I think the title of this needs to have facts in inverted commas. The problem with any kind of information is the person behind said info and their agenda. Everyone has an agenda and we all know how time and time again people twist facts to get to their truth. I am not sure so much if we have this intuitive ability or we're indoctrinated from such an early age-parents,society etc-that we're simply responding to what has been fed to us. This alone makes our use of the term 'fact' suspicious. Saying that, we aren't that complex and terribly predictable-which to me is a fact about human nature... IR Sent using BlackBerry® from Orange
-----Original Message----- From: Tony Davis <[email protected]> Date: Thu, 29 Jul 2010 09:04:39 To: <[email protected]> Reply-To: "mySociety public, general purpose discussion list" <[email protected]> Subject: Re: [mySociety:public] How facts backfire 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 > > _______________________________________________ > Mailing list [email protected] > Archive, settings, or unsubscribe: > https://secure.mysociety.org/admin/lists/mailman/listinfo/developers-public > _______________________________________________ Mailing list [email protected] Archive, settings, or unsubscribe: https://secure.mysociety.org/admin/lists/mailman/listinfo/developers-public _______________________________________________ Mailing list [email protected] Archive, settings, or unsubscribe: https://secure.mysociety.org/admin/lists/mailman/listinfo/developers-public
