Aug 06 2006
I don’t want to think in just one domain
I have a passion for combining ideas. Towards the end of my PhD I started to realise that what I had done, at least in my own mind, could be explained by talking about different “traditional†subjects. I had several different areas of computer science (performance prediction, scheduling, security, and a few others), economics, philosophy, mathematics, biology and even a bit of politics.
In most of these subjects, someone with even an undergraduate degree in it would quite possibly have laughed at the immaturity of each piece of work. That isn’t the point though. To my mind, what I really got my PhD for was for combining each of the different areas. For example I showed that a fairly trivial model of biological evolution, stolen by computer scientists in the 60s can actually be used to solve one of the “hard†problems in micro-economics. A problem that most of the economics text books I read will only solve for really easy cases, and then do so with 5-6 pages of maths, making it look really hard.
I see a common problem in the world today. Intelligent, bright educated people simply revert to scared uneducated people when faced with a problem from a subject they don’t feel they should know. Often the problem is so simple that knowing its subject is not necessary, simply being able to think, something we are told is the benefit of the university system, is all it takes to understand it. But that rarely works as expected. The person in question cannot do this, for whatever reason.
Take computers for example. Not complex actions like sending an e-mail, or browsing the web. But simple, simple actions, like pressing the on switch, or the reset switch. This terrifies many people. Urban myth is full of stories of people who ring their PC vendors support line when the computer won’t work, only to eventually inform the support line that there is a power cut. They simply can’t transfer the knowledge that “electrical devices require power†and “a computer is an electrical device†to come up with “computers require powerâ€Â. Either they are stupid, something which you can normally discount within 10 seconds if you talk to them about another subject, or, they are scared by computers, a new idea that is, or at least, can be, very complex.
For some reason, I love this sort of cross domain thinking. It formed the basis of my thesis after all. You will often find me reading introductory books in new subjects. While I read these books I often think “this is just like an idea from somewhere elseâ€Â.
I want to write about these ideas, I want to suggest them, probably often wrongly, but sometimes, maybe, I might hit onto something really interesting.
I think a lot of people have a fear that they will break a computer if they mess around with it. I get calls from friends/relatives all the time asking how to do certain things on a computer and I have to walk them through page by page. However, some (my grandad for instance) play around with the computer and figure things out for themselves.
The downside is that they sometimes do change settings that ‘break’ the computer and I get calls from them on how to fix it (usually minor things such as how to get the screen resolution back).
Indeed, fear is probably the reason people do not do much with computers, and as computers often represent both a sizeable initial cost, and a sizable repair bill, this may well have been a bad example of my point.
Consider the intelligent person, who has a long carrear in problem solving in some other domain, but when faced with a computer that isn’t doing anything, and will not respond, will not switch it off and on again. When you tell them do to this, they don’t say “i didn’t know if that was safe”, but instead say “i didn’t know I could do that”.
BTW, are you going to put your thesis online?
Yes I am, just as soon as I get round to formatting it nicely for fititng on the web