Trego's Mountain Ear

My grandson – who is beginning to use words – distinctly said airplane.  Since we’d been baling hay, and were working with the tractor, I wondered at the word choice.  It turned out that his better hearing let him hear the airplane engine at least a minute before I could distinguish the sound.

The toddler had more relevant information than the old professor.  Here, in Trego, it’s an interesting thought.  In England, during the blitz, it might have been life or death in getting to a bomb shelter.  Might still be in Ukraine.

A lot of education doesn’t help much when you lack the critical information – the one piece of information that lets you reach the correct conclusion.  I suspect that’s a significant part in explaining unanticipated consequences.  “Low information voters” is a term I hear regularly.  I suspect that even some of the folks who toss the term out casually are  themselves ‘low information voters.’

High intelligence doesn’t combine well with low information.  High intelligence and high ego really makes for poor conclusions.  Reading articles that disagree with me postpones decisions – and a decision is, at its simplest, something that occurs when you quit thinking.

In higher ed, one phrase you don’t want to use is “If you really want to understand X, you can read my dissertation.”  The reason is that a doctoral dissertation is done to prove you can perform original research.  Albert Einstein’s dissertation was on determining Avogadro’s number based on Brownian motion (1905).  Once Millikan developed a technique to measure the charge of an electron (1909), Einstein’s research based on Brownian motion was no longer the best estimate. 

Obviously, the first researcher – demonstrating his/her ability to conduct original research for the first time – doesn’t have the advantages later researchers do.  In my own dissertation, research proved my hypothesis invalid.  It was a neat hypothesis.  It was wrong.  The dissertation gets cited because the conclusion was correct – but it had nothing to do with cell phones.

High intelligence – High IQ – combines dangerously with low information.  Giordano Bruno – who refined the Copernican model – was burned at the stake for heresy in 1600.  Thirty-odd years later, Galileo (with Bruno’s example to consider) chose to recant and spend the rest of his life under house arrest instead of being burned.  I am sure the church officials at the time were intelligent men – but they had stopped thinking and reached erroneous conclusions.

We need disagreement to keep us looking for a more correct answer.  High intelligence plus low information (or worse, incorrect information) is a recipe for bad conclusions.  Remi was right – he heard the airplane long before my aging ears could notice the sound.