Patterns & pragmatism 2 of 3

Before Thursday’s trip to Liverpool, I talked about the pattern basis of human decision-making and our evolved ability to make decisions under inherent uncertainty. Now, this is a big subject, and I am only going to touch the surface in these two blog posts. In my last point, I talked about the requisite ambiguity that humans can, outside the context of a modern organisation, handle with ease. One of the reasons for that is that we evolved to a large degree for abductive reasoning. We can do the. but it is not the only arrow in our quiver; AI, inductive stuff, is inductive almost by definition. Now, I have discussed this in various ways, and SenseMaker® was designed as an abductive research tool. But it is worth summarising the difference rather than pushing you to a range of previous blog posts.

Abductive reasoning is about identifying the shortest possible connection between apparently unconnected things.  Originating with the American pragmatists, in particular, Pierce, who saw abductive logic as hypothesis generation, in Bateson (father and daughter), we see the use of metaphor to gain new insight and in the author’s field of naturalising sense-making the use of high abstraction metadata to distance human insight from material expectation to make serendipitous discovery more likely.  It also appears to be a uniquely human capability, insight without training datasets, which today hasn’t been possible with algorithmic insights (the author refuses to call it artificial intelligence) and, as Larsen argues, may be impossible.  It is a critical aspect of human resilience. It is linked to our ability to adapt quickly, see novel connections between apparently unconnected things, and radically repurpose them as described in the EUFG.  On the downside, it makes us very prone to conspiracy theories.  I wrote a two-part series on Granularity, Abstraction and Coherence earlier in the year, which explains and expands on this. I hereby incorporate those posts into this current series, so you might want to read them before we get to part three.

Abduction as a concept is closely linked to intuition, and, as the late great Larry Prusak said, intuition is compressed experience. The ability of a London Taxi Driver to navigate without conscious thought is linked to the enlarged hippocampus, which developed over the two-plus years of driving around the City on a scooter with a map learning the names of all the streets and routes. There is the old adage that appears in many forms of the retired Engineer who turns up on-site and, with one tap of a hammer, gets things working again. When his £3,000 bill is challenged, he revises it to £20 for the hammer blow and £2,980 for knowing where to hit. Experience counts, and it’s not just individual but also social. Indigenous friends in Australia are worried because they can no longer smell the seasons changing. Around this time last year, I reported on some of the work on dowsing, which suggests the rods may be a way in which the dower picks up and concentrates sub-conscious clues from the environment. There is a lot more to the capacity of humans to make sense of their world than we currently understand. Still, we know enough to say that experience and rich social interactions are key, as is visualisation, especially for anomaly detection.

We know that anomalies are critical if we are to pay attention to novelty. Otherwise, it may escape our attention. Methods designed to reduce uncertainty run the risk of preventing the detection of anomalies until it is too late to do anything. Surprise is one of the triggers for abductive thinking.  To reference Pierce, if we are surprised by something, but if something else was also true, then we would not be surprised, then we start to suspect that something else is true.  That statement is slightly complex, so it’s worth reading a few times. It is one of the ways we use intuition. It is also true that sometimes, we legitimately want to reduce uncertainty and create sufficient structure or scaffolding to create some sense of security. The secret is to know when that is legitimate and when it might prove fatal.

I’ll conclude this tomorrow and also lay down initial grounds for a series of posts on AI linked to planned events and a sensing capability we are about to launch,

Post script on Abduction that may help or hinder from Larson – referenced above

Deduction
All the beans from this bag are white
These beans are from this bag
Therefore, these beans are all white

Induction
These beans are from this bag
These beans are white
Therefore, all the beans from this bag are white

Abduction
All the beans from this bag are white
These beans are white
Therefore these beans are from this bag.

The banner picture is cropped from an original by Zoltan Tasi on Unsplash. DALL-E generated the Opening image on the instruction ‘create a panorama of humans managing complex patterns in nature”. It is my first use of algorithm-generated illustration.

The contrast between the two pictures is important here. The banner picture is redolent with possibilities and ambiguities, but any experienced boat person would immediately know what was possible, the reasons for the mist, etc. The machine-generated image creates highly structured patterns. Interestingly, there is a straight path that might distract from exciting side trips, and a forest surrounds the whole thing.