Thomas King’s position on the intelligence vs imagination debate has lived rent free in my head for a while: “Don’t show them your mind. Show them your imagination.” His ideas have resonated with me especially these last few weeks as I spend more time talking with founders, non-founders, investors, customers, and consumers.
We’re surrounded by the language of cynicism. It snakes its way into many places: from right-wing rationalists (a good chunk of twitter) to left-wing defeatists (a good chunk of reddit), from the old to the young, from the well educated to the uneducated, from the upper class to the lower class and from the happy to the miserable. In fact, some of my most intelligent friends are cursed with this delusion: they conflate cynicism with hyper rationalism.
Despite my dismissive tone, I want to illustrate two points:
- Intelligence and imagination are not strongly correlated
- You can be optimistic and rational at the same time
I usually ask a difficult question, not difficult in the sense that it requires unusual intelligence or some trick but difficult because it gauges the imagination. And perhaps also their intellectual honesty if they admit they don’t know enough. Here’s an example of a problem I pitch to folks:
I think the next generation of cities will have a synergistic transfer of energy. There’s a company in Toronto that wanted to put data centers underneath buildings to pipe up the heat in the winter. There’s a company called Crusoe AI that creates AI data centers right next to power plants or oil refineries. There’s a professor at Stanford who built a custom heat pump that converts heat from the AC to electricity and reuses it. What if we can export this synergistic model to an entire city? Crazy idea: we could line the streets with a huge copper heat sink and find ways to intelligently share heat energy…
And then I wait.
And the responses I get usually fall into one of four buckets in this scale:
- Cynic
- Pessimist
- Optimist
- Visionary
The cynic is dismissive of the idea of a city that is this efficient. They don’t have good reasons. They might argue that it would require some nebulously rich person to bankroll it. Or that it could only work on mars. Or that we don’t have the technology. Or some equally useless reason - their remarks are neither useful nor aspirational.
Then come the pessimists. They’ll tell you something won’t work. But they will offer good reasons for why something won’t work. Copper is too expensive. Electricity is fairly cheap. Grids are fairly stable. On and on. These are all good reasons for why this might not work. These are useful but not aspirational. I wouldn’t want to rely on someone that gave me an answer like this if I committed to a project this ambitious.
Now the switch to optimists is more subtle. They’ll tell you something is possible if you control certain factors or if certain factors come within goldilocks ranges. The price of copper must be below X. The price of electricity must be Y. The global temperature must be Z. Politicians must have B political capital. Now I realize that many things are not measurable. My aim is to show that an optimist’s attitude is truth-seeking. This is useful and aspirational. In an earlier startup, we were building mass-producible cryocoolers. My co-founders had initially started by building flywheels to store electricity instead of in batteries. However, they realized that flywheels wouldn’t work because the price of superconductors was X and they needed it to be Y. So they looked into how to do that. That opened up another series of criteria - the prices of superconductors were contingent on the prices of cryocoolers. And cryocoolers were bespoke and not mass produced. So we decided on building our own mass producible cryocooler. And that would unlock the vast space of superconducting technologies. Which would unlock flywheels. What I loved about working with them is that they were incredibly optimistic yet also very grounded.
Finally, the visionaries. They would give me solutions to this problem that were possible today: it was business friendly, used existing tech, used existing supply chains, etc. I consider them to be truly creative and imaginative. I have a friend who suggested getting businesses to buy heat pumps to capture latent heat and convert that to electricity to put back into the grid. That’s a business model that could work today. It wouldn’t be very efficient but there’s going to be some places that will want it regardless and that’s where you could start.
I want to stress that everyone on this scale is intelligent: from the cynics to the visionaries. And every bucket is rational and grounded. Being optimistic is not the same as being delusional or naive. And being cynical is not the same as being rational.
When I pitched this scale to a friend named Oscar, he asked if it was useful for everyone to be an optimist. It seemed like a similar argument to the one made in Brave New World, except with imagination instead of intelligence: do we need some people to be pessimists and cynics to have a functioning society? I don’t think so. There’s too many problems and life is too short. The same people are engaged in the political process and dictate socially regressive policies. The same people raise generations of cynics. My problem with the arguments in Brave New World is that society lacks imagination but perhaps that’s the point of all dystopian novels: that we lack the imagination to use our gifts and instead drop to our basest struggles for power and control. We appreciate the certainty that comes from thinking in the present vs thinking about the uncertainty of the future. It’s why we have personal libraries of books we’ve already read instead of keeping libraries of books we’ve never read. What could we be if everyone had the capacity to fully realize their aspirations?
It’s like that song about crabs in a bucket. We are to aspire to greatness. Not the lowest common denominator.
Appendix A
Another friend, Grant, made an interesting observation as well:
“Knee-jerk negative reactions to an optimist are so common, and yet for some stupid reason every time you see one, the typical sentiment is that the knee-jerk negative reaction is deep and profound and the optimist is simple and naive. But I think it takes a good deal of bravery (even vulnerability) to say something true about how you think the world should really be, and it really takes nothing whatsoever to tear it up. Imagine a guy taking a few hours to build a sandcastle, and then another guy stomps all over it in 5 seconds, and for some reason everyone applauds the stomper and walks away thinking they’re stomper is more intelligent and insightful.”
Appendix B
Oscar also mentioned that this happens with marathon times. Someone thinks no human could break X record. And then after a while, someone breaks that record. And then there’s ten other people that cross that barrier that everyone thought was impossible. I’m more convinced that if someone can show that something is possible, others will follow. Grant brought up npm: “npm was terrible and slow for ages until Meta made Yarn (which was good), and then npm suddenly got really good really fast.”