideas. A newly-imagined idea often arises from a sense of dissatisfaction with the existing situation. If you don't itch, you won't scratch, someone said. This was literally my situation once. My body itched for no apparent reason. Then I noticed it was just my upper body that itched, and especially my neck and shoulders. I first thought the itch might be due to a sweatshirt I'd worn earlier while doing dusty work. But a shower and a clean shirt did not solve the problem for long, so I ticked off that possibility. Then I thought it might be due to the synthetic material in the shirts I was wearing; again experimentation showed it not to be so. (But were these experiments really conclusive? Perhaps the itch was slow to develop and slow to go away, but let's leave that aside for now.) Then I noticed that the itch became most apparent upon waking in the morning and from my afternoon nap, so perhaps the sheets or pillow might be the cause, but again it was not so. Then ... Surprise! My hair was too long! The dander on my head was making me itch. The reason that this was so surprising is that I am thoroughly bald, and it never occurred to me that the tiny fringe around my skull could be producing enough dander to cause an itch. What I arrived at in this case by imagination, a physician would have arrived at from experience. A doctor undoubtedly would have a mental list which includes dander from hair, especially in the year the incident occurred when doctors were seeing many cases of long hair. Similarly, when a virus is going around town, a physician quickly spots its particular symptoms. But when an exotic tropical disease arrives, even skilled physicians may not recognize it for some time. The general principle underlying itch-and-scratch is that, necessity is indeed the mother of invention.1 The Nobel-winning economist and philosopher Friedrich Hayek may well be right that "Man has been impelled to scientific inquiry by wonder and by need. Of these wonder has been incomparably more fertile".2 Much basic knowledge is created in non- commercial settings, influenced only indirectly by economic needs and priorities. But as Hayek goes on to note, "Where we wonder we have already a question to ask". The need of the community, interpreted in the widest sense, often is the cause of the questions in thinkers' minds. This implies that you should give full sway to your "divine dissatisfaction". Ask yourself: What is not perfect enough here that we can improve? Brainstorming The group activity called brainstorming can speed the flow of ideas. Brainstorming is a procedure for unlocking the compartments of your mind and breaking down the barriers against the free flows of images, associations, comparisons, analogies, metaphors, and other non-routine aspects of thought. The technique was first used by advertising copywriters when stumped for new ideas about how to promote a product. It can be used in any context, however, and its principle can even help an individual working alone. Brainstorming works by letting you express the "crazy" thoughts that you would otherwise censor because you think they might sound foolish. Your wild idea can be the seed of someone else's not-so-wild idea. When you brainstorm you shut off the monitor that criticizes silly ideas, and you let 'em rip. The critical thinking takes place later. These are the rules of a brainstorming session (after Stone, p. 418ff): 1. Provide everyone with full information in advance about the problem to be addressed. The more you know about the problem, the better your chances of coming up with a good idea. Luck usually favors the prepared mind. Yet people who walk into the session knowing nothing of the problem sometimes come up with the the best ideas because their thinking has been the least limited by past thinking. 2. No one may criticize anyone else's ideas or their own. Suspend all judgment about whether an idea is good or bad. You can tell someone that his/her idea is really wild if you mean that admiringly, but aside from that -- no judgments. Just accept what you hear, and rack your brains for ways to improve the idea that you have just heard, or come up with another idea that is even farther out. 3. The wilder and crazier the idea, the more the group should welcome it. 4. Shoot for quantity of ideas rather than quality -- just the opposite of ordinary everyday behavior. 