Think Again

Epilogue
“What I believe” is a process rather than a finality.
—
EMMA
GOLDMAN
hen reading fiction, my favorite part has always been the
conclusion. As long as I can remember, whether I was devouring
sci-fi like Ender’s Game or mystery like The Westing Game, the
twist at the end wasn’t just the highlight of the story. It transformed the
story, making me rethink everything I’d read before.
In writing about ideas, though, I’ve never liked conclusions. Can’t the
final chapter just serve as the end? It’s a book, not a book report. If I had
something else worth saying, I would’ve already said it.
*
What bothers me most about a conclusion is the finality. If a topic is
important enough to deserve an entire book, it shouldn’t end. It should be
open-ended.
That’s an inherent challenge for Think Again. I don’t want the
conclusion to bring closure. I want my thinking to keep evolving. To
symbolize that openness, I decided to make the epilogue a blank page.
Literally.
My challenge network unanimously rejected that concept. Two of my
most insightful students convinced me that although it might represent an
endpoint for me as a writer, it’s a starting point for you as a reader—a
springboard to new thoughts and a bridge to new conversations. Then they
proposed a way to honor the spirit of the book: I could take a cue from Ron
Berger’s classroom and show some of my rethinking of the conclusion from
one draft to the next.
I loved the idea.
*
For a book about rethinking, it seemed delightfully
meta. Like the Seinfeld coffee table book about coffee tables—or the time

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when Ryan Gosling wore a shirt with a photo of Macaulay Culkin, and
Macaulay Culkin one-upped him by wearing a shirt with a picture of Ryan
Gosling wearing that shirt.
*
The conclusion seemed like the perfect place to show a few key
moments of rethinking, but I still didn’t know what to cover. I went back to
my challenge network, and they suggested one more way to synthesize key
themes and provide an update on what I’m rethinking right now.
The first thing that came to mind was a moment in the fact-checking
process, when I learned that scientists have revised their thinking about the
purported plumage of the tyrannosaurus family. If you were picturing a
feathered T. rex in chapter 1, so was I, but the current consensus is that a
typical T. rex was covered mostly in scales. If you’re devastated by that
update, please flip to the index and look up joy of being wrong, the.
Actually, I have some good news: there’s another tyrannosaur, the
yutyrannus, that scientists believe was covered in vibrant feathers to stay
cool.
*
Lately, I’ve been thinking again about how rethinking happens. For
thousands of years, much of the rethinking that people did unfolded
invisibly in groups over time. Before the printing press, a great deal of
knowledge was transmitted orally. Human history was one long game of
telephone, where each sender would remember and convey information
differently, and each receiver would have no way of knowing how the story
had changed. By the time an idea traveled across a land, it could be
completely reimagined without anyone’s being aware of it. As more
information began to be recorded in books and then newspapers, we could
begin to track the different ways in which knowledge and beliefs evolved.
Today, although we can see every revision made in Wikipedia, the
individuals making the changes often wind up in edit wars, refusing to
concede that others were right or that they were wrong. Codifying
knowledge might help us track it, but it doesn’t necessarily lead us to open
our minds.
Many great thinkers have argued that rethinking is a task for each
generation, not each person—even in science. As the eminent physicist
Max Planck put it, “A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing
its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its
opponents eventually die.”
From this perspective, generations are replaced
faster than people change their views.

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I no longer believe that has to be the case. We all have the capacity to
think again—we just don’t use it often enough, because we don’t think like
scientists often enough.
The scientific method can be traced back several millennia, at least as
far back as Aristotle and the ancient Greeks. I was surprised to learn, then,
that the word