#science This is a technique I've come up with to help me better understand how the world works. There are a lot of hard problems that we have to figure out during out every day life, and once technique I use to think through things I don't immediately understand is asking myself "What happens at the extreme ends of the spectrum?". The answer is often obvious, and then I can extrapolate back to the more normal parts of the spectrum I care about. ##### A Scientific Example Does driving faster through the rain mean that more rain hits my windshield? I know the rain hits the windshield _harder_, but does _more_ rain hit my windshield the faster I drive? The answer to this isn't immediately obvious. I remember thinking about this problem and applying the "evaluate the extremes" technique for the first time in my life to this problem, and it turns out to make the answer obvious. At the most extreme end of the spectrum, I am driving _so fast_ that the rain is not moving. It is literally stationary in the air, and I (or my car) am the only thing moving. So going back to the original question, what happens now? Well, I can move around so fast, I can swoop up all the rain drops in the air. Literally every one of them if I want because they are all moving so slow in relation to me that they are effectively stationary. So the answer is obvious when I extrapolate this backwards: of course more rain hits my windshield if I drive faster. This is a cool technique because it allows us to quickly and easily come up with an answer to a slightly different question, and then we can extrapolate that answer back to our original question. It's also interesting to me that the extreme version of the question is often totally impractical. There is no practical reason for needing to know that if I move at light speed, I can swoop up all the rain drops in the air. That's cool! but it's a situation that will literally never happen. But interestingly, understanding the answer to that impractical question allows us to draw a ton of interesting, practical conclusions. ##### A Non-Scientific Example Philosophy is on the other end of science, and this same technique can be applied to philosophy. In fact it's regularly used. Nietzsche and nihilism is the first thing that comes to mind. [Wikipeida says](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nihilism): "different nihilist positions hold variously that human values are baseless, that life is meaningless, that knowledge is impossible, or that some set of entities do not exist."" This is without a doubt an extreme point of view, and it's based on evaluating the world at its extremes. Practically, I don't think nihilism is useful belief system, but it can help us reason through some tough situations in life. Frankly, I don't know much about nihilism, so this example is sparse. [[Contact Me|Contact me]] if you have thoughts.