Re: Expertise, etcetera
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Overall an interesting thread. I'd like to offer a couple of
observations, however.
It is hard for me to think of "the brain" as a strongly conserved quantity. Most people speak as if developing one set of skills or proto-patterns to match from pushes some other set out... There is lots of evidence supporting the old rule of thumb that we "only use 10% of our brains"... Admittedly, the re-remembering that happens when we recall memories leads to (yet more) mis-remembering (re-member that next time you are being "coached" for legal testimony). Admittedly (as might be implied in Gladwell's Outliers examples), the time devoted to becoming an expert in one thing (exposing yourself to lots of examples and observing them carefully) takes *time* and *focus* away from exposing yourself to *other* things. All that time in an art gallery, takes away from time in the field looking at "little yellow flowers". Similar skills and styles of observation are required for both (being good at one prepares you to be good at the other) but one is done in stuffy (or airy) old (or new) museums and art galleries in the middle of big cities, far away from the wide open fields and meadows where little yellow flowers grow. In my own foray into Morphometric Analysis of Lithics (based on 3D Surface scanning), I feel like I experienced a hint of how my own *brain* must do such comparisons... observe enough examples to begin to develop an unconscious classification scheme of the feature set, develop a rough measure of the features (what are the distributions of size and orientation of flakes on a given lithic/point type?) and then begin to make rough comparisons of a weighted vector of said types, thereby identifying clusters based on high-dimensional similarity metrics. The "classification" and even measuring process would probably be enhanced mightily if I actually learned the techniques of flint-napping *myself* and didn't just observe hundreds of examples (often thousands of years old, from locations thousands of miles apart). This kind of "machine learning" seems to be quite accessible today for experts and hardy amateurs alike. Anecdotally, an astute observer (Sherlock Holmes, Columbo, House) can look at a situation or object or set of objects and do similar analysis with considerably less "training" on the specific class of objects. The ability to pull out of an object or situation the most relevant features and to recognize anomolous features with a limited sample size is even more fascinating... and something I suspect most of us aspire to do here, to become meta-pattern matchers... to determine the "pattern of patterns" in a new situation quickly. This class of pattern matching seems to be out of reach for automated reasoning systems for the most part, though I'll bet there are experts in the field right here ready to inform us on the current state of the art? - Steve Well ... by "built up" I mean the collecting of examples. Yes, each example is part novel and part pattern. So I do get what you are saying, in regards to how these specific examples allow a sort of mental pruning, down to the essential aspects. ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org |
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As I quoted earlier ... the best performance [expertise] came from
'compiled knowledge' which is intrinsically inexpressible.
Sometimes, we'd like to think it's pattern recognition. It
definitely is in my mind when I play Go. Being inexpressible means
I can't tell that there's a pattern in there or not - it feels like
it. "How to ride a pedal bike" is also in that category, tho' it
doesn't feel like pattern recognition at all. May be it is some
emergent phenomenon of how the brain works that makes it look like
expertise. More probably expertise is something the other guy has
like an accent.
BTW, I was told on good authority some years ago that Vision takes up 40% of our brain. That includes the reading process. So I never buy into the we "only use 10% of our brain" hypothesis. Thanks Robert C On 10/14/10 8:06 AM, Steve Smith wrote: Overall an interesting thread. I'd like to offer a couple of observations, however. ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org |
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1. Anyone who thinks that art of any kind makes you a better person had better explain why concentration camp commandants could listen to Bach at night--with great appreciation. (And, for all I know, read Goethe and Schiller). Furthermore, surely museum guards, exposed to art daily, must be among our better persons, right? Evidence?
