I want to be involved in those studies as the lab rat. The idea of expanding my own pocket of subjective reality is just extraordinary.
However, I can see what you are talking about Madness, but consider that meeingful communication is almost already impossible. Just the differences in educational background and socio-economic disparities make communicating meaningful information to "the masses" seem hopeless. As an example, consider vaccines. You get a few bad studies and a pretty celebrity with a sob story, and suddenly the lives of thousands of people are at risk because people choose to believe neither the quality or quantity of good data, but the bad subset of emotionally appealing data.
It does seem impossible, then, to believe for a second that a group of people who can just "feel" how something is working will be able to communicate this information in a way that someone without that extra sense will be able to understand, or even if understood, believe.
On the other hand, communication between groups who have an extra-sensory perception, an 'umwelt' expanded in the same way, could suddenly have an explosion of understanding between them. Like he said, large amounts of data are difficult to process, but what if you take something complex but scientifically un-controversial, like global climate change, and turned it into vibrations in a vest. Would you be able to train, without bias, a person to "feel" the state of the world's current and historical health? Could you sit a group of people in a room and use this to bypass certain internal biases that currently make communication basically meaningless, and have them leave in agreement on some issue that they had before held complete opposite stances?
Part of the communicative barrier between the academic/scientific world and everyone else, or between even any two disciplines, is that years of specialization and study can create a knowledge gap that is difficult to circumvent. I wonder if more people could have access, and the ability, to interpret large amounts of data in a shorter period of time and then simply have a mutual 'feeling' about things.
It seems with every potential solution there is always more problems.
You could feed think-tanks with massive amounts of data and come to some wild and potentially accurate conclusions, but how would they communicate that to anyone outside?
A technician that "feels" the state of the ISS, and tells mission control that they need to replace a $500 million piece of equipment, and all they have is blind faith that this guy doesn't just want a fancy new chair.
At least currently, everyone could potentially come to the same scientific conclusion given access to all the information out there. With umwelt augmentation, there would be a potentially insurmountable gap that would make those conclusion impossible to come to. It makes visible the inadequacy of the layman to understand the world as science describes, which would be entirely unacceptable to the world I see today. Even though that gap is already there, it seems like any one can "Science!" and reach conclusions.
It will be interesting if this takes off and studies are then done with control groups on non-augmented peoples and their augmented counterparts performing a task. If the augmented ones perform better given the exact same data... what then?
