Cobb: Are we moving toward a fact-free future?

[smiley]

It seems to me today's rabble have unprecedented knowledge and power at their finger tips. The internet has allowed people access to a treasure trove of information, facts, etc.

How much more well armed is the rabble of today compared to the authority of yesterday?

I'd say better and worse.

The problem is that all the information is out there, but among it is also a lot of trash, incorrect information. The way people copy, paste, tweet and retweet, with disregard to referencing etc, it is very hard to verify data.

If you are careful and only use peer-reviewed, refereed sources, then it can be a great resource. But if you just want to make a point and don't care about the quality or validity of your data, you just google for some information that collaborates with your ideas, and your bound to find something.

And unfortunately there are quite a few people that use the internet that way.

[seenmostofit]

As it turns out, information that is new, but not consistent with one's current belief system, is normally discarded by most people. Typically, only some exceptional concrete change of circumstances will cause people to open their belief systems to contradictory information.

Strikes me that this is a two edged sword and the question must be asked, does this apply to THEM, or to US?

[SeaGypsy]

This reminds me of the industrial imperative.

My father was an educator and craftsman, ethicist. He told a story which was passed down directly from Lino Tagliapietra, his glass master and the guy who really brought Venetian glass blowing to the USA then the world. Lino was troubled about the craft's environmental implications before he died near 20 years ago.

Lino would talk about the history of glass art as a metaphor for the world. How the Italians brought the technology from Egypt shortly after Jesus was a lad. How the craft was quarantined and became pivotal in the economy of Venice and Rome for many centuries. How during the empire and piracy wars, British and Dutch industrialists decided to break the backs of the glass monopolists of Venice. By this time Venice has been almost burned down by out of control glass fires twice and the industry has been moved out onto the island of Murano/ the capital of glass forevermore. The industrialists put up a huge bounty (the British even offered landed title and a Knighthood) to defecting glassblowers from Murano. (Murano and Venice, the bulk of Italy had been denuded of forest over more than a thousand years of wood fired industry, glass being a major chunk of this).

Once the British had their master glass blowers, they set up factories and set about a totally different method of production, factory lining the craft. There was a very deliberate effort to ensure that when the master died, he left no successor. Each man in the factory only knew his job. The smelter, the furnace technician, batcher, along with all the processes, were forceably kept separate. Nobody could learn enough to set up in competition.

The point was about the importance of learning a craft fully, "From the get go to the get 'Woah!" was Lino's line. This is one of the great things about America still, this old respect for craft knowledge, real world applicable stuff. Of course this cultural strength has not been of note in the news much the last century, but a quick google of any craft occupation you can think of will lead to an American publication.

My feeling is that there is nothing scarier than being dependent on some little slot job and being screwed to the wall if it falls over. Especially having dependents, it is important to have more than one way to put bread on the table. Being able to grow the bread, now that is something to sit down and call lunch to!

[Fishman]

"The models have a basis in historical evidence and accepted scientific theory. To ignore them is to ignore those facts. They need not be perfect, as most projections are not, to indicate a reliable certainty as to the outcome." Thank you Lore

The models have SOME basis in historical evidence and DEBATED scientific theory (as most models are). To ignore them is to ignore those facts. (Never wrote to ignore them, to accept them as basis for policy requires far more certainty) They need not be perfect,(herein lies your flaw - others get to have a say in their quality to make policy decisions) Reliable certainty as to outcome is the entire debate Lore.

[seenmostofit]

Reliable certainty as to outcome is the entire debate Lore.

And what is "reliable certainty"? A 50/50 chance of occurrence? 95/5? 100/0?

Current models do not even allow uncertainties to propagate over the time frames used in the models because it reveals exactly these types of uncertainties within the understanding/science of the system involved. And as some scientists have decided it is best to become advocates of the conclusions of their work (rather than objective observers and quantifiers of those uncertainties), their positions immediately become suspect. And thus we arrive at hockey sticks which don't recognize past warming and cooling episodes, bad projections of temperature going unexplained because it would be embarrassing to explain objectively what happened, and of course, everyone's favorite example of why happens when you don't pay very close attention to the particulars of data collection.

[Lore]

"The models have a basis in historical evidence and accepted scientific theory. To ignore them is to ignore those facts. They need not be perfect, as most projections are not, to indicate a reliable certainty as to the outcome." Thank you Lore

The models have SOME basis in historical evidence and DEBATED scientific theory (as most models are). To ignore them is to ignore those facts. (Never wrote to ignore them, to accept them as basis for policy requires far more certainty) They need not be perfect,(herein lies your flaw - others get to have a say in their quality to make policy decisions) Reliable certainty as to outcome is the entire debate Lore.

