Henry Threadgill, god bless him, has become by no particular fault of his own both the patron saint of the tuba in creative music and the source of too many shallow comparisons made by name-dropping idiot savant hipsters anytime they hear a tuba in creative music. I very much enjoy his work, but I can't claim to have been influenced by it in the least and can't for the life of me figure out what it could be about my music that makes people think of him other than the fact that there is almost always a tubist or two doing more than just sitting there looking lost.
Back in Minneapolis, the more frequently I played out with Milo Fine, the more I realized what a ridiculous range of references people would drop after the shows. I know that Milo takes pride in bringing lots of musical streams together in his groups, though not at all in the ways that turn of phrase might imply to most people, and he was generally amused at all the ground people were accusing him of covering. It does make you realize, though, that our ability to draw connections is profoundly limited by what we know, and if there's anything at all to be said for the kind of pursuit of knowledge for its own sake which I've mostly eschewed to this point in my life, I suppose this is it.
15 December 2012
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Daniel Kahneman
Thinking Fast and Slow
(2011)
"the availability heuristic"
"students of policy have noted that the availability heuristic helps explain why some issues are highly salient in the public's mind while others are neglected. People tend to assess the relative importance of issues by the ease with which they are retrieved from memory..."
(p. 8)
more from Kahneman:
"The availability heuristic, like other heuristics of judgment, substitutes one question for another: you wish to estimate the size of a category or the frequency of an event, but you report an impression of the ease with which instances come to mind. Substitution of questions inevitably produces systematic errors. You can discover how the heuristic leads to biases by following a simple procedure: list factors other than frequency that make it easy to come up with instances. Each factor in your list will be a potential source of bias. Here are some examples:
•A salient event that attracts your attention will be easily retrieved from memory. [e.g. the salience of celebrity sex scandals makes it seem like celebrities have more sex scandals than average] ...
•A dramatic event temporarily increases the availability of its category. [e.g. plane crash => fear of flying] ...
•Personal experiences, pictures, and vivid examples are more available than incidents that happened to others, or mere words, or statistics. A judicial error that affects you will undermine your faith in the justice system more than a similar incident you read about in a newspaper."
(p. 130)
This last, vis-a-vis "pictures" vs. "mere words," is very relevant to the observations of Mumford, McLuhan, Debord, Postman, Schickel.
Kahneman again:
"The conclusion is that the ease with which instances come to mind is a System 1 heuristic, which is replaced by a focus on content when System 2 is more engaged. Multiple lines of evidence converge on the conclusion that people who let themselves be guided by System 1 are more strongly susceptible to availability biases than others who are in a higher state of vigilance. The following are some conditions in which people "go with the flow" and are affected more strongly by ease of retrieval than by the content they retrieved:
•when they are engaged in another effortful task at the same time
•when they are in a good mood because they just thought of a happy episode in their life
•if they score low on a depression scale
•if they are knowledegable novices on the topic of the task, in contrast to true experts
•when they score high on a scale of faith in intuition
•if they are or are made to feel powerful"
(p. 135)
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