« Gunner on N2Y2 | Main | Gas stations are closing » Puzzles vs MysteriesBack in January I was reading a Malcolm Gladwell piece in the New Yorker, ostensibly about Enron, but actually about the difference between mysteries and puzzles. Here's how he made the distinction: The national-security expert Gregory Treverton has famously made a distinction between puzzles and mysteries. Osama bin Laden’s whereabouts are a puzzle. We can’t find him because we don’t have enough information. The key to the puzzle will probably come from someone close to bin Laden, and until we can find that source bin Laden will remain at large. The problem of what would happen in Iraq after the toppling of Saddam Hussein was, by contrast, a mystery. It wasn’t a question that had a simple, factual answer. Mysteries require judgments and the assessment of uncertainty, and the hard part is not that we have too little information but that we have too much. David Pescovitz has blogged another Treverton piece on the distinction in The Smithsonian. Pesco has a longer quote from the Smithsonian piece, concluding with this thought: Solving puzzles is useful for detection. But framing mysteries is necessary for prevention. jon posted this at 4:39 PM |
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