THE SHADOW OF THE RIGHT ANSWER BY GAVIN TANG

Plato believed that all things - every object, idea, concept or solution, was an imperfect shadow of an ideal Form. He thought that we are all born with full knowledge of the universe, and everything we “learn” by observation is just recollection. We can’t navigate this perfect “world of Forms” directly, according to Plato, but we can use what we see in the physical world to try to understand it.

Maybe Plato was being a little closed minded when he theorized that there was just one ideal Form of a solution. No matter how hard we search for the “true right answer” to a problem, the best we’re ever going to find is just a shadow, or an incomplete representation. If one were to know the shape of an object, and the direction of the light source, they could reasonably predict what its shadow would look like. But if you only have a shadow, you can’t know exactly what kind of object cast it.

Multiple objects can cast identical shadows. In the same way, from different angles, the same object can cast vastly different shadows. There’s no way to interact with the world of Right Answers. The best we can do is to look at as many ideas as we can, from as many angles as we can, to make some guesses about the answers that they represent.