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(\_~_/) This is Bunny.
(='.'=) Copy and paste bunny into your
(")_(") signature to help her gain world domination.
(\_^_/) This is Bunny.
(='.'=) Copy and paste bunny into your
(")_(") signature to help her gain world domination.
(\_Y_/) This is Bunny.
(='.'=) Copy and paste bunny into your
(")_(") signature to help her gain world domination.
(\_!_/) This is Bunny.
(='.'=) Copy and paste bunny into your
(")_(") signature to help her gain world domination.
____________________________________
• people do not act on the basis of reality.
• people act on their perception of reality.
• Evidence about a mismatch has to be very compelling for people to break out of the mindset.
• They have no expectation of a mismatch.
• the system has behaved reliably in the past.
• people always face a trade-off between changing their assessments and actions with every little change in the world, versus providing some stability in interpretation.
Sidney Dekker, The field guide to human error investigations, 2002
p.111 (pdf page: 109/154)
People generally interpret cues about the world on the basis of what they have told their automated systems to do, rather than on the basis of what their automated systems are actually doing. In fact, people do not act on the basis of reality, they act on the basis of their perception of reality. Once they have programmed their ship to steer to Boston in NAV mode, they may interpret cues about the world as if the ship is doing just that. Evidence about a mismatch has to be very compelling for people to break out of the misconstruction of mindset. They have no expectation of a mismatch (the system has behaved reliably in the past), and such feedback as there is (a tiny mode annunciation) is not compelling when viewed from inside the situation.
p.114 (pdf page: 112/154)
The pattern is typical because people in dynamic worlds always face a trade-off between changing their assessments and actions with every little change (or possible indication of change) in the world, versus providing some stability in interpretation to better manage and oversee an unfolding situation; creating a framework in which to place newly incoming information. There are errors of judgment on both ends. On the other, people can get fixated, they do not revise their assessment in the face of cues that (in hindsight) suggested it could be good to do so.
source: The field guide to human error investigations, by Sidney Dekker,
Cranfield university press
filename: DekkersFieldGuide.pdf
(Sidney Dekker, The field guide to human error investigations, 2002, )
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• Mental simulation can explain away disconfirming evidence.
• it is often wise to explain away mild discrepancies
• since the evidence itself might not be trustworthy.
• However, there is a point when we have explained away so much that the mental simulation becomes very complicated.
• until we have an alternate mental simulation, we will keep patching the original one.
• Decision makers noticed the signs of a problem but explained it away.
• garden path fallacy: each step makes so much sense that you do not notice how far you are getting from the main road.
• snap-back: the accumulated strain of pushing away inconvenient evidence.
Gary Klein, Sources of power : how people make decision, 1998
p.69
Marvin Cohen (1997), snap-back
Marvin Cohen (1997) believes that mental simulation is usually self-correcting through a process he has called snap-back. Mental simulation can explain away disconfirming evidence, but Cohen has concluded that it is often wise to explain away mild discrepancies since the evidence itself might not be trustworthy. However, there is a point when we have explained away so much that the mental simulation becomes very complicated.6 We look at all the new evidence that had been explained away to see if maybe there is not another simulation that makes more sense. Cohen believes that until we have an alternate mental simulation, we will keep patching the original one. We will not be motivated to assemble an alternate simulation until there is too much to be explained away.
p.274
Decision makers noticed the signs of a problem but explained it away. They found a reason not to take seriously each piece of evidence that warned them of an anomaly. As a result, they did not detect the anomaly in time to prevent a problem.5
p.70
This has also been called the garden path fallacy: taking one step that seems very straightforward, and then another, and each step makes so much sense that you do not notice how far you are getting from the main road. Cohen is developing training methods that will help people keep track of their thinking and become more aware of how much contrary evidence they have explained away so they can see when to start looking for alternate explanations or predictions.
p.70
That was the moment of snap-back; the accumulated strain of pushing away inconvenient evidence caught up with me.
(Klein, Gary, Sources of power : how people make decision / Gary Klein., 1. decision-making., 1998, 685.403, MIT Press, )
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• What your left hemisphere does instead is either ignore the anomaly completely or distort it to squeeze it into preexisting framework to preserve stability.