There in lies the fallacy, there really isn't a scientific debate, just a political one. The certainty is in the area of 90%+. How much more does one need to make a value judgement? As the analogy goes, I wouldn't get on an airplane if I knew there was less then a 10% chance I'd reach my destination.

The changes in policy is a rather mute subject in any case as the insurance companies very much believe in the risk of ignoring the facts.

[Pops]

Good discussion people.

Yes the articles are biased I did give a little warning.

ARs point seems valid in that we mere mortals would have a very hard time making our own independent observations of very complex phenomena. His example of believing the NWS on weather records may not be the best because I'd think there are other observations to review, TV stations maybe. Still a good point but I think he answered himself when he said we'll usually believe the authority who agrees with the way our knee naturally jerks anyway. Which of course is the problem.

I think the missing part of that equation is that many or even most times the choice is between believing the authority who is an observer or believing the authority who is merely another believer.

So if you are to believe anyone, do you believe the more or less verifiable (if not infallible) data of the NWS or no less an authority than Pat Robertson who points out it is hotter on Mars and they don't even have SUVs? Or maybe this gem, which I suppose is arguing against the possibility of sea level rise but cuts straight to the meat of the subject I think:

"The Earth will end only when God declares it is time to be over. Man will not destroy this Earth. This Earth will not be destroyed by a flood." ~Rep. John Shimkus, US House Subcommittee on Energy and Environment

Sad to say but for many the answer is obviously that they believe the believer because he is like them and knows which powerful belief buttons to push. The unscrupulous quasi-observer authority also has access to buttons - but the lowly strict-observer only has his observations. The average schmo has been convinced by people like Pat and Rush and even Rick Santorum that the entire higher education system is an indoctrination to liberal thinking – so of course they go with the belief authority who sounds like them and knows their buttons. And it doesn't hurt that many times the Belief Authority is reinforcing not the hard way but the easy way, i.e. We have dominion, God gave us this earth and we deserve to take what we want.

That is the point of the rants I think, most of us choose to believe the believer that looks like us instead of the observers. Especially if the observers come to conclusions with which we aren't comfortable. For many people, scientists (especially government scientists) that were indoctrinated in college by left leaning professors and professionally by (I guess, union bosses) are untrustworthy and the layman is better off believing their pastors on matters of science because, again I'm guessing, the pastor is impartial and perhaps even privy to the Truth.

Of course this all applies to doomer authorities like the Archdruid or Kolapsnik or Cid or Dohboi or D. Plainview but that is another rant!


I agree with rocdoc about models. I don't trust them too far unless they are extremely simple - I say that although I have no ability or aptitude for math, the ball and bat thing was just about my maximum! Anyway, I know it is a strange thing to say that I don't believe models on a site based around the work of one guy's model but Hubbert's only had one parameter, past discoveries. It seems to have worked worked pretty good considering. Crude oil extraction has been flat for a while now so if this is the peak and the oil curve covers 300 years that's a bullseye margin of error around 2%. Not bad.


FWIW, I don't have all that much faith in models that predict climate decades away (even though AGW is the direction my knee jerks) simply because there are too many parameters. Way more than whether it is going to rain next week and that is hit/miss even now. Still, I'm a plan for the worst kinda guy and dialing it back a little seems only prudent. Even that level of "belief" is way more than the staunch Right is willing to admit.


Reminds me of my old partner, a very churchy guy, who's favorite saying was "Easier to ask forgiveness than permission."

[rockdoc123]

there is also a plethora of empirical evidence suggesting that climate change is real. Now that doesn't mean scientists x's model of climate change is correct. But it suggests to me that there is enough empirical evidence that climate change is real

Depends on what your definition of climate change is. If it adheres to Pielke Sr’s definition which is basically the fact that , well climate changes and there are a host of controlling factors then yes I agree with you….but if you are suggesting a definition that equates climate change with AGW then you are dead wrong. In fact there is a host of empirical evidence that points to major discrepancies between what that model would predict versus what has happened and is happening with climate. As I’ve pointed out numerous times there is no direct evidence for AGW, it is all modeled based on theory and those models produce non-unique solutions which means they can not be proofs.

A yawning gulf between theory and observation has been with us since the begining of science and is still with us.

