Both napkins and envelopes are paper products, and as far as I can tell, both are folded. Furthermore, usually napkins and envelopes are quadrilaterals. Maybe this is why we confuse them, because they have so much in common. You can make notes on the back of the envelope, because it has more space than the front, which is true, at least, for used envelopes already marked with an address, a stamp, and the like. (I used the phrase “the like” because I couldn’t figure out how to briefly discuss the fact that there are two addresses and two stamps without repeating myself and sounding repetitive and saying the same thing more than once.) On the other hand, if the envelope is unused, you can fit more notes on the front, and you don’t have to worry about bumps in your cursive caused by the seams of the paper. I don’t really understand why we are making so many notes on envelopes, but the back of the napkin is the same as the front, unless it has a picture on it. For the sake of argument, we can assume a symmetric napkin and leave the illustrated napkin as an exercise to the reader. There is one more notable exception: The mobius napkin only has one side. Thus we conclude that the napkin has no back, and don’t even get me started on scratch paper.
Some of our disagreements, like the one above, are amusing, and others are subjective. For example, I could ask, “Is fall the best season of the year?” I’ve recently moved out of Florida and back into a state with more deciduous trees, and the leaves have started falling. Some of my favorite colors are beginning to emerge, though not in the sense of “emergence,” which is a word we probably don’t agree on even though we throw it around with increasing frequency these days. This season reminds us, though, of an aphorism about trees that we probably do agree on. The best time to plant a tree was thirty years ago—the second best time is today.
Flight test has its own set of both aphorisms and tropes, and if you are in Savannah this week, I hope you seek out Nathan “Cap’n” Cook, who will present Horizontal Time Safety Margin, a paper I’ve read and am quite excited about—but after his talk you can ask him about tropes, in particular. (Do you ever end a sentence with a preposition and simply add a hyphenated phrase to avoid the grammatical faux pax?) Sometime after the Symposium, when the Society publishes them on their website, you should read the paper, and though I disagree about the origins of Time Safety Margin, the application of this old idea to ground testing is brilliant. Of the many flight test colleagues I call my friends, Cap’n is one of the few with whom I can disagree on just about anything without being disagreeable.* (Note: Clay Harden introduced to me this phrase, “disagree without being disagreeable.”)
In May, the Flight Test Safety Workshop featured a tutorial on “the basics,” and I suspect that we don’t all agree on what the set of “the basics” actually contains. You can find the video and an unedited transcript on the website: Tutorial – Brilliance in the Basics, Raymond (RJ) Schreiner, Pivotal Aero. (The transcript is an AI creation, so your comments on its value would almost certainly be valuable, but I’m certain we can’t agree on the value of AI or even its definition.) RJ included a slide from Beaker’s paper (published in FTSF 19-01) that illustrated one author’s proposal on how to define uncertainty. That’s a monumental task. It’s so difficult, in fact, that when I asked Microsoft Copilot-the only AI allowed on my work computer-the definition of the word uncertainty, even it responded, “not certain.” I followed up by asking if it could provide a synonym, and even then, it said, “unsure.” I don’t know how to improve the confidence of large language models, but I am sure of three things: 1) no one agrees on what actually goes in the two quadrants on the right side of the quad chart Wickert used to define uncertainty, and 2) you should never tell anyone all your secrets. Before we discuss the quad chart in detail, we must ask a more fundamental question: So how should we respond when we disagree?
I’ve grown to believe that this question, answering it, is actually one of the fundamentals, the basics. And I believe that it’s one for which we lack brilliance. First, I believe we should respond. Procedurally it is appropriate to respond with one’s call sign to acknowledge receipt of a radio call. That feels like a norm we should adopt in all our communication. Second, I believe we should seek first to understand. (I put that one second on purpose, in part because I was amused that so many of Steve Covey’s habits are things you should do first, like “begin with the end in mind.”) Third, I believe we should disagree publicly more often, as a profession. Fourth, I think we should be prepared to cultivate an argument. I won’t expound on any of these four, though each could be its own TED talk. Speaking of “TED talks” can we agree that the term is overused and ought to be replaced, though it does convey a useful idea? Does anyone have a suggestion for what phrase to use in its place?
Back to our disagreements. Beaker thinks Bayes Factors can be done on a piece of scratch paper (not on the back of a napkin). I’m not sure anyone, who hasn’t heard his SETP talk from this September’s SETP symposium or read his paper on the topic, can actually do odds reliably, unless they gamble frequently. I know I can’t, and I have two degrees in math. I do think anyone, everyone, can do elementary probability on the back of an envelope. However, I believe, deep in my heart where convictions grow, that probability is a topic we aren’t good at and should be, and it should be done on a legal pad, not a napkin. I think numeracy is one of the basics, and we continue to reveal an utter lack of brilliance with this particular subset of the domain. We aren’t going to get good at it, or any of the basics, unless we are willing to work at it. Maybe the most surprising thing is what this numbers guy thinks about the solution: Words. I believe that the words we use to talk about uncertainty are the seeds we can and should plant today, that we should water and weed tomorrow, and someday, three decades hence, we’ll reap the fruit of our efforts, which I hope will be a safer profession, something we all can agree on.