NavList:

For context and a comparison of our Western approach to navigation and the Polynesian approach see chapter 2 of the book Cognition in the Wild by Ed Hutchins (a MacArthur Fellow “genius” grant awardee in his day) which I’ve uploaded as a pdf for your reference.  Link to shared directory is below.

It’ll be interesting to see what comes from the data collection effort outlined in the NYT article.  It’s famously difficult to gain insights into cognitive expertise in complex tasks taking the approach described in the article.  Understanding how Polynesians traditionally navigate is a great example.  If these researchers can give us a recipe for doing so via brain and other sensor data collection they should win a Nobel prize. Chapter 2 of Ed Hutchins book highlights some of these challenges.  Not the least of which is rising above bias of how we perceive the world, or how we navigate oceans in this case.  Ed Hutchins highlights that Polynesian navigation places the navigator in a stationary spot on the ocean with water flowing past the vessel versus our mental construct of traveling across the surface of the earth.

Data collection and subsequent analysis might provide some insights.  But as Steve Levitt (famously the author of Freakonomics) points out in a recorded lecture, also shared below, just because there’s lots of data to be analyzed doesn’t mean non experts in a domain can derive insights from the data.  Even with modern big data analytic approaches.

What would it be worth to be able to take the knowledge and expertise in Frank Reed’s brain and download it to our brains like Keanu Reeves in the Matrix?  Priceless for someone like me. Perhaps we’ll get closer to this capability in my kids lifetime with advances from people like those doing the research in the NYT article.

Steve Levitt lecture (mp3) and chapter 2 of Cognition in the Wild by Ed Hutchins (pdf): https://drive.proton.me/urls/YSX8X389A4#pmShnjDZMrhX (link expires on Nov 30)

- Charlie