I was reading the obituary of John Stallings, a mathematician at UC Berkeley who is famous for his contributions to proving the Poincare Conjecture, when I came across the following quote:
I was unable to find flaws in my ‘proof’ for quite a while, even though the error is very obvious. It was a psychological problem, a blindness, an excitement, an inhibition of reasoning by an underlying fear of being wrong. Techniques leading to the abandonment of such inhibitions should be cultivated by every honest mathematician.
Good advice, even for non-mathematicians.
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Hi Graham, found your blog and added it to my reader. Hope you don’t mind :)
I also come across this quote today in a discussion about the limits of technology re: human progress (e.g. are we so invested in advancing technology that we are blind to the limits, sustainability, and consequences of progress, and fail to consider alternative paths of development.)