CONTACTS 
0201 - Massachusetts Institute of Technolo                                                                                                                                O-00000712 0201
020101 - Mr. Steven Pinker, Ph.D.; Director
020102 - Brain and Cognitive Science Department                                                                                                                           O-00000712 0201
020103 - Center Cognitive Neuroscience                                                                                                                                    O-00000712 0201

SUBJECTS
Memory Fragile, People Can Align
Span of Attention Overwhelmed by Too Many
How the Mind Works, Pinker, Steven
Feature Not Bug Induction Mistakes Limited Span of Attention, Pinker
African Savanna Shaped Requirements for Human Mind, Pinker
Gist 5% - 10% People Remember Events, Reading
Feature Not Bug Meaning Drift False Knowledge, Steven Pinker
False Knowledge from Meetings & Calls Need a Metric
Architecture Human Thought Information and Knowledge
Pinker, Feature Not Bug 5% - 10% People Remember Gist of Events, Read
Memory Who What When Where Why How Capturing Organizational Memory Hi
Blind Spots Mental Biology Hearing Seeing Overhelmed Information Over
Memory Erroneous Feature Not Bug Limited Span of Attention Enables Sp
Attention Span Time Limited Cause Mistakes Bumbling

7916 -
7916 -    ..
7917 - Summary/Objective
7918 -
791801 - Follow up ref SDS 18 0000, ref SDS 17 0000.
791802 -
791803 - On 990303, I reviewed George Miller's 1955 paper that played a big
791804 - role in launching cognitive science to study information processing.
791805 - ref SDS 18
791807 -  ..
791808 - I have now gotten through most of Steve Pinker's book...
791809 -
791810 -
791811 -                      How the Mind Works
791812 -
791813 -
791814 -     ...purchased on 971228, ref SDS 14 0001, and it requires careful
791815 -     consideration.
791817 -  ..
791818 - Sent ref DIT 1 0001 with link to this record requesting the computer
791819 - file for the book, which can greatly expedite review.  Also linked to
791820 - review of Landauer's LSA paper on 960518. ref SDS 11 8811
791822 -  ..
791823 - I bought Pinker's book a year or so ago for Morris' Christmas present,
791824 - then decided to give him something else because he has not shown an
791825 - affinity or willingness to embrace cognitive science as a basis for
791826 - management practice and/or software tools.
791828 -  ..
791829 - Steve is a professor at MIT in the Cognitive Science department.  He
791830 - is the director of a research lab, and describes his work as...
791832 -        ..
791833 -       Cognitive Science; Psychology and Biology of Language
791834 -
791835 -     ...ref OF 8 0001. Since SDS is a text environment, the biology of
791836 -     language seems to fit our model to place emphasis on this mode for
791837 -     more effective management using an "intelligence" role.
791839 -  ..
791840 - A colleague, Mary C. Potter, Ph.D., seems to, also, be researching
791841 - information processing.  The explanation....
791842 -
791843 -     Cognitive Processes: Perception, Comprehension, and Memory
791844 -
791845 -     ...of professor Potter's work, ref OF 8 4717, aligns closely with
791846 -     the paper for the Asilomar Conference "Dialog, Documents and Human
791847 -     Memory, developed on 960620. ref SDS 12 8400
791849 -  ..
791850 - Pinker's book, "How the Mind Works," presents a computational theory
791851 - of information processing, which might support a system of "metrics"
791852 - for communication.
791854 -  ..
791855 - The Preface on page xii...
791857 -       ..
791858 -      My research on mind and language has been supported by the
791859 -      National Institutes of Health (grant HD 18381), National Science
791860 -      Foundation (grants 82-09540, 85-18774, and 91-09766, and
791861 -      McDonnel-Pew Center for Cognitive Neuroscience at MIT.
791863 -  ..
791864 - Pinker says on page 13...
791865 -
791866 -            ...but, there's nothing common about common sense.
791867 -
791868 - ...which seems to support a major thesis of NWO... ref OF 2 4235
791870 -  ..
