Cutting cognitive holes
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EDITORIAL
Cutting cognitive holes Once upon a time, there was a group of farmers who really understood their profession and did a
concerned, the farmers had little support from academia. Fortunately, they had not given up their
wonderful job. They had a good holistic perception of their professional practice (even if they had never heard of the term "holism") and they know what to do in any situation.
holistic perception of their professional practice. After some 40 years or so, someone explained the situation as follows: "Your understanding of your profession is holistic , comprehensive, systemic, and your cognitive culture is like a cobweb. What these academics offer is nothing else than replacing
To them came some young academics who pretended - even if they admitted that they had never done any farming - to know how to improve the farming business. They organised a seminar and had a great presentation in which they suggested techniques such as linear, nonlinear, integer and combinatorial ploughing, greedy harrowing, tree search and backtracking, trench & drown. Furthermore, they knew about many problems even the
some single knots of you cognitive cobweb by highly efficient mechanisms. But, if you followed
them, holes would be cut into your cognitive cobweb, and the cobweb would eventually break into pieces. What these academics did not offer, is a real support that reinforces the cognitive cobweb as a whole."
practising farmers had not yet heard of, such as the
Is this not one of the weaknesses of the OR/MS as
travelling sower's problem, the simple and the multiple seed-sack problem, the seed covering
well as of the Al community? We prefer to offer techniques for isolated operations instead of giving real support to the managers' cognitive processes.
problem, the seed partitioning problem, the seed packing problem etc.
We prefer to offer algorithms for mathematically appealing structures (independent of the reality in
The farmers were quite impressed and foresaw a great chance to improve their business remarkably,
the single case) instead of sitting with the problem owners and considering their real concerns.
and they hired the academics. On top of that the expectations in this new academic approach were accompanied by self-doubts of the farmers: "Did we do right doing our profession without academics as yet", they kept asking each other.
Would it not be worthwhile to see the purpose of OR/MS and Al in the design of "cognition support systems"? Should our endeavours not start with the
attempt to understand the subjective view of the
Over the years, some technical processes and
problem owner - instead of trying to design a pseudo-objective model of our own view? The
some isolated operations could indeed be improved. for example, linear ploughing was extremely successful in some of their fields, and tree search as well as backtracking helped them to organise some minor forestry operations. They also had some
sophistication of such new kind of OR/MS and Al would be measured in its subjectivel
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