Caltech students in Hawking's lecture

tech_fan
Thu, 05 Apr 2007 07:20:20 +0000

Nevertheless, she would have to agree we couldn’t have safer flights by merely having two pilots of the same rank in the cockpit. Still the story fell short to validate Ben Golub’s ‘tone’ theory.



What? I don’t understand.

We could have safer flights by having a mechanism so that the person with lower rank can forcefully convey messages to the person of higher rank, which was apparently not done here. Obviously there has to be a person whose command is final, especially in a cockpit, but that doesn’t mean that the lower-ranked person should speak like a schoolchild. As we see in this case, this leads to his (crucial) words getting less weight, and that can sometimes be disastrous.

The point is simply that the way we speak and the tone (quite literally – the pitches in the voice) matters a lot for determining how information flows, and sometimes whether it flows at all. There are reams of academic research on this, as alleya said, and if you want references, just ask us. Caltech (along with a lot of other small, nimble organizations) seems to have realized this long before the linguists by having an environment not without authority, but without superfluous deference. Unsurprisingly, the exchange of ideas at places like Caltech, early Google, etc., is much freer than in at the formal, structured, respectful counterparts (compare Caltech vs. Harvard; Google vs. IBM).

If you think this story, which makes falsifiable (i.e. checkable) claims backed up by scientific experiments is wrong, please provide evidence to that effect. Repeating that you “stand by what you said” doesn’t convince anyone.