791871 - "Intelligence" seems to be another term for "information processing,"
791872 - explained in POIMS. ref OF 1 0582  Pinker explains memory "chunks" and
791873 - how the mind evaluates how much time to allocate for analysis, with an
791874 - analogy on investing 20 minutes to study a faster route back to camp,
791875 - that only saves 10 minutes.  Human biology prefers immediate action
791876 - rather than delay for study and research that verifies accuracy, under
791877 - the common rule the separates the "quick and the dead" -- "do
791878 - something even if it's wrong." ref OF 2 F56K  On 921021 a seminar at
791879 - Cal Tech discussed people making instant cost/benefit assessment of
791880 - risk to decide on investing time for analysis. ref SDS 3 1661
791882 -  ..
791883 - All of this relates to Communciation Metrics.
791885 -  ..
791886 - I have highlighted a bunch of stuff in the book, but to really apply
791887 - the ideas, I need to work with the text in a computer file to align it
791888 - as was done with other books, e.g., Tom Landauer on 950710,
791889 - ref SDS 9 0001, Jeromy Campbell on 900303, ref SDS 2 0001, Andy Grove
791890 - reviewed on 980307, ref SDS 15 0001, and Kissinger on 940609.
791891 - ref SDS 5 4238
791893 -  ..
791894 - Rather than spend a week scanning the text, I will send Steve a letter
791895 - asking for the file.
791897 -  ..
791898 - I am struck that "communication" is really a melding of cognitive and
791899 - social science.  Maybe I have just not gotten to it yet, but, so far,
791900 - there is no discussion about the notion of building and maintaining
791901 - shared meaning over time in Steve's book.
791902 -
791904 -  ..
791905 - Erroneous Memory Feature Not a Bug, Feedack Enables Correction
791906 - Communication Mistakes are "Feature Not a Bug"
791907 - Remembering the Gist Good Enough to Get By with Timely Feedback
791908 -
791909 - Pinker notes on page 90 that the ability to expand information, which
791910 - causes meaning drift, per below, ref SDS 0 3723, by filling in gaps
791911 - with memory of what seems like relevant information at the moment for
791912 - quickly drawing the "big picture" and the "bottom line," from
791913 - understanding only the "gist" of information, is a "feature, not a
791914 - bug," because the environment on the African savanna which shaped the
791915 - evolution of the mind required the ability of slow, weak creatures,
791916 - called humans, to think quickly for capturing prey and avoiding
791917 - predators.
791919 -  ..
791920 - Under those conditions, small mistakes usually didn't matter, because
791921 - context and immediate feedback enabled adjustments in doing tasks that
791922 - were over and done with in seconds or minutes.  That is about the time
791923 - frame people can maintain alignment, analysed on 950204, ref SDS 6
791924 - 0550, and discussed by Landauer, from work on 960518. ref SDS 11 8787
791926 -  ..
791927 - The problem is compounded by the modern environment of high speed
791928 - technology that enables communication to transfer misunderstanding to
791929 - others who apply it at a different time and location.  These changes
791930 - in context do not permit timely adjustments.
791932 -  ..
791933 - On 900303 Campbell points out that people "pay a price" for a powerful
791934 - mind that expands information, ref SDS 2 4456, but compounds meaning
791935 - drift over space and time, as related in NWO. ref OF 2 9449  The
791936 - challenge is to calculate the price so that people are alerted to take
791937 - proactive measures to maintain alignment, shown by USACE report
791938 - received on 971008. ref SDS 13 2979
791939 -
791940 -      [On 990625 cited Pinker's point for analysis of article in
791941 -      Fortune on why CEOs fail. ref SDS 27 0796]
791943 -       ..
791944 -      [On 000307 educator notes that people only remember 5%-10% of the
791945 -      gist of a story. ref SDS 32 1122
791947 -       ..
791948 -      [On 000604 project to develop knowledge tools under sponsorship
791949 -      of Doug Engelbart and SRI yielded concern that people catagorize
791950 -      improperly. ref SDS 33 0855
791952 -       ..
791953 -      [On 000927 proposal to compare natural remembing with SDS that
791954 -      uses gist to improve natuarl memory. ref SDS 34 IP7F
791955 -
791957 -  ..
791958 - Cognitive Science Not Integrated into Technology Nor Management
791959 -
791960 - It is interesting that communication is the biggest cause of problems
791961 - and poor productivity in management, as reported on....
