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Re: NYT on Marshall Islands Wayfinding at Sea
From: Charlie Smith
Date: 2025 Nov 19, 07:58 +0000
From: Charlie Smith
Date: 2025 Nov 19, 07:58 +0000
I had forgotten that Ed Hutchins gives us a navigation puzzler of sorts towards the middle of chapter 2 of his Cognition in the Wild book to highlight that our western approach to navigation adopts, out of necessity, a frame of reference similar to the Polynesian navigator’s construct of water flowing past the boat instead of the boat crossing the surface of the earth. Both the western and Polynesian approaches use constructs that do deviate from the reality of the universe to make navigation calculation possible.
Thanks to Chris yet again for posting the NYT article. It inspired me to reread Cognition in the Wild!
Here’s the “navigation puzzle” from Hutchins:
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(pages 81-83, Cognition in the Wild)
It is tempting to criticize the Caroline Island navigators for
maintaining an egocentric perspective on the voyage when the global perspective of the chart seems so much more powerful. Before
concluding that the Western view is superior, consider the
following thought experiment: Go at dawn to a high place and point directly at the center of the rising sun. That defines a line in space. Return to the same high place at noon and point again to the center of the sun. That defines another line in space. I assert that
space
the sun is located in space where those two lines cross. Does that
seem wrong?
Do you feel that the two lines meet where you stand
and nowhere else? In spite of the fact that the lines seem to be orthogonal
to each other, they do cross at the sun. This is not intuitively obvious to us, because our usual way of conceiving of the sun’s location is not to conceive of its location at all. Rather, we
think of its orientation relative to a frame defined by the horizons and the zenith on earth. The rotation of the earth is not experienced as the movement of the surface of the earth around its center, but as the movement of the celestial bodies around the earth. From a
of view outside the solar system, however, the intersection of the lines is obvious, and it is immediately apparent that the sun is in fact located where the lines cross (figure 2.10).
Our everyday models of the sun's movement are exactly analogous to the Caroline Island navigator's conception of the location of the reference island. The choice of representations limits the sorts of inferences that make sense. Because we Westerners have been exposed to the ideas of Copernicus, we can sit down and convince ourselves that what we experience is an artifact of our being on the face of a spinning planet. That is, after all, the "correct" way to think of it, but it is not necessarily the most useful way. Modern celestial navigation is deliberately pre-Copernican precisely because a geocentric conception of the apparent movements of bodies on a rigid celestial sphere makes the requisite inferences about the positions of celestial bodies much easier to compute than they would be in a heliocentric representation. From a perspective outside the galaxy, of course, the heliocentric conception itself is seen to be a fiction which gives an improved account of the relative movements of bodies within the solar system but which is incapable of accounting for the motion of the solar system relative to the other stars in the universe. Such a "veridical cosmology" is irrelevant to any present-day navigator's concerns.
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-Charlie
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On Tuesday, 11/18/25 at 23:12 Charlie wrote:
On Tuesday, 11/18/25 at 23:12 Charlie wrote:
Thanks for posting this New York Times article!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
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On Tuesday, 11/18/25 at 19:06 NavList Community <NavList@navlist.net> wrote:NYT on Marshall Islands Wayfinding at Sea
From: Chris Post
Date: 2025 Nov 18, 18:49 -0800NYT: A Voyage Into the Art of Finding One’s Way at Sea
Here's an article from today's New York Times about a study of [Marshall Islands] seafaring. It should be free to read.
— Chris