While I will avoid the instance you provide I will say that gulfs between theories and models are pretty common throughout the history of science and just part of the whole process.

To some extent but what we deal with now is different. The instances you speak to were fought on the battlefield of science. The general public couldn’t care less. The example I speak to and which was used in the articles POPS referenced deal with a politicized science. The public is brought into a debate that they are not equipped to enter into. It is one thing when scientists argue but generally they continue to test theories and change them as experiment/observation tells them they were wrong. When you have people who are scientifically illiterate arguing about who or what is right and wrong then we have a problem. Richard Feynman once said “if I could explain it to the layman it wouldn’t have been worth a Nobel Prize” and such is complex science. What is happening now is you have a group of scientists who are portraying a set of theories as being incontrovertible to the general public when in fact the tests show them to be wrong, at least in part. This isn’t science. In each of the cases you spoke of scientists continued to test the theories and continued to refine them….there was no huge swell of scientists arguing the science was settled it was business as usual for the scientists involved….theorize, test, re-theorize and test again. This was in fact the way climate science progressed up until the late nineties when it all went sideways.

Another quote from Feynman sticks with me:

it doesn’t matter how beautiful your theory is, it doesn't matter how smart you are. If it doesn't agree with experiment, it's wrong

[Arthur75]

Er, I had to struggle with the math
A bat and a ball cost 110 cent together and the bat costs one dollar more than the ball. How much does the ball cost?
x + Y = 110, Y= 100 + x. Y=110- x 110-x = 100 +x 2x= 110 - 100 2x = 10 x = 5.

However, the "science " presented at the NC legislature is not quite so algebraic. Its a model, based on data, that had not fit the model so far. My preference is for a bit more data that fits the model, or a model that better represents the data. Asking "are we moving toward a fact-free future" based on ill fitting models, is manipulation of data. Not a fact-free future.

Uh ?
bat + ball = 110
bat = ball +100
->
2ball +100 = 110
->
2ball= 10 , ball=5

Otherwise earth climate science is indeed special in the sense that there is a single on going experiment and a single test tube, and that scientists do not decide how the experiment is conducted.
Even though it of course uses a lot of "normal science" with associated reproductible experiments and verified laws.

[SeaGypsy]

What does it benefit our masters we know what is really going on and how it really works? Fill in the blanks science is not science, but has emerged as a trend from the Anthropological and Archaeological end of the research spectrum, out of necessity/ the other way of looking at these is at the science end of the social sciences. The problem with climate science is that it blurs over the requirement for hard data to produce reproducible results/ putting it in the social science category, linguistically and in terms of level of adherence to any scientifically accepted norm of proof.

[seahorse3]

I find it hard to believe so many got the simple math problem wrong. I'm terrible at math but immediately knew the answer, so not sure I believe the "fact" that 50% of MIT students got it wrong. Can we fact check that please?

What rockdoc says makes sense to me. It seems to this layman that our reliance on technology has replaced using our minds for problem solving. I don't know if the models cause problems in science by trying to bend facts to meet the model (normalcy bias), but people suffer from normalcy bias in general and I'm not sure why "scientist" would be immune to this- that's essentially why we have peer review right? Further, models are certainly causing a lot of problems in economics, algorithm trading etc leading to crashes etc so our reliance on models to be predictive is misplaced, the model is limited and the limiting factor is always the quality of the info and assumption built into the model- models suffer from normalcy bias.

[vision-master]

Post-2012 Earth Changes

A Global Climate Change Remote-Viewing Study
Multiple Realities, Timelines, and Events

Introduction: We at The Farsight Institute are currently engaged in a fascinating study using remote viewing to study climate and planetary change between the years 2008 and 2013. The initial results appear dramatic on a global scale, and our research does indeed suggest that major global change is a possibility between now and 2013. However, web site visitors are reminded that this is research, not certitude. Remember what Albert Einstein once said, "If we knew what we were doing, it wouldn't be called research, would it?" Web site visitors are encouraged to examine all of our results carefully, and learn with us as we complete this experiment in mid-2013. We will not fully understand these remote-viewing data until the experiment is completed at that time.

How we obtain these results is a bit complicated, but it is worth the effort to understand our methods. The actual types of global change is discussed in the second part of the video presentation below, but the first part of this presentation is absolutely essential to understand how these results were obtained. Web site visitors should watch both parts of the video presentation. This presentation was given during the 29th Annual Meeting of the Society for Scientific Exploration in Boulder, Colorado in June 2010.

