No Noble's position is summarised by his phrase 'you cannot go fishing without a net' and it is the choice of net that determines what you catch, the mythical 17% is established by the task you ask the radiographs to do not by their 'superpowers' as suggested by Snowden
Dennis Noble’s position, particularly his critique of the “Data Hypothesis,” aligns with your summary: the observer’s choice of framework—the “net”—dictates what data is captured and how it is interpreted. This perspective shifts the focus from intrinsic “superpowers” of individuals to the emergent fit between an agent and the specific task or environment.
1. Noble’s “Fishing Net” and Biological Relativity
Noble’s theory of Biological Relativity asserts that there is no privileged level of causation[1].
• The Net Determines the Catch: Just as a fisherman’s choice of mesh size determines which fish are caught and which swim through, Noble argues that the genome acts as a “database” rather than a “program”[1]. The “catch” (biological function) is determined by the higher-level system (the cell or organism) utilizing that database under specific boundary conditions[1].
• Negative Explanation: This mirrors the cybernetic principle of negative explanation—the system does what is left over after the environment and the observer’s constraints have ruled out other possibilities[2][3].
2. The Critique of Snowden’s “17% Superpowers”
Dave Snowden uses the 17% outlier concept to advocate for “human sensor networks,” citing an experiment where 83% of radiologists failed to see a gorilla in a lung X-ray because they were focused on looking for cancer nodes[4][5].
• Snowden’s View: He suggests these 17% are essential “outliers” or “weak signal detectors” who avoid the inattentional blindness that affects the majority[5][6].
• Noble’s (and Flach’s) Counter-View: Drawing on Noble’s logic and John Flach’s ecological psychology, the behavior of those radiologists is not a result of internal “superpowers” but an emergent property of the agent-environment coupling[7].
• Task-Based Constraints: Like Herbert Simon’s “ant on the beach,” the complexity of the radiologists’ path is a reflection of the complexity of the task (the beach), not the internal rules of the observer (the ant)[8][9]. The 17% “success” rate is established by the specific constraints of the task you asked them to perform—change the “net” (the instructions or the visual domain), and you will catch a different 17%[7][8].
3. Emergence vs. Attributes
The core difference between these stances lies in where they locate intelligence:
• Snowden’s Stance: Tends to treat the 17% as a specific subset of sensors within a network to be managed[5][6].
• Noble’s Stance: Suggests that “intelligence” and “successful performance” are not attributes of the person alone, but emergent properties of the system-environment fit[7].
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If the 17% “catch” is purely a product of the “net” (the task), how might you redesign your organization’s “nets” to ensure that critical “gorillas” are caught by the majority, rather than relying on a few outliers?
References
[1] 💬Environment.md [2] 💬Environment.md [3] 💬Gists.md [4] 💬People Dynamics.md [5] 💬Perspectives.md [6] 💬Perspectives.md [7] 💬Environment.md [8] 💬Environment.md [9] 💬Environment.md