Naivety is a superpower

In grade 9, I was in in geography class and we were discussing landfills and how our current waste management approaches aren't sustainable. Mr. Spring asked the class to brainstorm how we would tackle this problem and one student piped up and said:

What if we shot the garbage into the sun with a rocket?

The class erupted in laughter, including myself; it seemed to be such an absurd answer to a complicated problem. I don't remember the kid's name, but the poor guy was made fun of the rest of the semester for that question. I still think about it this incident occasionally and I ask myself: why did I laugh so much at it?

I've come to realize we're conditioned to think that naivety is akin to ineptitude. We look at people who ask so-called dumb questions and deride them for not considering all the variables¹ or simplifying a complex problem.

The older I get, the more I realize that's a crock of shit. He asked a valid question and it deserved a valid answer. Moreso, I've come to find that naivety is an enviable characteristic. There's nothing wrong with asking a question that doesn't consider every variable or permutation. Sometimes every variable isn't really a variable we should consider.

What I'm getting at is that naivety is analogous to first-principles thinking. When we ask these questions, we're not contending that the answer is simple, rather we're asking why isn't this simple? We're flipping the premise on its head and challenging the assumptions it comes loaded with. We're stripping away our biases and we steelman the naive approach, hoping that we either gain some insight we did not have or remove an ill-placed assumption.

In that sense, I've come to think of naivety as a superpower. A way for me to throw away whatever assumptions I had and instead approach things with a childlike wonder.

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