This is the most carefully collected set of professional-grade remote-viewing data involving this time span that currently exists. This experiment is potentially one of the most significant experiments ever attempted using remote viewing as a data-collection platform.

In general, these remote-viewing data suggest the following types of physical changes across many of the above geographical locations by mid-2013:

1.Impacts from what appear to be large meteors leading to tsunamis and possible volcanism
2.Extensive and forceful flooding of coastal areas
3.Excessive solar radiation
4.Storms and other severe weather

In terms of the effects of these changes on humans, these data also suggest:
1.Massive self-organized relocation from coastal areas (refugees)
2.The breakdown of rescue or other notable governmental functioning
3.The breakdown of the food supply system
4.The breakdown of the vehicular transport system
5.Extensive loss of buildings near coasts

1.The U.S. Space Shuttle will launch its last mission in mid-2011. At that time, NASA is entirely abandoning its government-funded manned spaceflight program. Given the investment that the U.S. has made in launching humans into space since the 1960s, this is odd, especially since private efforts to launch humans into space are years away, and currently unproven. It is as if the government does not anticipate being able to launch humans into space in the near future for reasons not currently stated.

2.The Svalbard Global Seed Vault is being sealed in 2011. This will allow the world to restart agriculture given a global catastrophe. The United Nations formally inspected the facility, which might seem odd for a Norwegian project. The timing of this project seems like a strange coincidence.

3.U.S. and global debt. It is as if various governments are not expecting to have to pay back their debts, perhaps anticipating a global economic reset due to reasons not currently stated.

4.The devaluing of the U.S. dollar seems to be a trend that will stay. Moody, Standard and Poor, and Fitch have announced that they may be devaluing the rating of U.S. Treasury bonds (see NY Times article, 15 March 2010, as well as the editorial on 20 March 2010), and there have been discussions within the United Nations of the International Monetary Fund phasing out its dependency on the U.S. dollar. The governments seem to be acting as if the U.S. dollar will be replaced as the global currency.

5.Digging, digging is everywhere. The U.S. has no nuclear enemies, yet it is digging huge underground facilities in inhospitable regions difficult for the masses to reach. Why? On the other hand, the Chinese tend to think collectively, and China is digging extraordinary subway complexes under most of its major cities in a crash program that seems odd in terms of timing and scope. See, for example, the NY Times article by Keith Bradsher, 27 March 2009. Subways are, of course, conveniently located underground tunnels, and such tunnels could house millions of people in an emergency. Russia announced in 2011 that it is adding 5,000 new nuclear bomb shelters in Moscow, enabling it to protect all of Moscow's residents. The program is to be rushed so that it is finished in 2012. Why? Russia has no nuclear enemies. Russia's new subway systems have also been placed deeper than needed so that they can be used as deep emergency shelters. Again, why? Why all these preparations, and why the rush?

6.NASA is now predicting that the Sun may generate unprecedented solar storms for a lengthy period in 2012-13. We cannot accurately predict Earth's normal weather a week in advance, and it is by no means clear how NASA can do this with respect unprecedented weather on the Sun years in advance. They are saying that we are more dependent on vulnerable computer technology now. But we had similar dependencies in 2001 and 1990 when previous 11-year solar cycles hit. What is different about the current cycle? Some might suggest that NASA is acting as if it has some extra information that is not currently stated.



Post-2012 Earth Changes
A Global Climate Change Remote-Viewing Study
Multiple Realities, Timelines, and Events

http://www.farsight.org/demo/Demo2008/R ... Page1.html

[dissident]

Er, I had to struggle with the math
A bat and a ball cost 110 cent together and the bat costs one dollar more than the ball. How much does the ball cost?
x + Y = 110, Y= 100 + x. Y=110- x 110-x = 100 +x 2x= 110 - 100 2x = 10 x = 5.

However, the "science " presented at the NC legislature is not quite so algebraic. Its a model, based on data, that had not fit the model so far. My preference is for a bit more data that fits the model, or a model that better represents the data. Asking "are we moving toward a fact-free future" based on ill fitting models, is manipulation of data. Not a fact-free future.

The models have a basis in historical evidence and accepted scientific theory. To ignore them is to ignore those facts. They need not be perfect, as most projections are not, to indicate a reliable certainty as to the outcome.

