Grandiose

Zac looked at me, skeptically.

"What?" I asked.

He scrunched up his face.

"What?" I asked again.

"No offense," he grimaced, "but you kinda are just another person with another potential theory. How are you any different from the 'woo woo' folks?"

"Because-"

"Let's say you make it inside the fortress walls," Zac said. "You'll still be in the town square where everyone is discussing their ideas. There are a million different hypotheses out there, and everyone thinks they're onto something. What makes your potential theory any different? Aren't you still going to be battling it out with all the other academics, trying to gain access to the castle?"

I pointed at him. "That's fucking brilliant!"

"It is?"

"Absolutely!" I leaped onto the bed again and grabbed my Art of War book. "Here." I pointed to a highlighted passage. "To fight and conquer in all our battles is not supreme excellence; supreme excellence consists in breaking the enemy's resistance without fighting."

"What are you getting at?" Zac asked.

"I don't want to battle everyone else. I'm an underdog. I won't last against their forces. I need to break their resistance without fighting at all. I need a sling, like David — one little pebble hurled at the right time, in the right direction, to kill a behemoth." I jumped off the bed again and opened the drawer of my dressing table.

"What are you doing?"

"Searching for a book." I pulled out a tattered passport, a tennis ball, a yellow rubber ducky, a postcard from France, some boxing hand wraps. "Ah, here," I said, holding up a copy of The Obstacle Is The Way.

I opened the book and found the section I was looking for.

Perhaps your enemy or obstacle really is insurmountable — as it was for many of these groups. Perhaps in this case, you haven't got the ability to win through attrition (persistence) or you don't want to risk learning on the job (iterate). Okay. You're still a long way from needing to give up.

It is, however, time to acknowledge that some adversity might be impossible for you to defeat — no matter how hard you try. Instead, you must find some way to use the adversity, its energy, to help yourself.

Before the invention of steam power, boat captains had an ingenious way of defeating the wickedly strong current of the Mississippi River. A boat going upriver would pull alongside a boat about to head downriver, and after wrapping a rope around a tree or a rock, the boats would tie themselves to each other. The second boat would let go and let the river take it downstream, slingshotting the other vessel upstream.

So instead of fighting obstacles, find a means of making them defeat themselves.

The Obstacle Is The Way Ryan Holiday

"That's what we need to do." I pointed emphatically at the text. "Instead of fighting the system, we need to find a means of making the system defeat itself."

"But how?" Zac asked.

"Feynman," I whispered to myself.

"What?"

"Richard Feynman. He was the genius physicist who once said, 'Science is imagination in a straightjacket.'"

"How is that relevant?" Zac asked.

"He was using a restrictive straightjacket as a metaphor for the scientific method. If you take pure imagination and funnel it through the rules of logic, what appears on the other end is science at its best."

Zac tilted his head to one side in thought. "So, it's like your castle metaphor? In our battlefield, the castle is constructed from the scientific method. Hypotheses have to pass through those rules of logic to join the monarch and be accepted as truth."

"Yes!" I shouted as a new spark lit another fire in my mind. "That's how we beat the system! We'll use their own rules against them by constructing an intellectual kill zone from their beloved scientific method. We'll herd their minds into a very restrictive area, so they're closed in and vulnerable. There will be no escape routes — no allowances for lazy thinking or superfluous postulates. Then we'll slaughter their illogical dogma in one fell swoop."

"You're slightly terrifying," Zac grinned.

"Aw, I'm just having fun," I giggled. "I'm just playing."

"Like I said: terrifying."

"Thank you."

"So, how do we construct a kill zone?" Zac asked.

"Deduction," I replied, pointing to the whiteboard again. "You see, in the town square, everyone's ideas are competing with each other because everyone is using induction. Induction never gives you certainty. Multiple theories can explain a dataset, so lots of energy is expended fighting over whose theory is correct.

Deduction, on the other hand, is much more restrictive. It doesn't allow any competitive theories to be correct because the final answer is derived, not hypothesized. If we have any hope of winning this war, I need to deduce the answer to this riddle from first principles.

‘If I’m only allowed to start off with one point in the entire universe, can I derive everything else I need from that?’ That was Karl Friston’s question to himself, and it is the ultimate question. It is the key to this whole thing. I need to come up with a rigorous logical proof derived from a single point that has perfect structural integrity and cannot be disputed."

"Can you do that, though?" Zac asked. "No offense, but a few minutes ago, you were spewing a bunch of verbal gobbledegook."

"Yes. I can do it," I said firmly. "Just give me one match, and I’ll blow up the whole world."

"It's just that... well... I guess I don't want to be a downer, but... the brightest minds on this planet, who have existed for millennia, have never been able to do this before, and they get paid to work on it full time as their profession. They've spent their entire careers trying to solve this problem. You still have your kids coding school to run, and you're just dabbling with this on the side. Are you sure you want to bet everything on this strategy?"

I stomped my foot on the ground and held a hand to my heart. “I know of no better life purpose than to perish in attempting the great and the impossible! That’s Nietzsche, by the way,” I winked.

"Point taken." Zac held his hands up in surrender. "You know I'm generally batshit insane. But for once, I'm trying to be the pragmatic one here. This is a very grandiose plan-"

"Well, I'm feeling particularly grandiose this evening-"

"Which I love, but-"

"I can do it," I repeated.

"Okay. I believe you. I really do. Just... how do you know you're right about all this?"

"I just know."

"Yeah, but how?"

I took a deep breath and closed my eyes. "I don't know how I know. I just know. I can see it all in my mind, all at once. I can't articulate all that information in a linear sequence yet, but I'll be able to if I just focus on it long enough. I can build a deductive proof. I can do it. I've been training for this mission my entire life. The world has no idea what I am capable of."