The other day, Amazon suggested I might like "The Why Axis" by Uri Gneezy and John A. List. If you have spent much time around data analysis, you know that the horizontal axis of many graphs is the X axis and the vertical is the "Y" axis. The "Why" axis is a clever phrase and got my attention. The book costs $3.49 to download, another good sign. Reading the intro, I found a mention of the university where I taught for 37 years. How many good signs do I need?
The main author discusses holes and traditions in economics that have held the subject back. He explains that they found surprising ignorance, knowledge gaps, suppositions and traditions and habits instead of current, convincing data. It is very clear to me that we all operate more by intuition and habit than we realize. It is expensive and difficult to experiment, even just to plan a good experiment and we have to. If I want to check to see if blondes really do have more fun, I have to get some blondes to try a version of fun. That is going to take time and money and patience and skill and luck. No matter what I do or fail to do, there are dozens of questions, objections, and alternative arrangements and samples I might collect to run an experiment. Just one of dozens of difficulties is the passage of time. By the time I get funding, set up and run the experiment, analyze the data and reach a conclusion, the nature of blondes and non-blondes may have changed so that I and my data are already out of date.
This whole subject came to mind at lunch when the business of knowledge transmission came up. Upper grades of school and advanced learning in college and beyond often depend on reading. "Read the chapter on blondes and fun for a discussion in our next class." Let's set aside the question of whether the information in the reading is good stuff. A further question is how can we be sure that a reader who reads it knows, remembers, understands and digests the information on blonde fun. Truth is, we can't do an exhaustive job of checking knowledge acquisition and retention. We do the best we can, and so do learners and blonde-makers, but we of necessity have to go by guess, habit and intuition much of the way.
