Inner spam filters
In their article for Scientific American MIND titled, Your Inner Spam Filter (registration required), authors Andrew McCollough and Edward Vogel point out that there are two types of people: those who can remember large amounts of information (high-capacity individuals) and those who can't (low-capacity individuals). The draw on research and show that it's not that the high-capacity individuals have a larger store, it's just that they are better at ignoring the spam that comes their way! In fact they found that some low-capacity individuals were holding more information than high-capacity individuals. This is the same conclusion others have come to also. For example, Gary Klein, author of Power of Intuition, has put forth that expertise and experience is all about selecting the appropriate shortcuts through the flood of information. Malcolm Gladwell's Blink is onto the same conclusion with his notion of 'thin-slicing' of information.
When it comes to training, there is a tendency to just focus on expert behaviour, the thin-slices. But that’s not quite the way to train the spam filter in my opinion. The filter needs to see the junk to know the junk. The training should allow for messy situations, but channel the behaviour in spotting patterns of what is relevant and what is not. Much like a sandbox.
Add tag Permalink | Monday, August 25, 2008
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