it is a combination of the nature of the universe and of the device being used to do the observing.
Thank you for this; now I fully understand something I've only partially understood since high school(-equivalent) psychology classes, which is to say, observer influence. I always thought that it simply meant "the presence of an experimenter in the room changes the way subjects act", and there's that, but there's something much more comprehensive behind it: the observer themselves, no matter how neutral or impartial, is not remotely a pure vessel for the information they take in! The information is shaped by the inherent qualities of the vessel: human interpretations of the migratory patterns of egrets, for example, contain as much information about and influence from humans and their perceptions as they do from egrets.
One of those things you can only understand when you start looking up a meta-level from how humans normally think of the world, and questioning what data different species might take in-- leading to the obvious conclusion that any species would take in a data-set biased towards its kind, and thus the only unbiased data set is free of any observer.
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branchandroot
no subject
Date: 2010-09-13 05:22 am (UTC)Thank you for this; now I fully understand something I've only partially understood since high school(-equivalent) psychology classes, which is to say, observer influence. I always thought that it simply meant "the presence of an experimenter in the room changes the way subjects act", and there's that, but there's something much more comprehensive behind it: the observer themselves, no matter how neutral or impartial, is not remotely a pure vessel for the information they take in! The information is shaped by the inherent qualities of the vessel: human interpretations of the migratory patterns of egrets, for example, contain as much information about and influence from humans and their perceptions as they do from egrets.
One of those things you can only understand when you start looking up a meta-level from how humans normally think of the world, and questioning what data different species might take in-- leading to the obvious conclusion that any species would take in a data-set biased towards its kind, and thus the only unbiased data set is free of any observer.