When Fred Hargadon was Dean of Admissions at Princeton, he had hats made for the team that read:
"We do precision guesswork"
He was also known for saying:
"I don't know, is a perfectly acceptable answer, when you don't know."
Fred was the best in the business. In my view, what made him best was his awareness of how much he didn't know. The job of his team was to predict which 17-year-old applicants were most likely to accept an invitation to Princeton, then go on to complete a four-year degree program. For the best in the business, it was about 90%. That 10%? Don't know. They appeared the same.
When I learned to swim, I was exposed to a concept called 'feel for the water." There's no end of learning specific techniques, correct body position, timing of movements, and breath management. And all of the best swimmers describe a feel for catching the water, moving the water, feeling one's body in and on and through the water. The technique is the precision, after that is what Fred called "guesswork" but it's more informed than that. It's a feel for the information. As humans we swim in a sea of information. We get data from it. And we develop a feel for it.
The best musicians have something analogous. Music teachers and musicologists talk about students who are technically excellent, but the music lacks individuality; and, therefore, comes across as cold. It's notes coming out of instruments. Music is something we feel as well as hear.
From my experience with Fred, his use of "guesswork" was his acknowledgment that there was something unknowable about his and his team's feel for the person they got to know in the application process.
Machines now can run the data and analyze the statistical likelihood of something ridiculously above and beyond what humans can do. When it's just data we need, the machine outperforms us. What the machine can't do is bring that feel to an experience.
When people push back at AI-generated content, what they're most likely missing is that feel. It's what's behind the bromide, "I don't know much about art, but I know what I like." They may know little of the precision integral to great art, but, nonetheless, feel it.
That feel is vital to the human experience of imagining possibilities, setting one's heart on something, judging value, judging right and wrong, having ambition for more, inventing the new.These feelings aren't just physical and emotional sensations. They come from deep inside the profound and usually messy process of human being.
Unsolveably problematic is as we swim in the sea of information around us, our feel has a dark side. Our biases and prejudices show up unbidden and inform our decisions. That feel has been developed through our context and experience. Going back to physical swimming, professional swim coach Brenton Ford, talks about taking on ocean swimming after a career as a pool swimmer. He describes taking three years to develop his feel for the different context and experience of open water. His feel for the contained water of a pool, was off in the new context. This happens to us as we age, as times change, as new people and contexts come into our lives. Our feel for our context is now off. We want things the same.
I'm experiencing this now in another country and another language. I can go into a shop or a restaurant and know the words to say, but I don't have a feel for the customs and manners of this place.
At the same time I have ambition to learn, it's perfectly acceptable that I don't know.
Warm regards,
Francis Sopper