Previous Knowledge: The Forgotten Variable

Our mind is fascinating. It is in its operation and also in its products. He is able to remember an event that happened decades ago and forget what we did two days ago. It can get fatigued when we hold attention, but it can also automate a process and make room for us to do another at the same time. Very good at designing an equation to predict the future, but also a slave to certain vices, such as not having the importance of prior knowledge.

You can learn and unlearn, get excited and feel, handle motivations so powerful that they put our interests aside in favor of those of others. It is able to remain active while we sleep and almost asleep while we have the sensation of being awake.

Prior knowledge: what we don’t usually have

On January 15, 2009, Captain Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger and First Officer Jeff Skiles were piloting US Airways Flight 1549 from LaGuardia Airport to Charlotte Douglas International Airport.

Within three minutes of flight, at an altitude of approximately 2,800 feet (approximately 850 meters), the Airbus A320 hits a flock of Canadian geese, disabling both engines. The situation is critical and the pilots have to make a decision.

There is a need to land. Now where? The nearest airport is Teterboro. However, the pilots make a surprising and controversial decision. Landing on the Hudson River.

The result is zero victims; however, the National Transportation Safety Board initiates an investigation into the incident and does different simulations for this. They say that if the pilots had steered the plane toward Teterboro, they would have been able to land, thus avoiding the dangerous landing maneuver over the river.

Sully is the film, directed and co-produced by Clint Eastwood, that puts a cinematic rhythm to this story. Tom Hanks puts himself in the shoes of Captain Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger to open the door to the intimacy of the pilot. To the anguish of feeling questioned despite that voice of experience that tells him that he made the right decision.

However, he has to find a way to convince the National Transportation Safety Board commission and refute their simulations. To do this, he analyzes the equation and realizes that they had forgotten to include a very important variable: prior knowledge.

Judge from the present

Sully faced the challenge posed by the commission saying that they, in their simulations, had not taken into account that they already knew what was going to happen, that they had very valuable prior knowledge …, when, however, for them, in the real situation, it had been a totally unforeseen circumstance.

In the simulations, when trying to recreate what happened, they had forgotten to include reaction time ; that is, the number of seconds needed to gather information about what was happening and assess the alternatives.

Accepting this reasoning, the Commission proposed to carry out a new simulation with the inclusion of this parameter. The result was that of the plane crashing into a building, counting all its passengers as victims. Thus, technology also ended up agreeing with “Sully” and burying the shadow of suspicion with which he had had to carry up to that moment. Seconds, instants, that separated the hero from the villain.

Once again, reality and fiction remind us of our tendency to judge the past from the present, with the knowledge of the present. A position, without a doubt unfair for the defendant in that trial. On the other hand, the omission that Tom Hanks was somehow a victim of, that foreknowledge, is a common mistake.

I remember, years ago, a teacher explaining to me how he calculated the time to take his exams. In his detailed outline there was no space for reading the questions and understanding the problems.

He assumed that students entered the classroom with the exam already read and understood, that they just had to find the solution. However, the reality is very different. His pupils could know the subject, but not the exam. Like the pilots responsible for the so-called “Hudson miracle”, they could find themselves in a situation of alert or activation, but unaware of the unforeseen events that that kind, but clueless professor, would like to raise with them.

An extraordinary situation and another everyday, which happen every day in universities, institutes and colleges converge in not including in the equation the absence of prior knowledge. They avoid the fact that processing a complicated situation takes time to add to what we can estimate to solve it.

For moviegoers, we leave the movie trailer here: