On Feb 10, 4:16 pm, John Martz <zjo...@yahoo.com> wrote:
> I believe that humans are "wired" to try to find correlations. It's > not just the way our minds may be predisposed to work, I think it is > also how we feel about the way the world should work. When we have an > effect we look for a cause not only intellectually, but emotionally as > well. We have a longing, a desire for an explanation. > > So if we change something and the effect which was vexing us appears > to have gone away then I think most of us are quite eager to view that > change as causal, regardless of whether it was or was not. > > I offer this as a possible rationalization for what you saw when you > dug deeper into this. In my experience, this tendency can make trying > to find a solution very frustrating. Folks seem to always be ready to > claim that just giving their problem a good whack with whatever hammer > they happen to have had at hand is what sorted things. (It sure would > be nice if Google could come up with a search filter to weed out those > posts. ;-) > > -irrational john Here is an opposite take on claiming fixes. In the mid-1970s, I became involved in a system that had just come online with what was already an antiquated architecture: CDC 6400 computers running SDC's TDMS for the database, with dumb terminals and other peripherals wired to "controllers", in use for mission-critical, real time data receipt, processing, and human analysis and reporting. On several occasions, when the system broke down for mysterious reasons, and while running in degraded mode on the smaller of the two CPUs, the hardware people, applications programmers, and systems programmers would all spend hours finding problems and fixing them until the system returned to normal operations. At the end, I could find no one to take credit for detecting the root cause of the breakdown and fixing it. Al Poulin -- You received this message because you are a member of G-Group, a group for those using G3, G4, and G5 desktop Macs - with a particular focus on Power Macs. The list FAQ is at http://lowendmac.com/lists/g-list.shtml and our netiquette guide is at http://www.lowendmac.com/lists/netiquette.shtml To post to this group, send email to g3-5-list@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/g3-5-list