791962 -
791963 -   921127 inconsequential details become big problems.. ref SDS 4 0674
791964 -   960205 70% of day wasted in unproductive meetings... ref SDS 10 5222
791965 -   950327 examples..................................... ref SDS 7 0200
791966 -   950605 lawyers waste time because not not enough
791967 -          time to align communication in daily work.... ref SDS 8 3960
791969 -  ..
791970 - Cognitive Science seems well aware that meaning drift causes continual
791971 - bumbling and mysterious mistakes commonly attributed to Murphy's Law.
791973 -  ..
791974 - For example, Landauer's work on induction reviewed on 960518 explains
791975 - the mind's ability to expand information based on knowledge from prior
791976 - experience, ref SDS 11 3734, which was cited by Campbell reviewed on
791977 - 900303. ref SDS 2 4456  George Miller's work reviewed on 990303
791978 - indicates people can only track about 7 subjects, before the mind is
791979 - overwhelmed, ref SDS 18 5328, and that people recode information to
791980 - aid memory, commonly called paraphrasing. ref SDS 18 2838
791982 -  ..
791983 - Pinker explains this is a "feature" not a defect that can somehow be
791984 - corrected, which means human kind is stuck with this, as set out in
791985 - NWO, ref OF 2 4925, and is actually driven to recode as a survival
791986 - strategy, per above. ref SDS 0 3196
791988 -  ..
791989 - But none of this work has filtered into an application for better
791990 - management and technology.  It is just collecting dust in endless
791991 - papers and seminars, and so overlooks the fact that civilization has
791992 - evolved a different environment today where the impact of thinking is
791993 - deferred and transferred to others through communication.  In this
791994 - environment slight mistakes recoding that cause meaning drift are
791995 - compounded over time and blow up into crisis, giving rise to
791996 - Aristotle's rule cited in the NWO... paper. ref OF 2 4564
791997 -
791998 -      [On 990924 communication biggest risk in enterprise, explain
791999 -      meaning drift causes high cost of medical mistakes. ref SDS 29
792000 -      5576]
792002 -       ..
792003 -      [On 000106 Knowledge Management dilemma arises from meaning drift
792004 -      from example of "telephone game," that comes from a feature of
792005 -      human cognition. ref SDS 30 1025]
792006 -
792008 -  ..
792009 - Complexity of Language Reflects Power of the Mind to Manage Existence
792010 -
792011 - On 980405 Morris worried that managing information is too difficult
792012 - because subjects are hugely complex.  He noted that everything is
792013 - related to everything else. ref SDS 16 FN9F  Earlier on 970116 he
792014 - cited fractionalized subjects illustrate the difficulty of managing
792015 - organic subjects that reflect the structure of daily life, i.e., of
792016 - existence.
792018 -  ..
792019 - On 990303 George Miller, a pioneer in cognitive science, explained
792020 - people can only handle about 7 subjects in the conscious span of
792021 - attention. ref SDS 18 5328  Organic structure was reviewed on 890523
792022 - to develop SDS subject management to resolve the huge disparity
792023 - between conscious and subconscious organic structure. ref SDS 1 SQ5L
792025 -  ..
792026 - Pinker on page 88 cites the combinatorics of mentalese using simple
792027 - representations of alphabet technology demonstrate the inexhaustible
792028 - repertorie of human thought and action that makes communication a
792029 - highly complex process that is difficult to manage with conventional
792030 - business metrics and accounting methods.  A few elements and a few
792031 - rules that combine them can generate an unfathomably vast number of
792032 - unique representations, because the number of possible representations
792033 - grows exponentially with their size.  Say you have 10 choices for the
792034 - word to begin a sentence, ten choices for the second word (yielding a
792035 - hundred two-word beginnings), ten choices for the third word (yielding
792036 - a thousand three-word beginnings), and so on.  (Ten is in fact the
792037 - approximate geometric mean of the number of word choices available at
792038 - each point in assembling a grammatical and sensible sentence.)  A
792039 - little arithmetic shows that the number of sentences of twenty words
792040 - or less (not an unusual length) is about 10 raised to the 20th power.
792042 -  ..
792043 - This is 1 followed by 20 zeros, or a hundred million trillion, or a
792044 - hundred times the number of seconds since the birth of the universe. I
792045 - bring up the example to impress you not with the vastness of language
792046 - but with the vastness of human thought.  So.... people... can
792047 - entertain something like a hundred million trillion different effable
792048 - thoughts.