5. Try to find a kernel of solid sense in even the wildest idea, and then try to add to that kernel. That is, don't jump from one idea to the other, but try to enhance each one before moving on. (So even in the brainstorming session there is an underlying discipline, just as there is an underlying control in an artist even when she feels as if her imagination is completely unfettered and her mind on automatic pilot. The trick is to keep the discipline as light and unobtrusive as possible.) The brainstorming group should in advance designate a leader who will a) make known the rules before the brainstorming meeting, b) record the ideas that are suggested, c) shut off any critical thinking, d) try to get everyone involved, and e) work toward building up good ideas rather than just rushing helter- skelter from one to the other. Only after the brainstorming is over should you bring to bear your everyday critical faculties. Only then should you make judgments about which ideas are good enough to pursue and which ones should be dropped. The Letting-Go Mode There is considerable similarity between this two-step create-then-criticize procedure and the reports of many artists about how they work -- first letting themselves float effortlessly in an abandon of idea-production (though still under the control of a hardly-noticed discipline, as mentioned above), and only later on subjecting the ideas to critical scrutiny. More about this in Chapter 8-0 on art. Brainstorming also has much in common with the meditation of Asian 'religious' thought, which also is a letting-go process. ('Religious' is in quotes because of the great differences between what is called "religion" in the West and the East.) Brainstorming is quite different from meditation, however, in being energetic rather than effortless. You are trying to accomplish something in brainstorming, whereas in meditation you try not to try: this is an important apparent paradox which goes to the heart of the process. (More about meditation in Chapter 8-0). There also is a connection between the letting-go mode of thinking, and dreaming -- both daydreaming, and dreaming while asleep. While dreaming you do not maintain the same control over your mind that you do when fully awake. There are many accounts of ideas that came to people when asleep, though always when the mind had been prepared while awake. One of the most famous is the story of Friedrich August Kekule, the father of organic chemistry. One night in a dream he saw a snake with its tail in its mouth. This gave him the idea that the structure of benzene is six atoms of carbon arranged in a ring, which turned out to be what the Encyclopedia Brittanica calls the "most brilliant piece of prediction [ever made in] organic chemistry". Letting go is one of the fundamental elements of many disparate branches of thinking -- scientific and practical idea- getting, art, religion (mysticism in Western religion is related), and some therapeutic devices to fight the sadness of those who suffer from depression (see Chapters 5-2 and 5-3). Generating ideas requires that you prepare your mind well. But you must also keep yourself from being wholly absorbed by what is known. The ideal is a delicate balance between enjoying the fruits of past work, and yet being sufficiently free so that you can depart from past work to new ideas of your own. This paradoxical combination of thorough acquaintance with existing knowledge along with keeping yourself unencumbered by what is already known illustrates another theme that runs through many kinds of thinking: You need both of two opposed principles -- in this case the opposed principles of discipline and freedom. About the oriental martial arts people often wonder: How can the students be so rigidly regimented in their training and yet have the spontaneity to play well? There is no satisfying logical answer. Yet the outcome is beyond doubt: The method works. And many great innovative artists such as Leonardo da Vinci and Pablo Picasso have insisted on the importance of achieving a mastery of the craft of drafting, which requires arduous and precise training. The ability to execute perfectly with your hands what your eye sees -- that skill provides the springboard to great departures from the known, rather than being a bar to it, for many great innovators. Two other pairs of opposites that influence the creative flow are order-cum-disorder, and ambiguity-cum-clarity. We naturally pursue order and clarity, because life is more comfortable in their presence than in the presence of disorder and confusion. And it makes sense to struggle for order and clarity. But at the same time we must recognize that disorder and ambiguity often promote new ideas. ("Necessity is the mother of invention.") This is partly because they constitute states of need -- the needs for order and clarity -- which induce ideas. Partly they promote new ideas because by their very nature they are states in which there are many and conflicting stimuli contending within your mental playground. It is natural to compare two or more contending stimuli. And from that comparison arises ideas, as well as evaluation (as discussed in Part I). That is, a variety of dissimilar but comparable stimuli is crucial to the production of ideas. The fish would be the last to discover water, it is said. This explains why immigrants -- who have been exposed to two different cultures -- are so likely to produce new ideas. Hence it pays to tolerate some ambiguity and confusion, and occasionally even to cause it purposely. Unfortunately, however, most of us feel so uncomfortable with confusion and disorder that we do our utmost to get rid of it. Too much knowledge -- especially too much knowledge of the existing theory -- can hamper the production of new ideas. Some