Questions Are Nothing but Different Camera Lenses
Or, landing on a specific site on Mars at a specific time requires nothing short of an interplanetary hole in one
👋 Hey there! My name is Abhishek. Welcome to a new edition of The Sunday Wisdom! This is the best way to learn new things with the least amount of effort.
It’s a collection of weekly explorations and inquiries into many curiosities, such as business, human nature, society, and life’s big questions. My primary goal is to give you some new perspective to think about things.
India is celebrating her 75th year of independence this week. When you think about it this way, we are still a pretty young nation, but have been able to achieve a lot in the short time. In context, the US got its independence nearly 250 years ago.
Here’s to the next 75 years! 🇮🇳
Enough talk! On to this week’s essay! It’s about 1,650 words.
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Q: Why do smart people often solve the wrong problems?
In the movie I, Robot, when Dr. Alfred Lanning, co-founder of US Robotics, falls to his death from his office window, a holographic message he left behind requests homicide detective Del Spooner (Will Smith) be assigned to the case. The police declare the death a suicide, but Spooner is sceptical.
Dr. Lanning’s holographic message can answer only specific questions. It insists Spooner to ask the right questions. “I’m sorry! My responses are limited. You must ask the right questions.”
Today, let’s talk about problem-solving. More precisely, let’s talk about the importance of searching for a better question instead of a better answer.
In this essay, we’ll explore why we should resist the initial framing of our questions and discover the importance of finding (rather than solving) the right problem.
But, before we get into that, let’s talk a bit about rocket science.
The Jet Propulsion Laboratory, popularly known as JPL, is a small city of scientists and engineers in Pasadena, California. Located just east of Hollywood, JPL has been responsible for operating interplanetary spacecraft for decades.
If you’ve ever seen video footage of a Mars landing, you’ve seen the inside of JPL’s mission support area. If you’ve watched the movie The Martian, you’ve seen JPL’s team in action.
“To land on Mars is to execute a perfect cosmic choreography,” writes author Ozan Varol. “If any one thing doesn’t work just right, it’s game over.”
For one thing, Mars is a rapidly moving target. Depending on its alignment with Earth, the red planet is between 50 million and 400 million kilometres away, orbiting the Sun at over 80,000 kilometres per hour.
Landing on a specific site on Mars at a specific time requires nothing short of an interplanetary hole in one.
But the most dangerous part of the interplanetary journey isn’t the six months it typically takes a spacecraft to travel from Earth to Mars when the two planets are closest to each other. Rather, it’s the six minutes of terror at the very end of that journey, when the spacecraft enters, descends, and (hopefully) lands on the surface.
During its journey, a typical Mars-bound lander rests inside a two-part aeroshell (a cocoon of sorts) with a heat shield in the front and a back shell on the opposite side.
When the spacecraft touches the Martian atmosphere, it is travelling through space at more than sixteen times the speed of sound. In about six minutes, it must slow down from its 20,000-kilometres-per-hour velocity to land safely on the surface.
As the spacecraft tears through the atmosphere, the temperatures outside climb up to over 1,400°C. The heat shield protects the spacecraft from bursting into flames as the atmospheric friction slows it down to about 1,600 kilometres per hour. That’s still too fast for it to land.
At about ten kilometres above the surface, the spacecraft deploys a supersonic parachute and lets go of the heat shield. But the parachute itself isn’t enough to slow down the spacecraft.
Mars’ atmosphere is thin — its density is less than 1 percent of Earth’s atmosphere — and parachutes work by creating drag with air molecules. The fewer molecules, the less drag. As a result, a parachute can bring down the spacecraft’s speed to only about 320 kilometres per hour. The spacecraft needs something else to reduce that velocity so it doesn’t strike the surface at race-car speed.
That “something else” is a three-legged lander with rocket motors. After a parachute had reduced its speed, the lander would deploy the three shock-absorbing legs. The lander would then fire up its rockets, and using a radar, navigate down to the surface for a soft, steady touchdown on its three legs.
That was the theory. But there was a practical problem. The 1999 Mars Polar Lander, which used this landing system, died a swift death. A NASA review board concluded that the Lander had probably plummeted to the surface after a premature shutdown of its rocket motors.
This accident presented a significant challenge. NASA was supposed to use the same landing mechanism for its next mission, and that mechanism had just failed spectacularly. The mission seemed to be grounded.
So, the engineers at JPL asked the obvious questions: How can we innovate on the flawed design of the Mars Polar Lander? How do we design a better three-legged lander to ensure a smooth landing?
But these questions, as we’ll soon discover, weren’t the right questions to be asking.
Enter Mark Adler.