V. S. Ramachandran., and Sandra Blakeslee., Phantoms in the brain: probing the mysteries of the human mind, 1998
p.134
But now suppose something comes along that does not quite fit the plot. What do you do? One option is to tear up the entire script and start from scratch: completely revise your story to create a new model about the world and about yourself. The problem is that if you did this for every little piece of threatening information, your behavior would soon become chaotic and unstable; you would go mad.
What your left hemisphere does instead is either ignore the anomaly completely or distort it to squeeze it into your preexisting framework to preserve to stability.
pp.135-136
Imagine, for example, a military general about to wage war on the enemy. It is late at night and he is in the war room planning strategies for the next day. Scouts keep coming into the room to give him information about the lay of the land, terrain, light level and so forth. They also tell him that the enemy has 500 tanks and that he has 600 tanks, a fact that prompts the general to decide to wage war. He positions all of his troops in strategic locations and decides to launch battle exactly at 6:00 A.M. with sunrise.
Imagine further that at 5:55 A.M. one little scout comes running into the war room and says, “General! I have a bad news.” With minutes to go until battle, the generals asks, “What is that?” and the scout replies, “I just looked through binoculars and saw that the enemy has 700 tanks, not 500!”
What does the general--the left hemisphere--do? Time is of the essence and he simply can't afford the luxury of revising all his battle plans. So he orders the scout to shut up and tell no one about what he saw. Denial! Indeed, he may even shoot the scout and hide the report in a drawer labeled “top secret” (repression). In doing so, he relies on the high probability that the majority opinion--the previous information by all the scouts--was correct and that this single new item of information coming from one source is probably wrong. So the general sticks to his original position. Not only that, but for ffear of mutiny, he might order the scout actually to lie to the other generals and tell them that he only saw 500 tanks (confabulation). The purpose of all of this is to impose stability on behavior and to prevent vacillation because indecisiveness doesn't serve any purpose. Any decision, so long as it is probably correct, is better than no decision at all. A perpetually fickle general will never win a war!
In this analogy, the general is the left hemisphere5 (Freud's “ego”, perhaps?), and his behaviour is analogous to the kinds of denials and repressions you see in both healthy people and patients with anosognosia. But why are these defense mechanisms so grossly exaggerated in the patients? Enter the right hemisphere, which I like to call the Devil's Advocate. To see how this works, we need to push the analogy a step further. Supposing the single scout comes running in, and instead of saying the enemy has more tanks, he declares, “General, I just looked through my telescope and the enemy has nuclear weapons.” The general would be very foolish indeed to adhere to his original plan. He must quickly formulate a new one, for if the scout were correct, the consequences would be devastating.
• the coping strategies of the two hemispheres are fundamentally different.
• The left hemisphere's job is to create a belief system or model
• and to fold new experiences into that belief system.
• If confronted with new information that doesn't fit the model,
• it relies on Freudian defense mechanisms ...--anything to preserve the status quo.
• The right hemisphere's strategy is to play “Devil's Advocate”,
• to question the status quo and look for inconsistencies.
• When the anomalous information reaches a certain threshold,
• the right hemisphere decides that it is time to force a complete revision of the entire model and start from scratch.
p.136
Thus the coping strategies of the two hemispheres are fundamentally different. The left hemisphere's job is to create a belief system or model and to fold new experiences into that belief system. If confronted with some new information that doesn't fit the model, it relies on Freudian defense mechanisms to deny, repress or confabulate--anything to preserve the status quo. The right hemisphere's strategy, on the other hand, is to play “Devil's Advocate”, to question the status quo and look for global inconsistencies. When the anomalous information reaches a certain threshold, the right hemisphere decides that it is time to force a complete revision of the entire model and start from scratch. The right hemisphere thus forces a “Kuhnian paradigm shift” in response to anomalies, whereas the left hemisphere always tries to cling tenaciously to the way things were.
Now consider what happens if the right hemisphere is damaged.6 The left hemisphere is then given free rein to pursue its denials, confabulations and other strategies, as it normally does.
(Ramachandran, V.S., Phantoms in the brain : probing the mysteries of the human mind / V. S. Ramachandran, and Sandra Blakeslee., 1. neurology--popular works., 2. brain--popular works., 3. neurosciences--popular works., 1998, 612.82, )
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• there is a sort of coherence-producing mechanism in the left hemisphere
• that prohibits anomalies,
• allows the emergence of a unified belief system and
• is largely responsible for the integrity and stability of self.
