Don’t Outsource Your Thinking to “Them”

I really hate hearing people say: “They must have their reasons.”

It’s not that this sentence is always wrong. Sometimes it’s just admitting you don’t know — other people might have information I don’t, or they might stand in a position I’ve never occupied. But more often than not, it expresses something else: I don’t want to keep asking. I don’t want to understand. I’m handing this question off to a vague, blurry “them.”

It’s the second kind I can’t stand.

There’s a direction in On Liberty that I find deeply resonant: truth needs to be tested through free discussion. I can’t say I believe “the more you debate, the clearer it gets” applies in every scenario, because people have biases, vested interests, and emotions. But at the very least, when everyone involved is willing to honestly face evidence and logic, I believe that seemingly contradictory views can almost always be reduced to two cases: either one side has a logical fallacy or lacks certain facts, or both sides ultimately differ on a subjective preference.

If that’s the case, then there’s no “reason” that we can’t eventually understand — given enough experimentation, reasoning, and patience.

“They must have their reasons.” What bothers me most about it is how often it stops thinking exactly where thinking should begin. It’s not humility — it’s intellectual laziness, an abandonment of thought. It’s not prudence — it’s the comfort of outsourcing your judgment.

Behind this, of course, lies a default deference to authority. They’re experts. The system has been running this way. So let’s just assume they’re right. But I suspect the more common psychology isn’t worship of authority — it’s fear of looking stupid.

The moment someone stakes out a position on an issue, it feels like stepping up to a gambling table and placing a bet. The currency isn’t money — it’s face. If your opinion turns out wrong, it feels like your entire self has lost. If your reasoning gets demolished, it feels like your dignity went with it.

This is unnecessary. An opinion is just a temporary chain of reasoning, not the entirety of a person’s identity. It can be tested. It can be revised. It can be abandoned. If we treat every expression as a gamble on our reputation, then the safest move is, of course, not to bet at all: “They must have their reasons — I won’t say more.”

This habit doesn’t come from nowhere. From childhood, the way we learn is by being told answers. We learn from textbooks, from teachers and parents, from the experiences shared by our elders. This method is so natural that some people come to see it as the only way to learn.

And it really is effortless. We just open our mouths and chew on the knowledge fed to us — no need to grow the tree ourselves.

I was never a good student growing up, because I genuinely couldn’t muster any interest in unverified knowledge. If I didn’t derive a theorem in the math textbook myself, I couldn’t remember it. I could never remember the years in history class — only what each person advocated for and where they clashed. Organic chemistry, especially — I couldn’t see any logic in it at all. Every rule had exceptions. It just made me want to sleep.

I liked reading philosophy and political theory, because there I could find things I could latch onto through pure logic. Privately, I believe there are still many secrets in this world, hidden in corners we haven’t paid attention to. They might be utterly trivial things, not requiring any cutting-edge knowledge. They haven’t been discovered perhaps purely by accident, not for any especially profound reason.

If you picture humanity’s current knowledge as a circle, I think this circle is full of holes, like a piece of Swiss cheese. Some people can keep pushing outward, exploring and breaking through at the frontier. But others might stumble upon these mysterious holes by chance, filling in a little blank space in the human knowledge map.

The Absurdity — and Courage — of the Crackpot

Since I was young, I’ve often heard stories about “folk scientists” — fringe amateurs. People who claim to have invented a perpetual motion machine, or proved Goldbach’s Conjecture. The way these stories are told is almost always negative, dripping with ridicule.

This planted an idea in me as a child: I don’t want to become someone like that. I shouldn’t casually question established knowledge, because that would invite mockery.

But looking back now — was that really the right lesson?

Of course, fringe amateurs have their absurdities. They lack training. They’re not rigorous. When confronted with counterevidence, they dig in their heels and refuse to admit it. But if you separate “the impulse to question” from “the stubborn refusal to face evidence,” the former is not only not shameful — it’s worth keeping. It’s like Don Quixote tilting at windmills: absurd, and yet somehow hard not to admire.

We didn’t get the heliocentric model simply because someone “dared to question.” We didn’t discover the double helix structure of DNA simply because someone “defied the mainstream.” What actually made these breakthroughs work was mathematics, observation, experimentation, models, peer review, and — ultimately — the willingness to be changed by evidence.

But if a person can’t even entertain the thought that “the existing explanation might not be the final answer,” then the evidence and experiments that follow will never begin.

What’s genuinely captivating about fringe amateurs isn’t their defiance of authority — it’s their instinctive refusal to accept that only people authorized by a certain community are qualified to produce knowledge. You don’t need a title, a laboratory, or an invitation to the formal discussion to ask questions about the world. What’s genuinely dangerous about them isn’t ignorance — it’s the refusal to be corrected by reality.

So I’m certainly not encouraging anyone to become a fringe amateur. What I want to ask is: when did we become so rule-bound? So incapable of imagining otherwise?

Their biggest flaw isn’t a lack of that kneeling, reverent “respect for science.” Quite the opposite: in a sense, their greatest advantage is that they’ve never understood “science” as a temple you can only kneel before. What they truly lack is the scientific attitude itself: the willingness to propose testable claims, to design experiments, to accept counterexamples, to change their minds in the face of evidence.

Let the Experiment Speak

When you encounter something you don’t understand — if the books have no answer, or the answers in the books don’t convince you — why not just try it yourself?

If you doubt a conclusion, propose a testable prediction. If you think the current computer architecture isn’t good enough, roll up your sleeves and try to reinvent it. If you think the prevailing explanation everyone takes for granted feels incomplete, go find data, design an experiment, build a model. Don’t just chant slogans. Don’t just win battles in your head. Make your case with evidence. Make it with data.

Along the way, odds are you’ll fail. You’ll step into the same traps your predecessors stepped into. But this isn’t shameful — in fact, it’s excellent. It means you genuinely learned something from the process. You’ll understand the details behind the conclusion far more deeply than someone who only memorized the end result.

And if the unlikely happens — if you prove yourself right — then congratulations: you’ve discovered a secret in this world that no one else has found. What could possibly be more thrilling than that?

I’m very fond of the story of Poisson’s spot.

Poisson was a supporter of the particle theory of light. After Fresnel proposed the wave theory, Poisson derived a deeply counterintuitive consequence from it: if light is a wave, then under the right conditions, when a beam of light hits a circular opaque object, a small bright spot should appear at the exact center of the shadow. Poisson intended this result to show how absurd the wave theory was, because it sounded far too anti-intuitive.

Then Arago actually did the experiment. And saw the spot.

The most beautiful part of this story isn’t whether Poisson immediately changed his entire position. It’s the power that science itself demonstrates here: a theory must produce testable consequences, and a refutation must submit to the verdict of experiment. You can dislike a conclusion. You can find it absurd. You can find it counterintuitive. But if the experiment stands on its side, you must reconsider your own thinking.

This is what I understand as the scientific attitude.

What Real Respect Looks Like

“They must have their reasons.”

Why don’t we try to understand what those reasons actually are?

Real respect isn’t conjuring up a vague justification on someone else’s behalf and then stopping there. It’s pursuing that reasoning until you can understand it, verify it, or refute it yourself.

Perhaps, right there, we might actually discover something new.