Edited for clarity (hopefully) with thanks to Squirrell_in_Hell.

Lately, I find myself more and more interested in how the concept of "systematized winning" can be applied to large groups of people who have one thing in common, and that not even time, but a hobby or a general interest in a specific discipline. It doesn't seem (to me) to much trouble people working on their own individual qualities - performers, martial artists, managers (who would self-identify as belonging to these sets), but I am basing this on "general impressions" and will be glad to be corrected. It does seem to be a norm for some other sets, like sailors, who keep correcting maps every voyage.

The field in which I have been for some years (botany) does have something similar to what sailors do, which lets us to see how floras change over time, etc. However, different questions arise when novel sub-disciplines branch off the main trunk, and naturally, the people asking these new questions keep reaching back for some kind of pre-existing observations. And often they don't check how much weight can be assigned to these observations, which, I think, is a bad habit that won't lead to "winning".

It is not "industrial rationality" per se, but a distantly related thing, and I think we might have to recognize it somehow. Or at least, recognize that it requires different assumptions... No set victory, for example... Still, it probably matters to more living people than pure "industrial rationality" does, & ignoring it won't make it go away.

Tl;dr Different people will probably have different answers to the question of how to find the goal & nurture the 'something to protect' feeling, but mine is: your specific working experience is already doing it for you.

What values do other people expect of you?

I think that for many people, their jobs are the most meaningful ways of changing the world (including being a housewife). When you just enter a profession and start sharing your space and time with people who have been in it for a while, you let them shape you, for better or for worse. If the overwhelming majority of bankers are not EA (from the beneficiaries' point of view), it will be hard to be an EA banker. If the overwhelming majority of teachers view the lessons as basically slam dunks (from the students' point of view), it will be hard to be a teacher who revisits past insights with any purpose other than cramming.

So basically, if I want Something to protect, I find a compatible job, observe the people, like something good and hate something bad, and then try to give others like me the chance to do more of the first and less of the second.

I am generalizing from one example... or two...

I've been in a PhD program. I liked being expected to think, being given free advice about some of the possible failures, knowing other people who don't consider solo expeditions too dangerous. I hated being expected to fail, being denied changing my research topic, spending half a day home with a cranky kid and then running to meet someone who wasn't going to show up.

Then I became a lab technician & botany teacher in an out-of-school educational facility. I liked being able to show up later on some days, being treated kindly by a dozen unfamiliar people (even if they speak at classroom volume level), being someone who steps in for a chemistry instructor, finds umbrellas, and gives out books from her own library. I hated the condescending treatment of my subject by other teachers, sudden appointments, keys going missing, questions being recycled in highschool contests, and the feeling of intrusion upon others' well-structured lessons when I just had to add something (everyone took it in stride).

(...I am going to leave the job, because it doesn't pay well enough & I do want to see my kid on weekdays. It let me to identify my StP, though - a vision of what I want from botany education.)

Background and resolution.

When kids here in Ukraine start studying biology (6th-7th Form), they wouldn't have had any physics or chemistry classes, and are at the very start of algebra and geometry curriculum. (Which makes this a good place to introduce the notion of a phenomenon for the first time.) The main thing one can get out of a botany course is, I think, the notion of ordered, sequential, mathematically describable change. The kids have already observed seasonal changes in weather and vegetation, they have words to describe their personal experiences - but this goes unused. Instead, they begin with history of botany (!), proceed to cell structure (!!) and then to bacteriae etc. Life cycle of mosses? Try asking them how long does any particular stage take! It all happens on one page, doesn't it?

There are almost no numbers.

There is, frankly, no need for numbers. Understanding the difference between the flowering and the non-flowering plants doesn't require any. There is almost no use for direct observation, either - even of the simplest things, like what will grow in the infusions of different vegetables after a week on the windowsill. There is no science.

And I don't like this.

I want there to be a book of simple, imperfectly posed problems containing as little words and as many pictures as possible. As in, 'compare the areas of the leaves on Day 1 - Day 15. How does it change? What processes underlie it?' etc. And there should be 10 or more leaves per day, so that the child would see that they don't grow equally fast, and that maybe sometimes, you can't really tell Day 7 from Day 10.

