Hindsight, fast track to discovery (through Ch4)

Hindsight is a funny thing, the way it manages to simplify all of life's happenings. I am fairly certain that there is not a person on earth who has made a choice that when looking back on it later from a more objective and well informed position will wonder why they ever made such a decision. Though since the knowledge gained through said situation is usually what allows the hindsight to be effective, it raises the question of how anything ever actually gets accomplished in the first place.

The example of Kepler is a good one, considering all of the many ideas he worked with before the realization of the laws that now bear his name. It is a hard thing to model, to say the least, since the various influences came from concepts that often had little to do with the actual movement of celestial bodies in the sky. Certainly, as mentioned in the reading, finding the formula when given the appropriate table of values is only a little bit above trivial in difficulty. However, when taking into account the difficulty of even finding those values in the first place, then an estimate in the range of years, if not decades would not seem unreasonable before even factoring in the issue of whether or not the data is even pertinent. And such it is with Hindsight: when you already know exactly what you're looking for, it gets much easier to find.

There are a few scientific traps similar to this issue with hindsight. According to a study, people who brush their teeth regularly live an average of two years longer than those that don't. Personally, I would be embarrassed to even attach my name to such a study. We all know that Correlation is not Causality. Brushing your teeth must increase your lifespan, unless people brush their teeth more often as they get older. The more reasonable conclusion would be that the person has a wealth of good habits that tooth-brushing just happens to fall under. Whatever the case, a 2 year increase (in average, no less) isn't exactly worth mentioning. The amount of studies like this have created a modern day superstition about what particular activities or foods will increase your lifespan or what have you, when in actuality, the correlation is tenuously related at best.

The much closer pitfall (a generalization, mostly) of the idea of hindsight is one familiar to most people in the science and engineering fields: Testing. In computer science, a good deal of preliminary testing is usually done by the designer as part of the process, much like handing Kepler a table of values. The standardized tests will always give standardized results. Same goes for placing weights on model bridges and crash testing cars. Eventually it gets deployed to the field, and something unexpected gets thrown at it. A user tries to hit two buttons simultaneously, and the program crashes consistently. A particularly windy day hits the bridge's resonant frequency and causes it to collapse, or a tight turn causes the car to easily roll over. In hindsight, these would all seem like easily testable and preventable issues, but are often overlooked by the standardized testing. In terms of this, the problems with many of the AI programs mentioned in the reading seem quite reasonable. It isn't Hindsight that's the issue so much as Foresight, and that's a much more difficult issue.