people have the happy facility of forgetting bodies of knowledge and hence freeing up their creative capacities. Friedrich Hayek refers to such people as "puzzlers" or "muddlers", and repeats with approval the semi- joke that an educated person is one who has forgotten a great deal. He quotes Alfred North Whitehead that "muddleheadedness is a condition precedent to independent thought", and he writes: "Their [the muddlers'] constant difficulties, which in rare instances may be rewarded by a new insight, are due to the fact that they cannot avail themselves of the established verbal formulae or arguments which lead others smoothly and quickly to the result. But being forced to find their own way of expressing an accepted idea, they sometimes discover that the conventional formula conceals gaps or unjustified tacit presuppostions. They will be forced explicitly to answer questions which had been long effectively evaded by a plausible but ambiguous turn of phrase of an implicit but illegitimate assumption." (1978, p. 53) So don't despair if you are not in total command of all the knowledge in your field. Hayek also says that those "whom I regard as eminently `masters of their subject'...seem also to be particularly susceptible to the opinions dominant in their environment and the intellectual fashions of their time" (1978, p. 54). I would guess that he is correct.3 You can sometimes evoke ideas by purposeful exposure to random or incongruous stimuli. For example, a mechanical contraption called the Think Tank presents you with a random pairing of concepts, between which you try to find interesting connections. This is how an advertising copywriter used the Think Tank: First, I twist the dials on the sides of the Think Tank to jumble up the words inside. Second, I copy down six random words that appear in the window of the Think Tank. Third, I spend at least five minutes with each word, using word associations and so forth, that relate to the problem I'm trying to solve. Usually one or more of the words will "trigger" an idea. Here's an example: My problem was to come up with some new ideas on how to get more credit card holders for Amoco. I twirled the dial on the Think Tank and the word "water" popped into the window. In a matter of milliseconds my free, stream-of- consciousness thinking was set in motion and led to a unique idea. Water made me think of boats. Boats need gasoline, just as cars do (a good-size cruiser may spend $75 to $100 or more for a fill-up). There are Amoco gas pumps at marinas on the water. Why not send our regular credit card solicitation package with a special letter and special appeal to a list of boat owners? (Credit the lateral thinking process with this breakthrough idea.) (Stone, p. 420) Forced incongruity arises when someone asks a question such as: What happens if we add the best characteristic of your favorite toaster to the mini-tape recorder that we are selling? Incongruity can be useful in education, too. Next time you take a little girl or boy or a walk, ask: Why doesn't that tree fall down? And why doesn't it fly into the air? You may find useful some devices for training yourself to break out of conventional ruts. One of the most famous of these is this puzzle: Consider the nine dots in Figure 4-1-1. How can you connect all of them with an unbroken line without having the line cross itself? (For the answer, see 000). Figure 4-1-1 One special note about getting ideas for scientific problems to work on: Expose yourself to the world of real events and people. Look out your window as much as in the scientific literature. Certainly this is true in the social sciences, where social problems are perhaps the best source of important ideas. For example, the rampant unemployment of the 1930's stimulated Keynes to write his society-shaking book (for better or for worse). But in the physical sciences, too, interesting ideas may arise from watching the cream mix with the coffee in your morning mug, or watching the raindrops jerk their way down the window, or wondering why the squirrels chase each other in the patterns that they follow. It is also true in art as poet Wallace Stvens remarked: "The great well of poetry is not poetry but prose: reality". quoted in Washington Post Book World, December 24, 1989, p. 8. ELIMINATING IDEAS After producing a flock of ideas, you must quickly eliminate the least promising of them so that you can devote attention to those ideas that warrant closer inspection and evaluation. You cannot afford the time for careful evaluation of all the possible alternatives in any situation. Reducing the set to a manageable number is a crucial element of judgment in decision-making. Sometimes you can safely eliminate an idea on the grounds that others must have thought of it, tried it, and found it to be unsuccessful. For example, a mail-order advertiser can reasonably conclude know that a magazine that carries little or no mail- order advertising is not a profitable place to advertise for most products; other mail-order advertisers have surely tried it and found it wanting. (Of