Speaking With Authority on Subjects You Are Not Authoritative About

re: Speaking With Authority on Subjects You Are Not Authoritative About

Chris Jackson - MSFT — Wed, 02 Jan 2008 19:47:23 GMT

Kevin: your point is well taken, and I clearly oversimplified because, well, I had the license to. Proving a statement incomplete is a simple matter of coming up with a counterexample. Proving a statement right is much harder. I obviously chose the easy way out!

That being said, the language you use seems to suggest that changes happen more frequently when the gene in question more profoundly affects viability. I think this still doesn't capture the nuance of selection. We have all of the atomic factors of ordering of DNA molecules making bonds more difficult to break in some places than in others, or more or less likely for substitution. We have genes that have been unchanged since long before humans were around, with others that mutate much more regularly. We have error correction mechanisms at the cellular level. And absolutely none of it cares about anything other than propogating itself - whichever component that is. I wouldn't want a reader to infer causation from these statements (genes don't really care if drastic changes would or would not affect viability - there is no intent in the system).

J.D.: your points are great indeed. And then comes the subtle undertone: how could anything ever get done if we don't claim our authority and push the boundaries from time to time? I learn more from saying something is true and later finding out that it isn't than most any other way of learning. If people only talked about what they were sure they would know about, we'd lose the inherent error correction of the informal scientific method that is human discourse. At the same time, managing your reputation is important when you want people to listen to you. And, when you actually do know what you're talking about, that's kind of important.

I wish comments were as front and center as my ramblings - I find them far more interesting than anything I could ever say!

re: Speaking With Authority on Subjects You Are Not Authoritative About

JD Meier — Wed, 02 Jan 2008 08:45:44 GMT

On a good note, when you speak from your experience, you're always an authority (e.g. "In my experience ...)

One of the challenges of writing prescriptive guidance, is writing it in a way that it's precise enough to be accurate, relevant enough to be useful, broad enough to be reusable, but not stretched so far it becomes inaccurate.

Based on what I run into everyday, a lot of perfectly good information, "breaks" depending on how it's used or portrayed (perspective, context ... ) Bridging perspectives is tough. What's interesting is I think that for just about any statement, you can ask, "how might that be true" AND "how might that NOT be true" and you can find answers for both. I think that's why the interplay of accuracy, relevancy and timeliness are so important. Bottom line - making truthful statements in text is tough. Context gets lost, disclaimers get lost ... etc. I think this speaks to your point that the tone matters and to be careful how you stretch your authoritative boundaries.

Regarding brain changes, you might find this post interesting on "Focus Changes Your Brain" http://blogs.msdn.com/jmeier/archive/2008/01/02/focus-changes-your-brain.aspx

re: Speaking With Authority on Subjects You Are Not Authoritative About

Kevin Daly — Tue, 01 Jan 2008 11:06:02 GMT

I think the truth is somewhat more nuanced than you suggest: different kinds of changes can be expected to require vastly different times to occurs because of differences in the complexity of the features involved and the number of genes concerned etc.

For example, pigmentation of eyes, skin and hair in humans seems to have shown considerable variability over a short time frame. These are areas where small random changes in one or two genes can have noticeable effects without making the mutants fatally disabled or completely non-viable.

The brain however is a very complex beastie, and useful structural changes are not a simple matter, and would seem to require very incremental changes to avoid fatal defects. On the other hand progressive improvements in a single feature could occur over a fairly short time frame (a case in point would be the way the structures involved in spatial memory have been enlarged in Australian Aborigines over the course of the last 50 000 years in response to environmental pressures, resulting in a measurable improvement in their efficacy)

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