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Blind Spot: Why We Fail to See the Solution Right in Front of Us
The Voynich Manuscript has been considered to be the world's most mysterious book. Filled with strange illustrations and an unknown language, it challenged the world's top code-crackers for nearly a century. But in just four-and-a-half months, Dr. Gordon Rugg, a renowned researcher, found evidence (which had been there all along) that the book could be a giant, glittering hoax. In Blind Why We Fail to See the Solution Right in Front of Us , Dr. Rugg shares his story and shows how his toolkit of problem-solving techniques—such as his Verifier Method—can save the day, particularly in those times when the experts on your team have all the data in front of them but are still unaccountably at an impasse. In the tradition of Malcolm Gladwell and Dan Ariely, Dr. Rugg, a rising star in computer science, challenges us to re-examine the way we think, and provides new tools to solve problems and crack codes in our own lives.
304 pages, Hardcover
First published September 11, 2012
19 people are currently reading
124 people want to read
About the author
Gordon Rugg
7 books12 followersGordon Rugg is a former timberyard worker and English lecturer turned field archaeologist. His PhD was in Psychology, on attitude theory; he then worked in Artificial Intelligence, moving from there to information retrieval and then software engineering for safety-critical systems. His current research includes a collaboration with a NASA researcher looking for life on other planets, and research into ancient technologies.
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Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews
March 23, 2014
I read this book with a mix of responses. One was fascination, the other frustration. The fascination came from the topic, which we catch a glimpse of in the subtitle ‘why we fail to see the solution right in front of us.’ Gordon Rugg, with the help of journalist d’Agnese, gives us a remarkable analysis of how we all – including experts – make errors in our decisions and research. But not limiting himself to saying what’s going wrong, Rugg also provides a method to root out the errors in the ‘Verifier method’, a suite of techniques to pull apart the way we approach, assimilate and make use of information to come to a decision.
The frustration is that the method is seen through a veil of vagueness. We are constantly hearing about this Verifier toolkit, but only get sideways glimpses of what it entails. I would have loved an appendix with a brief description of the contents of the toolkit and a couple of the tools explained in more detail. I appreciate that Rugg and his colleagues probably want to keep the toolkit proprietary (and the danger of having a journalist as a co-author is that they will tend to weed out the detail and weave their stories on people instead). But the book would have been better with a bit more depth.
Having said that, it’s pretty good as it is. The authors take what could be a rather dry topic and give it some life. We see how Rugg started with knowledge elicitation techniques – used, amongst other things, in the attempt to construct expert systems that are designed to provide an accessible bank of expertise. This first requires experts, who often don’t know how they do what they do, to initiate the system builders into their methods and knowledge. From there we move onto looking at the way errors occur in even the most detailed academic study and the gradual realisation that it would be possible to build a series of techniques that would help uncover these errors or, even better, prevent them happening in the future.
There are two major case studies to explore this – the (probably) medieval Voynich manuscript, which for more than 100 years has proved a mystery to all those who have tried to crack its strange script, and the nature of autism. In both cases, making use of the early version of the Verifier method uncovers gaps in expert understanding. While it doesn’t enable Rugg and his colleagues to actually solve the problems, it does provide impressive pointers to where there are currently failings and what should be done next.
All in all, the book will appeal to a very wide market. Whether you are in business (interestingly, the early writing style, before it settles down, is rather like a business book with numbered ‘lessons’ like ‘Experts often don’t know what they know’ in pull quotes) or any branch of academia… or just interested in the nature of knowledge, understanding and human error, there’s a lot here to get your teeth into.
The frustration is that the method is seen through a veil of vagueness. We are constantly hearing about this Verifier toolkit, but only get sideways glimpses of what it entails. I would have loved an appendix with a brief description of the contents of the toolkit and a couple of the tools explained in more detail. I appreciate that Rugg and his colleagues probably want to keep the toolkit proprietary (and the danger of having a journalist as a co-author is that they will tend to weed out the detail and weave their stories on people instead). But the book would have been better with a bit more depth.
Having said that, it’s pretty good as it is. The authors take what could be a rather dry topic and give it some life. We see how Rugg started with knowledge elicitation techniques – used, amongst other things, in the attempt to construct expert systems that are designed to provide an accessible bank of expertise. This first requires experts, who often don’t know how they do what they do, to initiate the system builders into their methods and knowledge. From there we move onto looking at the way errors occur in even the most detailed academic study and the gradual realisation that it would be possible to build a series of techniques that would help uncover these errors or, even better, prevent them happening in the future.
