Being Milton

I am an expert.

I don't know things.

In my field that's what makes you an expert - not knowing things, so having to work them out, check and verify, test and validate. If I was working always within my previous knowledge base, then I might know things - and sometimes I do - but even then I would have to verify, check my own knowledge, in cases where being right is critical. I am convinced that is what real experts do - we are critical of our own knowledge, questioning of our own understanding, suspicious of certainty.

Of course I do know some things: I know the solution to a Laplace Transform, I know how to calculate the quantization noise of an Analog to Digital Converter from its bit length, I know the wavelength of 5 GHz radio waves in the human body, I know the size and shape of a water molecule,  - but those are tools of the trade, not expert knowledge.

As an expert I am usually asked to solve things that haven't been solved before: which is why I can't rest simply on my own prior knowledge. This affords me a particular viewpoint on knowing things, and leads to my very great caution in asserting what I do and do not 'know'.

There is a lot of pressure to know things. I invented a novel method of identifying different types of lesion in breast cancer through their radio wave spectral properties. This sort of thing leads to conversations with investors, board members, marketing specialists, that depend ultimately on their assessment of my knowledge. So the question: "How certain are you?" gets asked a lot, in many different variants. And the answer, honestly, is: "I don't know." That is what I mean about not knowing things: it is to do with the degree of certainty, and it requires a great deal of humility. A fuller answer in the case of the breast cancer classifiers might be along the lines of: "Since the model is based on well-established radio wave properties, that have been shown to correspond well to a simple and well-accepted physical and mathematical model of how water molecules in human body tissues affect radio waves, and verifying on an initial set of data where clear indepenent diagnoses were available, I would bet my shirt on it if push came to shove." Which in short form might be summarised as: "very certain" or "90% certain". But the key is to lay out the chain of reasoning - the logical, mathematical, and measurement trail that leads to that estimate of certainty. The established data; the well-accepted model; the initial test results: it is not enough just to refer to these, you have to question them - you have to ask whether the models hold in the novel circumstances we are discussing; if there may be missing or other links that might change or disrupt the chain of reasoning and verification; if the 'innovative step' that makes this new (and patentable) is valid.

Very often I encounter people who do know things. In my work it is quite common for me to begin laying out a chain of reasoning and verification that may have taken me weeks or months to develop, and someone will jump in before I have even finished the first equation or diagram, and solve it. They can do this because they know the answer: they know the solution. It is quite rare that they do really know, though: more often they did what is called 'leaping to a conclusion'.

We all meet people who know things in 'ordinary' life too. We start out explaining some personal issue, or a question of kitchen layout, to which we have given much thought and discussion over perhaps many days or weeks - and someone jumps in and tells us what to do - they know what we should do. Actually, in most cases, they are leaping to conclusions.

Leaping to a conclusion is so much what I have to avoid in my work that it has become something of an obsession.  Sarah will sometimes ask me something I should - and probably do - know: "how do I get the icons back at the top of the page in Microsoft Word?" - and I will answer, truthfully: "I don't know". Sarah knows, of course, that I do know - it is just that I am not sure at that moment, without thinking - so she will push the issue, with me insisting I don't know (it drives her mad, understandably). Of course in such cases I do know - or at least I can know once I have thought about it - but I note it as an infuriating habit, to take this thing about not claiming knowledge without verifying to a fault.

I have an odd hobby. I don't do it so much now as I used to, but I still enjoy it.

My hobby is called LARP - Live Action Role Play - I won't go into it here but suffice it to say that you go away for a weekend with like-minded people and act out a sort of game where you play roles. I think it started as Dungeons and Dragons, when players realised they could dress up and act out the scenes that would otherwise remain on the board with plastic figures. I started LARP because my son James kept asking me to go with him. He insisted I would enjoy it (and he was right) but I declined, thinking it all a bit odd. It took me a while to realise that my adult son was asking his Dad to spend time with him doing something he enjoyed - and what more could a loving father ask for?

It took me a while to get into LARP. I am not good at the game aspect - there are rules, and strategies, and plays that lead to successes and failures, and I just totally fail to engage with that aspect. But it turns out that I really enjoy the role play. You can think of it as Stanislavski's 'Method Acting' - you have to become the character you are playing - to think like them, act like them, become them - and it turns out that appeals to me.

My favourite LARP at the moment is one organised by a friend - Jessica - who, fittingly, I first met at a LARP. Jessica's LARP is called Lost and Found. It is about where things - and in our cases people - go when they are lost. I have no idea what the universe of Lost and Found is, or what its rules may be, or how we can all escape, if escape is what we want to do (I don't want to escape it..). But I enjoy the current popular notion that the universe of Lost and Found involves some form of curved, wormholey, or multi-dimensional space - and that the key to our being Found from our current state as Lost is to do with that. Now it so happens that multi-dimensional, curved or wormholey spaces are my thing - dealing with them is, basically, what I do (it is amazing how the same equations and visualizations turn up in so many apparently unrelated fields). I not only 'know' the equations for many kinds of multi-dimensional spaces, but I also have a rather useful ability, developed over many years, to 'see' in multiple dimensions, in my mind - I can visualize more than four dimensions, in my head. But I don't use that ability in Lost and Found (well, apart from throwing in the odd amazingly insightful observation in such a way that everyone else dismisses it out of hand as ridiculous): instead what I do is play a character who leaps to conclusions.

