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Checking Your Assumptions
How to Live a Better Intellectual Life and Have a Happier Marriage
Assumptions are serious blind spots in our intellectual lives. We often do a great job of listing pros and cons, providing evidence, and even thinking of counterexamples that might cause us problems in the future.
However, it is easy to overlook the intellectual baggage that we haul around with us in the form of assumptions. This is dangerous because assumptions can lead to miscommunication, warp expectations, and even weaken our position by not making explicit important parts of our views.
I feel the best way to talk about assumptions and how to become aware of them is to look at a concrete example. By focusing on an example, we can highlight assumptions and set an example of how to check assumptions in other areas of our intellectual lives.
The Perfect Marriage
A great case study for assumptions is marriage. Marriage, apart from being a very personal thing, is an extremely cultural institution. I married someone from another country and the different cultural assumptions about marriage still manage to surprise me after five years. These assumptions not only impact how we live our lives together, but also our views about the purpose of marriage itself.