• But what if a person were confronted by several anomalies that were not consistent with his original belief system but were nonetheless consistent with each other?
V. S. Ramachandran., and Sandra Blakeslee., Phantoms in the brain: probing the mysteries of the human mind, 1998
p.147
To understand what is going on here, let us return to our general in the war room. I used this analogy to illustrate that there is a sort of coherence-producing mechanism in the left hemisphere--the general--that prohibits anomalies, allows the emergence of a unified belief system and is largely responsible for the integrity and stability of self. But what if a person were confronted by several anomalies that were not consistent with his original belief system but were nonetheless consistent with each other? Like soap bubbles, they might coalesce into a new belief system insulated from the previous story line, creating multiple personalities. Perhaps balkanization is better than civil war. I find the reluctance of cognitive psychologists to accept the reality of this phenomenon somewhat puzzling, given that even normal individuals have such experiences from time to time.
(Ramachandran, V.S., Phantoms in the brain : probing the mysteries of the human mind / V. S. Ramachandran, and Sandra Blakeslee., 1. neurology--popular works., 2. brain--popular works., 3. neurosciences--popular works., 1998, 612.82, )
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on page 232 and page 235
Written by Tom Butler-Bowdon, on page 232 and page 235::
from the book, ‘Phantoms in the Brian: Probing the Mysteries of the Human Mind,’, by V.S. Ramachandran & S. Blakeslee (1998), New York: HarperCollins,
... Freudian idea of defense mechanism; that is, thoughts and behaviors whose purpose is to protect the idea we have of ourselves. Neurology's task is to discover why people rationalize and avoid reality, only it involves considerations of brain wiring instead of the psyche. Patients in denial mode are the best way to research this because their defense mechanism are concentrated and amplified.
The brain will do anything to preserve a sense of self. This evolved perhaps because the brain and nervous system involve so many different systems and a grand illusion is necessary to tie them all together. To survive, to be social, to mate, we need to have the experience of being an autonomous being who is in charge. However, the part of us that is in charge is in fact only a small part of our whole beings; the rest carries on automatically, zombie like.
(50 Psychology Classics: who we are, how we think, what we do; insight and inspiration from 50 key books, by Tom Butler-Bowdon, © 2007, MJF books, p.232, p.235)
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Thomas S. Kuhn, The structure of scientific revolution, 1962, 1970, 1996
pp.84-85
The transition from a paradigm in crisis to a new one from which a new tradition of normal science can emerge is far from a cumulative process, one achieved by an articulation or extension of the old paradigm. Rather it is a reconstruction of the field from new fundamentals, a reconstruction that changes some of the field's most elementary theoretical generalizations as well as many of its paradigm methods and applications. During the transition period there will be a large but never complete overlap between the problems that can be solved by the old and by the new paradigm. But there will also be a decisive difference in the modes of solution. When the transition is complete, the profession will have changed its view of the field, its methods, and its goals. One perceptive historian, viewing a classic case of science's reorientation by paradigm change, recently described it as "picking up the other end of the stick," a process that involves "handling the same bundle of data as before, but placing them in a new system of relations with one another by giving them a different framework." 8 Others who have noted this aspect of scientific advance have emphasized its similarity to a change in visual gestalt: the marks on paper that were first seen as a bird are now seen as an antelope, or vice versa. 9 That parallel can be misleading. Scientists do not see something AS something else; instead, they simply see it. We have already examined some of the problems created by saying that Priestley saw oxygen as dephlogisticated air. In addition, the scientist does not preserve the gestalt subject's freedom to switch back and forth between ways of seeing. Never-the-less, the switch of gestalt, particularly because it is today so familiar, is a useful elementary prototype for what occurs in full-scale paradigm shift.
8 Hebert Butterfield, The Origins of Modern Science, 1300-1800 (London, 1949), pp. 1-7.
The preceding anticipation may help us recognize crisis as an appropriate prelude to the emergence of new theories, particularly since we have already examined a small-scale version of the same process in discussing the emergence of discoveries. [...]