It's more correct to say that the models are based on fundamental governing equations much like those of Maxwell. You can chose not to believe in Maxwell's equations or the Navier-Stokes equations. But then you would be a loon who thinks, for example, that gravity is an opinion and not an objective fact. There is way too much subjectivism being spread by the mass media that loves quoting social "science" research. Reality is not in the eye of the beholder and if you jump off a cliff and pretend the rocks below are not there you still die splattered all over them.

[vision-master]

Why do you wake up before hitting the ground?

[rockdoc123]

It's more correct to say that the models are based on fundamental governing equations much like those of Maxwell. You can chose not to believe in Maxwell's equations or the Navier-Stokes equations. But then you would be a loon who thinks, for example, that gravity is an opinion and not an objective fact.

that isn't the point at all. Having various factors built into an equation that are based on proven theory is merely a starting point. The problems arise in complex systems when you do not account for all of the possible variables or you put too much emphasis on certain variables or you put too little emphasis on other variables. In climate models this is referred to simplistically as forcings. The models by their very nature are non-unique, that is to say that a number of models with different forcings and feedbacks can produce the same result. The non-uniqueness of the solutions means that the predictive capabilities of such models are quite poor.

Coincidently there is a nice two part discussion on climate models by Ross McKitrick in the National Post
http://opinion.financialpost.com/2012/06/13/junk-science-week-climate-models-fail-reality-test/?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=twitter
http://opinion.financialpost.com/2012/06/20/climate-reality-check/
In this discussion he points to a paper published last year in Journal of Forecasting that compared the outputs of various climate models with a mathmatical random walk where future data is predicted mathematically from the last data point. The random walk approach was found to actually be at least as good a predictor of outcomes than current climate models. In part two of the discussion he points to a paper he and a colleague recently published in Climate Dynamics entitled: Evaluating Explanatory Models of the Spatial Pattern of Surface Climate Trends using Model Selection and Bayesian Averaging Methods. What they found was:

We then tried a so-called “encompassing” test, which asks if each of the 22 GCMs does such a good job explaining the climate data that the socioeconomic data can be ignored, or vice versa. In all 22 cases the probability that you could leave out the socioeconomic data was computed as zero. But only in three of 22 cases did the data say you should keep the GCM, and in one of those cases the fit was negative (opposite to the observed patterns), so it didn’t count. So, again, only two of 22 climate models demonstrated enough explanatory power to be worth retaining, but in all 22 cases the data gave primary support to the socioeconomic measures the IPCC insists should not be used.

Then we estimated a weighted combination of the two types of models and asked if the socioeconomic data should be given all the weight, some, or none at all. The data never rejected the option of giving all the weight to the socioeconomic model, and always rejected giving it none.

Finally, we used Bayesian methods to check if the climate models might work better in some new super-model consisting of an unknown linear combination of some or all of the 22 GCMs, with a linear combination of some or all of the socioeconomic variables. Our data set yields 537 million such combinations, so we employed a computational method that searched over the entire model space and estimated the probability that each of our variables belongs in the overall, best model.

This approach identified the optimal combination as consisting of three of the seven socioeconomic variables and three of the 22 GCMs. The rest, it said, could be ignored. Redoing the encompassing tests confirmed that these variables contained all the relevant information in the data set. So we conclude that a valid model of the pattern of temperature changes at the Earth’s surface requires both measures of data contamination induced by regional socioeconomic variations and some climate-model processes.

There is a plethora of published papers in various climate journals that address problems with the current GCMS, where the shortcomings are and what needs to be improved. This is, of course, good science, identify the issues and try to solve them, retest and reiterate the process. However, the current philosophy seems to be that no matter how poor a predictive tool the models actually are they are being put out there as the incontrovertible truth.

Richard Lindzen has just published a paper that delves into the issue of models and he attempts to take a more simplistic approach by looking at forcings and feedbacks on their own. The paper is pay-walled unfortunately.

R.S. Lindzen, 2102: Climate physics, feedbacks, and reductionism (and when does reductionism go too far?). Eur. Phys. J. Plus (2012) 127: 52 DOI 10.1140/epjp/i2012-12052-8

I think the first paragraph in the introduction speaks to the topic at hand:

The public perception of the climate problem is somewhat schizophrenic. On the one hand, the problem is perceived to be so complex that it cannot be approached without massive computer programs. On the other hand, the physics is claimed to be so basic that the dire conclusions commonly presented are considered to be self-evident. Consistent with this situation, climate has become a field where there is a distinct separation of theory and modeling. Commonly, in traditional areas like fluid mechanics, theory provides useful constraints and tests when applied to modeling results. This has been notably absent in current work on climate. In principle, climate modeling should be closely associated with basic physical theory. In practice, it has come to consist in the almost blind use of obviously inadequate models.