And there would be questions like 'given such gradient of densities of stomata on the poplar's leaves from Height 1 to Height 2, will there be any change in the densities of stomata of the mistletoe plants attached at Height 1 and Height 2? Explain your reasoning.' (Actually, I am unsure about this one. Leaf conductance depends on more than stomatal density...)

Conclusion

...Sorry for so many words. One day, my brain just told me [in the voice of Sponge Bob] that this was what I wanted. Subjectively, it didn't use virtue ethics or conscious decisions or anything, just saw a hole in the world order and squashed plugs into it until one kinda fit.

Has it been like this for you?

Related to: 37 ways that words can be wrong.

Consider the following sentence (from Internet; but I have heard it before): 'Lichens consist of fungi and algae, but they are more than the sum of their constituents.'

It is supposed to say something like 'the fungus and the alga don't just live very close to each other, they influence each other's habitat(s) and can be considered, for most purposes, to form a physiologically integrated body'. It never actually says that, although people gradually come to this conclusion if they look at illustrations or read long enough. And I don't think the phrase is sufficiently catchy to explain its popularity; rather, that it is a tenuous introduction to the much-later-explained term 'synergism'. A noble (in principle) preparation of the mind.

Yet how is a lichen 'more than the sum of fungus and alga'? I suppose one could speak of a 'sum' if the lichen was pulverized and consumed as medicine, and then its effect on the patient was compared to that of the mixture of similarly treated fungus (grown how exactly?) and alga (same here). It doesn't exist in the wild. It shouldn't exist in the literature.

A child is not bothered by its lack of sense. When she encounters 'synergism', she'll remember having been told of something like it, and be reassured by the unity of science. It flies under the radar of 'established biological myths', because it doesn't have enough meaning to be one.

I picked a dictionary of zoological terms and tried to recall how the notions were put before me for the first time, but of course I failed. (I guess it should be high-level things, like 'variability', or colloquial expressions - 'bold as a lion', etc., that distort and get distorted the most.) They seem to 'have always been there'. Then, I looked at the definitions and tried to imagine them misapplied (intuitively, a simpler task). No luck. Yet someday, something other truly unknown to me will appear familiar and simple.

We can weed out improper concepts from textbooks, but there are too many sources which are written far more engagingly and 'clearly', and which propagate not even wrong ideas. Explained like I'm five.

And never named.

Edited based on the outline kindly provided by Gram_Stone, whom I thank.

There is a skill of reading and thinking which I haven't learned so far: of looking for implications as one goes through the book, simply putting it back on shelf until one's mind has run out of the inferences, perhaps writing them down. I think it would be easier to do with books that [have pictures]

- invite an attitude (like cooking shows or Darwin's travel accounts or Feynman's biography: it doesn't have to be "personal"),

- are/have been regularly needed (ideally belong to you so you can make notes on the margins),

- are either outdated (so you "take it with a grain of salt" and have the option of looking for a current opinion) or very new,

- are not highly specialized,

- are well-structured, preferably into one- to a-few-pages-long chapters,

- allow reading those chapters out of order*,

- (make you) recognize that you do not need this knowledge for its own sake,

- can be shared, or at least shown to other people, and talked about, etc. (Although I keep imagining picture albums when I read the list, so maybe I missed something.)

These features are what attracts me to an amateur-level Russian plant identification text of the 1948.** It was clearly written, and didn't contain many species of plants that the author considered to be easily grouped with others for practical purposes. It annoyed me when I expected the book to hold certain information that it didn't (a starting point - I have to notice something to want to think). This is merely speculation, but I suspect that the author omitted many of the species that they did because the book was intended to convey agricultural knowledge of great economic importance to the Soviet population of the time (although some included details were clearly of less import, botanists know that random bits trivia might help recognizing the plant in the field, which established a feeling of kinship - the realisation that the author's goal was to teach how to use the book, and how to get by without it on hand). I found the book far more entertaining to read when I realized that I would have to evaluate it in this context, even though one might think that this would actually make it more difficult to read. I was surprised that something as simple as glancing at a note on beetroot production rates could make me do more cognitive work than any cheap trick that I'd ever seen a pedagogical author try to perform purposefully.

