We take good explanations seriously. The comfort and peace we enjoy today is due to our forebears who figured out how to stave off cold, avoid starvation or prevent disease, and subsequent generations have refined and bequeathed these ideas to us. This knowledge can go unnoticed, embedded as it is in our technology and social norms, but it is nonetheless sacred. And it is our duty to improve on the ideas we have inherited, and to discover new explanations in our own right, so that the poorest among our descendants are wealthier than the richest of our contemporaries. When explanations are suitably paramount, things happen which are strange in contemporary discourse. Problems are opportunities for new explanations, and new problems. Sources become uninteresting, because our only concern is whether an idea works. Authorities become impediments, because they stifle the urge for new ideas. Creativity is celebrated in all its forms — good ideas spill across fields and domains — and criticism is the only way to remove bad explanations. Words are tools. Assertions are empty. And arguments are everything.
