The last keynote presentation at LegalTech 2010, titled The New Convergence of Intelligence, Intuition, and Information, featured Malcolm Gladwell (author of Outliers, Blink, and The Tipping Point), Dr. Lisa Sanders (Internist, NYT Columnist, and author), and David Craig (Chief Strategery Officer for Thomson Reuters). Below is a curated and edited collection of live tweets by V. Mary Abraham, Jenn Topper, Adrian Dayton, and Michele Kersey. I suggest you check out their Twitter streams for a more complete picture of what is presented below. As part of the process of putting this information together, I also took great liberties in reorganizing it according to topic (read: not necessarily chronological).
David Craig
“There’s an expectation that there’s an online answer for every question.”
Digital info isn’t just black & white anymore; emotional info—the human behind it—carries increasing importance. [Editor’s note: Some of the tweets seemed to suggest that video plays a big role in carrying emotional information. There was no clarification, however, on how emotional information facilitates decision making, such as through sentiment analysis.]
[There were] 2 billion searches on Westlaw last year alone.
[There are a half] million updates on news and info online per second.
Since the crash of Lehman Bros, the number of videos viewed online has increased by 3 times.
Malcolm Gladwell
Rise of information tsunami imperils the ability of the expert to do their job.
There’s too much information; humans have difficulty weighing the data points.
Too much information overwhelms [a human’s] ability to make decisions clearly.
Experts operate by intuition. They don’t always know how they decide.
Intuition of the expert is key despite all the information.
Free up experts from too much information so [they can use their] intuition in cognitively complex situations.
Intuition works best when you decide based on relatively few variables.
Problem [occurs] when experts can’t explain how they make expert decisions. The intuition of the expert is mysterious. It’s opaque to us. There are biases built in as well.
Instead of trying to document best practice [of experts], perhaps we should focus on supporting decision making—decision trees.
Decision trees give transparency to information; gives frugality to the decision-making process; restores intuition.
Medical decisions [are] similar to legal ones. Decision aids improve ability for experts to make best decisions.
Individual cops make better decisions than those with partners. Intuition remains in tact.
To change the way lawyers resist decision trees, start in the law school. Change the expectation.
Aviation industry uses decision aids regularly. It’s in their culture. We need to change lawyer culture in law schools.
Pilots would never think it right to “improvise” at work. Why do doctors and lawyers think it’s ok?
How decision aids are built matter. New technology enriches learning processes, but must be designed intuitively.
We need to redesign the interface for presenting information to lawyers. Building the right learning experience improves intuition.
Must develop tools to organize vast amounts of knowledge. We’ve organized the information in one way; must change how it’s organized [in search].
Focus on the quality of the learning experience. The limitations of computers/screens affect how we learn. Be aware.
It is the interface of technology tools that can determine the level of enhancement of intuition rather than the inhibition of experts.
(On how he researches) He starts with library databases (Jstor) and then moves into the stacks. Info is arrayed differently in the stacks than online. Each facilitates different kinds of serendipity.
We need to preserve time/space to engage in undirected info gathering. This fuels creativity.
Dr. Lisa Sanders
Our instinct [is] to gather as much info as possible before making a decision. This can result in info overload & paralysis.
An expert engages her subconscious to sift thru the data. Then, checks results against authoritative sources.
Don’t reach out for more information; reach for better information. That’s what instinct helps you differentiate.
It is impossible to master most subjects under ordinary conditions. Why would you think you could master it in an emergency?
The difference between a master clinician & an ordinary doctor is experience. They can safely rely on their brain to decide.
What is key is how you organize the content in yourr brain. She is studying how to deliver information to doctors in an orderly way.
We need a system that feeds us information like Pandora feeds us music.
We need a Pandora to give us more relevance and preference to information.
We need a Pandora to help us filter information to find the truly useful information. Then, focus on signal not noise.
Diagnostic aids are helpful to make diagnoses. But they assume [the] need four too much data and can limit creativity & intuition.
The problem with current electronic medical records is that they contain too much irrelevant data and don’t federate information.
Her theme: use technology to filter information and data and locate better data for good decision making. More data isn’t enough.
We don’t need better search. We need better “find”
What we really need is Dr. McCoy’s tricorder—do something humans can’t do.
The Panel
Don’t try to replicate with technology how humans operate. Use technology to help humans operate better.
[Image (cc) by johannes pape]
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