Dumbbell

“How stupid not to have thought of it before.”

T.H. Huxley on reading Darwin's Origin of the Species

Here is a famous dumb question:

Sally is five feet tall, always tells lies, and weighs what Sam would weigh if he were 2 inches taller than her.  Sally says she weighs 10 pounds more than Sam.  Sam is the exact same height as Sally and always tells the truth and in fact weighs 10 pounds less than her.  What is the simplest way to find out Sam's weight? 

Smartycats relish the details of that question and see it as a fine challenge.  But that will not help because the answer is not in the calculus but in the obvious.  We will get to that in a moment.

What is striking about many creative breakthroughs is not how majestic they are but how dull.  Not explosive but plodding.  In a word…dumb.  After all, great ideas do not have to be brilliant; they just have to be illuminating in the same way that even a tiny match in a dark room is a bright light.

This is another take on Occam’s Razor, the idea that the simplest solution to a problem can be the most effective one.  Sometimes the answer is the most obvious one no one else saw.  But to see it, you have to lower your sights, take the low road, plod with the best of them.  Like the question posed by a French newspaper: "If a fire broke out in the Louvre and you could save only one painting, which one would it be?”  Of the many opinions about that, the French dramatist Tristan Bernard had the simplest answer: "The one nearest the exit."

Sometimes you just have to dare to be dumb.

Which naturally brings us to the Black Death.

The plague that ravaged Poland in the 14^th century led to a host of victims who were not actually dead but instead in a deathlike coma.  It was discovered after a while that they could sometimes spontaneously revive.  The problem was that you could not tell by observing them who would live or succumb and the upshot was that many people were accidentally being buried alive. 

Horrible thought.

So they came up with all sorts of elaborate designs to solve the problem of being buried while you were still alive.  Food and water systems inside the casket, bells and pulleys so someone inside could signal from the grave, and complicated methods of bringing air into the coffin.  But these were all way too expensive, too complex. 

There was actually a much simpler solution but it took a while to find it.  What was it?  The coffin makers began to install a foot-long stake in the coffin lid directly over the victim’s heart.  Brainstorm!  When the coffin lid was nailed down, the stake in the lid killed you. 

That solved the problem because now they knew for certain that the person they were burying was dead.  It was a simple solution but it involved changing their thinking, dumbing it down in a way.  The question about what to do if they buried someone alive was complicated.  A much simpler question was…how do we make sure that everyone we bury is dead?

The fact that this tale may have been the basis for the best way to kill a vampire, another twist on the undead, is just icing on the cake.

Dare to be dumb means that you may have to ask a simpler question to get a better dumb answer.  But perhaps a more upbeat example will make a better case.  It involves NASA, the space agency, which spent millions of dollars trying to create a pen that would write in zero gravity.  They did experiments on fluidics, tests of various pump mechanisms, new kinds of pigments and binders, hired design firms to compete for solutions that would work.  Meanwhile, the Russians did not have that kind of money.  So what did they do?

Their astronauts used pencils.

I rest my case and hereby place a nice solid dumbbell in the Ingenarium, a symbol of looking for the obvious.

And the answer to that opening poser?  The simplest way to find out Sam's weight is to just ask him.  After all, he always tells the truth!