Everyone is shaped by their beliefs: what’s healthy, what makes a marriage work, what’s a meaningful life, how much money is enough. Most of those beliefs were never chosen. We absorbed them from family, friends, what we have read, the media, and now social media driven by algorithms. We have acted on them ever since, often without verifying these beliefs are turn. Many of them are flawed.

At his trial, Socrates said the unexamined life is not worth living. I would put it differently. An unexamined life is a squandered life, one that misses a richness and countless opportunities that were there the whole time.

It’s my observation that many people don’t really think. Something happens or an emotion spikes and a reaction follows; the crowd moves and we move with it. I catch myself doing it more often than I’d like. This often leads to insanity: repeating the same behavior while expecting the results to change.

I think the best possible life is one that is examined, with its beliefs tested and then re-examined when they are found wanting. Put simply, life should be lived as a giant experiment.

Theory, Experiment, Evaluate, Update (Repeat)

A scientist treats a belief as a theory. It is the best current explanation, held until the evidence says otherwise. The method is short enough to fit on an index card:

1. State a theory that could be falsified. “Exercise is good for me” can’t fail. “I sleep better on days I exercise before noon” can.
2. Run an experiment. Do the thing on purpose, for a set period, and write down what happens.
3. Evaluate the results. Compare what happened with what the theory predicted.
4. Update the theory. Keep it, adjust it or drop it.

Then go around again.

The first step is the one most often skipped. A falsifiable theory says in advance what would count as being wrong. Without that, every outcome looks like confirmation, and a person can “try things” for decades without learning much.

Small questions and big ones

Take a small one: how much water do I need to drink when I exercise? Suppose my theory is that 1L / hour hour is plenty. I can test that inside a week. I weigh myself before and after a few runs, and note how much I drank, how hot it was and how the last twenty minutes felt. Perhaps the theory holds on cool mornings and falls apart in afternoon heat. Now I have a better theory, one with temperature as a parameter.

The same loop applies to the largest question I know: what promotes a thriving life? That can’t be tested whole, but pieces can be broken off. “I’d be happier with one more evening a week with friends” is a theory. So is “I do my best work before breakfast.” Each can be tried for a month at low cost.

Others have built whole methods on this. Anne-Laure Le Cunff calls them tiny experiments: pick one action, commit to it for a fixed stretch, observe and take notes. Bill Burnett and Dave Evans, coming from design, call them prototypes in Designing Your Life. Before rearranging your life around a new career, talk to people already living it and try a small version first.

Big questions answer more slowly and less clearly than the water bottle did. That argues for running more experiments on them, since a wrong belief about how to live costs years.

Why it’s harder than it sounds

None of this is complicated, and very few people do it. In Think Again, Adam Grant argues that we spend most of our time in three other modes. As preachers we defend what we already believe. As prosecutors we attack what someone else believes. As politicians we say whatever wins the room. Only in scientist mode do we go looking for reasons we might be wrong.

Intelligence is rarely the obstacle. Identity is. Once a belief becomes part of who I am, evidence against it feels like an attack on me, and I defend it. Richard Feynman warned that the easiest person to fool is yourself, which makes not fooling yourself the first rule.

Grant describes a study that shows what the scientist’s habit is worth. Italian startup founders took a course in running a business, and half were randomly assigned to treat their strategy as a theory and their product launch as an experiment. By his account, that half brought in more than 40 times the revenue of the control group. They were more than twice as likely to change course when a first launch failed.

It helps to lower the bar. Peter Attia describes the goal as being “less wrong over time” and not as being right. Grant tells of asking Daniel Kahneman why he looked delighted to learn that one of his hypotheses was false. Kahneman’s answer was that he was now less wrong than he had been before.

The feed is not a lab

Social media pushes hard the other way. It rewards the preacher, the prosecutor and the politician, and gives the scientist very little to do. It is built for reaction, the habit I complained about at the start. And it delivers other people’s conclusions by the hundred with none of the method that produced them.

The most destructive part is comparison. I see someone’s results (the body, the house, the career) without any of their data: what it cost, what they tried that failed, what sits outside the frame. Then I measure my whole unedited life against their best ten seconds. As an experiment, that is worthless. The sample is biased and the measurement is rigged, and the conclusion is nearly always that I’m behind.

