When an idea is blatantly wrong or flawed, it’s easy to dismiss.
But there’s another category of ideas, which are much sneakier: “flawless” ideas. These are initiatives, plans, and strategies that seem to make perfect sense at first: in our mind, there’s a direct connection between action and result, we have a plan to deal with all contingencies, and nothing could possibly go wrong.
Our minds love flawless ideas because [[human-beings-hate-uncertainty|Human beings hate uncertainty]].
Unfortunately, reality is much more complex than our mental model of it. Most flawless ideas are only flawless because we are swapping the territory for its map and we are failing to account for a number of potential problems or sources of entropy. When they face the real world, they’ll break down in a nanosecond because they are inserted in a chaotic system. This leads to problems such as:
This is one of the reasons why Ideas need to be grappled with: because it helps us uncover their flaws and blind spots, and it keeps us honest.