No, literary art is the same: it is its own best excuse. To see how an author spins a tale, presents a character, reveals a landscape, or how a poet stops us short with a line that upends our thoughts, all these using only the medium of words, the stuff in our mouths every day, is simply to be made more sensitive to the act of observing. Good enough, as far as I'm concerned. If it also helps you to understand human nature a little better, in its contradictions and inexplicable impulses, so much the better. 2. "Compiled knowledge" was first noticed in expert chess players (so far as I know). They "chunked" knowledge that less experienced players had to put together slowly, piece by piece. I expect it is the same in go, the same in playing a violin, the same in medical diagnosis, in architecture. That's why it takes ten years to attain expertise in almost anything. That compiled knowledge cannot be made explicit is another question, and since I haven't thought about that issue for a while, I won't say. I *suspect* it can be made explicit with some effort. 3. I have also read what Robert read about the vision system taking up 40% of our brain. (40%? 60%? a high very proportion). Small illustration: my cousin had surgery to correct a vision defect she'd had all her life (she was in her sixties). Though physically her vision in the corrected eye is perfect, she still has some trouble with that eye because the brain pathways have not yet adjusted to the new vision. It gets better, but very gradually. On Oct 14, 2010, at 10:46 AM, Robert J. Cordingley wrote:
"How quickly weeks glide away in such a city as New York, especially when you reckon among your friends some of the most agreeable people in either hemisphere." Fanny Trollope, "Domestic Manners of the Americans"============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org |
Re: Expertise, etcetera & Zen
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In reply to this post by Eric Charles
On Thu, Oct 14, 2010 at 6:51 AM, ERIC P. CHARLES <[hidden email]> wrote:
But I would say exactly the opposite, though I wonder if "exact" and "opposite" are really appropriate words. Â The person who lets thoughts come and go without grasping at them experiences more thoughts and more varieties of thoughts than the person who grabs at thoughts and worries them to exhaustion. Â Investing awareness in determining the correctness of passing thoughts or the appropriateness of openness simplifies the stream of consciousness by reducing its scope.
-- rec -- ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org |
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In reply to this post by Eric Charles
I think we are talking past each other.  By "mental space" I'm talking about storage; you seem to be talking about processing.  Yes, the expert can process faster, more efficiently.  But that is because more mental space has been dedicated to storing specific patterns and their combinations, and more time has been spent studying and integrating examples.  The expert chess player certainly pays less attention to the pieces - but that is because she has developed a larger amount of brain area for chess, and has more processing architecture available for it.  So she can process the board much faster.  The novice does not yet have this architecture in place, and so the board's configuration is mostly a new experience, rather than a combination of patterns he has largely seen before.
I do agree that the brain is not like a hard drive, so my analogy about storage is only weakly connected to the idea of a hard drive. Â And I agree about the dynamic structure emerging over time, as more examples and patterns are integrated, for more efficient processing. Â I'm simply saying that this specialization requires a larger chunk of dedicated brain-area than what the non-expert has available for a particular domain. Â It is because the expert has this architecture in place that he/she can do more, faster, with a new (related) example.
BTW - I wouldn't say the expert cannot explain why he has reached a certain conclusion. Â Largely speaking, she can. Â A blind person can tell you exactly what all the little raised dots and patterns mean. Â I just mean that, as expertise is built up, this process of articulation becomes unnecessary. Â And probably, in more complex domains, some subtle patterns are probably integrated into the architecture without awareness of them. Â In these cases, it would be more difficult and more complex to articulate what has led to the conclusion. Â However, the broad strokes of analysis are almost certainly readily available.
Cheers, -Ted
On Thu, Oct 14, 2010 at 8:51 AM, ERIC P. CHARLES <[hidden email]> wrote:
-- Ted Carmichael, Ph.D. Complex Systems Institute Department of Software and Information Systems
College of Computing and Informatics 310-A Woodward Hall UNC Charlotte Charlotte, NC 28223
Phone: 704-492-4902 ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org |
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In reply to this post by Pamela McCorduck
On Thu, Oct 14, 2010 at 11:19 AM, Pamela McCorduck <[hidden email]> wrote: [snip]
I came across an anecdote once that is similar. Â A woman hit her head when she was very young and became blind. Â When she was much older (in her 50's or 60's, IIRC) she slipped and hit her head again and her vision was restored. Â But she preferred to continue most of the time with her eyes closed. Â Her brain was not accustomed to the new type of information flowing in, and all the strange lights and colors tended to be very confusing, and difficult to process. Â As you said, her brain had not yet developed the pathways for processing this information.