Mark Adler defies all engineer stereotypes. He’s charming and charismatic, with a pair of sunglasses often hanging from his neck — a relic of his upbringing in sunny Florida. He laughs often but also has a strong undercurrent of intensity. In his spare time, he flies small airplanes and goes scuba diving.
When the Mars Polar Lander crashed in 1999, Adler was an engineer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. At the time, everyone in the team — except Adler — was suffering from the Einstellung effect. They were struggling to come up with a fix for the failed landing mechanism.
When we’re familiar with a problem, and when we think we have the right answer, we stop seeing alternatives. This tendency is known as the Einstellung effect.
In German, einstellung means “set,” and in this context, the term refers to a fixed mental set or attitude. The initial framing of the question — and the initial answer — both stick and are hard to shove off.
“What is the problem?” The three-legged landing mechanism of the spacecraft isn’t reliable. “What can we do about it?” Fix it and build a reliable three-legged landing mechanism.
The Einstellung effect is partly a relic of our education system. In schools, we’re taught to answer problems that are handed to us in the form of problem sets. The problems have already been set (einstellung), and the student’s job is to solve them — not change or question them.
A typical problem declares all of its constraints and all the required information comprehensively and in advance. The students then take the prepackaged and preapproved problem and plug it into a formula they memorised, which in turn spits out the right answer.
This approach is wildly disconnected from reality. In our adult lives, problems often aren’t handed to us fully formed. We have to find, define, and redefine them ourselves.
But once we find a problem, our educational conditioning kicks in, launching us into answer mode rather than asking whether there’s a better problem to solve.
Although we pay lip service to the importance of finding the right problem, we double down on the same tactics that have failed us in the past.
This is exactly what was happening with the engineers at JPL. Because the problem was so obvious and they knew everything about it so well, they weren’t able to come up with alternative solutions.
Adler broke this cycle.
Instead of solving for the existing problem, Adler came up with a better problem to solve.
The way Adler saw it, the real problem wasn’t the lander. The real problem was gravity. When everyone was preoccupied with the obvious question: “How do we design a better three-legged lander?” Adler stepped back and asked, “How do we defeat gravity and land our rover safely on Mars?”
Adler’s solution was to abandon the three-legged lander design altogether. He proposed a very obvious solution: using giant airbags with the rover cocooned inside a lander. These balloons would inflate shortly before impact with the Martian surface. Cushioned by these big white grapes, the rover would be released from a height of about ten meters, strike the surface, and bounce roughly thirty to forty times before coming to rest.
Sounds pretty obvious in retrospect? It does! But it would have been impossible to come to this solution without reframing the question in the first place.
“Every answer,” as Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen writes, “has a question that retrieves it.” The answer is often embedded within the question itself, so the framing of the question becomes crucial to the solution.
Charles Darwin would agree. “Looking back,” he wrote in a letter to a friend, “I think it was more difficult to see what the problems were than to solve them.”
NASA selected Adler’s design largely because it had the highest probability of getting the spacecraft safely to Mars. Yes, the balloons were crude. Yes, they looked ugly as hell. But they worked. Airbags had successfully landed the Pathfinder spacecraft on Mars in 1997.
When the Einstellung effect gets in the way — when we can’t see the better move — we can change our definition of the problem by questioning the question.
In one famous study, Jacob Getzels and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi found that the most creative art students spend more time in the preparation and discovery stage than do their less creative counterparts.
Problem finding however doesn’t end with the preparation stage. Even after spending time viewing the problem from different angles, the more creative individuals keep an open mind as they enter the solution stage and stand ready to make changes to their initial definition of the problem.
Think of questions as different camera lenses. Put on a wide-angle lens, and you’ll capture the entire scene. Put on a zoom lens, and you’ll get a close-up shot of a butterfly.
“What we observe is not nature itself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning,” said Werner Heisenberg, the brains behind the uncertainty principle in quantum mechanics. When we reframe a question — when we change our method of questioning — we have the power to change the answers.
Timeless Insight
Knowledge is helpful, but there’s a stark difference between practical wisdom and scientific knowledge.
Practical wisdom is rooted in action, and you can create different outcomes by taking various actions. Whereas scientific knowledge describes how reality is.
One doesn’t need to know everything about how something works to be able to use it, or more appropriately, to benefit from it. You need not be aware of the history of an internal combustion engine to learn driving.
What I’m Reading
The more unlived your life, the greater your death anxiety. The more you fail to experience your life fully, the more you will fear death.
― Irvin D. Yalom, Staring at the Sun
Tiny Thought
We forgive Airbnbs for being less attractive than their photos, but we never forgive human beings for being less impressive than their first impressions.
Before You Go…
Thanks so much for reading! Send me ideas, questions, reading recs. You can write to abhishek@coffeeandjunk.com, reply to this email, or use the comments.
Until next Sunday,
Abhishek 👋