I got involved in the resulting discussion with some really smart people. I’m pretty pleased with one long comment I made, so I thought I’d post it here in its entirety.

The canonical reference for that idea is Hubert and Stewart Dreyfus’ “Mind Over Machine” (1986). Dreyfus H is a professor of philosophy at MIT and Dreyfus S is a mathematician. (Dreyfus H is a follower of Heidegger and that tradition.) Mind Over Machine describes (among other things) a hierarchy of expertise: naive; novice; competent; proficient; expert. In that hierarchy, only an expert uses their instinct. Everyone else follows various rules, frameworks, or processes. The mark of an expert, for Dreyfus, is that an expert acts in a way that *even they* cannot decompose into rules (or that they rules they say they follow are hilariously incomplete).

So, this has a number of applications. Patricia Benner, a nurse and nursing researcher, actually published Dreyfus’ ideas in 1984 in a book on nursing practice. In it she quotes a nurse telling a story about how they look after babies in the Neo-natal ICU. Some of the nurses “just know” if a baby is going OK or if the baby is in trouble, even if all the outward signs and all the diagnostic tools say everything is going fine. So they will hover over that baby or check it more frequently. Sometimes everything is fine, but sometimes it’s not and the extra care often saves a life. But if you ask the experienced nurses what it is they see, they can’t tell you any more than vague homilies. They have passed through a stage of rule-following.

BUT! There are times when instinct and expertise fails. In “Sources of Power” (1992?) Gary Klein, a psychologist and consultant researcher, often for the US military, tells the story of a bunch of firefighters trying to rescue a woman dangling from a highway overpass. Their previous experience led them to attempt a particular kind of rescue, using a particular sort of harness that was usually used on firemen on the outside of buildings. But the woman was slightly built and she was far too small for the harness. She slipped out of the harness and was only saved by a fireman on the ground catching her(!). In a debrief with Klein they figured out that they had other rescue tools that they could have used effectively that she would not have slipped out from.

Now, to finance. Some people have argued that one of the things that went wrong to cause the GFC was that the different investment houses had their financial models which had worked really well, until the time when they very much *stopped* working. Dreyfus would argue that the best a computer model can do is competence (this requires accepting that expertise has superior performance to competence) because a computer model is the very embodiment of rules. This is not to say that having the models was bad, simply that there times when something occurs that is not foreseen by the rules and those are the times when expertise comes to the fore. But, as the firefighters example shows, expertise is only as good as the experiences that built it.

So, is process-oriented thinking bad? A process-orientation works because, Dreyfus would argue, you simply cannot communicate the process an expert follows without converting it into rules. But that leaves the expert as expert and the person, or thing, following the rules as competent.

The vast majority of the time there’s nothing wrong with competence or proficiency. Competence is lovely. Give me competence or give me a leaky sink. And the best thing about competence is it’s easy to assess.

(Actually, this may or may not be true, when I was studying for my PhD one of my supervisors other students was a nurse pursuing a definition of competence which was surprisingly, or perhaps not, proving to be highly situated and contextual. But let’s leave the constructionist sociology aside and treat ourselves to a little reducitionism and say that competence can be tested.)

So, is process a hoax or is an emphasis on process false or useless? I say most likely not. Process is itself a model or a map and as has been pointed out by many others, the map is not the terrain. Process tends to break down under extreme scrutiny as people elide over parts that they have internalised. But it’s still useful.

Finally, back to Nina’s skiing. In the post she says, “I do it exactly as I planned in my head, carefully paying attention to my markers, the physical cues and things I need to do”. In our research we have found that experts plan well in advance and then execute, and we have seen this with designers and nurses and ordinary people who are well versed at using digital cameras and microwaves. (You’re thinking, “aha! he just said experts use rules!” Maybe. The difference is that if you ask an expert to describe what they do and then watch them do it, you’ll see two different things. They will gloss over things in their pre-description that they explicitly engage with while acting and they will ignore things in their action that they described in detail. Expertise is weird like that.) From this description I would be fairly confident to say that Nina is an expert skier.