-Ted ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org |
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In reply to this post by Ted Carmichael
Ted Carmichael wrote:
> BTW - I wouldn't say the expert cannot explain why he has reached a > certain conclusion. Largely speaking, she can. A blind person can > tell you exactly what all the little raised dots and patterns mean. > I just mean that, as expertise is built up, this process of > articulation becomes unnecessary. And probably, in more complex > domains, some subtle patterns are probably integrated into the > architecture without awareness of them. In these cases, it would be > more difficult and more complex to articulate what has led to the > conclusion. However, the broad strokes of analysis are almost > certainly readily available. It's like learning a language (foreign or computer) - at first, one translates in one's head between the new language and one you know and still thinks in the known language. Fluency comes when one thinks in the new language rather than translating. -- Ray Parks [hidden email] Consilient Heuristician Voice: 505-844-4024 ATA Department Mobile: 505-238-9359 http://www.sandia.gov/scada Fax: 505-844-9641 http://www.sandia.gov/idart Pager:505-951-6084 ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org |
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In reply to this post by Roger Critchlow-2
More complex, less complicated. Knowledge or ontology becomes more
robust if it is independently *accessible*, whereas expertise is the
fluidity of understanding what knowledge is most *reachable*, given
some variety of current contexts. So its more topological
(what's the most or least involved transformative path to make a
smooth mapping from one moment to the next). Granted, one
generally isn't transforming while one is grasping, but I think we
refer to expertise as a kind of broad-based competency, while what
you are talking about is the employment of that in the moment. Not
so much choosing as appreciating the conversation by allowing the
complexity to come and go. *Fluency* touches on it.
On 10/14/10 10:45 AM, Roger Critchlow wrote:
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Re: Expertise, etcetera & Zen
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In reply to this post by Ted Carmichael
On Thu, 14 Oct 2010 13:44 -0400, "Ted Carmichael" <[hidden email]> wrote:
The physician reports: "I enter the patient's room, consult the chart and notice a high fever. I examine the patient and observe red spots. A culture test reveals x-bacteria, so I conclude the patient has measles."
The camera observes: the physician enters the room, walks to the bed, says hello to the patient, picks up the chart and records the diagnosis of measles.
what happened? the physician had read a news article about a measles epidemic on the subway to work, smelled the distinctive odor of chicken soup upon entering the room, made the mental link and came to the appropriate conclusion.
Confronted with the record, the physician relates, "that was the way I was taught in medical school, so it is the correct protocol." It took a lot of thought before the physician was able to articulate what she really did when making the diagnosis. It revealed two distinct mental models of "diagnostic expertise" one based totally on experience and the other on "book learning." Correlation between the two was nominal.
davew
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In reply to this post by Pamela McCorduck
May be Art is a personality amplifier. If you have a great
personality Art makes it better. If you are as wicked as sin, through Art you will become more so. A little like computers are productivity amplifiers (but I don't know who said this first). If you are a time waster... "there's an app for that!" I've always thought that Art was never the picture on the wall, the sculpture in the garden or the performance on the stage. It was the personal experience you have when exposed to the Art phenomenon, what ever it is. This makes the debate about what is good or bad art irrelevant because it becomes personal and not societal. This seems to fit with the personality amplifier idea too. Thanks Robert C On 10/14/10 9:19 AM, Pamela McCorduck wrote: > 1. Anyone who thinks that art of any kind makes you a better person > had better explain why concentration camp commandants could listen to > Bach at night--with great appreciation. (And, for all I know, read > Goethe and Schiller). Furthermore, surely museum guards, exposed to > art daily, must be among our better persons, right? Evidence? > > No, literary art is the same: it is its own best excuse. To see how an > author spins a tale, presents a character, reveals a landscape, or how > a poet stops us short with a line that upends our thoughts, all these > using only the medium of words, the stuff in our mouths every day, is > simply to be made more sensitive to the act of observing. Good enough, > as far as I'm concerned. If it also helps you to understand human > nature a little better, in its contradictions and inexplicable > impulses, so much the better. ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org |
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Maybe The Art you take is equal to the Art you make.
