Introspection: Experimental mind (continue 41)
Posted by: adonis49 on: February 6, 2009
Compensation: An Experimental mind
I recall my advisor telling me once in frustration “At your age I was professor and had raised a family”. He had two grown up sons and a daughter who just got married. I didn’t need this reminder to comprehend my desperate situation: I am just plainly stubborn with no imaginations on earning money. These long years in a PhD program in the specialty of Human Factors, at the age 35 to 41, should be considered a waste of time for any career-minded student but they were valuable for my mind. My exposure to the methods and vocabulary of five other different fields of study in psychology, business, marketing, economics, and education permit me to think that I acquired an experimental mind, a mind that not many could claim to explicitly have. I was exposed to various experimental designs, not necessarily cause and effects designs, and inevitably to different statistical results and interpretations. I witnessed graduates focusing on the technicality of terms and so many “point statistics” that basically means nothing, and a fortiori meant nothing in the minds of the graduates but their experimental minds were lacking in comprehension. The end result is millions of graduates publishing papers not valid scientifically and unable to interpret results.
When someone asks “how” (the mechanical process or procedure) it is tacitly understood that he comprehend the why and what of the subject matter or the system; that he knows all the factors and variables that may affect the outcome of a system, including the human element within the system. Maybe a practicing or a professional knows his particular system, (he should though implicitly most of the times, as engineers learn), but the fundamental question remains “has he acquired the generalized method and rationality to investigating systems outside his discipline?”
I know what I am talking about but the difficulty is to express and disseminate the problem. I have taught engineers who had no understanding for discriminating among variables such as dependent, independent, or controlling variables; you think that they implicitly know how to differentiate among the variables; wrong, they don’t. Even after three sessions coupled with examples they were still in the dark and still wondering what is all the fuss about. You think that they can interpret graphs, extract wealth of information and comprehend pages of written materials from one meaningful graph, they generally cannot. I can testify that 30% of my engineer classes could not read; another 30% could not understand what they read. It was a pleasure to educate a couple of good minds. I have written several articles on that subject in my category “Professional articles” for further detailed clarification.
Worst, undergraduates are almost never exposed to research papers. Most Master’s graduates barely comprehend or interpret correctly research papers. Graduates join the “work force” of the rational minds practically illiterate; they cannot resume any continuation learning programs for a simple reason: they are illiterate in reading and comprehending research papers.
My contention is this. If you acquired an experimental mind then you should be eligible to comprehend any field of study by reading the research papers in the field. The major contraption devised my professions to discriminate among one another is a flimsy mask targeted in changing the technical terms and vocabulary; a secret ritual inherited from ancient times to creating castes of literates. Other than that, the experimental methodology is fundamentally the same. When you acquire an experimental mind then all disciplines are one course away; you need to learn the slang, a new language that sound familiar, but with terms that have different meanings and connotations. The ultimate goal of teaching is for every university graduating mind to be trained to comprehend research papers of other disciplines.
May I refer the reader to my current article “Rationality Fraud: Can our leading minds pass Socrates’ dialogue test?”
Adonis Diaries 
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