There may be other ways that books could be written to spontaneously cause independent thought in their audiences. Perhaps we can do this on purpose. Or perhaps the practice of making inferences beyond what is obviously stated in books can be trained.

* which might be less useful for people learning about math.

** Ф. Нейштадт. Определитель растений. - Учпедгиз, 1948. - 476 с. An identification key gives you an algorithm, a branching path which must end with a Latin name, which makes using it leisurely a kind of game. If you cannot find what you see, then either you've made a mistake or it isn't there.

It would be good to have a way of telling people what they should expect from jobs - especially "intellectual" jobs - they consider taking. NOT how easy or lousy the work is going to turn out, just what might happen and approximately what do they have to do, so that they will decide if they want this.

Once upon a time, in a dark, cruel world – maybe a world darker and crueller than it is – there lived a woman who wanted a piece of the action. Her name was Capsella Medik, but we remember her as Donna Capsella. This is an anecdote from her youth, told by a man who lived to tell it.

...you've got to understand, Donna started small. Real small. No money, no allies, no kin, and her wiles were – as feminine as they are. Still, she was ambitious, even then, and she had to look the part.

Girl had a way with people. Here's how it went.

One night, she rents a room – one table, five chairs – and two armed bodies, and sets up a date with four men at once – Mr. Burr, Mr. Sapp, Mr. Ast and Mr. Oriss, who've never seen her before. All are single, thirty-ish white collars. One look at the guns, and they're no trouble at all.

On the table, there's a heap: a coloured picture, a box of beads, another box (empty), four stacks of paper, four pens, a calculator and a sealed envelope.

'So,' says Donna. 'I need a manager. A clever man who'd keep my bank happy while I am...abroad. I offer you to play a game – just one game – and the winner is going to sign these papers. You leave hired, or not at all.'

The game was based on Mendel's Laws – can you imagine? The police never stood a chance against her... She had it printed out – a kind of cheat-sheet. It's like, if you have some biological feature, it's either what your genes say, or you helped Nature along the way; and the exact – wording – can be different, so you have blue eyes or brown eyes. The wording is what they call allele. Some alleles, dominant, shout louder than others, recessive, so you'll have at most two copies of each gene (hopefully), but only one will ever be heard on the outside.

(It's not quite that simple, but we didn't protest. Guns, you know.)

So there was a picture of a plant whose leaves came in four shapes (made by two genes with two alleles each):

From left to right: simplex, rhomboidea, heteris and tenuis. Simplex had only recessive alleles, aabb. Rhomboidea and tenuis each had only one pair of recessive alleles – aaB? and A?bb. But heteris, that one was a puzzler: A?B?.

'Okay,' Donna waves her hand over the heap on the table. 'Here are the rules. You will see two parent plants, and then you will see their offspring – one at a time.' She shows us the box with the beads. 'Forty-eight kids total.' She begins putting some of the beads into the empty box, but we don't see which ones. 'The colours are like in the picture. You have to guess as much about the parents and the kids as you can as I go along. All betting stops when the last kid pops out. Guess wrong, even partially wrong, you lose a point, guess right, earn one. Screw around, you're out of the game. The one with the most points wins.'

'Uh,' mumbles Oriss. 'Can we, maybe, say we're not totally sure – ?..'

She smiles, and oh, those teeth. 'Yeah. Use your Bayes.'

And just like that, Oriss reaches to his stack of paper, ready to slog through all the calculations. (Oriss likes to go ahead and gamble based on some math, even if it's not rock solid yet.)

'Er,' tries Sapp. 'Do we have to share our guesses?'

'No, the others will only know that you earned or lost a point.'

And Sapp picks up his pen, but with a little frown. (He doesn't share much, does Sapp.)

'Um,' Ast breaks in. 'In a single round, do we guess simultaneously, or in some order?'

'Simultaneously. You write it down and give it to me.'

And Ast slumps down in his seat, sweating, and eyes the calculator. (Ast prefers to go where others lead, though he can change his mind lightning-fast.)

'Well,' Burr shrugs. 'I'll just follow rough heuristics, and we'll see how it goes.'