There are two major case studies to explore this – the (probably) medieval Voynich manuscript, which for more than 100 years has proved a mystery to all those who have tried to crack its strange script, and the nature of autism. In both cases, making use of the early version of the Verifier method uncovers gaps in expert understanding. While it doesn’t enable Rugg and his colleagues to actually solve the problems, it does provide impressive pointers to where there are currently failings and what should be done next.
All in all, the book will appeal to a very wide market. Whether you are in business (interestingly, the early writing style, before it settles down, is rather like a business book with numbered ‘lessons’ like ‘Experts often don’t know what they know’ in pull quotes) or any branch of academia… or just interested in the nature of knowledge, understanding and human error, there’s a lot here to get your teeth into.
December 29, 2014
I came across a reference to this book in connection with the Voynich manuscript, the mystery of which the "author" supposedly solved. The book is ostensibly about some system Rugg came up with to figure out if and why researchers are screwing up. The book is unsatisfactory on both topics.
The book is by "Gordon Rugg with Joseph D'Agnese" (the second element being definitely subordinate to judge by the size of the font on the cover). Rugg is a doctor of thinkology or some such crap (he apparently studies how people make mistakes) and D'Agnese is a popular science writer. What does this "with" mean? Did Rugg hand the content over to D'Agnese, who actually wrote it (e.g., it was ghost-written, which is my sense of what "with" actually means in titles). This seems very strange for a book as strewn with "I" as this one. Or did Rugg basically write it and then turned over the text for revision by D'Agnese? Certainly, it has all the defects of popularizing science writing, so I'd attribute a lot of the faults to D'Agnese. In any event, I think it's pathetic to come up with a book by farming out a lot of the work to somebody else without making it clear who did what.
Anyway, what exactly is this big theory of how to figure out whether, how and why researchers are making fundamental mistakes? Damned if I know. Towards the front of the book, we're introduced to ACRE. This means "acquisition of requirements". Basically, the idea is that when you want to produce some sort of system for a client (like software), you have to figure out what the client needs/wants and then try to fit the final product to those requirements. Turns out this is easier said than done, and ACRE refers to various methods to get around the problems that clients have in conveying what they actually want. So far, so good. From this comes VERIFIER, which is the actual method in question. It is never anywhere clearly (or even at all) explained. Pp. 116-121 supposedly lay out the "birth" of the method, but this is entirely opaque. Pp. 168-172 supposedly explain how the method was applied in studying the Voynich manuscript, but this treatment is again very hard to follow, and the "method" can only be inferred from the poorly explained details. Seemingly, it's something to do with statistical analyses of words and concepts that turn up in searches of studies on some topic. That may be wrong because I can't be bothered to figure out for myself what the author himself (themselves?) can't be bothered to explain. This book is basically a long version of some allusive, ill-informed "piece" on a science website that's designed simply to go through the surface meaning of the story without any detail or demonstration. Sorry, but that's bullshit for what purports to be a real book. Rugg should perhaps have done some VERIFYING of his own to get a decent ghost writer.
Given this sort of writing, it comes as little surprise that the internal structure borders on the incomprehensible. Just to give an example, Chapter Five is called "Ambush of the Mind." It treats a) how the ever ingenious Rugg solved the mystery of whether Neanderthals were right-handed, b) how mistaken reasoning supposedly led to the Roman debacle at the battle of Cannae in 216 BC, and c) the circumstances that led to the "birth" of VERIFIER. I have absolutely no idea why these topics sit in the same chapter or how they relate to each other. Chapter Eight is a grab bag of poorly laid out odds and ends that go nowhere that I could see. I really had no idea a lot of the time why what was being (cursorily and dubiously) discussed was there at all.
Turns out that in this disjoined book, two of the main "contributions" of our protagonist pertain to the Voynich manuscript and autism. This was in furtherance of demonstrating the great utility of VERIFIER by applying it to the solution of real problems before some unnamed company shells out a lot of dinaros for using it to solve some unnamed problem of theirs. For the uninitiated, the Voynich manuscript is a mysterious work that turned up in 1912 and supposedly goes back to the middle ages. It's written in a strange script which may or may not contain a code and has weird illustrations. I have no clue what VERIFIER had to do with Rugg's coming up with his supposed solution. Basically, he seems to have rejected the contention that the work is "too complicated" to be a fraud, and so came up with a practical method to reproduce with a grid and tables the patterning of the characters used in the manuscript. This is taken as proof that it's a fraud. He then tries to ascribe the hoax to the sixteenth-century English fraudster Edward Kelley (collaborator with the angel interpreter John Dee). None of this is exactly compelling, and in any event, I don't see how he needed VERIFIER to come up with this solution (though since he never really explains the methodology in its own right, perhaps this isn't surprising). It should also be noted that as with so much else in this book, the material is presented in a very unsatisfying way. I doubt I could have followed the story if I didn't already know it.
