I cant think of a title

This blog was prompted by comments from Mindframes and Survivor on the blog by Mano related to the recent marathon. Mindframes states that "the real value can only be perceived by a runner". Survivor counters "any one can understand shaving off time...need not be runners alone". This stream of conversation is interesting because there seems to be some tension (in the sense that each statement has its merits) between the arguments.

I found this stream of thought very interesting. For instance there is lot of talk about professor's sitting in the ivory tower and creating theories out of thin air without ever having any work experience in the "real" world. Hmm...Now lets think about this. Imagine you are a biologist working with say Apes. Is it a requirement that you live like or socialize with an Ape to get an understanding about its behavior?

Surely no! I agree that it is difficult to have any understanding about the animal if you have never been closer than 100 feet to an Ape. But if we have observational data say collected by a zoo keeper, we can always run a few regressions and claim that here are some empirical regularities. Hence, not living or being near the ape does not mean one cannot draw valid inferences but the real question is does this suffice? Not really! Data can only tell you as much. The critical aspect is, sometimes what we miss is intuition and feel for the problem on hand. This leads to to mechanical use of tools which may or may not be relevant. The only solution in my view is that it is essential to mingle once in a while with the Ape to get a feel for what it really is. Essentially this is what biologists tend to do (or so I believe).

In that context, there is merit in both arguments.