The ratio of doing to thinking

Thinking is much more difficult and rare than doing - it is also of low status; which is why so little thinking gets done. 

I first realized this some forty years ago when I began to work as a laboratory research scientist, and noticed that there was (in the biological and medical sciences anyway) extremely little thinking about the meaning of what we were doing. 

There was, indeed, active hostility (and scorn) directed against anything that challenged, or even seriously analysed, whatever the currently-accepted meanings and purposes of research-doing. 

The ratio of doing to thinking was so high, that it seemed to me that very few bioscientists ever thought consecutively and in a focused way for even ten minutes about their subject, or even their results. 

(I formulated this in a kind of slogan that anyone who did succeed in thinking for ten minutes about the implications and purposes of some research, thereby became a leading theoretician in that field.)

I was much more disposed towards thinking-hard than I was to doing-hard (long hours in the lab were mostly a chore, though this was my daily work environment for more than seven years, in the end); I soon decided that my "edge" as a scientist would come from focusing on solo theory rather than the usual practice of trying to generate vast quantities of data by forming vast teams of collaborators*

I felt, and still feel, that this was a flaw in the biosciences and medicine (attempting to remedy which was why I edited Medical Hypotheses for seven years) - and I think the same applies to other sciences. 

So far as I can gather - even the theoretical scientists don't really think, but just apply externally-learned models in a routine fashion. In other words; theory is not thinking! - or, seldom so.  

Eventually; this insight became a kind of Master Theory about Life! For nearly everybody, it seems that the ratio of doing to thinking is way too high; indeed apparently infinitely high in many people (i.e. they never think consecutively and in a focused way; so the ratio is some-quantity, divided by zero).  

And this is a major reason why our civilization is where it is: self-painted into a corner where it is purposively destroying itself - and simultaneously trying to bring-down the rest of the world from spite.  

No amount of doing will help - only thinking. 

Some serious and sustained thinking... very likely coming at the cost of less doing. 

*Note - on-average modern researchers do Not, contrary to almost universal perception, publish significantly more papers than earlier scientists who worked largely alone. What the moderns actually do, is work in much larger teams, and share in more publications. The bigger the team, the more shared-publications. But when the number of publications is divided by the number of authors (which has increased many-fold) - there seems to have been no significant change in average publication rates.