It is becoming obvious to me that one of the most debilitating and virulent of all Wiki-Induced Knowledge Impairments (WIKI’s) is the loss of one's faculty for observing the obvious.

So I thought I'd open a skein for discussing that effliction and its possible remedies.

Jon

you're "jonny cache" right?

I am ♥ened to see that The Art Of Observing The Obvious (TAO~OTO) is beginning to cache on.

Jon

It’s A L I V E ! ! !

It has of late occurred to me that one of the obtrusive influences rendering one oblivious — obstructing one's observation of obvious phenomena — is the opacity of one's projections, that is, the lack of transparency of prior images that one projects on phenomena.

Jon Awbrey

Jon, it occurs to me that if one requires both a degree of art and a degree of science to observe the so-called "obvious" then it's not obvious to me that what you label the "obivous" is quite as obvious as you might have imagined.

At least, that's my observation (which may or may not be obvious to others).

So you really mean observing the oblivious.

You cannot observe the obvious without changing the results.
So a tree can fall in a forest and only kill a woodchuck.

I haven't (yet) used the label “obivous”, but yes, there are those who come to a fork in the road and opt to get in the way of both ways.

And when it comes to degrees, there are angles from acute, through normal, to obtuse.

But this particular line of diversion is far too protracted already …

Jon

I think what he's saying is that some people fail to see the obvious because something has trained or conditioned them to see non-obvious things instead (or else nothing at all). Or, perhaps, they simply are messed up in some way.

I suppose a good example (aside from the ones we often see on Wikipedia) might be if you were a really big fan of, say, a movie actor or pop singer. The actor (or singer) in question might release a real stinker of a movie (or album), one that most other people can see is a stinker, but because you've always been a big huge fan, you either don't notice the stinkiness or refuse to accept the possibility of it, in spite of the reality. In other words, whatever caused you to be such a big fan in the past acts as an "opaque" image that you project onto the current reality; hence the term "blind loyalty," just to name one such term off the top of my head.

Am I close?

I think that's one way it happens — the inertia of past experience makes it hard to update one's current view of things and thus to adjust one's present course of action.

I know I'm using visual metaphors for what are really the biological-cultural analogues of database operations. All this language about "images" and "projections" can serve as a useful intuition helper — but only so long as we don't forget what it would take to implement the corresponding operations in concrete creature culture or other media of effective computation.

Aside from rational expectations — images projected from things that really happened in one's previous experience — it appears that people can also get fixated on or hypnotized by images that derive from pure wishful thinking, blocking their ability to see the reality. That is how con games work — the angler follows the visible lines and sinkers to find the hooks already embedded in the prey's brain.

Jon Awbrey