'Such as?' asks Donna, cocking her head to the side.

'As soon as there's a simplex kid, it all comes down to pure arithmetic, since we'll know both parents have at least one recessive allele for each of the genes. If both parents are heteris – and they will be, I see it in your eyes! – then the probability of at least one of them having at least one recessive allele is higher than the probability of neither having any. I can delay making guesses for a time and just learn what score the others get for theirs, since they're pretty easy to reverse-engineer – '

'What!' say Ast, Sapp and Oriss together.

'You won't get points fast enough,' Donna points out. 'You will lose.'

'I might lose. And you will hire me anyway. You need a clever man to keep your bank happy.'

Donna purses her lips.

'You haven't told anything of value, anything the others didn't know.'

'But of course,' Burr says humbly, and even the armed bodies scowl.

'You're only clever when you have someone to mooch off. I won't hire you alone.'

'Deal.'

'Mind, I won't pick you if you lose too badly.'

Burr leers at her, and she swears under her breath.

'Enough,' says Donna and puts down two red beads – the parents – on the table.

We take our pens. She reaches out into the box of offspring.

The first bead is red.

And the second one is red.

And the third one is red.

...I tell you, it was the longest evening in my life.

 

---

So, what are your Fermi estimates for the numbers of points Mr. Burr, Mr. Sapp, Mr. Ast and Mr. Oriss each earned? And who was selected as a manager, or co-managers? And how many people left the room?

(I apologise - the follow-up won't be for a while.)

Related to: diminishing returns, utility.

I, for example, really don't care that much about trillions of dollars being won in a lottery or offered by an alien AI iff I make 'the right choice'. I mostly deal with things on pretty linear scales, barring sudden gifts from my relatives and Important Life Decisions. So the below was written with trivialities in mind. Why? Because I think we should train our utility-assigning skilz just like we train our prior-probability-estimating ones.

However, I am far from certain we should do it exactly this way. Maybe this would lead to a shiny new bias. At least I vaguely think I already have it, and formalizing it shouldn't make me worse off. I have tried to apply to myself the category of 'risk-averse', but in the end, it didn't change my prevailing heuristic: 'Everything's reasonable, if you have a sufficient reason.' Like, a pregnant woman should not run if she cares about carrying her child, but even then she should run if the house is on fire. Maybe my estimates of 'sufficient' are different than other people's, but they have served me so far; and setting the particular goal of ridding self of particular biases seems less instrumentally rational than just checking how accurate my individual predictions/impressions/any kind of actionable thoughts are.

So I drew up this list of utility components and will try it out at my leisure, tweaking it ad hoc and paying with time and money and health for my mistakes.

Utility of a given item/action for a given owner/actor = produced value + reduced cost + saved future opportunities + fun.

PV points: -2 if A/I 'takes from tomorrow'*, -1 if'harmful' only within the day, 0 if gives zero on net, 1 ifuseful within the day, 2 if 'gives to tomorrow'

*'tomorrow' is foreseeable future:)

RC points: -3 if takes from overall amount of money I have, less the *really* last-resort stash, -2 if takes from more than one-day-budget, -1 if takes from one-day-budget, 0 if zero on net, 1 if saves within a day (like 'saved on a ticket, might buy candy'), 2 saves for 'tomorrow' on net

SFO points: -2 if 'really sucks', -1 if no, 0 if dunno, 1 if yes

F points: -1 if no, 0 if okay, 1 if yes, 2 if hell yes.

U(bout of flue) =-2-3+0-1=-6. Even if I have flue, I might do research or call a friend or do something useful if it'snot very bad, then it will be only -5. On the other hand, I might get pneumonia, which really sucks, and then it willbe -7. Knowing this, I can, when I feel myself going under, 1) make sure I don't get pneumonia, and 2) go through low-effort stuff I keep labelling 'slow-day-stuff'.

U(room of a house) = use + status -maintenance = U(weighted activities of, well, life) + U(weighted signalling activities, like polishing family china) - U(weighted repair activities).

U(route) = f(weather, price, time, destination, health, 'carrying' potential, changeability on short notice, explainability to somebody else) = U(clothes) + U(activities during commute) + U(shopping/exchanging things/..) + U(emergencies)+ U(rescue missions).

