"In my world, if you think you have figured out a clever trick by which you can get ahead of everyone else, you're almost certainly wrong and depending on what you're meddling with it may literally explode in your face," he says. "Trying to figure out how the world works, in a new area or at a significantly increased level of detail relative to what's already common knowledge, is the sort of thing best done very humbly and cautiously and keeping in mind that the world might at any moment, usually the most inconvenient one possible, abruptly decide to start working in a slightly but crucially different way."