(Kuhn, Thomas S., 'The structure of scientific revolution')
(The structure of scientific revolution / Thomas S. Kuhn. --3rd ed., copyright © 1962, 1970, 1996, 1. science--philosophy, 2. science--history, pp.84-85)
____________________________________
pp.149-150
To make the transition to Einstein's universe, the whole conceptual web whose strands are space, time, matter, force, and so on, had to be shifted and laid down again on nature whole. Only men who had together undergone or failed to undergo that transformation would be able to discover precisely what they agreed or disagreed about. Communication across the revolutionary divide is inevitably partial. Consider, for another example, the men who called Copernicus mad because he proclaimed that the earth moved. They were not either just wrong or quite wrong. Part of what they meant by 'earth' was fixed position. Their earth, at least, could not be moved. Correspondingly, Copernicus's innovation was not simply to move the earth. Rather, it was a whole new way of regarding the problems of physics and astronomy, one that necessarily changed the meaning of both 'earth' and 'motion.' 4 Without those changes the concept of a moving earth was mad. On the other hand, once they had been made and understood, both Descartes and Huyghens could realize that the earth's motion was a question with no content for science. 5
These examples point to the third and most fundamental aspect of the incommensurability of competing paradigms. In a sense that I am unable to explicate further, the proponents of competing paradigms practice their trades in different worlds. One contains constrained bodies that fall slowly, the other pendulums that repeat their motions again and again. In one, solutions are compounds, in other mixtures. One is embedded in a flat, other in a curved, matrix of space. Practicing in different worlds, the two groups of scientists see different things when they look from the same point in the same direction. Again, that is not to say they can see anything they please. But in some areas they see different things, and they see them in different relations one to the other. That is why a law that cannot even be demonstrated to one group of scientists may occasionally seem intuitively obvious to another. Equally, it is why, before they can hope to communicate fully, one group or the other must experience the conversion that we have been calling a paradigm shift. Just because it is a transition between incommensurables, the transition between competing paradigms cannot be made a step at a time, forced by logic and neutral experience. Like the gestalt switch, it must occur all at once (though not necessarily in an instant) or not at all.
(Kuhn, Thomas S., 'The structure of scientific revolution')
(The structure of scientific revolution / Thomas S. Kuhn. --3rd ed., copyright © 1962, 1970, 1996, 1. science--philosophy, 2. science--history, pp.149-150)
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Language, usage and context
• human error investigations
- general interpret cues about the world
- a mismatch has to be very compelling
- to break out of the mindset (under the spell)
- Sidney Dekker, The field guide to human error investigations, 2002
• how people make decision
- Mental simulation
- alternate mental simulation
- noticed the signs of a problem
- Gary Klein, Sources of power : how people make decision, 1998
• Phantoms in the brain: mysteries of the human mind
- The left hemisphere's job is to create a belief system
- The right hemisphere's strategy is to play “Devil's Advocate”
- When the anomalous information reaches a certain threshold
- time to force a complete revision
- V. S. Ramachandran., and Sandra Blakeslee., Phantoms in the brain: probing the mysteries of the human mind, 1998
• structure of scientific revolution (Thomas S. Kuhn)
- When the transition is complete, the profession will have changed its view of the field, its methods, and its goals.
- "handling the same bundle of data as before, but placing them in a new system of relations with one another by giving them a different framework."
- proponents of competing paradigms practice their trades in different worlds.
- before they can hope to communicate fully, one group or the other must experience the conversion that we have been calling a paradigm shift.
- Thomas S. Kuhn, The structure of scientific revolution, 1962, 1970, 1996
• under the spell of a mindset
- most famous poem of China's Han dynasty
- “Qíngchéng Qínggúio” (a commonly used phrase in China)
- to describe an incredibly beautiful girl
- A whole city, a whole nation is completely under the spell of her beauty.
- 2004 Chinese film, House of Flying Daggers, director Zhang Yimou
- DVD commentary by Zhang Yimou, director
- Helen of Troy, the Trojan war, the face that launch a thousand ships
- The adage "Beware of Greeks bearing gifts is heard often, and is normally used to refer to an act of charity that masks a hidden destructive or hostile agenda. But it's not widely known that the phrase originates with a story from Greek mythology--specifically the story of the Trojan War, in which the Greeks, led by Agamemnon, sought to rescue Helen, who had been taken to Troy after falling in love with Paris. This tale forms the core of Homer's famous epic poem, The Illiad.