I've always had a bias for the performance arts, in that appreciation there comes to mean making a piece developed possibly somewhere else your own by performing it; making it manifest in your own unique context. Sterling might say: Art catalyzing your history, to wake you up. Renata floated a fine proposal today along these lines in which we would read snippets of the great litrichar list and try to write a couple of pages in the style, given our understanding of the original author's perspective. Of course we confront similar issues in taiko, where 'respecting' the IP and lineage of a piece does not necessarily need to mean leaving it be. There's a sort of 'collaborative ownership' which is continuously being refined, a kind of jazz. As to more (hmmm) tangible artifacts, I have held micaceous clay pots, simple and complex at the same time, first attempts, sitting there on the floor behind the driver's seat of a Taurus, still warm, that simply stopped the mind and the day. They radiated that sincerity, that 'loyalty to one's moment' that comes in part from finding a way to make remote techniques from the ancient gallery one's own. A community thing (I knew the artist), more an offering of a restorative path to that community (had we but the wit), less a timeless statement to some idea of 'human nature'. So the art here is something you participate in, show up for; it's a conversation, concourse; necessarily complex and fluid (there's that zen topology thing again). Good art, maybe great art is *accessible* to those just downstream of the original in just that way. Maybe that's why so many of us are science fiction fans - through the science the fiction is accessible in a way much of the other canons are not - yet. Pamela, I doubt that the commandants you describe were experiencing this complexity (most of us are grateful to make a glimpse). Perhaps more cargo-cult banal -- 'He consoles himself that he is cultured because he can summon the works of Bach and Goethe from the vasty deep'. So can I, and so can any one (given inclination and time), but does the commandant show up for them? Big whup, he's got a Gramophone (or its 21st century equivalent). How do you define appreciation? Does one converse with a specific work or an art form to cultivate ones self into manifesting a better person or because the form or the artifact is a Linji challenge and you just have to? Carl + ale "I was sitting in a chair in the patent office at Berne, when suddenly a thought occurred to me, if a person falls freely, he would not feel his own weight" - Einstein. On 10/14/10 8:44 PM, Robert J. Cordingley wrote: May be Art is a personality amplifier. If you have a great personality Art makes it better. If you are as wicked as sin, through Art you will become more so. A little like computers are productivity amplifiers (but I don't know who said this first). If you are a time waster... "there's an app for that!" ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org |
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More than snippets, Carl. WAY more than snippets. Nick From: [hidden email] [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Carl Tollander Maybe The Art you take is equal to the Art you make. May be Art is a personality amplifier. If you have a great personality Art makes it better. If you are as wicked as sin, through Art you will become more so. A little like computers are productivity amplifiers (but I don't know who said this first). If you are a time waster... "there's an app for that!" 1. Anyone who thinks that art of any kind makes you a better person had better explain why concentration camp commandants could listen to Bach at night--with great appreciation. (And, for all I know, read Goethe and Schiller). Furthermore, surely museum guards, exposed to art daily, must be among our better persons, right? Evidence? </snipped> ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org |
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Carl Tollander wrote:
> > > Pamela, I doubt that the commandants you describe were experiencing > this complexity (most of us are grateful to make a glimpse). Perhaps > more cargo-cult banal -- 'He consoles himself that he is cultured > because he can summon the works of Bach and Goethe from the vasty > deep'. So can I, and so can any one (given inclination and time), but > does the commandant show up for them? Big whup, he's got a > Gramophone (or its 21st century equivalent). How do you define > appreciation? Does one converse with a specific work or an art form > to cultivate ones self into manifesting a better person or because the > form or the artifact is a Linji challenge and you just have to? > While I believe that many people *do* engage in what superficially looks like deep appreciation of cultural experiences (Art being one of them) in a "cargo-cult banal" manner, I am not sure this is required. And I am not sure those we recognize as "evil" are less capable of such than those (ourselves most notably) who we identify as "good" are moreso. In the deeper questions of "good vs evil" it is quite common (because it is easy?) to align ourselves and our own highest aspirations, deepest desires and motivations with "good" and assume/assert that anyone whose nature or activities we define as "evil" not be capable of experiencing the same aspirations/desires/feelings. I strongly suspect that the commandants in question enjoyed Bach *much more* than I do (or could)... partly because despite my Teutonic blood, I have little Teutonic culture which they would have been steeped in. I also suspect that those same commandants could very well be capable of loving their spouses and children every bit as much as any of us here. It is *very* hard for me to think about how someone could have those feelings while being as callous (or downright disrespectful of) to the dignity and the lives of the victims