Have just finished Blink by Malcom Gladwell (an appropriately quick read), and thought I'd jot down a few notes of summary:
** our intuition is smarter than we give it credit for, and we can make surprisingly accurate judgments based on comparatively 'little' information
**adding more information can actually mess up our judgment by obscuring what's really important
**unless we're experts, we are awful at actually explaining/understanding what informs our preferences and judgments (prime us to be 'logical' about taste tests, for instance, and we'll rank it completely differently -- and 'incorrectly,' in terms of quality)
**context is hugely important in our decisions; too little time, too much pressure, cultural and racial and gender prejudices all mess with our ability to judge properly
A lot of interesting anecdotes to back this up -- one I found particularly interesting in the context of librarianship had to do with doctors diagnosing possible heart-attacks in a poor Chicago district hospital. Gladwell described how a scientist created a 'decision chart' with a few very limited factors (ECG, systolic blood pressure, fluid in lungs) -- essentially an algorithm for diagnosis -- and found that it increased doctor accuracy by 70 percent.
Medical professionals were incredulous, arguing that the model didn't take enough of the patient situation into account, it was far too limited...more information is always better, right? But Gladwell argues that more information in this case was actually detrimental to the doctors' ability to properly diagnose the symptoms; data about the patient's background, other conditions, exercise levels, etc. were all adding up to 'white noise' that interfered with their ability to process the relevant factors.
So, as an 'information provider' at a medical reference library, it occurs to me that swamping down our patrons and clients with data is not only unhelpful but actually dangerous - if Gladwell is right, information provision needs to be tailored to providing the 'best' data for a given diagnosis situation, not 'all data you could possibly be interested in.' In a vast oversimplification: Information Overload Kills.
Fragments of the Web
So I'm reading David Weinberger's Small Pieces Loosely Joined, and I highly recommend it to anyone even remotely curious about how the Web is affecting (and being affected by) our society - from our daily information snarfing habits to large-scale collaborative projects like Wikipedia.
He has made me think about the Web from new and startling angles, and that has actually made a lot of the 'weird' stuff we do online start to make a twisted kind of sense. For example, why do we jump from page to page like addled kangaroos? Why do we trust online forums teeming with advice from unqualified strangers? (No, we're not just stupid/overly trusting). What is so appealing about the messy, chaotic nature of the Internet, and aren't we better off just putting the whole thing under centralized government control? (Hint: The Web works because it's a mess, and trying to streamline everything under a centralized process would cause stagnation and death - basically a shot to the heart of the freedom that the Web needs to survive).
It's beautifully written, clear and engaging without being patronizing, and Weinberger weaves together a rich variety of aspects of the Web, from the gritty hardware task of actually 'moving bits' to the abstract philosophical implications of a traditional separation of 'inner' and 'outer' worlds (and also 'subjective' and 'objective' knowledge).
I'm getting so interested just writing about this now that I'm going to try and finish off the book -- in particular, I've been caught up in Weinberger's musings on how we process information in terms of applications for designing new virtual user interfaces for the library. It looks like we're far more 'bodily' oriented in how we learn the world than we realize -- that typical 'consciousness trapped in a physical limiting shell' view of the mind/body split doesn't take into account how much we use our bodies to interact with our environments and, therefore, learn things. We build models to visualize abstract concepts, we draw on backboards with chalk -- just think of how much people automatically love to 'fiddle' with new gadgets at the presentation booths. I'm pretty sure everyone who saw that scene in Minority Report with Tom Cruise 'conducting' a series of photos, videos, and documents with graceful sweeps and twists of his hands immediately thought, "Cool! I want to try!"
Wouldn't it be awesome if libraries could be that fun and immersive?
He has made me think about the Web from new and startling angles, and that has actually made a lot of the 'weird' stuff we do online start to make a twisted kind of sense. For example, why do we jump from page to page like addled kangaroos? Why do we trust online forums teeming with advice from unqualified strangers? (No, we're not just stupid/overly trusting). What is so appealing about the messy, chaotic nature of the Internet, and aren't we better off just putting the whole thing under centralized government control? (Hint: The Web works because it's a mess, and trying to streamline everything under a centralized process would cause stagnation and death - basically a shot to the heart of the freedom that the Web needs to survive).
It's beautifully written, clear and engaging without being patronizing, and Weinberger weaves together a rich variety of aspects of the Web, from the gritty hardware task of actually 'moving bits' to the abstract philosophical implications of a traditional separation of 'inner' and 'outer' worlds (and also 'subjective' and 'objective' knowledge).
I'm getting so interested just writing about this now that I'm going to try and finish off the book -- in particular, I've been caught up in Weinberger's musings on how we process information in terms of applications for designing new virtual user interfaces for the library. It looks like we're far more 'bodily' oriented in how we learn the world than we realize -- that typical 'consciousness trapped in a physical limiting shell' view of the mind/body split doesn't take into account how much we use our bodies to interact with our environments and, therefore, learn things. We build models to visualize abstract concepts, we draw on backboards with chalk -- just think of how much people automatically love to 'fiddle' with new gadgets at the presentation booths. I'm pretty sure everyone who saw that scene in Minority Report with Tom Cruise 'conducting' a series of photos, videos, and documents with graceful sweeps and twists of his hands immediately thought, "Cool! I want to try!"
Wouldn't it be awesome if libraries could be that fun and immersive?
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