Terence Tao: uncertainty

Transcript context

…There’s some strange power to the declaring which problems are hard to solve, the statement of the open problems. Yeah, this is bystander effect everywhere. If no one says you should do X, everyone just mills around waiting for somebody else to do something, and nothing gets done. And the one thing that actually you have to teach undergraduates in mathematics is that you should always try something. So you see a lot of paralysis in an undergraduate trying a math problem. If they recognize that there’s a certain technique that can be applied, they will try it. But there are problems which they see and none of their standard techniques obviously applies and the common reaction is than just paralysis, I don’t know what to do. I think there’s a quote from the Simpsons, “I’ve tried nothing and I’m all out of ideas.” So the next step then is to try anything no matter how stupid and in fact almost the stupider, the better, which technically is almost guaranteed to fail, but the way it fails is going to be instructive. It fails ’cause you are not at all taking into account this hypothesis. Oh, this hypothesis must be useful. That’s a clue. I think you also suggested somewhere this fascinating approach, which really stuck with me as they’re using it, and it really works, I think you said it’s called structured procrastination.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.