The definition of inductive method refers to "a way of cognition in which people find out the basic laws or common laws that they obey based on a series of empirical things or knowledge materials, and assume that other things in the same kind of things also obey these laws, so as to use these laws as the basic principles of predicting other things of the same kind." ”
In the past few years, the inductive method was prevalent in society, and many predictions were deduced from the inductive method, and basically most of them were effective. However, in recent years, with the changes and turmoil of society, the inductive method seems to have failed, and everyone can feel that when the development of some things is deduced according to the logic and experience that they are familiar with in the past, they often do not follow the predetermined track.
For example, the once popular belief that "housing prices will keep rising" is no longer working, and the stock market has been falling endlessly, as if there is no bottom.
Our past experience can only be used as a reference in the future. Chairman Mao repeatedly emphasized in his book "Mao Zedong's Selected Works" that one way of thinking is to "see the essence of a problem through its phenomenon", teaching us to start from the origin, essence, and common sense to think about the multiple possibilities of problems.
Here are a few examples to give you a feel for the charm of this way of thinking.
The first example is a dialogue in the novel "Red Dust in the Sky", one of the points of contention is that hand-rolled noodles are better than machine-made noodles, this view is a typical conclusion deduced from one's own past experience, but the fact is: the essence of hand-rolled noodles lies in the softness and hardness of the noodles, the thickness and width of the noodles, the way and direction of the dough, and the structure of the noodles.
As a second example, I would like to quote a passage from Bill Gates's 2024 open letter, in which Bill Gates raised several questions, such as, how to improve the health of the poor? I believe that many people's first reaction is to improve the health of the problem itself, such as improving medical conditions, increasing social welfare, improving diet, etc. Bill Gates is good at solving problems from the essence of the problem, he mentioned that if you want to improve the health of the poor, you must first know why you are not healthy. The main reason lies in various diseases. So how do you treat the disease? You need to buy medicine. So why don't these people buy medicine? Because it's too expensive. Why is that drug so expensive? Because the cost of drug research and development is too high, and the research and development cycle alone takes 5 or 10 years. Well, now the essence of the problem is the drug itself, so Bill Gates plans to use AI technology to help the research and development of drugs, and reduce the research and development costs of pharmaceutical companies.
The third example is the famous Tesla founder Elon Musk, who boasted all over the Internet that his first-principles way of thinking is actually a way of thinking through phenomena to discover the essence of the problem. Space x, Tesla's electric car, were born with the blessing of Musk's way of thinking. For example, he wanted to make a rocket at that time, and everyone persuaded him that the production cost of the rocket was too high, and the company would not be able to afford such a large amount of money, so he went to a friend to borrow a book on related majors, and after reading it, he found that the cost of raw materials was actually not much, and the biggest cost was actually the rocket itself. It's the same when doing Tesla, Musk used first principles to trace back to the source and found that the biggest cost of electric vehicles comes from the power battery, when the R&D team estimated that its cost reached $600/kW, so he disassembled the battery into various elements and other components, and then conquered them one by one, reducing the cost of the battery to $80/kW.
The way of thinking listed in the above examples is through the phenomenon of the problem to see the essence of the way of thinking, this way of thinking has great energy, each of us born in this era should strive to exercise themselves to learn this way of thinking, the future social changes will be more and more intensified, only to upgrade their way of thinking in order to better adapt to the future.