implicit models
Every once in a while, I'll be thinking about some crazy thing that other people believe, and all of a sudden I'll feel something smack me in the head, the pressure wave of a new perspective slamming into me. I'll see what they must be seeing and instead of thinking about how they're wrong, I'll desperately, voraciously want to understand how they're right -- not objectively right, but how the implicit system of ideas and definitions in their heads leads to their belief.
The other day I saw an alternative health establishment decrying the fact that "half of all Americans die from cancer, and one-third die from heart disease." That sounds horrifying, unless you realize (and I don't remeber whether I realized this, or whether someone told me earlier): everyone dies from something! Cancer is a huge class of problems that we don't have good solutions for yet, and so percentage of deaths from cancer is practically a measure of good population health -- old people who die from cancer are the ones who avoided dying from everything else. What you really want is number of person-years lost to various diseases.
But what's interesting is to think about the alternative idea. The folks who put up that poster must have an image in their head of "dying naturally," of passing away for no particular reason just because you're old and you're sort of supposed to die. What does that look like to them? What do they imagine happening to an old person who avoids falls, strokes, cancer, and the rest indefinitely? Just what is this implicit image that all of us probably have in our heads?
That's the kind of thing I think about a lot.
The other day I saw an alternative health establishment decrying the fact that "half of all Americans die from cancer, and one-third die from heart disease." That sounds horrifying, unless you realize (and I don't remeber whether I realized this, or whether someone told me earlier): everyone dies from something! Cancer is a huge class of problems that we don't have good solutions for yet, and so percentage of deaths from cancer is practically a measure of good population health -- old people who die from cancer are the ones who avoided dying from everything else. What you really want is number of person-years lost to various diseases.
But what's interesting is to think about the alternative idea. The folks who put up that poster must have an image in their head of "dying naturally," of passing away for no particular reason just because you're old and you're sort of supposed to die. What does that look like to them? What do they imagine happening to an old person who avoids falls, strokes, cancer, and the rest indefinitely? Just what is this implicit image that all of us probably have in our heads?
That's the kind of thing I think about a lot.