Negative Feedback

Tag: semantics

  • What does “it works” mean?

    Response to my rants about the hologram bracelets and articles like this one about magical thinking on SciAm have forced me to re-evaluate my language. I would like to say that the hologram bracelets “don’t work” because they have no physical effect on the phenomena that they claim to affect. However, people who use the bracelet will probably have a measurable improvement in their performance as per the SciAm article. So what to do?

    Ever since reading Ben Goldacre‘s Bad Science, I’ve been fascinated by the term “no better than placebo”. The placebo effect is one of the reasons for using blind testing and shows what kind of rigour needs to be employed to avoid being fooled. Now, the idea is that a medicine is only really effective if it works better than placebo. Is there a corollary that says that if a medicine will not be particularly effective, it is better to attempt placebo treatment? I suppose this makes a kind of sense if the medical solution has physical side effects but the placebo doesn’t. I just can’t bring myself to think that I should start believing in crystals and holograms so that I can have cheap placebo improvements to my performance. Is this why superstition persists? I suppose it should be no surprise that it would have been selected away unless it conferred some advantage.

    Unfortunately this brings us to an uncomfortable point. If the superstitions really do confer advantages (even if only mental) what is the sceptic’s method of achieving similar benefits for similar (low) cost? It costs nothing to wear gold thongs to important interviews – what should you do if you honestly don’t believe the thong will work? In fact, what does “work” even mean in this context? I hate semantics.

  • Applicable or unavoidable

    I have had a couple of moments of clarity recently, suddenly seeing how the words people use mean such very different things. Last year I realised that my approach to learning differs from most of the students in my class. I am an obsessive reader and need a lot of big picture structure with cohesive theory to understand stuff. My students are mostly experiential learners who don’t like to read and need to do problems to understand things. I skip the examples in books, they skip everything else. This means that most of my sincere attempts at teaching them would be destined to fail until I started making a concerted effort at using numbers in my examples.

    The title of this post is related to another realisation. I am an integrator. I try to find application of all the knowledge I have. I don’t believe that truly useless knowledge exists, which is probably why I have such a vast store of trivia tucked away in the recesses of my mind — I’m holding out hope that it will come in useful one day. This means I have often misinterpreted what people mean when they say they “haven’t needed” a particular thing they learned in school or at university. When I say something like that I mean I couldn’t find application for it. When they say it they mean they have been able to avoid application. This seems to be a very common goal in people’s jobs; to avoid application of their knowledge as much as possible. I speak to people and they’ve come up with poorly implemented versions of what should have been Wiener filters because they’ve avoided dredging up some signal processing theory they learned a while back, or they don’t program on principle, and spend hours doing a task that could have taken them seconds to Google and write down.
    Now, as I read that paragraph I can see how superior it comes off, but I am pretty sure my obsession with application has cost me a lot of time. It has definitely cost me a lot of time arguing with people over needing a particular piece of theory because I didn’t understand what they meant. To my mind, when you have a filtering problem you need a good filtering algorithm, which means you need to dredge up some filtering theory. To their mind they don’t need it if they can come up with their own implementation, and if what they come up with works ok, it’s good enough.
    The take home message here is that I am trying harder to use numbers in my examples and to search for the proper semantics when people speak. Do they mean they don’t need in my sense as in applicable or need as in unavoidable or need as unavoidable?