- https://www.thoughtco.com/beware-of-greeks-bearing-gifts-origin-121368
source:
2004 Chinese film, House of Flying Daggers, director Zhang Yimou
Language: Mandarin Chinese, English, French
DVD commentary by Zhang Yimou:
the lyrics you're singing right now ...
... are from the most famous poem of China's Han dynasty
It's a pity that the translationed subtitled ...
... won't be able to capture the entire meaning.
“Qíngchéng Qínggúio” is now a commonly used phrase in China ...
... to describe an incredibly beautiful girl.
A whole city, a whole nation ...
... is completely under the spell of her beauty.
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• "GGR," or the law of gradual granularity refinement. [ ]
Written by Bill Buxton
JND significance ~ 1 / familiarity.
JND (just noticeable difference)
"What is the smallest level of differentiation that you can perceive as being significant?"
The tilde character (~) means "varies with."
Hence, the law says that the granularity at which we distinguish meaningful differences gets finer the more our familiarity with a subject grows. Conversely, it also says the less familiar we are with something, the coarser the granularity will be before we can distinguish differences as being significant.
Predictable and Avoidable
Let me tie all of this back to our two scenarios. Each is the result of differences in JND (the granularity of recognizing differences of significance) at play between the two parties involved.
In the first, you had the insight and saw something significant in it because you were immersed in the problem space. The granularity of your analysis was really refined. But the subtlety required to appreciate the essence of the idea fell below the threshold of your audience's ability to see any difference between it and what they had seen before.
In the second, the roles were reversed. Yes, you had all of the data. But what you didn't have was the ability to see the significance buried within. The granularity of your analysis was too coarse compared to that of your competitor. Most likely, despite your hard work, you simply weren't sufficiently familiar with the problem space to fully appreciate the significance of its subtleties.
The reason that I've taken the seemingly pretentious step of declaring the GGR as a law is to help emphasize there are no villains or stupid people in any of this. The behaviors in both scenarios are human nature. But that means they are predictable and avoidable――so there are some lessons that can be drawn from all of this.
source:
gradual granularity refinement
https://www.billbuxton.com/BW%20Assets/02a.%20A%20Familiar%20Problem%20Published.pdf
____________________________________
It takes time to gain experience and familiarity that lead to the fineness of granularity wherein the sweet spots lie. And, no, we haven't found a solution to time travel. But the history of technology is full of discoveries of how to move [slower], finer, smoother. That is the heart of your quest to find ways to [slow down] the rate and quality of gaining experience that get you to the fine level. What all of this says is that to be successful, we need to innovate around the whole package, not just one part.”; ([ you need to work on each part individually, the interaction between the parts {one-to-one, one-to-many, in layers, in chunks, as a group}, all of the parts collectively together, and avoid doing all the things at the same time ])
── Bill Buxton, February 06, 2008
Innovation & Design :
A Familiar Problem,
gradual granularity refinement
http://www.bloomberg.com/bw/stories/2008-02-06/a-familiar-problembusinessweek-business-news-stock-market-and-financial-advice
https://www.billbuxton.com/BW%20Assets/02a.%20A%20Familiar%20Problem%20Published.pdf
https://www.billbuxton.com/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Buxton
____________________________________
Douglas Hofstadter & Emmanuel Sander, Surfaces and essences: analogy as the fuel and fire of thinking, 2013
p.382
To choose one analogy over another is to favor one viewpoint over another. It amounts to looking at things from a particular angle, to taking a specific perspective on a situation. An insightful analogical take on a situation gives you confidence in your beliefs about the situation while also revealing new facts about it. A teacher, a lecturer, a lawyer, a politician, a writer, a poet, a translator, or a lovr may pass hours or days in search of the most convincing analogy, like a goldsmith crafting a beautiful chalice for maximal effect. Such individuals work very hard and very conciously to induce in their listeners or readers the same point of view, or the same emotion or feeling or judgement, as they have.
p.383
You feel that you are deliberately creating an analogy to advance a certain point of view, but actually it's the other way around: your point of view comes from a myriad of hidden analogies that have given you a certain perspective on things.
