Are anomalies blindspots?
[ by Charles Cameron — watching a Franco-British detective saga ]
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This police helicopter view from The Tunnel (series 1 episode 3 at the 16’21” mark) —
— raises the question for me: are anomalies blindspots, or are blindspots so anomalous as to evade even the “blindspot” category? Certainly my practice is to seek out blindspots, and anomalies may be clues..
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What’s interesting about anomalies is that they aren’t isolated, they’re precisely anomalous in respect to some norm or other, figure against field.
Which boils up to another instance of my repeated plaint that a single data point is nothing, that two is the first number — see, eg, It is always good to find oneself in good company.
February 26th, 2017 at 5:39 am
“are anomalies blindspots”
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No.
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At least not all of them. Some anomalies attract attention by presenting their audience with the “impossible” situation (“This can’t happen! It’s fill-in-the-blank because it must always fill-in-the-blank!”). Black swans are catastrophic scale anomalies to our usual patterns.
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Less colorfully impactful or significant anomalies do fit more snugly into our blind spots and when noticed are more easily rationalized away.
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Blind spots are a twofold problem of orientation and observation. Sometimes we are blind because we can’t see or don’t see and sometimes because we refuse to see because it refutes what we wish to be true
March 6th, 2017 at 7:04 pm
Anomalies are a two-factor problem of action and observation.Sometimes the anomaly rises because of inaccuracies in our actions (missed target). Other times what we observed did not meet the expectations of our actions (wrong target). Somewhere along the line between missed and wrong, and because of our observations and actions, the biggest factor can develop: we produce a closed loop.
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In other words, the loop has become immortal, i.e. a cancer, which is a Blind Spot.