The second test of VERIFIER concerns autism. Basically, the "conclusion" is that the terms used to describe the condition are not precisely definable, and so different people mean different things when they talk about the "syndrome", and so (maybe) it actually is an overly broad concept that encompasses a number of different phenomena (whose investigation is hindered by their being lumped together with the others). Okay, but so what?
Rugg as presented here is an extremely annoying character. The book is full of humble brag. He's constantly figuring out how to solve one of the great mysteries of mankind, only to have to set it aside while he's occupied with some other great triumph, only to return to the first problem and find out that everybody else was wrong about the first problem and it turned out that he had solved the question of how to use nuclear fission to power bicycles after all. Apart from being a world-class thinkologist, he's also a first-rate anthropologist and a world-class calligrapher in his spare time. I'm just surprised he (or D'Agnese) didn't tell us about his work with Albert Schweitzer in Africa or as a handmaiden to Marie of Romania.
The book is by "Gordon Rugg with Joseph D'Agnese" (the second element being definitely subordinate to judge by the size of the font on the cover). Rugg is a doctor of thinkology or some such crap (he apparently studies how people make mistakes) and D'Agnese is a popular science writer. What does this "with" mean? Did Rugg hand the content over to D'Agnese, who actually wrote it (e.g., it was ghost-written, which is my sense of what "with" actually means in titles). This seems very strange for a book as strewn with "I" as this one. Or did Rugg basically write it and then turned over the text for revision by D'Agnese? Certainly, it has all the defects of popularizing science writing, so I'd attribute a lot of the faults to D'Agnese. In any event, I think it's pathetic to come up with a book by farming out a lot of the work to somebody else without making it clear who did what.
Anyway, what exactly is this big theory of how to figure out whether, how and why researchers are making fundamental mistakes? Damned if I know. Towards the front of the book, we're introduced to ACRE. This means "acquisition of requirements". Basically, the idea is that when you want to produce some sort of system for a client (like software), you have to figure out what the client needs/wants and then try to fit the final product to those requirements. Turns out this is easier said than done, and ACRE refers to various methods to get around the problems that clients have in conveying what they actually want. So far, so good. From this comes VERIFIER, which is the actual method in question. It is never anywhere clearly (or even at all) explained. Pp. 116-121 supposedly lay out the "birth" of the method, but this is entirely opaque. Pp. 168-172 supposedly explain how the method was applied in studying the Voynich manuscript, but this treatment is again very hard to follow, and the "method" can only be inferred from the poorly explained details. Seemingly, it's something to do with statistical analyses of words and concepts that turn up in searches of studies on some topic. That may be wrong because I can't be bothered to figure out for myself what the author himself (themselves?) can't be bothered to explain. This book is basically a long version of some allusive, ill-informed "piece" on a science website that's designed simply to go through the surface meaning of the story without any detail or demonstration. Sorry, but that's bullshit for what purports to be a real book. Rugg should perhaps have done some VERIFYING of his own to get a decent ghost writer.
Given this sort of writing, it comes as little surprise that the internal structure borders on the incomprehensible. Just to give an example, Chapter Five is called "Ambush of the Mind." It treats a) how the ever ingenious Rugg solved the mystery of whether Neanderthals were right-handed, b) how mistaken reasoning supposedly led to the Roman debacle at the battle of Cannae in 216 BC, and c) the circumstances that led to the "birth" of VERIFIER. I have absolutely no idea why these topics sit in the same chapter or how they relate to each other. Chapter Eight is a grab bag of poorly laid out odds and ends that go nowhere that I could see. I really had no idea a lot of the time why what was being (cursorily and dubiously) discussed was there at all.
Turns out that in this disjoined book, two of the main "contributions" of our protagonist pertain to the Voynich manuscript and autism. This was in furtherance of demonstrating the great utility of VERIFIER by applying it to the solution of real problems before some unnamed company shells out a lot of dinaros for using it to solve some unnamed problem of theirs. For the uninitiated, the Voynich manuscript is a mysterious work that turned up in 1912 and supposedly goes back to the middle ages. It's written in a strange script which may or may not contain a code and has weird illustrations. I have no clue what VERIFIER had to do with Rugg's coming up with his supposed solution. Basically, he seems to have rejected the contention that the work is "too complicated" to be a fraud, and so came up with a practical method to reproduce with a grid and tables the patterning of the characters used in the manuscript. This is taken as proof that it's a fraud. He then tries to ascribe the hoax to the sixteenth-century English fraudster Edward Kelley (collaborator with the angel interpreter John Dee). None of this is exactly compelling, and in any event, I don't see how he needed VERIFIER to come up with this solution (though since he never really explains the methodology in its own right, perhaps this isn't surprising). It should also be noted that as with so much else in this book, the material is presented in a very unsatisfying way. I doubt I could have followed the story if I didn't already know it.
