As an American, I have a patriotic duty to be impatient, to want EVERYTHING Immediately. Of course, I rediscover every minute that such a duty is shortsighted and impossible and, as we say, suboptimal (dumb!). I can find helpful ideas in many places and one of them is a good book on systems analysis. I learned that if you want to automate your shoe factory, you might call in some systems analysis people who will study what your factory does now and how it could be automated. In Peter Senge's writings about systems analysis, he discusses the 5 Whys approach.
To use the 5 Whys, the idea is to ask "Why?" repeatedly, much as you did when you were an irritating 4 year old. Except that now you can understand much more complex answers and including science, culture, politics, history and finances in your thinking. I don't know of any reason one should go to 5 Whys and stop. It might be that three or four would suffice to get some good ideas going and it might be necessary in some cases to go to 8 or 10 whys.
The thing is that our families, our religions, our health, our desire for novelty, our desire for continuity, and all sorts of other factors might hold implications, stimulants or obstacles to automating your shoe factory that aren't apparent or don't even exist until a week or a year or a decade or a century passes. So, as a antsy American, I want all the answers NOW but I can see that it might take me and my government a long time to get them.
It is not just "implications", that is, logically derived consequences of ideas and principles I cling to. Maybe even more important are assumptions. I go around assuming all sort of things, often that I don't even realize I am assuming. For instance, I was shocked way back in graduate school when I read that much of science depends on the assumption of what might be called "relative independence." I can study the growth and development of pears but in doing so, I would usually just assume that today's date or which day of the week I do some experiment or analysis does not affect my results. All the while I go about assuming independence of phenomena, I am also mumbling "It's all one" and "The universe is a unity" and "Everything is connected to everything else".
As a human, I can "compartmentalize" as Madam Secretary (Tea Leoni) says. I can keep one set of ideas in mind in the workplace or the morning and a different set at home or in the evening. Over time, I or my replacements may find ways to bridge the compartments or use an entirely different set of assumptions.
