A Hearing Test, History, the Election Results, Your Supper, and a T-shirt

There was an election recently in the U.S. Perhaps you’ve heard about it. Many people have explained why it turned out the way it did. I’m not one of them.

Long ago, when I was considerably younger, I participated in some subjective evaluations of new technological developments. Some were hearing tests, usually of the A-B-X variety: one listens to stimulus A followed by stimulus B followed by stimulus X. Then one decides whether X is A, B, or can’t tell.

??????????? In one such test, I was one of thousands participating across North America. There were many sets of stimuli, and I could only rarely detect any differences. About a year later, I encountered one of the test designers and was told I had the highest score on the continent. It wasn’t that I could hear things others couldn’t; it was that I’d never said I heard a difference when it wasn’t there.

??????????? I’m an engineer, a person who helps solve problems. To me, that means I’m also, of necessity, a historian. I need to know why what was tried before did or didn’t work. I’ve been so focused on “why” in my history work that I often overlook other questions, sometimes to my embarrassment. When I’d recently discovered an early use of a particular technology in an opera performance, I told a friend who was an opera archivist. Of course, his first question was, “Which opera?” I didn’t know.

??????????? According to the Associated Press as this is being written, in the recent U.S. election, a little over 143 million votes were cast for President, and a little over three percent of that total separated the top two contenders. Some Senate candidates from the Democratic Party won their races, some from the Republican Party did, and two independents won, too. There are also winners from both major parties in the races for House of Representatives.

??????????? As soon as the election was over (perhaps not even that late), explanations were offered for why those were the results. As they were using my favorite question, “why,” you might think I was happy to discover their wisdom; I wasn’t.

??????????? My “why” questions involve technology; theirs involve people’s minds. Consider your supper yesterday. Do you know why you ate what you did? If you just ate what someone else made, does that person know why? Was it a recipe seen that day? What was in the refrigerator or pantry? Something new? A food store or restaurant ad? A whim? And that’s just your mind, not someone else’s. As the late, great musician, historian, and teacher Albert Fuller once said, “If our minds were simple enough for us to understand, we’d never be able to understand them.”

??????????? I almost always wear a T-shirt. One of my favorites has a quote from former U.S. Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. “Certitude is not the test of certainty. We have been cock-sure of many things that were not so.”