[dinopello]

My first job was as a research engineer developing commercial empirical modelling software (computer inductive reasoning). On the title page of the user's manual, we had this quote:

“The sciences do not try to explain, they hardly even try to interpret, they mainly make models. By a model is meant a mathematical construct which, with the addition of certain verbal interpretations, describes observed phenomena. The justification of such a mathematical construct is solely and precisely that it is expected to work - that is correctly to describe phenomena from a reasonably wide area. Furthermore, it must satisfy certain esthetic criteria - that is, in relation to how much it describes, it must be rather simple.”
― John von Neumann

[dorlomin]

I find it hard to believe so many got the simple math problem wrong. I'm terrible at math but immediately knew the answer, so not sure I believe the "fact" that 50% of MIT students got it wrong. Can we fact check that please?

Its because that is how the mind is meant to work. You are custom designed to use predefined patterns to sort through the myriad problems that come at you all the time every day. You have a basic template for how to deal with a "costs $1.10, part a is $1 more than part b", you are designed to take a very quick look at this and see the basic arithmetic problem that leads people to pull the basic arithmetic answer out for it.

Every day you encounter thousands of minor problems that you need to solve without involving your conscious, the conscious mind is slow to work and takes alot of resources, if you used it for every problem you would be slow, deliberate, accurate but not get much done.

People who have encountered a similar problem before may have retained a problem solving pattern that they can grab for a quick solution.
Others may instinctively realize that anything that seems so simple in the context the problem is presented is likely to have a hidden issue and slow down and think carefully about where the trick may lie.
But most will look quickly, think they recognize the problem and apply a simple pattern to solve it freeing their mind for the next problem to come along.

To design a psychological test that was more accurate in testing weather people could solve this I think they would need to be sat down, presented with a couple of other tricky questions then given this one so they were already on guard, otherwise all we get is a well known phenomena of using the path of least resistance to solve a problem.

I really think that the reason people do not take other scientific issues more seriously is a completely different type of problem. We only have so much time, so when assessing information we usually do the least thinking over sources we trust the most. For a great many people (clearly not all) their beliefs on issues like the national debt, climate change, peak oil will tend to strongly reflect the views of the most trusted sources.

Few have the time and skill to deconstruct the arguments.

[dohboi]

Thanks for linking this, Pops. I'm a big fan of Kurt Cobb, as well as John Cobb, his dad, I believe, who cowrote a book with Herman Daly on no-growth economics.

I think we are seeing examples of promoters of that fact-free future (nice alliteration there!) right here on this thread.

[AgentR11]

His example of believing the NWS on weather records may not be the best because I'd think there are other observations to review,

Not weather records, climate predictions. Their weather records are easy to test; a $200 mini station will spit out numbers good enough to compare. As a result, I have quite a bit of confidence in their accuracy.

I was talking about the models they use to predict future climate, and how impossible it is for anyone to do anything other than "wait and see". eg, the models say, ENSO positive is coming next. The only thing I can do is choose to believe, or choose to disbelieve. I have nothing other than "appeal to authority" type basis upon which to choose; and I find that terribly unsatisfying.

[rockdoc123]

People who have encountered a similar problem before may have retained a problem solving pattern that they can grab for a quick solution.
Others may instinctively realize that anything that seems so simple in the context the problem is presented is likely to have a hidden issue and slow down and think carefully about where the trick may lie.
But most will look quickly, think they recognize the problem and apply a simple pattern to solve it freeing their mind for the next problem to come along.

definitely the problem of having a supercomputer unlike anything created to date sitting in your cranium.
This is a problem I've run into all the time, first when writing technical papers for publication and later in trying to proof read 10K submissions, documents for the SEC or other gov't bodies and commercial contracts. The mind tends to scan over a sentence in a paragraph and miss incorrect numbers, spelling errors etc. How I got around this is I eventually read everything backward, sentence by sentence. By doing this your brain is forced to concentrate on individual words and numbers and it makes it less likely you will miss an error. It is interesting that I do not run into this problem when reading French or Spanish documents I think mainly because my level of fluency is much less than in english and hence I tend to slow down and concentrate on particular phrases to make sure I understand what is being said.

Supercomputers will achieve one human brain capacity by 2010, and personal computers will do so by about 2020.
Ray Kurzweil