A few days ago I finished listening to the book Range by David Epstein, and it was good. Essentially it described to me something that I already knew, but in a way that I hadn't understood or articulated. People that do a range of different sports or jobs before getting to their current sport or job often have more success than people that specialize very early in their sport or job.
One way this manifests is that people with a range of experience can give an analogy about a situation to describe it in a different way, and that might provide some insight to a group that they didn't have before to the current situation. He spends one chapter of the book talking about people that forecast different events, and the people that are able to forecast the best often have the largest range of experience, and relentlessly change their minds about thing as new information is presented. So I took some time to reflect on myself, do I have a good range of experience? Am I open to changing my mind on things? What have I changed my mind on in the past?
It both made me feel good about having changed my mind on a number of things, and also made me feel a little bad that I didn't seek out more diverse opinions on topics to intentionally change my mind more often. To give a big example, but also one that moved rather slow for me, 20 years ago I didn't think that universal healthcare made sense, it would be too expensive, end of story. However, over the last two decades, I've learned how much money insurance companies make, and how much money pharmaceutical companies make, and how much debt it takes to become a doctor, and how in many cases, like PEPFAR a dollar a day can actually save a person's life for decades. Would you save a person's life for $1.00 per day? I think that's a no brainer, yes, every single time. Raise my taxes to make that possible. I can pay an extra $10/day to save 10 lives a day. The United States is a wealthy country, how is it countries with half or a third of our average income per person can have universal healthcare, but we can't?
To give another example, I still can't believe I'm in manufacturing. In a few months it will have been five years, and admittedly my design skills are a little rusty. I always perceived manufacturing as dirty, dangerous, poorly illuminated, but the reality today is very different than the factories of 50 years ago. Plus there is a certain satisfaction to building something, you get to see the thing that you were working on come to fruition. In the design world you can spend years working on something, and then it can actually get canceled before it becomes reality, and that happened to me several times. Of course the risk in manufacturing is you build a whole new factory and never get to take the factory to production.
Another example is the three stage rocket. I need to write this one out more, but nearly three years ago I watched two coworkers debate a two stage versus a three stage rocket, and despite the fact that nearly every rocket company works around two stages, I've actually come down on the side of a three stage rocket. Why? Well, we know a first stage rocket can be reusable and land vertically, so now it's just a matter of making it more reusable and easier to reuse. We also know that orbital vehicles like the space shuttle can be reusable. However, due to the rocket equation, a two stage rocket just never really can get that much to orbit. So a solution that no one has implemented is make a three stage rocket, with stage one landing back on land within a few miles from the launch pad for easy refurbishment between flights. Stage two landing 1000 miles away on a barge, or better yet some piece of land, and then stage three being orbital, and either disposable, or reusable. Trying to make a second stage orbital and fully reusable means that the payload capacity will be small compared to the mass of the second stage, something like 5% of the dry mass of the second stage. It's like saying that you need a 5,000 pound SUV to deliver 250 pounds total to the destination... which is only two people and no luggage if the people are small. And the problem is reentry is always going to be harsh on vehicles, so that second stage in a three stage vehicle that is suborbital, you really want to minimize the reentry stress on that stage.
The point of these examples are it's okay to change your mind, in fact, it's good when you are presented with new information. Often the ideal answer isn't clear and it can take a lot of research to find the best answer that incorporates all of the available data. It can definitely be hard to search out an opposing opinion at times, but it's often worth is to find a better solution.
