Zé Continha
comentada em 27/04/2023 10:51

I’m a follower of what I call the Thomas Hunt Morgan school. Morgan was one of the great biologists in the history of the world who figured out a lot of genetics [Morgan established that chromosomes carried the units of inheritance] with very slender resources in a so-called “fly room” – first at Columbia and then at Caltech. And when Morgan reached Caltech, he did something that was very peculiar. He banned the Friden calculator – which was the computer of that age – from the biology department. Everybody else at Caltech used the Friden calculator endlessly for all kinds of statistical correlations and much else. Morgan banned it.

And they asked, “Why are you doing this?” He said, “I’m so located in life that I’m like a gold miner in 1848 who could just walk along the banks of the river and pick up enormous nuggets of gold with organized common sense. And as long as I can do this, I’m not going to use scarce resources in placer mining.”

Well, that’s the way I go at life. I think if you get the big points with organized common sense, it’s amazing the placer mining you never have to do…

But is there still enormous gain to be made with organized common sense that doesn’t require a computer? I think the answer is “yes.” Are there dangers in getting too caught up in the minutiae of using a computer so that you miss the organized common sense? There are huge dangers. There’ll always be huge dangers. People calculate too much and think too little.