course there may be circumstances that make a generally poor medium a successful one for your given product, but the circumstances will almost surely be very unusual ones.) On the other hand, a seemingly-obvious idea may simply never have been thought of by someone in a position to try it. Consider the little loop on the inside of the wide upper end of men's ties that keeps the narrow underneath end from floating free. Before perhaps 1980 there were no such loops, though obviously there were no technical reasons for not putting them on ties; instead men used tie-clips or looked sloppy. Then after the tie loops came loops on the tongues of sneakers for insertion of the laces, to keep the tongue from sliding to one side, an even more utilitarian improvement. Odds are that the sneaker loops were an emulation of the tie loops. They, too, could have existed years before if someone had gotten around to making the innovation. So do not be to quick to assume that it must have been tried before. (It would be interesting to study the history of those loops as an interesting case of innovation. And incidentally, lots and lots of seemingly-obvious topics for fruitful scientific research have never been studied, simply because no one ever got around to it; the limited number of minds in the world limits the amount of knowledge that can be produced in any one period.) Weeding out ridiculous ideas requires that you have some knowledge of the world about you. Why does not the tree float off into the air? You must understand the force of gravity, and the mechanism of the tree's roots holding it in place. You should have the habit of asking yourself whether the numbers you hear and read make sense, given your general knowledge. For example, a superb self-help book for the asthma sufferer by a well-qualified allergist says on the first page that a) there are eleven million asthma victims in the U. S., b) "over 50 percent of asthma patients spend greater than 18 percent of their family income on asthma care", and c) "Over $1 billion is spent each year by asthma sufferers on hospital care, medications and doctor visits". (Weinstein, 1987, p. xxiii) If you know that there were almost 250 million people in the U. S., with average family income of more than $25,000 for a total national income of more than $4 trillion, you know immediately that either the $1 billion figure is wrong, or (more likely) the 18 percent of family income for half the patients is wrong, or both are wrong, by a huge factor of perhaps 10 or 20. (My guess is that the $1 billion figure is too small, and the 18% of income is too high.) The habit of checking ideas against your general knowledge saves you from many such blunders. But too little knowledge can be dangerous, too, when weeding out unfeasible ideas. If you are making fantasy movies in Hollywood and someone suggests having a tree float into the air, it would be useful to know about more than gravity and roots, and to think of helium and balloons painted like trees, before you dismiss the idea of airborne trees as ridiculous. There is always the danger that what seems ridiculous to you may be practical in the mind and hands of another person. For example, for the twelve years after I first published my volunteer-and-auction scheme for dealing with airline oversales, everyone in and out of the airline industry said it was a ridiculous idea that could not possibly work; they made fun of the idea and said I lacked the necessary knowledge of the industry. (That's what insiders always say to ideas from the outside. This is the NIH syndrome -- Not Invented Here.) When the idea was finally tried, it turned out that the insiders' knowledge was insufficient (in addition to insufficient profit motivation, probably). Now the scheme works beautifully every day of the year. (Remember an airline asking for volunteers when the plane was overfull? That's the idea.) More about this in Chapter 3-2 on experts. The concept of dominance is a neat logical tool for quickly eliminating ideas. You can sometimes simplify complex choices by finding an alternative which is better in every relevant characteristic than another alternative, though sometimes the dominance is not immediately apparent.4 For example, my excellent colleague W. was considering joining me at institution N -- first on a one-year basis to see if he would like it. But he would have had to take a pay cut for the trial year. He therefore tried to balance the better quality of the institution he might come to against the money cost for that year. But then we noticed if he were to come to N for a year and later go back to M, the latter institution would raise his pay on return because of his having been at N. Hence if he visited N and did not like it enough to remain, he would not lose any money in the long run; money therefore was not a reason not to reject visiting N. And he would not choose to stay at N after visiting if it did not then seem better than returning. So he did not need to compare coming to N permanently versus staying at M. Instead he needed only to compare staying