Saturday, January 4, 2014

Miracles of explanation

People often refer to a child who can answer questions about facts of, say, history or science as "smart".  That makes sense.  Even Wechsler who designed one of the leading individual "IQ" tests thought along similar lines.  I learned that he reasoned an intelligent child would accumulate knowledge through living and schooling and personal reading.  He thought, for instance, that a child in the middle grades of elementary school should be able to tell the distance from New York to Paris.


The other famous individually administered IQ test, the Stanford-Binet, was based on the idea that intelligence is some ability or several to think quickly, incisively, and imaginatively in a logical and sometimes original way.  So Alfred Binet and the Stanford extenders/modifiers of his test thought that that same child with the distance knowledge should be able to answer questions like "Johnny put his pants on over his head this morning.  Tell me what's funny about that."


You may know that around 1500 years ago, it was not easy to learn to write or to read.  There seemed to be less need to be able to and there was less chance to learn those skills.  People who had those skills were in a similar position as expert "coders" are now: they had a specialized skill and those would wanted something in writing paid a scribe to produce it for them.  Now, we think of a person in North America who cannot write and read in some language as lacking what we take to be an essential skill while something like ⅓ of the earth's population do not have that ability.


The interesting idea put forth by Amazon.com to deliver goods ordered at a distance to the orderer by drones was said somewhere to be technically feasible more or less immediately but that FAA clearances and liability arrangements were the big hang-up to implementation.  I got to imagining the rules, regulations and agreements that will probably be in place eventually being considered a 'Miracle of Explanation', especially if the whole body were produced quickly and met the expectations, demands, objections and needs of all parties concerned.


Many practices and projects in the social, scientific, educational, medical, legal and business spheres that we take for granted today took smart, imaginative and articulate people years to work out.  Once the inventing and explanation and necessary approvals of parties and authorities concerned are in place, the whole package can be taken for granted, considered every day and usual.  Driving those things called "cars" for the distances and at the speeds we do, getting cataract operations, having 4 yr olds using tablet computers, starting a business quickly and successfully are just a few of the modern miracles that required great bodies of explanation.

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