This article first appeared in Forum, The Edge Malaysia Weekly on February 5, 2024 - February 11, 2024

I love reading science fiction. Among all the genres in fiction, it is by far at the very top alongside murder mystery. And while science fiction isn’t necessarily everybody’s cup of tea given its supposed lack of realism, that is precisely why I enjoy it so much. In particular, I am very much a fan of hard science fiction, which is defined — at least in Wikipedia — as “… a category of science fiction characterised by concern for scientific accuracy and logic”.

In hard science fiction stories, the authors essentially imagine a setting that falls within the realm of scientific plausibility. They take an idea from everyday life and imagine what would happen if one or two parameters were changed. For instance, something that would be in play would be as follows: What if octopuses somehow evolved to become hypersocial like humans (see The Mountain in the Sea by Ray Nayler)? What’s probably not in play is something like humans evolving wings to fly like birds or even where a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, life forms evolved to look exactly like human beings.

The main reason I especially like science fiction is that it really opens my mind up to the possible, not just the probable. In short, it really does expand the imagination. In Learning to Imagine: The Science of Discovering New Possibilities, professor of psychology 

Andrew Shtulman argues that “Science fiction provides a workspace for exploring the malleability of real-world causes and constraints …” Indeed, he discusses some academic evidence that science fiction readers are typically more open to the possibility of extraordinary events and the permissibility of extraordinary actions.

But why does this matter? Well, when we talk about things like innovation and creativity, what we’re really hoping for is for people to be able to imagine different ways of doing things, and then trying to actually do them. Just like how the concept of productivity is more nebulous at macro levels but is better defined at micro levels (Can you do more with less?), the extent to which a country is innovative at a macro level needs to start at the micro level — to what extent are its people imaginative?

And what does imagination really mean? Well, beyond overused slogans of “reimagining this” and “reimagining that”, imagination is essentially an ability to evaluate counterfactuals. Shtulman defines a counterfactual as an event that “did not happen but might have if the circumstances had been different”. For instance, the Quentin Tarantino movie Inglourious Basterds imagines a counterfactual in World War II ends when an SS agent blows up 

Adolf Hitler, Martin Bormann, Hermann Göring and Joseph Goebbels at a movie premiere.

Naturally, some counterfactuals are more realistic than others. A counterfactual in which I decided to take Jalan Tun Razak to KLCC instead of Jalan Sultan Ismail is plenty realistic. A counterfactual in which my car suddenly developed the ability to be a hovercraft to fly me to KLCC is less so.

As Shtulman puts it, “Counterfactuals that alter too many facts will no longer be informative. Goals that depart too far from current circumstances will no longer be achievable. And predictions that stray too far from prior outcomes will no longer be correct.”

So, if we’re going to be innovative, we need to be imaginative and, more precisely, we need to be imaginative in a useful way. This takes hard work. Evaluating only counterfactuals that are probable means that we won’t be particularly innovative. Dealing with the “probable” would generally mean more textbook answers. However, evaluating counterfactuals that are too improbable is not helpful either. A counterfactual for economic development where a meteorite full of some vibranium and adamantium alloy strikes Earth doesn’t really get us anywhere. The key is to imagine counterfactuals in the realm of the “possible” but being neither too conservative nor too ridiculous.

How do we do that? Shtulman argues, “Imagination, on its own, lumps the improbable with the impossible, but we can co-ordinate imagination with other faculties — namely knowledge and reflection — to disentangle the two. Unstructured imagination succumbs to expectation, but imagination structured by knowledge and reflection allows for innovation.”

Thus, imagination cannot be obtained by being ignorant. One may as well have the imagination of a child — imaginative, but hardly useful. (That being said, Shtulman spends a good amount of time debunking the myth that children are more imaginative than adults).

The key is knowledge, and then reflecting on that knowledge. And there is perhaps no better example that I have ever come across than in the historian Walter Scheidel’s book, Escape from Rome: The Failure of Empire and the Road to Prosperity. The book makes the argument that a particular quirk of historical development in Europe gave it the opportunity to overcome Malthusian growth constraints and become the world’s most powerful and wealthy world civilisation, eclipsing contemporaries such as the Ottoman Empire, Qing China and Mughal India. This is known as the “Great Divergence”.

That quirk is the rise and subsequent fall of the Roman Empire. The rise of the Roman Empire gave Europe some common foundations, Latin and Christianity, while its fall led to a fragmented polity in Europe, enabling smaller empires and states to be built on those common foundations, but in constant competition with one another. That competition drove wars, trade and even the Republic of Letters, so crucial to the Enlightenment. Scheidel argues that nothing else in history resembles that quirk — there have been unified empires for sure, but they never broke down in the way that the Roman Empire fragmented, and that has made all the difference.

The specific details of the dense but well-researched argument are worth checking out. But I did want to touch on how Scheidel made his arguments. He effectively employed the most imaginative historical counterfactual arguments I have ever come across. To show that the formation of the Roman Empire itself was a unique circumstance, he imagines a world in which other contemporary kingdoms may or may not have plausibly taken the place of the Empire, and provides arguments as to why that counterfactual is ultimately too improbable.

Then, to show that no other Empire could have come close to replicating the Roman Empire subsequent to its fall — thereby leading to fragmentation — he evaluates counterfactuals asking if the Mongol Golden Horde, the Ottoman Empire and the Habsburg Empire, among others, could have come close to the size and scope of the Roman Empire in Europe. He also asks if it was ever possible for China to have fragmented in such a way as Rome at the turn of dynasties. Evaluating and providing detailed arguments, based on great breadth and depth of knowledge, against each counterfactual is what makes this book such a sparkling display of useful imagination.

So, as we aspire to be “innovative” or “creative”, we must learn to be better at evaluating plausible useful counterfactuals. Playing too safe doesn’t really get us anywhere beyond what may be in textbooks. And being too unanchored just creates arguments as useful as those in YouTube comments. To start, we must learn widely to acquire some breadth in our knowledge, allowing for examples, principles and models from different fields to be applied across one another. And only from there can we really get into the business of useful innovation.

Nicholas Khaw is an economist and head of research at Khazanah Nasional Bhd

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