Distancing from direct definitions.

Wikipedia defines "negative space" in art as the empty space around and between the subject of an image. For example, in the image below, we see that the subject of the image is supposed to be something like a white chalice, and the negative space is all of the black space -- which seems to contain two geometrically opposed faces -- that surrounds it. 

Now, you could get this image by drawing either the chalice or drawing the two faces. If presented with this task, my intuition is that most people would opt for the former, just because it seems that the faces would take up more time. Assuming you agree the chalice is the real subject, you could say that by drawing the two faces to get the chalice, you're drawing the chalice indirectly, but still getting the same result than if you just drew the chalice.

Moving away from visuals, I think we experience negative spaces more often in our daily lives when we talk about what things are not. For example, I'm not quite sure what my 'dream' career is (or if I will ever find one), but I'm confident that it's not being an accountant. While I could get an idea of my dream career directly by, say, thinking about the kind of lifestyle I enjoy and what kinds of tasks I enjoy doing, and seeing what kinds of jobs cater to both of those, I could also list off specific occupations I know for sure are not for me. I found that I've been pretty happy with the early-career decisions that have come from precisely this indirect thinking. I really don't really see myself as a software engineer, either, but I do enjoy thinking about certain concepts that appear in computer science, and these two pieces of information in conjunction I think have moved me in a direction I want to be going in. One might say that, in so doing, I've been establishing the 'negative space' of a dream job.

I know for a fact that this trick isn't only helpful in my own life. Indirect reasoning, carving up the 'negative space' of 'what is true' (so, showing what is not true), is used in math all the time. We can prove that the square root of 2 is an irrational number by first assuming that it is rational, and then showing that this would lead to statements that are plainly not true. We use this thinking to dispel what we know to be false in everyday contexts, too. If you can't immediately appeal to scientific evidence to know that the earth is flat, assume it is, and then note that this would mean people can fall off the edge. But that's never happened! So you know it's false. You're reasoning about what the world is like by stating what you know for sure it's not. 

I'm not sure how much this kind of indirect, negative-space type thinking moves the needle on the important questions, but I think it's really good for getting us off the ground in the first place. I don't know how dependent we should be on technology in the future, but I do know that, however much power we give different forms, I'd want humans making the big, final decisions. That's valuable information, and assuming you agree, it makes the question less abstract. We'd then instead start talking about where we'd draw the line for future technology, which could then lead us to discussions about how much power to give AI, leading us closer and closer to plans that could be implemented in practice. One measure of intellectual progress is seeing how much our thoughts have moved from the abstract to the granular, and I think indirect reasoning jumpstarts this process. This implies that, as we discover new scientific fields, such thinking becomes more and more important. In a sense, it's just the process of making obviously true statements.

That's why I named this blog 'Negative Spaces'. I'm not going to explicitly try to reason indirectly in everything I write, but as I said, I think it's critical for objectively understanding our world and for the bettering of our own lives in a very practical sense, both of which I do hope to help with in my own way.