Acuity vs. Experience.

categories:

I’ve been pondering the relationship between sensory acuity and detection experience.  This occurred when an SF novel had the listing alien describe precision navigation by “the planet’s magnetic field.”  Precision navigation of a teleporting plot device, so accuracy to at least a millimeter.

I thought immediately that a planetary magnetic field would have a lot of detail, but it would be like trying to navigate by the waves in a lake.  Then I remembered that apparently the Polynesian sailors did exactly that.

So then comes the question of how many “parts per million” of ocean-swells did they have to detect in order to actually know where they were going.  And that brings us to experience: doesn’t matter if an 18 year old’s got the best eyes, it’s going to take a lot of successful apprentice-voyages before there’s the experience detecting those differences.

So here’s where I’m getting curious.  As we age, acuity fades.  I just had an eye doctor tell me that my ever-increasing need for light is normal age-related loss of “dynamic range.”  Shadow detail is disappearing for me.  It’s my current opinion that the acuity over time slopes downward to the right, and the experience graph slopes upward.  The combination is an “ability over time” graph that rises to some plateau, stays there, then drops off.

The initial upward slope is the learning.  No matter how perceptive the novice’s senses, they’ve got to learn what to look for.  When they reach their personal max, they level off as the ever-refining experience teaches them new tricks tangential to the skill that make up for their decreasing acuity.  Up until the point where that acuity has dropped below all thresholds and the practitioner is now incapable.

This seems to work for my experience in my first career I handled a lot of film.  I collected a lot of tricks to detect features needed to do my job, all of which made me pretty adept at some skills needed.  I was reminded each time I trained a new person, some simple quality about the product was required to be confirmed and I could use a half dozen tricks plus my under-40 acuity to confirm whereas the noob had no idea.

If all this seems rational, back to the SF novel.  Just what insanely hi-acuity map of a planet’s magnetic field must a visitor acquire to pull off milimetric-precision (beyond line of sight) navigation? What kind of standing-waves and transient ripples must one detect?

I’m expending way too much lifespan on an author’s lazy world building, but that’s what gets me about SF.  The really good ones, this never happens.  I never noticed one of the most important novels of the 80’s completely missed all forms of personal/portable communications devices in its future world.  Everything. Cellphones, all of it.  Decades after reading it (5x so far, probably more) I get to the end and go “Oh, that would’ve made a difference.”  I just missed the omission because the rest of the world-building was so good.