What do you think? 

Just a comment on how some people decide the money/time allocation problem when helping their charity of choice. I almost posted it to the open thread, but it is longish, so I posted it here.

 

1. The ordinary hour.

When I read about the lawyer working at the soup kitchen instead of spending another hour at his paying job, I keep thinking, 'how cute these choices are. There are so many lawyers already, and so many kitchens, the guy can hardly say he's on the front-line... he found a way to occupy an evening, less depressing than watching the news.' (If anybody can just pay others to fill in, why doesn't the kitchen already hire help? If it did, surely the lawyer would one day donate money. Charities don't work like clocks, the need for extra funds would arise eventually.)

If the lawyer doesn't come at all, and other people don't come, the kitchen won't work. Even if a handful keeps coming, they won't hold out for long. I have seen it happen. High turnover rates are ok if new volunteers keep stumbling in, but when you come out in full force of five or three, you get this feeling. Like you're the Last Fools on Mars.

And then you all quit.

And then you don't start again. And then you never learn the effect of not contributing anything, and will be discouraged from donating to any cause, because this will be your new default setting. So even if the lawyer allocates one evening for manual labour, he already benefits the cause by being there, which is more than just his personal warm fuzzies.

2. That one hour which you really shouldn't have missed.

Sometimes, asking people to donate money is difficult because you would lose too much by being seen as for-profit, and asking people to donate time is difficult because you have to be absolutely sure they will follow orders. And then the lawyer who comes out of his own volition is worth very much.

Our NGO's hazy mission was protection of wild nature. One of traditional ways to do it is by focussing on specific species, or groups of species. Operation 'Snowdrop' is an umbrella covering prohibition of trade in endangered plants; it starts around late January and closes around late June, but it peaks around February 14 and March 8, the black days of mass destruction.

Now, the problem with people buying endangered plants can be attacked from different angles.

One is educating them. Writing to militsia (police) was the most targeted correspondence, but the most it did was make them wary and derisive (unless they suddenly needed to show activity to their superiors.) We contacted schools, but children usually don't buy flowers; and it always took so much time. Mass-media occasionally took up interest, but for real coverage they wanted Action. Since this provided us with the largest audience, we tried our best to provide it.

We invited them to the train station, where the plants arrived in bulk (mostly snowdrops and cyclamens from the Crimea and crocuses from the Carpathians). There we enlisted police's help and confiscated the flowers, counted them, wrote protocols which would hopefully end up in court and directed the flowers to hospitals. A reporter and a law-enforcer would typically go there with one of us, to witness the distribution. Once, a man demanded before the cameras than we destroy them, so that he would know we didn't cheat him out of profit. The police supported him. That was a devastating hit. We would be reminded of that event for years to come. Explaining that this wasn't what we had planned, or that the flowers were already cut and dead, or that this was one party out of likely ten from that train alone fell on deaf ears - people saw us trampling 10 thousand snowdrops into pulp; we were guilty.

...maybe it is possible to raise funds for this kind of work, but we never figured out how. Office supplies we already had, through association with another NGO. 'For insurance'? (There was that time when it was the cops who trespassed upon a population of Pulsatilla nigricans we monitored.) But men and women, thinking on their feet, not quitting after the first large loss, we never had enough. Now imagine that the lawyer's interested in wild nature protection. What would he rationally do?

 

(What tags should I use?)

This is a rambling post, and I will appreciate your criticism to help dry it or delete it altogether.

It seems that however little a question I research by reviewing [botanical] literature, there is always a much more complex, and rather difficult to rigorously put, question that I have to ask for the first one to be meaningful. The second answer (or tier of answers) doesn't add much to the information I will build upon, but it might - just might! - add uncertainty to the result or allow predictions in advance. How do we use it in advance? We don't apply formal reasoning, usually, and yet somehow we use it!

1.

Consider: a certain invasive plant has a host of adaptations beneficial to its success. (They probably wouldn't be sufficient if there were some actual effort to manage manmade ecosystems, but duh.) A trait many IP share is the ability to increase their ploidy - from 2 to 3, 4, 6, 8 or even 10 sets of homologous chromosomes, etc. (Polyploidization sometimes happens even in single cells in somatic (= non-reproductive) tissues, so it's really a heavily used shortcut.)