792049 -
792051 -      ..
792052 -     Intelligence Requires Time for Cognitive Overhead
792053 -     Inaccurate Memory Cultural Paradigms Survival Strategy
792054 -     Cognitive Overhead Requires Time for Explicit Intelligence
792055 -
792056 -     This indicates the human mind has the capacity to grapple with a
792057 -     vastly complex existence, but most of the grappling occurs on
792058 -     automatic pilot using parallel processing in the subconscious mind
792059 -     that relies on guessing by remembering the gist of the story,
792060 -     because there is not enough time for serial processing that occurs
792061 -     in the conscious mind to verify accuracy of memory, as related in
792062 -     POIMS. ref OF 1 8774
792064 -      ..
792065 -     On 990303 cognitive science pioneer George Miller reported a study
792066 -     that people can only manage in the conscious mind about 7 subjects
792067 -     at a time. ref SDS 18 5328
792069 -      ..
792070 -     On 890523 complexity of organic structure to manage subjects was
792071 -     reviewed in developing SDS. ref SDS 1 SQ5L
792073 -      ..
792074 -     The complexity of human thought explained by Pinker in relation to
792075 -     the limited capacity to manage about 7 subjects, shows a large
792076 -     opportunity for augmenting human intelligence by using technology
792077 -     to manage organic subject structures, rather than simply leave the
792078 -     mind to run on automatic pilot. ref SDS 18 5328
792079 -
792080 -        [On 000221 ontology is a study of existence, ref SDS 31 2622,
792081 -        that reflects pandora's box of complexity. ref SDS 31 3248
792083 -      ..
792084 -     Cognitive overhead consumes time for the conscous mind to slowly
792085 -     and accurately use serial processing that carefully considers and
792086 -     tests at most seven (7) subjects for correlations, implications
792087 -     and nuance.  The subconscious mind works quickly and inaccurately
792088 -     to process billions of subjects that guides the conscious span of
792089 -     attention based on experience, commonly called "common sense" and
792090 -     "culture" that enable immediate response, rather than coutenance
792091 -     delay that may threaten safety.  The fact that people can succeed
792092 -     under many scenarios in life by relying on paradigms that
792093 -     prejudice decisions (i.e., pre-judge - see POIMS, ref OF 1 6J9J),
792094 -     rather than invest time for accurate understanding on everything,
792095 -     and further that people run out of time striving to increase the
792096 -     accuracy of understanding, per Pinker's point above, ref SDS 0
792097 -     FF70, and also POIMS, ref OF 1 HL6N, creates a biological bias for
792098 -     immediate action and eschews investing time for analysis, based
792099 -     on drives for survival.
792101 -      ..
792102 -     POIMS technology helps the conscious mind handle a greater share
792103 -     of the billions of subjects being managed on automatic pilot by
792104 -     the subconscious mind.  Flexible structure of SDS implements POIMS
792105 -     to improve organization, and makes creating links fast and easy by
792106 -     assembling relevant history on objectives, requirements and
792107 -     commitments.
792108 -
792109 -         [On 990816 Boy Scout analogy explains how technology enables
792110 -         good management with less diligence, i.e., gives diligence a
792111 -         boost. ref SDS 28 2880
792113 -          ..
792114 -         [On 010420 cognitive overhead makes creating structure and
792115 -         links difficult, and requires people to take time deciding to
792116 -         open links. ref SDS 35 SU6K
792118 -          ..
792119 -         [On 010908 laziness prevents people from using diligence that
792120 -         is overcome in some cases by technology like SDS. ref SDS 36
792121 -         YF5O
792122 -
792123 -
792124 -
792125 -
792126 -
792128 -  ..
7922 -
7923 -
7924 - 0039 called Steve
7925 -
792501 - Left a voice mail of having sent him an email.
792503 -  ..
792504 - The recent scare about the Melissa virus, could make people jumpy
792505 - about getting email from unknown sources.  I explained the email has
792506 - a link to my letter which is on a web page, so he will be alerted
792507 - that the thing may look a bit odd.
792508 -
792509 -
792510 -
792511 -
792512 -
792513 -
792514 -
792515 -
7926 -