at M versus visiting at N. And the latter alternative dominated the former because it provided valuable experience about whether he would want to remain, while not having a money cost. The analysis is shown in two tables. First we see how the decision looked at first, with the numbers in the cells indicating the order in which an institution is desirable on that characteristic: Original Analysis Institutional Alternative Preference Money Stay at N 1 2 Stay at M 2 1 Neither alternative is a clear choice because each is preferred on one dimension. Now let us add the possibility of visiting N for a year, creating two new alternatives: Amended Analysis Institutional Alternative Preference Money Visit N, then stay at N 1 3 Visit N, then return to M 2 1 Stay at M 3 2 The second array indicates that visiting N and then returning to M dominates simply staying at M, because the former is preferred on both dimensions. Therefore W. could immediately decide to visit N and use that year to decide whether to stay at N permanently -- which is what he did. Thus the principle of dominance immediately enabled him to eliminate the alternative of staying at M without more complex analysis. Here is another example of how one can discover an alternative that dominates another and thereby simplifies decision-making: J. was doing administrative work at university N when university Q offered him a nice position to be entirely a scholar. This was attractive to J., largely because he wanted to stop doing administrative work. But upon reflection he recognized that he also could be wholly a scholar at N -- by resigning his administrative job. And at N he could make a better salary, his family would not have to move, and there would be some other advantages as well. That is, being a scholar at N dominated being a scholar at Q. But until he sought to expand the list of alternatives in the search for combinations which would dominate the obvious alternatives, the alternative of being scholar at university N did not appear on list. (How did it come out? In a typically realistic twist, J. decided that he wanted to go to university Q anyway. How could this be, if our analysis was correct? The fact is that something was left out of our analysis -- J. just felt like moving. And this hidden benefit was only brought to light by the dominance analysis. Well, that's life.) Often it is possible to expand the set of choices from say, A and B, to some combination of A and B, by taking parts of both in sequence. The case of Professor P above is an example. Another example: Daniel is looking for an apartment. Should he take apartment A, or continue looking? Another possibility is to take A for a short while and also continue looking in a relaxed fashion. Of course there are added costs to this alternative, such as the additional burden of looking and moving again, and perhaps a security deposit, But the added costs may be less than the costs of being locked-in with a bad alternative, or to having to look for an apartment under pressure. Muddling Through Alternatives often fall into two general categories -- radical, and `meliorative'. And often you find yourself discussing whether the radical ideas with far-reaching consequences and hence needing thorough analysis should be considered further, or whether the scope of the discussion should be limited to less-global adjustments where no attempt will be made to do an overall analysis; this latter sort of `myopic' adjustment process is known as `muddling through' -- an inelegant procedure, but often effective. There are three possible reasons to decide in advance against adopting a radical idea: 1) It is not politically feasible even though it might improve the overall welfare of a situation. 2) The consequences are too unforeseeable. 3) It is possible to reach the radical idea in a series of less-radical steps, allowing for trial-and-error learning along the way. Political Infeasibility. There is no doubt that prudence is often a virtue in discussions of policies to adopt. If you urge policies that others think not worth discussing because the political situation renders them beyond possibility of adoption, people may dismiss you as impractical and a waster of the group's time. Sometimes, however, labeling an idea as politically unfeasible is a device to eliminate the idea by people who oppose it. I suggest that in such a case you say something like this: "If the rest of you consider the idea sound but politically unfeasible, let us quickly agree in stating that. We can then simply send on the suggestion to the next stage of deliberation noting that we find it sound but guess that it is unfeasible, and allow the other decision-makers to dismiss it rather than us dismissing it here. Sometimes good ideas are dismissed too early on grounds of political unfeasibility when they really are not unfeasible, or can become feasible in the future. So let us at least send on our best judgment, along with other policies we recommend as next best and also feasible." This tactic has the virtue of smoking out the real reasons for opposition, and sometimes the tactic can prevent an idea from being eliminated too early. Unforeseeable Consequences. The wisdom of eliminating a radical idea on the ground that the consequences are unforeseeable obviously depends on just how foreseeable the consequences really are. And people differ greatly in their judgments about foreseeability. Karl Marx believed that he could foresee the consequences of proletarian revolution and socialist economy clearly enough to urge with confidence those courses of action. To have opposed those radical social changes on the grounds that their consequences were not foreseeable makes sense in the hindsight of most of the people who have inherited the results in Eastern Europe and China. On the other hand, we never can know all of the consequences of a change, and unless we are prepared to move even in the face of considerable uncertainty we will never move at all. Anglo-Saxon societies have tended more toward making small "meliorative" changes rather than large changes, as compared to France and China. Perhaps this is connected to the greater willingness of the French than the British to trust in `logic'. The issue is somewhat different with respect to societies as a whole than with respect to mechanical systems and small groups. A society embodies spontaneously-acting forces for change which prevent paralyzing stasis, as long as individuals have reasonable liberty to act. And a society embodies many patterns of behavior the consequences of whose disturbance are unforeseeable because the patterns have evolved over generations rather than being the result of design by contemporaries. (See Chapter 6-4 for more discussion of this point; also Hayek, 1960; 1989.) But if one goes on patching up an old bicycle tire rather than purchasing a new tire when the patches become many, there is no spontaneously- acting force to change the situation independently. Therefore, the penalty for rejecting radical change in favor of only small changes is greater in mechanical matters, and in groups too small to have independently-acting centers of initiative, than it is in society at large. Often it is possible to gain the benefits of radical change while avoiding the hazards of radical moves by embarking on the radical change in small steps, to provide time for evaluation of the effects. This obviously will not work in all cases, however; sometimes the change must be all-or-nothing, as with pregnancy and birth; one cannot be just a bit pregnant. But in a surprising number of cases, ingenuity can create sequential alternatives. Consider an issue dear to me, major increase in the volume of immigration into the United States. Often the argument rages between a) those who call for an open door, on the grounds that the effects of present rates of immigration are positive, and b) those who call for no change on the grounds that the effects of huge increases in immigration are unforeseeable. I advocate increasing immigration in steps perhaps every three years, each new step taken only after there has been a chance to see whether the previous level has caused unforeseen problems of a sort that do not occur with present levels of immigration. In principle, in many cases a sequential strategy should appeal to both sides because it does not threaten major costs and keeps open the possibility of major benefits. But most people are so sure that they can foresee consequences on the basis of their experience and logic that even a tiny experiment is unnecessary. A painful example was my idea that airline oversales should be handled with a volunteer auction system. Opponents said it would cause chaos. I suggested a trial for a single day in a single airport at a single ticket counter. But for twelve years I could not even induce such a minor trial because the airlines were so sure they knew what the results would be. (And of course they were wrong, as the results at all U. S. airports since 1978 have shown.) ALTRN31# 8-2-90 FOOTNOTES 1[quote from Ult Res] 2Hayek, Friedrich A., "The Theory of Complex Phenomena", in Studies in Philosophy, Politics and Economics, Chicago: U of C. Press, pp. 22-42). 3Hayek also says of these "puzzlers" that "many of their particular ideas in different fields may spring from some single general conception of which they are themselves not aware but which, like the similarity of their approach to the separate issues, they may much later discover with surprise" (1978, p. 54). This rings true in my own experience. The underlying conception of humankind as improving its state of knowledge and evolving patterns which tend toward group survival has guided my expectations about the effects of population growth upon a wide range of phenomena. See my "Does Doom Loom?" 4Economists well recognize a cognate of dominance in the concept of Pareto improvement. REFERENCES Hayek, Friedrich, "Two Types of Mind", in New Studies in Philosophy, Politics, Economics and the History of Ideas, Chicago: U of CP, 1978, p. 53. Weinstein, Alan M., Asthma, New York: Fawcett Crest, 1987, p. xxiii. Page # thinking altrn31# 3-3-4d