Why Did Popper Say to Marry a Problem?

David Deutsch says diversity is the key to a good life, and he does not think any formula applies to everybody, or even to any two people. Any two people are more different than we are really capable of understanding. Individual humans are as different from each other as humans in general are from other species. Every person is like a different species.

Some people like a life of intellectual problem solving. Deutsch points to a passage in Popper's autobiography. Popper says the thing to do in life is to find a problem, not fall in love with it, get married to it, and live with it for the rest of your life, until death do you part. If you happen to solve it, the tone is that you were unlucky enough to solve it, and then there will be delightful problem children. Problem children was a euphemism invented for children you would not want to live with. Popper uses the phrase for something you really ought to live with, because problem in his philosophy has two opposite meanings.

People who survive doing unusual things, and then advocate unusual things, often gloss over good discipline and bad discipline, and a good problem and a bad problem. What was exactly right for them, because they were on the good path, is often taken to mean knuckle down, do your chores, then your homework, then go to bed. Deutsch says that path is the opposite of what you should be doing, even though it can be described in the same words.