means of satisfying my monkey-like curiosity. And, partly, I had found that

theory-structure was a superpower in helping one get what one wanted, as I had

early discovered in school wherein I had excelled without labor, guided by

theory, while many others, without mastery of theory, failed despite monstrous

effort. Better theory, I thought, had always worked for me and, if now

available, could make me acquire capital and independence faster and better

assist everything I loved. And so I slowly developed my own system of

psychology, more or less in the self-help style of Ben Franklin and with the

determination displayed in the refrain of the nursery story: “‘Then I’ll do it

myself,’ said the little red hen.”

 

I was greatly helped in my quest by two turns of mind. First, I had long looked

for insight by inversion in the intense manner counseled by the great

algebraist, Jacobi: “Invert, always invert.” I sought good judgment mostly by

collecting instances of bad judgment, then pondering ways to avoid such

outcomes. Second, I became so avid a collector of instances of bad judgment that

I paid no attention to boundaries between professional territories. After all,

why should I search for some tiny, unimportant, hard-to-find new stupidity in my

own field when some large, important, easy-to-find stupidity was just over the

fence in the other fellow’s professional territory? Besides, I could already see

that real-world problems didn’t neatly lie within territorial boundaries. They

jumped right across. And I was dubious of any approach that, when two things

were inextricably intertwined and interconnected, would try and think about one

thing but not the other. I was afraid, if I tried any such restricted approach,

that I would end up, in the immortal words of John L. Lewis, “with no brain at