Fractionals

Excellent piece by Malcolm Gladwell in the New Yorker on pitbulls and profiling. It kind of reminds me of a conversation K and I had once about how you teach people. I'm trying to remember the terms I used, but basically there are two types of things you can try to pass on to someone to teach them. You can give them individual, focused rules (like the 46 traits the US Customs Service used to look for), or you can explain what you're trying to do and give them the rules they need to use to make their own decisions (like the 6 criteria those 46 traits were replaced with). The former teaches you how to respond to certain circumstances, and usually leaves people confused or doing the wrong thing when something else happens; the latter teaches you how to do something.

I'm pretty sure AI ties in here somewhere.