[Leica] New Yorker

[abridge at gmail.com (Adam Bridge)]

Admiral Rickover, in a Naval Reactors Technical Bulletin, observed
that in critical situations there's a real tendency to see what you
want to see and to disbelieve indications that are directly contrary
to your belief. Three Mile Island had several such occurances - where
the plant operators disbelieved reliable instruments in favor of an
easier scenerio.

Any situation that requires the piecing together of information into a
mosaic has the same problem. Intelligence analysis is fraught with
this as the lead-in to the Iraq War demonstrates. (Here I'll take the
most benign interpretation that the failure wasn't willful, something
I do NOT wish to argue.)

I'm not sure exactly what struck B. D. with regard to his student's
photography because I don't know what image he'd like us to see. Or
was it a film?

On Wed, 15 Dec 2004 11:36:53 -0500, Richard S. Taylor
<r.s.taylor@comcast.net> wrote:

> B.D. - I reread the New Yorker article this morning.  The article
> quite rightly identifies the role of interpretation in identifying
> objects in very low signal-to-noise ratio (i.e., fuzzy, high-grain)
> images.  In such a situation we will all tend to see what we want, or
> expect to see.
> 
> Unless you're talking about abstract work, surely most Leica
> photography has a very high signal-to-noise ratio (sharp, low-grain)
> with easily identified subjects, so I don't see the connection.
>