When you are looking for rocks, everything looks like a rock.....go figure!!
-ea6bflyr
Reminds me of something, semi-related...
The last day of my Sedimentation and Stratigraphy (soft rocks...) course last semester, my class discussed a short paper on "Conceptual Uncertainty."
In a nutshell the paper asked some 400 geologists, from undergrad students through crusty old PhDs to analyze a fictional (but possible) cross-section of Earth at depth and explain what happened to form the structures in it.
2 got it right. 30 got it somewhat right.
What was interesting was that most people just analyzed it in the specific context of their field: the guy who did neotectonics described it as micro-fault structures. The reef guy thought it was a reef. The salt dome guy explained it as a salt dome. I looked at it and would have told you it was all cyclical sea-level changes (what I had been doing for the past three months...)
Experiece level had no effect on success of interpretation: people saw what they were trained to see and left it at that.
The one thing that held constant was that the more methods (cross-specialization) somebody used to interpret the cross-section, the more likely they were to generate the "correct" answser.
There was more to the paper; even the eventual hope that you could assess and calculate for certain institutional biases in models based on the approach used to design the thesis or model.
My prof often said we were, "trying to solve a jig-saw puzzle with no edge pieces and no box to look at... in 3D."
Intel sounds a lot like that...
It also
sounds like corroboration of multiple methods and styles, makes for the most accurate intel picture. The story of Curveball highlights that point.
