Greetings from an elderly lurker on this list. Apologies, but an old
war story may shed a little light.
In mid '60's I was commissioned to do a study into how Stilton cheese is
judged fit for release. I was to manage the study and do the stats. I
recruited suitable experts and we went to meet a lot of cheese and the
85 year old Stilton expert who was being cantankerous to his putative
apprentices. His judgments, lots of tests, lots of stats -> result 'On
the basis of the information provided it is not possible etc'
Simply do more tests on more cheeses. Same result.
Could be he is a charlatan. Recruit a panel of experts - in those days
there were 'Cheese correspondents'! - and explain what they were being
asked to do. Posh London meeting place. Uniform response - 'Great, but
you are not inviting the man from the XXXX are you?' We were, I was
only the gofer.
All the experts agreed on their judgments so there was something but
unclear what.
The Milk Marketing Board told me that some 9 months later one of their
technicians observed a significant difference in the number of
Lactobacillus in mature Stiltons. They had excluded that from our work
since it was 'ubiquitous'
From this followed a number of studies on concordance, most notable
being one which showed cardiologists of those times were not uniform in
their judgement of ecgs and led to the present day availability of super
market self diagnosing cardiac defibrillators.
I am clear that there is a class of knowledge - of facts - where the
group that operate it do not know how they make correct judgments.
And, sadly, that leads some to claim they have the magic cloak
inappropriately. Showing that such cloaks do not exist proves both
difficult and resource consuming.
Facts do back fire. I have a sneaking suspicion that my cardiology
results did nothing to help my aspiration to be a consultant physician.
But I have had a wonderful alternative life.
Tony D
On 27/07/2010 22:38, Mark Goodge wrote:
On 27/07/2010 20:53, Francis Davey wrote:
On 27 July 2010 17:11, Francis Irving<[email protected]> wrote:
One of the cultural things I like about the community around mySociety
is our susceptibility to facts. It's key to our non-partisanship.
More fundamentally though, it's a built in geek trait.
I think this is coupled with habit again. As a programmer one is
habituated to dealing with a device (a computer) which has an
objective reality that is relatively inflexible and that is not
susceptible to persuasion, flannel or otherwise able to behave other
than its internal logic demands.
I'd agree that it's almost certainly true that working with computers
(or any other kind of discipline that requires manipulation of objective
devices - engineering is another example) requires the ability to take
an objective approach to them. But I think that characterising a
preference for facts as a "geek trait" is falling into exactly the trap
of making subjective judgements on the basis of prejudice :-) I've
worked with plenty of geeks, and outside their ability to write
programmed they can be as bloody-mindedly dogmatic as anyone else. In
fact, they're often more so, because they tend to approach Real Life
with the utterly false belief that it is as easily debugged and
disassembled as a few lines of code.
When I was teaching children mathematics they were often sceptical of
some of my conclusions (however well explained) but a quick appeal to
a calculator resolved their doubts instantly. Its a classic amongst
maths teachers, but 0.2*0.2=0.04 is a result many children do not
believe (they are already convinced its 0.4, on the basis that
0.5*0.5=0.25 and extrapolating from there), it helps to be able to
show that the *calculator* shows otherwise 8-).
I think that what that demonstrates, more than anything else, is that
intuition is very fallible. But it's easy to go to the opposite end of
the scale and dismiss intuition on the basis that it is fallible. There
have been interesting studies done in the military arena, where it has
been shown that giving too much information to soldiers and commanders
in the battlefield reduces, rather than enhances, their effectiveness.
Fighter pilots who "fly by the seat of their pants" tend to fly better,
and be more effective in combat, than those who studiously take note of
every piece of instrumentation.
I think that what that demonstrates is that facts and information alone
aren't enough - it's the ability to process them that matters.
Uninformed intuition is (often) practically useless, but informed and
trained intuition is more likely to get to the truth more often, and
more quickly, than trying to derive it from first principles through a
purely logical sequence.
Mark
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