On Opinions

I subscribe to a mailing list of birders, people who spend a lot of time in the Real World looking at What Is There, with the express purpose of identifying the species of the individual birds they encounter. While on one level, birding has far more to do with learning human taxonomy than with individual birds, on another level, it represents a scientific act. As birders, we don't get much benefit from saying what a bird "should be". The vast majority of birders will only count the ones they can unequivocally identify. This requires observation, comparison with references, attention to detail, etc.

But more importantly, it involves cognitive accuracy--the willingness to accept the answer that the evidence and analysis leads to rather than derailing the evidence to get to the desired answer. Everyone who has birded seriously, meaning, those who get up at 3 am to get out to the field before dawn, or who stand motionless in a cloud of mosquitoes so as to not startle the snipe at their feet--every serious birder has tried, at least once, to turn a run-of-the-mill sparrow into an exotic visitor, or to turn a white rock into a snowy owl. But rarely do we stick to these wishful misidentifications. At the end of the day, we tally up the "hits" and leave the puzzlers in the field for another day.

If we have only an ambiguous glimpse to go by, then we can each have an opinion, but we may never get to agreement because none of us has sufficient information to make an unequivocal case. But when we have enough information to make an identification, opinion no longer applies. We may have to work to make the case, but if the case can be made, then we have an answer.

As one poster said in a recent exchange about the identification of a Chipping Sparrow:

It is a Chipping Sparrow not because Dave says so or because Craig is from Virginia. It is not a Chipping Sparrow because the majority of respondents called it that. It is a Chipping Sparrow because an examination of the whole bird eliminates other choices. Had the picture been more ambiguous, we quite possibly would not have been able to identify it. Sometimes "We don't know" is the best identification....We should use the opinions of other to re-examine our own, but bird ID is not a democratic process.

Much as we all revere the democratic process in our government, when it comes to the identification of something in the Real World, we do better with cognitive accuracy, in my view.