Now, suppose I want to see how a different specific property of the species behaves abroad. I will have to check the ploidy level, of course! Quick, what does the literature say, how many chromosomes can it have?

...but wait. Make no mistake, I do have to count them; but what if there is a continent-wide study showing that it generally has 4n in Eastern Europe?.. That would allow me to at least expect 4n, or whatever amount they found, and see if there is any research specifically dealing with this situation within its native range.

...but wait. Of course, those findings will be useful in discussion if I find 4n, but if I don't, they will be just a point in the overall space of possibilities. Still relevant, but not worth putting much explanatory weight on.

Something in my brain evaluated the usefulness of a piece of data other people have found, which I myself have yet to look up, of whose exact composition I have no idea - perhaps there are simply no other reports! - and placed it in context of what I really expect to do.


2.

Okay, if I can think so about other people's writings without even reading them, then maybe I can compile a dummy set of data I expect right now and compare them to those I will find in the literature. And later, to actual data. Here's a simplified problem that doesn't approach labwork on any scale (I don't want to add too many qualifiers).

Let us 'measure' 8 parameters, and check if there have been studies that have found correlations between at least some of them (and maybe with some other ones), and then try to see if our expectations based on knowledge of study area and casual surveys fit our expectations based on published research in any specific way. We are not ready to put forth any causal structure - no real data yet - though we strongly suspect (80%) that all the parameters are in some way linked to each other.

The following table is rough and repetitive, but I think useful as an illustration of how things brew in [my own] a not-much-clever student's head. The numbers are 'dimensionless', distributions are normal, total number of studies measuring each parameter is 7 or less, and all correlations are no less that 0.8.

 

Parameter	Total range	Our expected data ±SE	Reported data range*	Our imaginary correlations	Reported correlations
A	1-12	8±1	4-10	A&F, A&H	A&D, A&F, A doesn't correlate with anything if nothing else correlates with anything
B	1-5	2±1	1-4	B&C, B&E, B&G, B&H	B doesn't correlate with E if F&H
C	1-100	35±20	80±7 (only one other study)	C&B, C&F, C&H	Unknown
D	1-28	6±2	2-18	D&F	D&G (and then E&F)
E	1-500	200±46	150-480	E&B, E&G	E&F if D&G
F	1-50	47±8	8-45	F&A, F&C, F&D, F&H if A&H	F&A, F&H (and then B doesn't correlate with E)
G	1-25	18±2	11-20	G&B, G&E	G&D (and then E&F)
H	1-40	23±10	1-40	H&A, H&B, H&C, H&F (and then H&A)	H&F (and then B doesn't correlate with E)

*as in, 'for this species, out of 1-12 that are altogerther possible, only 4-10 have been so far observed. It might mean that 4-10 is the actual range, but the prior for that is about 60% due to difference in methodologies used by various researchers and to the fact that only a part of the species's habitats have been studied' etc.


Now I understand that this is hardly the most profitable presentation method and statistics has advanced much since Pearson and eveything. It is just that I find it difficult to compare graphs with diagrams with clouds along axes as they are published in different papers. I only want to guesstimate if my data fit a pattern, to discuss them qualitatively. To stratify the parameters in such a way that I will place explanative weight on some of them, and report the others to give a full picture. I have to do this explicitly, because I know I am doing this implicitly – it's a feeling I get, of brain working and deciding and not showing me what it has.

I cannot speak about A, only that maybe A, H and F do have something in common – perhaps I haven't measured it. B looks rather suspicious; I will need to reread that other report. C is intriguing, but ultimately belongs to the 'lower value stratum', and maybe those correlations I found are spurious; if only there was a way to reduce the variability... but it won't be cost-efficient. E, F, D and G also might be worth discussing together. F by itself doesn't seem very meaningful, unless there is a causal connection to the others; too bad one can imagine many plausible explanations for that. I will probably start discussion with H, since it probably has been studied for other plants and at least something has already been proposed.