But why doesn’t her expertise translate to racing? Well, I’m not a cognitive psychologist, but with that hat on I would say that maybe Nina’s competence at racing combined with her expertise at skiing sends her expertise at skiing back to competence. Maybe it’s hard to follow the rules of racing without engaging the rule-following part of your brain, so if you’re rule following about racing, you can’t switch to instinctive skiing, but you are stuck at rule following for skiing too. And then it’s like trying to drive a manual (stick-shift) transmission fast when normally you just drive to commute. You start paying more attention to *how* you use the clutch and shifter and pretty soon you’re going slower than you think you should be and you’ve crunched gears or missed a shift. Or something like that.

It might be about Ubiquitious Computing.

It might be about using ethnographic methods to understand how people use technology.

It might be about saving the world.

It might be about maybe making the world just a little be better.

Current projects include:

• Writing four papers for IASDR2009.
• Writing a book chapter about contrasting scenarios
• Chasing down ethics approval for our ARC-funded digital stethoscope study
• Finishing a journal paper about how we did the analysis for our recent nurses-applying-bandages/expertise research
• Finishing a journal paper about the major theoretical outcome of my PhD thesis
• Associated random teaching and admin stuff that comes with the job

That’s a lot. To paraphrase Homer Kang:

I must move forward, not backward, upward not forward, and always twirling, twirling, twirling towards publication.

It’s just a thing I’m doing. Let’s see how it goes.

Instead, I have a tumblelog on the splendid tumblr service.

I do not suggest that you follow me on rss unless you can cope with lots of frequent,  tiny, updates. Such is the way of a tumblelog.

On the other hand, if you have the need for a rapid-fire outlet of the “I saw this and it’s awesome” type, I highly recommend tumblr.

Update 090409: Still at tumblr. Back here. Let’s see how that works out.

The basic design has more than a passing resembalance to the Smart/Mercedes forTwo which is also rear-engined. It’s safe to say that the Smart’s haven’t exactly changed the world. And let’s not forget the (in)famous Smart forTwo “moose test” rollover. Of course a rollover is almost inevitable if you have a high, narrow car and fling it about.

Some people have compared the Nano to other great city cars (as opposed to people’s cars) of the past, particular the Mini and the Fiat 500 or, more accurately, to the new Mini and new 500 — modern incarnations which are sad parodies of city cars. The modern “Mini” is too big to be a proper city car and is really a sort of upright sporty hatchback. The 500, at least, is quite small (apparently, as they’re not on-sale in Oz) but so are non-retro things like Toyota’s Yaris.

A better comparison of the Nano to other cars would be to great people’s cars of the past, which are simpler than the Mini and 500, and intended for a population making the transition to cars. Even more particularly cars designed for sub-optimal roads should be sought out. To find small, affordable, cars designed for poor roads you need to look to Europe just after WWII. I’m thinking of three cars, the Volkswagen Beetle, the Citroen 2CV and the Renault 4.

The Beetle

(Injured Beetle by extranoise)

The Beetle (nb: it was never officially the Beetle, until the “New Beetle” came along, a poor parody of the original) was not really intended for use of poor roads. Hitler commissioned it before the War for use on the new Autobahn system with the brief that it be able to carry a family of four at 100km/h. Pre-1940, that was ambitious. Ferry Porsche decided that the most efficient means of packaging four people and an engine was with a horizontally-opposed rear-engined two-and-a-half box sort of arrangement. The Beetle is a whimsical shell to wrap that particular style of mechanics in, given that the much more conventional, though less successful, Type 3 had the same basic mechanical layout under conventional three-box sedan, notchback and wagon designs. That the same basic layout is still used in the more expensive Porsches is triumph of nostalgia over sense and of engineering over physics.

