4 ms·
Sometimes it's good to pick people who are experts in related fields but with no direct knowledge of the issue -- it's a source of unbiased ideas that can be va
by lutorm 16y ago
Sometimes it's good to pick people who are experts in related fields but with no direct knowledge of the issue -- it's a source of unbiased ideas that can be valuable. My impression is that that's the whole idea behind this JASON team, to bring together people from various fields of science who all bring their particular viewpoint to a problem. It's the whole idea behind the word "interdisciplinary"...
- brg 16y agoExactly. Why was Feynman on the Roger's commission? QED has little to do with rocket science.
- mturmon 16y ago<blockquote> In the days when Sussman was a novice Minsky once came to him as he sat hacking at the PDP-6. "What are you doing?", asked Minsky. "I am training a randomly wired neural net to play Tic-Tac-Toe." "Why is the net wired randomly?", asked Minsky. "I do not want it to have any preconceptions of how to play." Minsky shut his eyes. "Why do you close your eyes?", Sussman asked his teacher. "So the room will be empty." At that moment, Sussman was enlightened. </blockquote> My point: not to confuse "no preconceptions" with "not much directly usable knowledge." Look at the resumes of the people on the team. You've got the head of one of the premier research institutions in the nation (Sandia), a national medal of science winner who has consulted about the Kuwait oil well disaster, a robotics engineer, and a petroleum engineer. And an astrophysicist. About Feynman, remember, he was a Nobelist and widely understood, when he was appointed, to be the most brilliant physicist of the latter half of the 20th century. His university (Caltech) runs a NASA facility, JPL, where his sister and a lot of his colleagues worked.