Limits of Subjectivity
How about some interesting stuff on the limits of subjectivity rolled up in a presentation about how architecture (buildings and such) is like IT!??!
I quote (emphasis added by me):
"The essence of the experiments is that you take the two things you are trying to compare and ask, for each one, is my wholeness increasing in the presence of this object? How about in the presence of this one? Is it increasing more or less? You might say this is a strange question; What if the answer is Don't know or They don't have any effect on me? Perfectly reasonable! That can happen. But the resolution is easy. What turns out to happen is that if you say to a person �Yes, it is a difficult question, it might even sound a bit nutty. But anyway, please humor me and just answer the question.� Then it turns out that there is quite a striking statistical agreement, 80-90%, very strong, as strong a level of agreement as one gets in any experiments in social science."
- from http://www.patternlanguage.com/archive/ieee/ieeetext.htm
The possibility of an objective and universal sense of 'wholeness' is pretty cool, I think... Something like a person's 'wholeness' smells like mumbo-jumbo and yet here is somebody sighting 'striking statistical agreement' on what it is...?
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home