of such a sweeping genocide (any genocide would do). I do not think that Beauty or Grace or ... alone is an antidote/ward for "evil" or a proof of "good"... I think it is much more subtle and complex than that. And I think that for all the non-fiction (harping on that topic again) such as the sum of Freud and Jung's work on the topic of Good&Evil that works of Fiction such as that of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy and Dickens and (most if not all of the Fiction authors listed in our last spate of recommendations) have significant amounts of insight to offer about the nature of Good&Evil. The fictional nature of the details of the specific characters, settings and events is irrelevant to whether they help to frame the fundamental questions of character vs circumstance, of choice, of will, of human kindness. It is *scary* to consider activities and behaviors which we identify as *evil* in association with other activities, behaviors and attitudes which we identify as *good*. At best there might be partial correlations. Perhaps, the beauty of good music or painting or dance might in some circumstances help a twisted soul transcend their own damage and arise like a phoenix from their own ashes to shine in the glorious sunlight of goodness! But I don't think it really works that way, except in rhetorical arguments about the objective and transcendent value of "Art" (worked into NEA Grant proposals?). - Steve ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org |
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Good and evil would be some other essay. We were talking about art
and involvement and attribution of appreciation. I was attempting to provide a counter-argument that we simply did not know on the face of it whether some fictional commandant indeed had such and such an appreciation, so one could therefore call into question the assertion about art appreciation and moral fiber. No intent here to make blanket assertions about commandants in general. On 10/15/10 9:10 AM, Steve Smith wrote: > Carl Tollander wrote: >> >> >> Pamela, I doubt that the commandants you describe were experiencing >> this complexity (most of us are grateful to make a glimpse). >> Perhaps more cargo-cult banal -- 'He consoles himself that he is >> cultured because he can summon the works of Bach and Goethe from the >> vasty deep'. So can I, and so can any one (given inclination and >> time), but does the commandant show up for them? Big whup, he's got >> a Gramophone (or its 21st century equivalent). How do you define >> appreciation? Does one converse with a specific work or an art form >> to cultivate ones self into manifesting a better person or because >> the form or the artifact is a Linji challenge and you just have to? >> > I'm not sure I can agree to dismiss the implied paradox this easily. > While I believe that many people *do* engage in what superficially > looks like deep appreciation of cultural experiences (Art being one of > them) in a "cargo-cult banal" manner, I am not sure this is required. > And I am not sure those we recognize as "evil" are less capable of > such than those (ourselves most notably) who we identify as "good" are > moreso. > > In the deeper questions of "good vs evil" it is quite common (because > it is easy?) to align ourselves and our own highest aspirations, > deepest desires and motivations with "good" and assume/assert that > anyone whose nature or activities we define as "evil" not be capable > of experiencing the same aspirations/desires/feelings. > > I strongly suspect that the commandants in question enjoyed Bach *much > more* than I do (or could)... partly because despite my Teutonic > blood, I have little Teutonic culture which they would have been > steeped in. I also suspect that those same commandants could very > well be capable of loving their spouses and children every bit as much > as any of us here. It is *very* hard for me to think about how > someone could have those feelings while being as callous (or downright > disrespectful of) to the dignity and the lives of the victims of such > a sweeping genocide (any genocide would do). > > I do not think that Beauty or Grace or ... alone is an antidote/ward > for "evil" or a proof of "good"... I think it is much more subtle and > complex than that. And I think that for all the non-fiction (harping > on that topic again) such as the sum of Freud and Jung's work on the > topic of Good&Evil that works of Fiction such as that of Dostoevsky > and Tolstoy and Dickens and (most if not all of the Fiction authors > listed in our last spate of recommendations) have significant amounts > of insight to offer about the nature of Good&Evil. The fictional > nature of the details of the specific characters, settings and events > is irrelevant to whether they help to frame the fundamental questions > of character vs circumstance, of choice, of will, of human kindness. > > It is *scary* to consider activities and behaviors which we identify > as *evil* in association with other activities, behaviors and > attitudes which we identify as *good*. At best there might be partial > correlations. Perhaps, the beauty of good music or painting or dance > might in some circumstances help a twisted soul transcend their own > damage and arise like a phoenix from their own ashes to shine in the > glorious sunlight of goodness! But I don't think it really works that > way, except in rhetorical arguments about the objective and > transcendent value of "Art" (worked into NEA Grant proposals?). > > - Steve > > ============================================================ > FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv > Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College > lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org > ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org |
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