(Surfaces and essences: analogy as the fuel and fire of thinking, Douglas Hofstadter & Emmanuel Sander, 2013, )
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Douglas R. Hofstadter, I am a strange loop, 2007
p.150
All it takes is that there be an easy analogy ── an unforced mapping that reveals both situation to have essentially the same central structure or conceptual core ── and then the extra meaning is there to be read, whether one chooses to read it or not.
p.150
In short, a statement about one situation can be heard as if it were about an analogous ── or, to use a slightly technical term, isomorphic ── situation.
p.150
An isomorphism is just a formalized and strict analogy ── one in which the network of parallelisms ── and I'll use the term freely below.
p.150
Hinting by analogy allows us to get our message across politely but effectively. Of course we have to be pretty sure that the person at whom we're beaming our implicit message (Bill, here) is likely to be ware of the A/B analogy, for otherwise our clever and diplomatic ploy will all have been for naught.
p.151
Now how can one statement speak on two levels at once? How can a second meaning lie lurking inside a first meaning?
p.171
Gödel carefully concocted a statement about numbers and revealed that, because of how he had designed it, it had a very strange alternate meaning.
p.182
I might add that the “I” of a particle physicist is no less entrenched than is the “I” of a novelist or a shoestore clerk. A profound mastery of all of physics will not in the least undo the decades of brainwashing by culture and language, not to mention the millions of years of human evolution preparing the way. The notion of “I”, since it is an incomparably efficient shorthand, is an indispensable explanatory device, rather than just an optional crutch that can be cheerily jettisoned when one grows sufficiently scientifically sophisticated.
p.183
We want (and need) to find out where we belong in all sorts of social hierarchies and classes, and sometimes, even if we don't want to know these things, we find out anyway. For instance, we are all told, early on, that we are “cute”; in some of us, however, this message is reinforced far more strongly than in others.
p.224 gene
p.224 novel
No one has trouble with the idea that “the same novel” can exist in two different languages, in two different cultures. But what is a novel? A novel is not a specific sequence of words, because if it were, it could only be written in one language, in one culture. No, a novel is a pattern ── a particular collection of characters, events, moods, tones, jokes, allusions, and much more. And so a novel is an abstraction, and thus “the very same novel” can exist in different languages, different cultures, even cultures thriving hundreds of years apart.
Douglas R. Hofstadter, I am a strange loop, 2007
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Charles Perrow, Normal accidents : living with high-risk technologies, 1999 [ ]
pp.321-322
People vary in their cognitive abilities in absolute terms, but they also seem to vary with respect to different thinking abilities for different tasks. You and I may be equally intelligent, when measured over a number of areas, but you are good at counting while I (as I tell my quantitative colleagues) don't count. Yet I have learned how to visualize, or model, things in 3-dimensional space, or perhaps have an innate capacity for it. Because of my limitation in counting, I need you, and vice versa. Our limitations bring about social bonding. Bonding by diversity in skills (which is related to limitations in cognition, incidentally) is more stable and perhaps more satisfying than bonding by addition of equal talents. That is, the standard illustration of two people moving a rock that neither could move alone as the basis for social life is a very minimal one; any partner would do, and once the rock is moved, we can part. But bonding because sometimes we need to count and sometimes we need to visualize, so we had better have each other around when these tasks appear, is a strong basis for social life. If everyone were equally rational, we would not need economists. Since we are not, we need both economists who try to see where rational, quantitative solutions will work and sociologists who try to see how social bonding can be utilized and maximized.
p.322
A second cheer for our limitations stems from your propensity, for example, to see all problems as one of measurement and counting, and my propensity to see all problems as one of social interactions. If we have a common problem and it seems to have a lot of numbers, rates, proportions, and so on in it, you are likely to move quickly to a mathematical solution. Your “heuristics” are better than mine if numbers are included. But because of your expertise, you are very likely to end up deciding that the problem should be seen in a manner that allows a quantitative analysis. Your “framing” of the problem prejudges the problem and prejudices the answer. So does mine. For you, the choice of nuclear or coal can be measured by toting up the deaths per megawatts of power produced to date by each activity. The risks of DNA research can be measured by seeing how many experiments have gone on without any accidents. But I might define the power generation problem in terms of potential deaths in a rare but conceivable catastrophe, the fact that the deaths would involve related people (communities), and potential contamination of large land areas for generations to come.
( Normal accidents : living with high-risk technologies / Charles Perrow, 1. industrial accidents., 2. technology--risk assessment., 3. accident., HD7262 P55 1999, 363.1--dc21, 1999, )
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