Mysteries and Puzzles

Two articles recently have stimulated a discussion on the difference between mysteries and puzzles and why it is important to be clear about the distinction if we are to arrive at the right conclusions.

There's a reason millions of people try to solve crossword puzzles each day. Amid the well-ordered combat between a puzzler's mind and the blank boxes waiting to be filled, there is satisfaction along with frustration. Even when you can't find the right answer, you know it exists. Puzzles can be solved; they have answers.

But a mystery offers no such comfort. It poses a question that has no definitive answer because the answer is contingent; it depends on a future interaction of many factors, known and unknown. A mystery cannot be answered; it can only be framed, by identifying the critical factors and applying some sense of how they have interacted in the past and might interact in the future. A mystery is an attempt to define ambiguities.

Puzzles may be more satisfying, but the world increasingly offers us mysteries. Treating them as puzzles is like trying to solve the unsolvable—an impossible challenge. But approaching them as mysteries may make us more comfortable with the uncertainties of our age.

Osama bin Laden’s whereabouts are a puzzle. We can’t find him because we don’t have enough information. But we do know that he is somewhere and that he can be found. The right question here is finding the requisite information that leads to him.

Similarly during the cold war, much of the job of U.S. intelligence was puzzle-solving—seeking answers to questions that had answers, even if we didn't know them. How many missiles did the Soviet Union have? Where were they located? How far could they travel? How accurate were they? It made sense to approach the military strength of the Soviet Union as a puzzle—the sum of its units and weapons, and their quality. Initially puzzle-solving is frustrated by a lack of information. But eventually with the right information becoming available, the solutions are clear.

In contrast if you consider September 11th as a mystery, you have to wonder if the authorities asked the right questions at the right time. If you consider the motivation and methods behind the attacks of September 11th to be mainly a puzzle, then the logical response is to increase the collection of intelligence, recruit more spies, add to the volume of information. So in one case you want to improve the quality of your analysis, in the other the quantity of your information.

Sometimes, however, mysteries often grow out of too much information. Until the 9/11 hijackers actually boarded their airplanes, their plan was a mystery, the clues to which were buried in too much "noise"—too many threat scenarios. So warnings from FBI agents in Minneapolis and Phoenix went unexplored. The hijackers were able to hide in plain sight. After the attacks, they became a puzzle: it was easy to pick up their trail.Mysteries require judgments and the assessment of uncertainty, and the hard part is not that we have too little information but that we have too much.In the case of the Enron financial scandal, there was too much information available but no one had the skills to interpret the data. So rather than being a puzzle, it became a mystery.

Take another case- medical treatment. No matter how much patients may seek the clarity of a puzzle, healthcare, will remain largely a mystery. The goal of medicine is an absence—of illness and disease. But achieving that goal depends on many different factors. Tests are imperfect predictors of illness, and treatments interact or have side effects. Doctors base an initial assessment of a patient's health on propensity, as revealed by his or her medical history, and on diagnosis, determined through an examination. Dr Grootman ( How Doctors Think) alleges on average a physician will interrupt a patient describing her symptoms within eighteen seconds. In that short time, many doctors decide on the likely diagnosis and best treatment.If the doctor's initial assessment is of a high probability of disease, he orders more tests, which in turn refine that probability. Thus the route is one of seeking answers through more and more pointed questions and having the ability to ask the right questions.

Most discussions about energy, as well, treat it as a puzzle: so many million barrels of proven reserves in country X, production to "peak" in country Y at a particular date and so on. From a geological point of view, the puzzle perspective makes sense: any individual drill hole or field has so much oil. Yet energy futures are a mystery, not a puzzle. How much oil a given well can produce is not the same as how much oil is there: whether it makes sense to use secondary or tertiary recovery methods after primary methods no longer suffice depends on price. And beyond a single well, the factors multiply. How fast will the global economy grow? What new energy discoveries will be made? Which alternative sources will come on line at what price? This too requires a constant reappraisal of answers.

In essence a puzzle is mostly about the left side of your brain. It's a logical process of collecting data. Get enough data points and you'll be home free.Puzzles have straightforward answers. Collecting more data always helps you solve a puzzle, just as collecting more pieces of a real jigsaw puzzle gets you closer to assembling the picture. You know when you have solved a puzzle because all the pieces fit and the picture becomes completely clear.

On the other hand, solutions to a mystery live on the right side of your brain. The artistic, creative and non-logical side. Solving a mystery usually takes leaps of faith and judgment. Paradoxically sometimes adding more data to a mystery only serves to obscure the truth. In a murder mystery, such misleading bits of data are known as ‘red herrings’. Often mysteries do not have simple answers. Solving a mystery thus depends not simply on amassing data, but on developing an intelligent hypothesis and applying judgment to determine whether the hypothesis is correct. Mysteries contain inherent uncertainty.However rarely is a problem just a "puzzle" or a "mystery", usually it is both, requiring not just the careful analysis of existing information, but also the creation of new data.Thus the origin of life is a mystery to many, but to many scientists it is simply a puzzle requiring new information to resolve.

Finally to solve puzzles, you need the right data and information, to solve mysteries you need to ask the right questions.