Comparison also swaps the question. An experimenter asks, “What happens when I try this?” The feed trains me to ask, “How am I doing next to them?” The first question teaches me something about my own life. The second produces envy or pride, and neither tells me what to do on Monday.

The other issue with social media is that it doesn’t encourage thoughtful dialog. Rather it encourages people to accept “soundbites”. We love easy answers, but the world is really simple. Life is complex filled with paradoxes. As H.L. Mencken observed “there is always a well-known solution to every human problem—neat, plausible, and wrong.”

2000 Year Old Instructions

None of this is new. Writing to the church in Rome, Paul tells his readers not to be conformed to the world around them but to be transformed by the renewing of their minds, so that by testing they may discern what God’s will is (Romans 12:2).  Acts 17:11 said of the dreams were noble because they “received the word with all eagerness, examining the Scriptures daily to see if these things were so.” This wasn’t blind acceptance but rather a careful examination and testing. Conformity is going with the flow. The alternative he offers is a renewed mind that tests.

He goes straight on to warn against thinking of yourself more highly than you ought, and calls for sober judgment (12:3). Then he points out that a body has many members and they don’t all have the same function (12:4). Pay attention to truth which has it’s roots in God, be honest about yourself, and stop measuring yourself against others.

That passage feeds an something that always excites me: social science from biblical truth. Scripture makes many claims about how people work. It says that it is more blessed to give than to receive (Acts 20:35), that a cheerful heart is good medicine (Proverbs 17:22), and that bad company corrupts good character (1 Corinthians 15:33). Those are statements about human beings, and statements about human beings can be turned into theories and tested.

Some already have been. In one well-known study, researchers gave people a little money and randomly assigned them to spend it on themselves or on someone else. Those who spent it on someone else ended up happier.

The interesting cases will be the ones where a test seems to fail. Then I have to ask whether the experiment was badly designed, whether I misread the text, or whether I turned a proverb into a promise it never made. Any of those is worth finding out. What gets tested is my understanding and my practice. God is not the one on trial.

Tools that Sharpen the Process

The loop is simple, but running it well takes skill. Several habits of thought help at different steps. At some point I will likely write about each of these.

• First principles, systems thinking and mental models produce better theories. Reasoning up from what you know to be true, and asking how the parts of a situation affect one another, beats borrowing a conclusion by analogy.
• Deliberately exploring alternatives stops you from testing only the first idea that showed up. Edward de Bono’s lateral thinking and Six Thinking Hats were built for this.
• Knowing your biases protects the evaluation step. Confirmation bias in particular will mark your own homework generously if you let it.
• Metacognition, thinking about your own thinking, is what notices that you have slipped back into preacher mode.
• One-way and two-way doors tell you how careful to be. I first heard this distinction in an interview with Jeff Bezos. A decision you can walk back through is a two-way door, and most decisions are. Those are cheap experiments, so run them quickly. Save the long deliberation for the few doors that lock behind you.

Where to Start

One caution first. What we are learning is likely not universally true. A life is a sample of one, with no control group, multiple things change at once. A single good week proves very little. Conclusions should stay provisional and keep the loop running.

Here is how I would begin:

1. Pick one belief you act on every day and have never checked.
2. Write it as a prediction, and write down what result would change your mind.
3. Test it for two weeks and keep notes.
4. Decide what you believe now, then pick the next one.

Most of these experiments will be small, and plenty will only confirm what I already thought. A few will overturn something I have believed for years. Those few are the richness and the opportunities that an unexamined life misses.

Further Reading

• My notes about truth, faith, systems thinking
• How to become “the scientist of your own life,” an interview with Anne-Laure Le Cunff, author of Tiny Experiments.
• Thinking Scientifically, an episode of Peter Attia’s podcast The Drive on why scientific thinking is hard and how to practice it.
• Think Again by Adam Grant, on the value of rethinking what you know. This interview about the book is a quick way in.
• Designing Your Life by Bill Burnett and Dave Evans. Design thinking applied to a life: theory, prototype, evaluate, repeat.