On Sat, Mar 19, 2016 at 6:34 PM, cameron tonkinwise <[log in to unmask]>
wrote:
> Heuristics are very different from the claim that there is a “human
> tendency to want simple answers and straightforward linear causality.” The
> latter strikes me as a very dangerous assumption to make when trying to
> determine how best to negotiate sociotechnical complexities.
>
Gee Cameron
You don't read the literature. You are not up to date on the science of
cognition, but that doesn't stop you from making weird statements.
Look, the issue is not whether heuristics are good or bad: the issue is
that people use them. Why? Because understanding the complex, non-linear
complexities of the world is far too complex for human minds (for that
matter, for any minds). Heuristics are the method humans have adopted in
order to simplify their life. Obviously, the heuristics, on the whole, work
well, else the species of humans would not have survived. And sometimes
they fail badly.
My use of them is to ask why they evolved in the first place. And my answer
is that they are ways of coping with the complexity of the world.
The very point I was trying to make in my argument.
You misunderstood, which means I was not being clear enough. I hope this
statement helps.
---
Thank you Tom (Fischer) for the nice references to linear and circular
causality. (Circular causality occurs when there are feedback loops,
sometimes negative feedback, sometimes positive feedback. Negative feedback
tends to lead to stability, while positive feedback leads to faster, more
agile responses. Positive feedback also leads to oscillation. Negative
feedback can become positive feedback when the feedback phase is just right
(or, to the engineer designer, just wrong). Feedforward leads to other
virtues and difficulties.)
The mathematics are complex and non-linear. Which is why the unaided mind
cannot figure them out and why heuristics are needed. Even experienced
circuit designers who know the mathematics revert to heuristics to
explain unexpected behavior (I was once just such a circuit designer,
several eons ago when I was an electrical engineer). (And Terry will
remind us that the design equipment today has all that stuff built-in, so
the designers can let the machines do the math while they focus on
higher-level issues.)
As an aside to this long aside, this is not a case where machines take over
from designers. it is a case where machines do the tedious hard stuff, the
math, and designers do the creative, high-level stuff, deciding what sort
of thing to build, guiding the systems, but letting their tools test their
assumptions.
For complex sociotechnical systems, the appropriate tools don't exist.
Which is the point of DesignX (and of the other disciplines that address
these issues, such as Cybernetics, systems theory (especially soft-systems)
and political science (where muddling through came from) and the RSD
conference series.
Don
Don
Don Norman
Prof. and Director, DesignLab, UC San Diego
[log in to unmask] designlab.ucsd.edu/ www.jnd.org <http://www.jnd.org/>
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