My wife was managing two high-profile meetings today and spent a good deal of time last week preparing for exigencies. Double check the room reservation. Allow extra time in the morning. Plan for backup tech support. Check to see how long the laptop can go before the screensaver locks out a critical user and requires re-authentication. And so on.

Meanwhile, my students are designing and building model bridges. As part of this month-long project, they test individual components under load and are told that their final design should include a factor of safety of 2.0. I.e. the design should support twice as much weight as we expect the bridge to actually experience.

If I were Malcolm Gladwell, I would write a book called “Overbuilt,” which would be about the many advantages of…not worst-case-scenario planning, exactly, but bad-case-scenario planning. It would be about the virtues of paranoia. The world throws low-probability events at us all the time: not only is the IT guy sick, but the projector has a burnt-out bulb and the post-it note that had our room reservation on it came unstuck from the monitor and fell to the floor, where it was missed because yada yada.

Planning for such things isn’t just prudent. It’s a shared characteristic of the punctual, the effective, the reliable in every domain. Even in the realm of pure idea, we expect critical thinkers to consider objections to their claims, to anticipate counterarguments, and to systematically eliminate, minimize, or otherwise contain those oppositions.

Our imaginations are rarely as creative as Murphy’s forces. The second law of thermodynamics wants you to fail. To ensure that your project is successful, you need a plan that will work when the shit comes down. And if it doesn’t come down today, it probably will tomorrow.

Thus, one of my favorite mottos: Semper paratus. Always ready.

Students are oysters. Education is sand.

If what you are doing must be done, and must be done by you, then do not hesitate. Do it perfectly. But if you have not yet decided what to do, then by all means stop to reflect and choose wisely. Do not waste perfection on that which is not worth doing at all.

Two thoughts for today:

(1) This one pretty much straight from Wittgenstein. Adjectives like “this,” “that,” and “other” have obvious practical utility and one can easily imagine their arising in the natural circumstances surrounding linguistic evolution. When the nouns they describe are commonplace — this rock, that apple — we have few problems. So far, so good. I just saw on tv a couple talking about “welcoming [their child] into this world” (my emphasis). From a syntactical point of view, this is a perfectly reasonable construction. But from a semantic point of view, use of the phrase “this world” almost automatically leads to an inference that there are other worlds. It was unstated in the tv show, but I got the impression that the couple was religious, and if so I can guess that they might have the usual sort of belief in “another” world. The word “world” as it is used here ought to have a little rule attached to it: this is not one of those nouns that can be modified by the seemingly harmless adjective “this.” But there’s no such rule, at least in English. If there were, I wonder if the speaker of this sentence would have had to have been more explicit about the claim she was making so subtly and perhaps unconsciously.

In short, I worry that the mere exercise of our syntactic machinery — the creation of syntactically valid expressions — leads us to legitimize the external reality of the states of affairs entailed by those expressions.

(2) Aphorism in progress: “Critical thinking is immunization to nonsense.”

Education is too important to be taken seriously.