Sunday Seminar Series: Misunderstanding

Easy to misunderstand. Image via Wikipedia

Dear Readers,


In your own time stream, exploration is a thing of physical locales and geographic or astronomic travels.  At the University, we are instead explorers of temporal distances.  This sort of work is more stationary, but hazards its own perils.

Join me for this week's Sunday Seminar, adapted from my lectures for our introductory Anachronism class, CHRN/AUG 100.

I think the main hazard that we face as Anachronists is misunderstanding.  With our new ability to manifest whenever we would like, the danger is doubled.

Let me tell you the classical problem of misunderstanding.  It is best related through the anecdote of Clinton IV, a space  colony I have studied.

The colonists of Clinton IV learned early on that they were not alone on their world.  They found this very excitig at first, but as attempts to contact the local humanoid lifeforms failed or ended in disaster, they became discouraged.  It took a century for the xenobiologists to realize their mistake:  just because a creature looks and acts intelligent, does not always mean it is.

There are many classical misunderstandings we can make. One of them is to use our own cultural framework to read a source.  Thankfully, Dr. Bacon's mindset simulator is helping somewhat with that.  But you must be ever vigilant.

There are other sorts of misunderstandings we can make as well.  These aren't based on cultural frame problems, but instead on simple bad "facts".  Sometimes we just have the wrong assumptions, and we assume that a source says a society was at war when in fact they were playing a sports game.  Hint, hint, football fans.

These two classes of misunderstanding lead to bad conclusions and pollute the literature when they appear in our sedentary activities.

But, if you make these mistakes on assignment to a time stream, they can be deadly.  So watch out.

There's one last class of misunderstanding that is unique to being on assignment, though: that's where you don't consider your own effect through your presence.  When you visit, you're in a unique offshoot of the time stream that is affected by your presence.  It's almost the same, but not completely.  If you're going to collect evidence, make sure you didn't accidentally create that data.

And with that, I leave you to your sports games.  Hopefully the referees have had a good class on misunderstanding.

  Always,

  Dr. John Skylar
  Chairman
  Department of Anachronism
  University of Constantinople