Skip to main content

Blind Spot – Gordon Rugg with Joseph d’Agnese ****

I read this book with a mix of responses. One was fascination, the other frustration. The fascination came from the topic, which we catch a glimpse of in the subtitle ‘why we fail to see the solution right in front of us.’ Gordon Rugg, with the help of journalist d’Agnese, gives us a remarkable analysis of how we all – including experts – make errors in our decisions and research. But not limiting himself to saying what’s going wrong, Rugg also provides a method to root out the errors in the ‘Verifier method’, a suite of techniques to pull apart the way we approach, assimilate and make use of information to come to a decision.
The frustration is that the method is seen through a veil of vagueness. We are constantly hearing about this Verifier toolkit, but only get sideways glimpses of what it entails. I would have loved an appendix with a brief description of the contents of the toolkit and a couple of the tools explained in more detail. I appreciate that Rugg and his colleagues probably want to keep the toolkit proprietary (and the danger of having a journalist as a co-author is that they will tend to weed out the detail and weave their stories on people instead). But the book would have been better with a bit more depth.
Having said that, it’s pretty good as it is. The authors take what could be a rather dry topic and give it some life. We see how Rugg started with knowledge elicitation techniques – used, amongst other things, in the attempt to construct expert systems that are designed to provide an accessible bank of expertise. This first requires experts, who often don’t know how they do what they do, to initiate the system builders into their methods and knowledge. From there we move onto looking at the way errors occur in even the most detailed academic study and the gradual realisation that it would be possible to build a series of techniques that would help uncover these errors or, even better, prevent them happening in the future.
There are two major case studies to explore this – the (probably) medieval Voynich manuscript, which for more than 100 years has proved a mystery to all those who have tried to crack its strange script, and the nature of autism. In both cases, making use of the early version of the Verifier method uncovers gaps in expert understanding. While it doesn’t enable Rugg and his colleagues to actually solve the problems, it does provide impressive pointers to where there are currently failings and what should be done next.
All in all, the book will appeal to a very wide market. Whether you are in business (interestingly, the early writing style, before it settles down, is rather like a business book with numbered ‘lessons’ like ‘Experts often don’t know what they know’ in pull quotes) or any branch of academia… or just interested in the nature of knowledge, understanding and human error, there’s a lot here to get your teeth into.

Paperback:  

Hardback:  
Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you
Review by Brian Clegg
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Laws of Thought - Tom Griffiths *****

In giving us a history of attempts to explain our thinking abilities, Tom Griffiths demonstrates an excellent ability to pitch information just right for the informed general reader.  We begin with Aristotelian logic and the way Boole and others transformed it into a kind of arithmetic before a first introduction of computing and theories of language. Griffiths covers a surprising amount of ground - we don't just get, for instance, the obvious figures of Turing, von Neumann and Shannon, but the interaction between the computing pioneers and those concerned with trying to understand the way we think - for example in the work of Jerome Bruner, of whom I confess I'd never heard.  This would prove to be the case with a whole host of people who have made interesting contributions to the understanding of human thought processes. Sometimes their theories were contradictory - this isn't an easy field to successfully observe - but always they were interesting. But for me, at least, ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Einstein's Fridge - Paul Sen ****

In Einstein's Fridge (interesting factoid: this is at least the third popular science book to be named after Einstein's not particularly exciting refrigerator), Paul Sen has taken on a scary challenge. As Jim Al-Khalili made clear in his excellent The World According to Physics , our physical understanding of reality rests on three pillars: relativity, quantum theory and thermodynamics. But there is no doubt that the third of these, the topic of Sen's book, is a hard sell. While it's true that these are the three pillars of physics, from the point of view of making interesting popular science, the first two might be considered pillars of gold and platinum, while the third is a pillar of salt. Relativity and quantum theory are very much of the twentieth century. They are exciting and sometimes downright weird and wonderful. Thermodynamics, by contrast, has a very Victorian feel and, well, is uninspiring. Luckily, though, thermodynamics is important enough, lying behind ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Nanotechnology - Rahul Rao ****

There was a time when nanotechnology was both going to transform the world and wipe us out - a similar position to our view of AI today. On the positive transformation side there was K. Eric Drexler's visions in the 1986 Engines of Creation. Arguably as much science fiction as engineering possibilities, it predicted the ability to use vast armies of assemblers to put objects together from individual atoms.  On the negative side was the vision of grey goo, out of control nanotechnology consuming all in its path as it made more and more copies of itself. In 2003, for instance, the then Prince Charles made the headlines  when newspapers reported ‘The prince has raised the spectre of the “grey goo” catastrophe in which sub-microscopic machines designed to share intelligence and replicate themselves take over and devour the planet.’ These days the expectations have been eased down a notch or two. Where nanotechnology has succeeded, it has been with the likes of atom-thick mat...
Post a Comment
Read more