Yostivanich

This is the sec­ond post in a mul­ti­ple post series. Yes­ter­day, I dis­cussed how the news media is miss­ing an impor­tant part of the dis­cus­sion with the Inter­na­tional Astro­nau­ti­cal Union or the IAU, on the new sys­tem of nam­ing what is and is not a planet. My gen­eral idea was that there is a vast dif­fer­ence between a non-governing body such as the Inter­na­tional Astro­nau­ti­cal Union declar­ing a new nam­ing con­ven­tion and the masses, you and I, accept­ing this con­ven­tion. Today I wish to fur­ther this rela­tion between researchers and infor­ma­tion being accepted into main­stream society.

Sci­en­tific Amer­i­can has an arti­cle describ­ing a study involv­ing the mem­ory reten­tion of chess play­ers. The arti­cle can be read at this web address — http://www.sciam.com/print_version.cfm?articleID=00010347-101C-14C1-8F9E83414B7F4945. The largest dif­fer­ence between a grand­mas­ter at chess, and an expert player or a novice player, wasn’t that they looked at more moves or looked fur­ther ahead in the game. Instead it was in how the play­ers viewed the game. A grand­mas­ter viewed the cur­rent game board and it’s setup as a sub-set of a type of chess game. For example:

To a begin­ner, a posi­tion with 20 chess­men on the board may con­tain far more than 20 chunks of infor­ma­tion, because the pieces can be placed in so many con­fig­u­ra­tions. A grand­mas­ter, how­ever, may see one part of the posi­tion as “fianchet­toed bishop in the cas­tled king­side,” together with a “block­aded king’s-Indian-style pawn chain,” and thereby cram the entire posi­tion into per­haps five or six chunks( of information).

All of the chess play­ers stud­ied scored about the same on mem­ory tests and intel­li­gence tests. So the skill of a chess player is not from his/her IQ score or mem­ory recall but intel­li­gent orga­ni­za­tion and dis­tri­b­u­tion of information.

Now what does this have to do with infor­ma­tion from researches being pre­sented and accepted by the masses. It comes from how researches present infor­ma­tion, in long drawn out bor­ing papers that very few peo­ple want to or have the time to read. The only peo­ple who have the time or desire to read the full paper are the peo­ple who spe­cial­ize in that same field that the paper is writ­ten for. Now, yes research papers do have abstracts to sum­ma­rize what is pre­sented in the paper, but even these are long drawn out bor­ing things that no one reads. Now I am not advo­cat­ing another sum­ma­riza­tion of papers, instead what I am advo­cat­ing is a new way of writ­ing papers and in pre­sent­ing infor­ma­tion to the masses.

Papers and infor­ma­tion should be pre­sented in the same way that the Grand­mas­ters of chess recall the board, in chunks, in easy to dis­till and under­stand chucks of data. These chunks do not have to present all the infor­ma­tion, for the gen­eral pub­lic doesn’t need to have all the infor­ma­tion that is actu­ally con­tained in the paper. But, and this I believe this is the key, the pub­lic does have to under­stand and remem­ber the infor­ma­tion, if that infor­ma­tion is to make any dif­fer­ence to society.

There are a great host of exam­ples of this in his­tory, and that will be the dis­cus­sion tomor­row. How when infor­ma­tion is pre­sented in a way that is easy to remem­ber and under­stand, the gen­eral pub­lic will accept it as fact and that is the only way the Inter­na­tional Astro­nau­ti­cal Union will ever be able to change Sci­ence books from list­ing 9 plan­ets, and not the 12 or so that we could end up with.