Now when I have my own data I will see where they deviate from my expectations, and that will be some knowledge I can put into words, and I will hopefully start calibrating myself on these matters. And on matters of Discussion structuring:)

Note: there probably are tons of studies more and less 'solid' than these. Heck, there are probably reviews, too, although I'm not sure how to google them. I just haven't seen this point made on LW, and hope it's worthy of discussion.

Standard disclaimers apply.

Related to: http://lesswrong.com/lw/uh/trying_to_try/

A young Jedi Padawan is assigned to a research lab to learn a new technique. His friends give him advice, helpful and a bit confusing, and his Master sends him to the Archives, where knowledge is never lost. He hopes the Archives will have an exhaustive protocol of how to go about 'this thing', too, because there are two ways to gain experience, and one of them is heavier on the error part. The more protocols the better; he'd be able to tailor something to his own specific needs, or just let Decision Theory guide him to the correct answer.

At the end of the day, he reluctantly comes back.

'Well, Padawan, how fared your quest?' his Master asks. 'Are you able to Stain and Count the Chromosomes of Fragaria x Ananassa?'

'Maybe?'

'...Okay, show me what you have.'

The Padawan opens the report of Owen and Miller (A Comparison of Staining Techniques for Somatic Chromosomes of Strawberry, HortScience 28(2):155-156. 1993) and jumps to the Results section.

'See, Master, orange means there's some problem with the Staining: the Chromosomes are too pale to see at all or indistinguishable from the rest. Either way, you cannot Count them.'

'I see. Orange, as a Sith's blade...and green?

'Good intensity, good contrast. Green are the proper ways to Stain.'

'But?'

'You can only do it with α-bromonaphtalene - Farmer's fluid - Alcoholic HCl carmine (or altered carbol fuchsin) or with 8-Hydroxyquinoline - Farmer's fluid - altered carbol fuchsin! Master Yoda told me to pretreat the Roots with p-Dichlorobenzene! I cannot Count Chromosomes if I cannot really see them!'

'We shall meditate upon this. Did Owen and Miller test all combinations extensively, to the point where they showed that p-Dichlorobenzene only ever results in Sithly - that is, unacceptably poor Counts?'

'They don't say anything like that here. No, I don't think they did.'

'See? Victory is still possible. Tinker around with Fixatives and Dyes, and let Decision Theory guide you.'

'But Master, must I tinker with each and every one?'

'Yes. It is deeply unfortunate that as late as 1993, there still were Researchers who published such incomplete Results. What is it to you if they happen to commend α-bromonaphtalene - Farmer's - alt carb fuchsin and disparage p-Dichlorobenzene? Everyone can Make bad Preparations - it is not an accomplishment to be proud of. Actually, you must find optimal Staining conditions for all the 'orange' options too, while you're at it. The Archives will benefit from your efforts.'

'...'

'Beware the Dark Side, Padawan. Irrational Decisions are waiting for you  - one mistake and you're lost!.. But that was not all that you were tasked with. What about Fungi in Roots, have you learned to Prepare those?'

The Padawan opens another file (Gange et al, A Comparison of Visualisation Techniques for Recording Arbuscular Mycorrhizal Colonization, New Phytol. 142:123-132. 1999) and sighs.

'I cannot even decide which technique is best, because one gets different Levels of Fungal Colonization if one uses Acid Fuschin, Trypan Blue or Chlorazol Black.'

'That is awfully inconsistent.'

'Indeed, Master. And although the authors probably did Treat all their Roots well enough, they do not grade the Preparations' Intensity and Contrast, so I still have lingering doubts about them. What if they just Stained suboptimally?'

'Surely Master Gange would not have done that!'

'Oh good, I wasn't looking to benefit the Archives even more. Why didn't these people just report everything useful?'

''Useful' is not that simple, but unless you look at your Results impartially, you are likely to omit Relevant Information. It is so easy to support your Preferred Outcome, when you simply have no other Evidence. It would fall to other people to look for it, perhaps many times, and the ripples will spread on as time goes by. Stain well, my Padawan; and Count well. There is no Try.'

 

 

Edit: added the image of O&M's results and changed wording a couple of times. Thanks to Gunnar_Zarncke for pointing me to 'technical debt'.