The Beetle, though, isn’t really designed for poor roads, rally use and dune-buggies notwithstanding. A Beetle doesn’t have a great deal of ground clearance, and with the engine hanging out behind the back axle, it’s vulnerable to damage. And don’t forget the early Beetle’s swing-axle rear suspension which has a tendency to tuck under the car during forward weight transfer, resulting in always unwelcome, occaisionally disasterous, nigh-unrecoverable lift-off oversteer.

Engineering “people’s cars” which are inherrently dangerous should be sternly frowned upon.The plus points for the Beetle are that it was pretty simple, it was cheap and it had great marketing.

The Citroen 2CV

(Pimp my Ride by StrudelMonkey)

The finest poor-road people’s car is the Citroen 2CV. A possibly apocryphal story is that the design brief was for a car that could carry a carton of eggs over an freshly ploughed field and not break any. I’m not sure if anyone’s ever tested to see if the goal was met, but the 2CV sure does have soft suspension, ideal for traversing Frech rural roads and inner-city cobblestones alike.

The 2CV has a twin-cylinder engine, like the Nano. Unlike the Nano, the 2CV’s lump is a horizontally-opposed design of radical symplicity — among other things it has no head gaskets.

The 2CV was produced for many years but was also made over into other models, none of which lasted as long as the 2CV or are as loved. The most notable are the Dyanne and Ami which are agressively modernist especially when to the 2CVs charming art-deco lines. Other variations included various delivery-type vans and the plastic-bodied Méhari.

Unlike the Nano, the 2CV is appealing and solves more than one problem.

The Renault 4

(4L pour L by Kat…)

The Renault 4 is, in many ways, a better 2CV. It’s more powerful (as in, it has adequate power, rather than nowhere near enough in the 2CV), arguably more practical and given the number still seeing daily duty in north Africa and the middle east, more robust.

Like the 2CV the R4 has long-travel soft suspension, all the better for dealing with country potholes and city curbs. And, like the 2CV, the R4 was designed with consideration of carrying loads. Like the 2CV the R4 also came in a variety of configurations, the oft-seen 4-door wagon and 2-door van being most common.

Back to the Nano

The Nano, on the other hand, appears to have no load carrying ability at all. Poor form.

Yes, it’s cleverly engineered. The fuel-injected engine is quite sophisticated. But I don’t think a tiny-wheeled high-and-narrow city car will be looked upon with the affection of the Beetle, the 2CV or the R4. Or even the Hindoostan Ambassador.

Perhaps that’s the problem. The Beetle, the 2CV and, to a lesser extent, the R4, are all design icons. They look good, but they also solve the problems that the designers decided to tackle. What’s more, by virtue of solving some very specific problems, the trio become more than their brief and are able to be thought of in new ways, to have those specific uses extended and transformed in use. The Nano, on the other hand, is sort of weird looking, and has space to seat four people. And that’s not enough.

Then, thanks to the wonders of This Modern Age, someone who knows a great deal more than me about urban density discovered my post and responded. (I have a feeling that someone emailed it to him, probably with a “here’s another one” type of message.)

Robert McDonald is a “landscape ecologist who is broadly interested in the effects of land-use change and
urbanization on the maintenance of ecological and social function, at regional, global, and
international scales”.

He very graciously takes issue with my reproduction of the “myth” that LA is denser than NYC and shows some more interesting ways to consider density, particularly the “distribution of density”. He goes on to show that

The “average” house in LA is in a neighborhood of 10-15 homes/ha; 20% of houses fall in this category. The “average” housing unit in NY is in a neighborhood with more than 80 homes/ha; 27% of homes fall in this category. This kind of statistic becomes extremely important when considering the feasibility of mass transit, which (for light rail) works well above 40 homes/ha. Only 8% of houses are in such a neighborhood in LA, versus 32.6% of houses for NY.

And there you go. Is LA more dense than NYC? Yes, if you take raw numbers for the entire region, but it seems that the scale of either city is too large for that measure to be meaningful if you’re talking about things like mass transit.