Challenge Your Preconceptions or They Will Challenge You - second-hand-tigers/badocter-career-learnings GitHub Wiki

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Challenge Your Preconceptions or They Will Challenge You

Star Trek: Enterprise, "Strange New World", television, 2001

At the onset of the series, the chief engineer Trip Tucker, a human, and the Vulcan science officer, T'Pol, have a tense, openly and mutually disrespectful working relationship. (ST:ENT: Broken Bow (pilot) excerpt) A bit later in the season, their relationship has noticeably improved, behaving as professionals and already having earned a level of mutual trust. On an away team mission, all come under the influence of a hallucinogen in the environment that leads to paranoid and agitated behavior, during which Trip rants about his distrust of T'Pol and threatens to kill her. After the team is rescued and given the antidote, Trip apologizes to T'Pol and then delves deeper about the prejudices that surfaced during his hallucinations

TUCKER: Challenge your preconceptions or they'll challenge you. T'POL: Commander? TUCKER: That's something Mister Velik used to say. Tenth grade biology class. He was a Vulcan scientist who came to teach us about life on other worlds. I'd never seen a Vulcan before... T'POL: Perhaps it's not too late to follow his advice.

Their relationship evolves over the show's 4 seasons into one of absolute trust, and by the end they talk to each other like a married couple. In "Terra Prime" — the next-to-last episode of the series — Trip and T'Pol sit together holding hands in private, having just lost their daughter, Elizabeth, to a genetic disorder. (ST:ENT: "Terra Prime" ending)

The beginning of the series portrays Humans, Vulcans, Andorians, and Tellarites all mutually prejudiced at nearly every interaction. The breaking down of their long-held preconceptions about each other is a major theme of the series, culminating in the four powers coming together to defeat a shared Romulan threat. The series finale, "These Are the Voyages...," culminates in Captain Archer heading into the ceremony to help found the United Federation of Planets.

How it relates to my approach to life and career

In all of science and engineering, we often have to make simplifying assumptions to make a problem manageable. Many textbooks give guidance on when those assumptions generally hold — and that outside those bounds, they can lead to a completely wrong answer. In practice, we often remember the part about an approach being useful, but forget the part about its applicability. When our mathematical models disagree with the observable data, we have to revisit the assumptions and ferret out what's different, why they didn't hold, and what the alternative is.

The same instinct applies outside of engineering too. I grew up in the Greater Cincinnati area, and to many Cincinnati natives, that really means Cincinnati is greater than every place else — there was Cincinnati, and then there was the third world, starting with Kentucky, Indiana, and Cleveland, the latter being made famous by Cincinnati Bengals Coach Sam Wyche: You Don't Live in Cleveland.

When I moved to New Jersey to start work with Exxon, some of my relatives thought I was going to be living next to the Sopranos. The reality was I lived up in the hills and had to worry more about bears trying to raid my garbage, not gangland nonsense.
Then I moved to Northern Virginia, and the warning was to look out for the riots. The reality was there were multiple groups of protesters every day in DC, and it was peaceful — and I never even saw them because I worked near the beltway.
Then I moved to Belgium, and some relatives warned me about Europeans hating all Americans. I never saw that.
By the time I moved to the UK, everyone was on the same page: that people are basically good everywhere, and that we are greater when we get past the stereotypes and face society's challenges together.

References

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