In my last post about route knowledge and survey knowledge, I wrote about my rideshire driver, disoriented in Vegas without her GPS, and about London taxi drivers whose famous navigation skills are enabled by extraordinary embodied memory and hierarchical route planning.
I appreciated your point about trust in people over data — especially in how narratives shape what we believe. In my experience, leaders often use data to reinforce existing beliefs or as a shield to deflect accountability. Data rarely drives decisions directly; instead, leaders lean on trusted interpreters to shape the story they’re willing to follow. I’d love to expand on this idea in a separate post — thank you for sparking the conversation!
Ok, this is not a blog post. It is a masterclass worthy of a series of posts or its own book. You've connected so many ideas into a web of useful revelation, I will have to spend a bit of time evey day for a month to contemplate small pieces of this stunningly expansive essay. The only appropriate thing I can add is ... thank you for the gift of pointing out these things and makiing them easier for us to see.
Donald, as always your thoughts raise memories and questions.
First, a memory—when working on the Extreme Ultraviolet Explorer, there were two engineers who were deep wells of experience and practical knowledge, and there was one chief mechanical engineer, whose route knowledge, as you say, was from ground based medical equipment, not space flight hardware. All three of them, and the many students, astronomers and engineers, shared survey knowledge, the same or similar coursework, bodies of knowledge, compendium and frameworks. The discussions around material selection and tolerances were… Interesting. These memories from almost 40 years ago are helping me to, or perhaps filtering, my understanding of your thoughts.
For me, what you are writing is not so much about knowledge, but about questioning and learning, about individuals forming communities to make or block decisions. About how we come to have our inherent recognition of cause and effect, regardless of correlation and the arrow of time, and how we form conceptualizations of our place and what surrounds us. It also tells me why I continue to feel that machines don’t learn and our current approaches, even using causal inference, and even if useful, will never lead to artificial intelligence at any level.
Your words are well written; thank you for sharing them.
Joseph, your comment spawned some thinking about the inescapably shared nature of knowledge. My perceptions, even those which are derived from what I believe to be a scientific process, are still desperately in need of confirmation by others. Errors, biases, delusions, assumptions, etc can each corrupt a perception such that it appears fact. This is also true of pur experiences. So your comment beautifully reminded me that knowledge is ultimately what "we" decide it is, which makes the choice of your collaborators supremely important -- since they will influence the very litmus tests for what will be treated as knowledge. Thank you.
I appreciated your point about trust in people over data — especially in how narratives shape what we believe. In my experience, leaders often use data to reinforce existing beliefs or as a shield to deflect accountability. Data rarely drives decisions directly; instead, leaders lean on trusted interpreters to shape the story they’re willing to follow. I’d love to expand on this idea in a separate post — thank you for sparking the conversation!
Data storytelling is often a form of "decision defense" rather than "decison support" don't you think?
Ok, this is not a blog post. It is a masterclass worthy of a series of posts or its own book. You've connected so many ideas into a web of useful revelation, I will have to spend a bit of time evey day for a month to contemplate small pieces of this stunningly expansive essay. The only appropriate thing I can add is ... thank you for the gift of pointing out these things and makiing them easier for us to see.
Donald, as always your thoughts raise memories and questions.
First, a memory—when working on the Extreme Ultraviolet Explorer, there were two engineers who were deep wells of experience and practical knowledge, and there was one chief mechanical engineer, whose route knowledge, as you say, was from ground based medical equipment, not space flight hardware. All three of them, and the many students, astronomers and engineers, shared survey knowledge, the same or similar coursework, bodies of knowledge, compendium and frameworks. The discussions around material selection and tolerances were… Interesting. These memories from almost 40 years ago are helping me to, or perhaps filtering, my understanding of your thoughts.
For me, what you are writing is not so much about knowledge, but about questioning and learning, about individuals forming communities to make or block decisions. About how we come to have our inherent recognition of cause and effect, regardless of correlation and the arrow of time, and how we form conceptualizations of our place and what surrounds us. It also tells me why I continue to feel that machines don’t learn and our current approaches, even using causal inference, and even if useful, will never lead to artificial intelligence at any level.
Your words are well written; thank you for sharing them.
Joseph, your comment spawned some thinking about the inescapably shared nature of knowledge. My perceptions, even those which are derived from what I believe to be a scientific process, are still desperately in need of confirmation by others. Errors, biases, delusions, assumptions, etc can each corrupt a perception such that it appears fact. This is also true of pur experiences. So your comment beautifully reminded me that knowledge is ultimately what "we" decide it is, which makes the choice of your collaborators supremely important -- since they will influence the very litmus tests for what will be treated as knowledge. Thank you.
Now you have ME thinking more about this, Joseph. And in wonderful ways. I need to revisit some ideas. Thank you!