The second test of VERIFIER concerns autism. Basically, the "conclusion" is that the terms used to describe the condition are not precisely definable, and so different people mean different things when they talk about the "syndrome", and so (maybe) it actually is an overly broad concept that encompasses a number of different phenomena (whose investigation is hindered by their being lumped together with the others). Okay, but so what?
Rugg as presented here is an extremely annoying character. The book is full of humble brag. He's constantly figuring out how to solve one of the great mysteries of mankind, only to have to set it aside while he's occupied with some other great triumph, only to return to the first problem and find out that everybody else was wrong about the first problem and it turned out that he had solved the question of how to use nuclear fission to power bicycles after all. Apart from being a world-class thinkologist, he's also a first-rate anthropologist and a world-class calligrapher in his spare time. I'm just surprised he (or D'Agnese) didn't tell us about his work with Albert Schweitzer in Africa or as a handmaiden to Marie of Romania.
June 8, 2019
I definitely enjoyed reading about cryptography. I didn't know creating and cracking code can be this interesting! Unfortunately though, I do have to say that this book in particular is very poorly written. The author in ever-waving the mysterious "verifier method" throughout the book sounds like a really desperate salesman with nothing good to sell. I enjoyed the read to the extent that this book was there and I don't like leaving books unfinished. would not read again, and do not recommend reading it. 2 stars.
January 4, 2023
Good thought experiments
I enjoyed reading this book. Topics well thought through and eloquently presented. Definitely helps me see one explanation for the Voynich manuscript.....and a satisfying one at that. Definitely a recommended read.
I enjoyed reading this book. Topics well thought through and eloquently presented. Definitely helps me see one explanation for the Voynich manuscript.....and a satisfying one at that. Definitely a recommended read.
July 6, 2014
Confusing. Probably better for math and comp sci majors, though maybe simplistic for them.
Author and colleagues developed the Verifier Method, which they hope can help solve complex problems. It quickly helped the author show that a famous undeciphered renaissance manuscript "The Voinich" was likely a hoax. It also showed problems with how Autism is diagnosed, including poor categorization and dismissal of coincident symptoms/problems. I can't say that I really understand how the Verifier works.
An interesting concept is that there are different methods that must be used to get information from experts, simply interviewing them will not do (ex. loading cargo ships). Difficult problems are often multi-disciplinary and require devoted people to learn things outside their area of expertise to solve. The solution often lies in the gaps of expertise of those looking at the problem. Pattern matching is an amazing human skill, but can also anchor us to the wrong line of inquiry - don't write anything down too soon in the investigation. Humans grasp probabilities much faster & better when they are presented as frequencies. Humans are hard wired to prefer symmetry, even when it is not the best option.
Author and colleagues developed the Verifier Method, which they hope can help solve complex problems. It quickly helped the author show that a famous undeciphered renaissance manuscript "The Voinich" was likely a hoax. It also showed problems with how Autism is diagnosed, including poor categorization and dismissal of coincident symptoms/problems. I can't say that I really understand how the Verifier works.
An interesting concept is that there are different methods that must be used to get information from experts, simply interviewing them will not do (ex. loading cargo ships). Difficult problems are often multi-disciplinary and require devoted people to learn things outside their area of expertise to solve. The solution often lies in the gaps of expertise of those looking at the problem. Pattern matching is an amazing human skill, but can also anchor us to the wrong line of inquiry - don't write anything down too soon in the investigation. Humans grasp probabilities much faster & better when they are presented as frequencies. Humans are hard wired to prefer symmetry, even when it is not the best option.
December 13, 2016
Started off very interesting, but really dragged at the end, ultimately not delivering on the Verifier method. I enjoyed the tidbits that are were pertinent to my work as a UX Designer, and the interesting facts and anecdotes, but that's it really. I feel a bit embarrassed that I recommended this book in the beginning...
May 13, 2013
I enjoyed this, but want the follow up. The book discusses why the "Verifier Method" is great, but it doesn't dive deep into the method itself. I'm eager for the book that actually presents this method.
Want to read
April 25, 2013want to read because of this fascinating article: http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-arts-...
May 20, 2013
Great detective work on the Voynich Manuscript. I wish that they described their cases in more detail and included a few more - I felt the book was too short!
October 15, 2013
Fantastic insight into a brilliant mind!
August 21, 2016
Came close to giving this one star but it did have a few good ideas on going across discipline. Overall mediocre, self congratulatory book on a basic method of investigation.
Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews