Good Explanations Are Acts of Creativity

There's a phrase that you're going to hear both Brett and I use over and over again, and that phrase is good explanations. Good explanations is Deutsche's improvement upon the scientific method. At the same time, it's beyond science. It's not just true in science, but in all of life.

We navigate our way through life, and we do it successfully by creating good explanations. If you take away nothing else, try and understand what a good explanation is. A good explanation, first and foremost, is testifiable and falsifiable. You can run some experiment in the real world to see if it's true or not.

Stepping back from that, it's a creative explanation. It looks at something that's going on in the real world and says, "This is why it's happening." It is a creative leap that says this is the underlying explanation for how the thing works.

For example, when I talk to my young kids and we're out watching the sunset, I keep telling them, "Is the sun setting? Is the sun going somewhere? Is the sun moving? Or is it maybe we're moving, and we're moving in such a way that it looks like the sun is setting?" Which is the proper explanation.

Because looking at it naively, you would think the sun is hurtling across the sky, and there goes the sun again, going around the earth. But that may not be the only explanation. There is a completely creative explanation that seems to fly in the face of the obvious observation of the sun's movement, but could also fit the facts.

But it requires some creativity, and that creative explanation is that the earth is rotating. Good explanations don't have to be obvious. They're not derived from just looking at what happened in the past, but they are testable.

There are experiments we can run to figure out, is it the sun that is going around the earth, or is it the earth turning? Thank you to Eight Sleep for supporting the Naval Podcast. All of the sponsorship revenue goes to our guests to support their work.

Eight Sleep makes a heating and cooling smart mattress, which they tell us gets you to sleep 32% faster with 40% fewer sleep interruptions. Go to eightsleep.com/infinity for a discount. I'll put a link in the show notes.