My character in Lost and Found is John Milton (Milton - Paradise Lost - Lost and Found - geddit?).

Milton leaps to conclusions. Milton is the very antithesis of me in almost every other aspect of my life. I think Milton for me is a sort of therapy - but also a way for me to understand - to empathise with - those around me who do leap to conclusions. The therapy aspect is fun but also valuable - it is like other things I do, such as running or walking until exhausted, that can halt or at least let me step away from the loops of long-term logical and mathematical reasoning that I set up in my head and that sometimes drive me quite literally to distraction. It stops me thinking, which I otherwise find it quite hard to do.  I can't even begin to describe the sheer joy of absolute certainty arising from total lack of thought - the Joy of Leaping to Conclusions - that playing Milton affords me. It is like entering an alternate reality where I just know things - where I don't have to think hard about them, or reason things out, or face the humiliation of realising that I don't know, and maybe never will. Milton never has to admit failure, or lack of capacity: Milton is never knowingly wrong.

But the empathy aspect is I think more interesting: it is, I think, an unexplored aspect of LARP that it can help to build empathy. By playing a role that is distinct from your own 'reality', you can make yourself at least try to understand - to empathise with - that role. By playing Milton, I help myself to understand - to empathise with - people who leap to conclusions: I build respect for them, because I make myself try to think like they do. I have an idea one day to create a LARP where we all play demented people, or Trump supporters, so we can build empathy with them and hence create harmony in the world.

Well, I would't want to empathise too much with Milton - he is incredibly irritating. But playing him - the real Milton not the exaggerated one - is fascinating. Leaping to conclusions is I think a very human thing to do. Faced with a charging sabre-tooth tiger it is probably best to decide on a course of action without too much thought, so quite literally leaping to a conclusion is probably a good idea. But when, like me, you are trained to a fault not to do it, it is like a new discovery. I think of it like the film The Invention of Lying - except that everyone else seems already able to do it, but even so the joy of (re-)discovering a new mode of thought is intensely liberating. Wow! I can solve things without even thinking!

Milton leaps to conclusions. Sometimes Milton's conclusions are right (since Milton has occasional mischievous access to my own multi-dimensional space knowledge base) but they are never based on reasoning of any kind. Milton just solves things. If you were facing a personal crisis and wanted someone who would just tell you what you should do without thinking about it - without even needing to actually listen to you - then Milton would be your friend. Milton could solve all your problems, without thought of any kind, in a flash.

Leaping to conclusions infects experts too. I was recently at a seminar on the prevalence of lung cancer amongst various distinct geographic populations in Cyprus. The puzzle was, that some population groups in Cyprus break just about every rule of lung cancer risk - they smoke, they eat burnt meat, they drink to excess - and yet have a low incidence of lung cancer. The study, like many of the studies I lay out in my own work, for discussion and further development - was a study of the anomaly: laying out the statistical fact of the anomaly, verifying that indeed, there was a surprising anti-correlation that did in fact hold, in some population groups. Note that there was no study of why that anomaly existed - the study was to establish that in fact there was an anomaly, not in any way to advance any cause. Half way through the presentation, one of the experts in the audience asked: "could it be the olive oil?". To which the response of the study author was about as I just outlined: the study had in no way even attempted to establish a cause, it was limited in scope to verifying the statistical anomaly, not to explaining it. The meeting, ignoring the study author entirely, then descended into excited discussion of the merits of different kinds of olive oil for avoiding cancer risk. (Tip: buy shares in Cypriot olive oil..). These were experts. I suspect they were, at that moment, the kind of experts Michael Gove meant when he said we have 'had enough of experts'. They leapt to conclusions. Similar conclusions, I suspect, were leapt to when the govenment encouraged us all to convert to diesel cars, only to reverse that years later after thousands had died from pollution as a result: and probably similar conclusions were leapt to at the beginning of the 'fat bad, sugar good' food science that is only now beginning to be overturned, after probably producing a generation of obese Type II diabetics.

Actually Milton is going through a learning phase. One of the characters in Lost and Found is a Vulcan - a creature of pure logic - and Milton's new obsession (spoiler alert!) is with the power of Logic. Logic, you see, is pure Reason, applied to conclusions to which you have leapt. You leap to a conclusion, and then you apply Logic to develop the longest, most tortuous, most obscure chain of reasoning possible to justify the conclusion to which you leapt. Milton is looking forward to that new phase in his life, very much. The Vulcan may enjoy it less than Milton, but luckily Vulcans have no emotions so the Vulcan will not mind.

Anyway: leaping to conclusions is often followed by post-hoc reasoning to justify the conclusion - a 'Just So' story (so-called because Rudyard Kipling's 'Just So' stories offer plausible but probably unlikely explanations for just about anything). The Cypriot olive oil is a Just So story: a post-hoc
justification - a cause generated by correlation (in fact actually in the absence of correlation).

Leaping to conclusions, I would say, is the prime cause for the degradation of science. Just So stories lead us further down that miserable path. Both are reasons why we have 'had enough of experts'. Being Milton helps me to empathise with that.