Letter to a Friend: The Beginning of Infinity
Dear friend,
Thank you again for our recent conversation. I’ve been reflecting on it, and I’m struck by your passion and your desire to get to the bottom of things. It’s a quality I genuinely admire in you, and it’s one of the reasons I value our discussions.
I want to talk about something that I think is more important than the topic we were discussing itself. It’s about how we discuss things. I was less troubled by your view on the matter than by the method you used to critique what you assumed my view to be.
I’ve been reading a book called “The Beginning of Infinity” by David Deutsch, and it’s given me a new lens for this. One of its central arguments is that the only way to make progress is to create better explanations. But not all explanations are created equal. Deutsch argues that a good explanation is hard to vary. It’s a specific, detailed account of reality that can’t be easily twisted to fit a different outcome.
This is where our conversation went in a different direction. You tried to convince me that my view was incorrect, but you did so by speculating on what that view was. The explanation you constructed “your view is X, and it’s wrong” was, by its very nature, incredibly easy to vary. Because you weren’t responding to my actual explanation, you were responding to a phantom of your own creation. You could have easily substituted a different phantom and argued against that just as easily.
An explanation that is based on a guess isn’t really an explanation of the thing itself; it’s an explanation of the guess. It has no real reach into the truth of the situation, because it’s not anchored to the reality of what I actually think or have experienced.
The fundamental error wasn’t in your conclusion, but in your starting point. You attempted to criticize an explanation without first taking the crucial step of understanding it. You skipped the most important part: creating knowledge about what you were trying to refute.
This isn’t a personal failing; it’s a trap we all fall into.
It’s easier to argue with a straw man we’ve built than to engage with a real, complex idea that might challenge our own. But that shortcut guarantees that no real progress is made. We both leave the conversation exactly as we entered, with our own views intact, because the thing you were arguing against never really existed.
The truly optimistic and dynamic approach (the one that actually creates new knowledge), is to first seek to understand. To treat the other person’s view as a real, tangible theory that deserves to be accurately represented before it is subjected to criticism. The goal of a good conversation isn’t to win, but to refine our ideas through a process of conjecture and mutual criticism.
I am as fallible as anyone, and I’m certain I have been guilty of this same mistake in the past. But now that I see it so clearly, I can’t unsee it.
So, I propose a new pact for our future talks. Let’s make a promise to each other: we will never argue against a speculation. We will first do the hard work of asking questions, listening, and ensuring we can accurately state the other’s position to their satisfaction. Only then can we begin the exciting work of trying to find its flaws and, together, build a better explanation.
That’s how infinity begins. Not with a grand declaration, but with the humble, optimistic commitment to understanding the world as it is, not as we assume it to be. Let’s start with our own conversations.
Crepi il lupo! 🐺