Tavia wrote:

I beg to differ.

Fair enough. It's not as if we can pick a control [scientific meaning] system, and then compare different people's understandings.

In my line, understanding complex systems in their totality is all part of a day's work, though I admit it's a reasonably rare skill.

We're probably talking about different things, with a similar net result.

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And a town planner, who reroutes roads around buildings to give better traffic flow, can screw things up in exactly the same way as a programmer, when, say, that tiny through-road gets flooded.

And a really good town-planner would close his/her eyes, then say 'no that doesn't work, there's a bottleneck there'.

But then, if the planner understood it *in total*, the mistake wouldn't have been made at first, because it would have been clear. Having to consider how some aspect relates to another is the problem - it's closing off the rest of the system while momentarily viewing a component. It's the difference between looking at how two points are connected, and how two million are connected, at once.

Our brains can do this sort of stuff - the most basic (?) example is recognising things visually. Logic and intuition fits in here, too. Do something enough, and the brain develops its own way of recognising certain aspects automatically. That ability to recognise attributes doesn't equate to an ability to understand the whole at once, though.

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From my knowledge of some exceptionally intelligent people (mainly

mathematicians & computer scientists), they all have the skill to *both* understand a problem in its totality *and* deconstruct it into its subsystems.

Which is interesting, because I've never met anyone who could demonstrate this. Admittedly, it's hard enough to explain, never mind demonstrate. I know lots of people who can work through a problem with ease, can recall baroque aspects and will, and generally do amazing stuff, but I wouldn't put that down to contemplating the whole, at once.

This level of intellect is where I'd expect Avon to fall, though maybe he and Vila are just talking his skills up, and he really was just a back-room database programmer...

I disagree. Where Avon won out was because he was methodical, not haphazard. I never got the impression that Avon had an all-encompassing understanding. Quite the reverse. I got the impression that he worked diligently through a problem until he got a suitable solution. That would make him an excellent programmer by today's standards, because you don't *have* to know the whole lot, yourself. You just have to be systematic about the bit you're working on.

steve