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Ask Naive Questions to Shift Perspective, with Jonathon Keats | Big Think.

Big Think | November 6, 2025



Ask Naive Questions to Shift Perspective,
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Jonathon Keats says growing out of childhood was “probably the worst thing that ever happened to us, certainly the most traumatic.” Even we re-enter states of naivete and wonder, our impulse as adults is to hide that precociousness from the outside work lest our peers interpreted it as immaturity or denseness. In this video, Keats explains why asking questions from this perspective helps us gain a new approach in solving the problems in our lives.

For example, Keats walks us through one of his most famous experiments, the Honeybee Ballet, which began as a simple naive question: “Could I choreograph a ballet for another species?” Keats then built from his absurd starting point, eventually exploring the not-so-absurd topic of “how we live within a world that is as complex as ours in harmony with other species.”
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JONATHON KEATS:

Jonathon Keats is a San Francisco-based experimental philosopher who has, over the years, sold real estate in the extra dimensions of space-time proposed by string theory (he sold a hundred and seventy-two extra-dimensional lots in the Bay Area in a single day); made an attempt to genetically engineer God (God turns out to be related to the cyanobacterium); and copyrighted his own mind (in order to get a seventy-year post-life extension.

Keats’s bold experiments raise serious questions and put into practice his conviction that the world needs more “curious amateurs,” willing to explore publicly whatever intrigues them, in defiance of a culture that increasingly forecloses on wonder and siloes knowledge into narrowly defined areas of expertise.
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TRANSCRIPT:

Jonathon Keats: Happily we all have at least one thing in common. We were all once children. We grew out of it probably the worst thing that ever happened to us, certainly the most traumatic. But I think that we can all find our way back into that space. In fact I think that we all every now and then have that guilty pleasure of thinking like a child, which we do our best not to mention in public, not to get too much credence to. But I think that we can give credence to that even if we don’t want to admit it necessarily to our superiors or some of our friends probably would think twice about associating with us if they knew that we were as naïve as we really are. But we can still, for own sake, the back of our mind ask those sorts of questions and let them play out. We can fully develop them. And even if it’s only in our own minds that we are fully developing them that process can take us to something that is more concrete, something that is more actionable in an adult responsible world that we don’t really need to say we came to it through that naïve question. We only have to then take up where it got us and make use of that in terms of solving the problems within our lives. Whether they be personal or whether they be at the level of making the most of the world in which we work.
Several years ago I got to be very interested in honeybees and the extraordinary talent that they have for dancing. They’re better dancers than us, they’ve been doing it a lot longer and they certainly seem to have dance as their culture to a greater extent than probably any other species. So I got to thinking about whether there was a way to work with honeybees collaboratively, making use of their dance in a way that would choreograph it is we do amongst ourselves for human audiences. The way in which they dance is determined by where flowers are to be found. And that information can be used as a way of marking a dance that they might be able to perform. So what I did was I studied extensively the language of bees, the language by which they indicate to others where flowers are to be found so that others can then go and find those flowers and, in the process of pollinating them, bring back more nectar or more pollen for the hive. And having decided on some basic geometric arrangements for my dance that I was going to provide for the bees, I worked out where hives were in the city of San Francisco relative to places that I might plant flowers. And then mapped out specifically where the flowers should be planted as a way of choreographing, of marking in their own language according to their own way of …

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Comments

This post currently has 34 comments.

  2. @RealCarrera

    November 6, 2025 at 8:02 pm

    This is a brilliant perspective! The message delivered in this video opened up an incredible amount of possibilities for me. It describes an incredibly profound and remarkable concept that requires one’s ability to listen without judgement. I agree with some viewers that the man in the video seems uneasy, but that is irrelevant to the message. I would be uneasy too if I had to sit in front of a camera to explain a concept so revolutionary. I invite you to move past appearances and really listen to what this man is saying, otherwise you may just miss out on one of the most significant pieces of life-transforming advice that you may ever get in your adult life. This message is at the core of the solution for making beneficial change in the world. All by just asking a naïve question…wow!

  3. @ryand1404

    November 6, 2025 at 8:02 pm

    This is pretty out there, which is cool I guess. But what the hell was the point of MAYBE making them dance if you never recorded any data on it…..?

  4. @RockSprites

    November 6, 2025 at 8:02 pm

    Why wouldn't you admit that you came to brilliant conclusions through naive questions? I mean, on one hand you're encouraging us to do this, but then we
    are being told to keep it a secret. If more people should do this as a thinking exercise, shouldn't we be encouraging them to do it openly and proudly, particularly if it is beneficial? Why is thinking like a child something to be ashamed of???

  10. @davidadams8135

    November 6, 2025 at 8:02 pm

    Why do people believe that childhood is better than adulthood?  It is like a version the "noble savage" myth on the left.

    Putting that aside, using shifting perspective is important for creativity and innovation in the adult world.

    The "bee dance" thing is a little nutty.

  25. @Linvael

    November 6, 2025 at 8:02 pm

    I understand, that he did not do his bee ballet for any sort of concrete profit. Did not want to record them, sell them. But… He did not even CHECK whether he was right? Whether he really cracked some of bees language, whether he succeeded? He went "plants are where I wanted them, good job, thanks" and went on with his life? This all just seems like an illuminati florist scheme…

  28. @burt591

    November 6, 2025 at 8:02 pm

    Making this whole bees experiment, and not putting a camera  into the hive to see the result sound pretty stupid to me, but he is a conceptual artist, not a scientist, so I think that explains a lot

  32. @michealray8783

    November 6, 2025 at 8:02 pm

    When you open up the available idea where some find great treasures in daring to do that but in order to understand the elementary principals at its mid to end marginalization they have somewhat a theory of what might seem sub practical in the party pool.

  33. @kristofferterbush2610

    November 6, 2025 at 8:02 pm

    i wont say that this is wasted potential… but i will say that while this question is solid… i think that there are much greater problems facing the human species as a whole rather than exploring the understanding of the honey bees… call me crass and base… and i'm fine with that…. but truly wish that humanity as a whole would consolidate our collective mind and figure out how and when and where we can thrive into the next 300 years… because truth told we DO need to figure that out first… how can we manage to live on as a consumer species living in a finite environs…???

  34. @Jessx

    November 6, 2025 at 8:02 pm

    Some of you are so shallow, commenting more about his appearance and the way he speaks more than the actual message. I thought he communicated it quite effectively though the bee anecdote seemed like a bit of a digression at first. The point, it is good to embrace your naïveté in order to gain a broader understanding for a certain subject. A lot of the time, we rely on our own assumptions or what we've learned from other people to sum up an entire subject when there is so much more to learn about it. Sometimes we're to prideful to ask questions in fear of looking stupid even though we're only perpetuating our ignorance when we do that. This man made discoveries in bee behavior because of his naïveté which led to his pursuit of knowledge and I find that commendable. I appreciate this message. 

Comments are closed.

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