Hard science

Found an extraordinary exam question in a post called GCSEs are dumbed down and getting worse, by Cabalamat, taken from an actual physics exam (Edexcel GCSE Physics P1b reference 5010 taken on 9 November 2006) (via Ben Goldacre).

Our Moon seems to 'disappear' during an eclipse. Some people say this is because an old lady covers the Moon with her cloak. She does this so that thieves cannot steal the shiny coins on the surface.

Which of these would help scientists to prove or disprove this idea?

A - collect evidence from people who believe the lady sees the thieves
B - shout to the lady that the thieves are coming
C - send a probe to the Moon to search for coins
D - look for fingerprints

I have read this question several times, and I am still unsure what answer they are looking for.

A - Well, this is exactly the kind of thing that social scientists would probably do. The question doesn't specify what kind of scientists it is talking about.

B - Well, this is a good experimental approach. If shouting affected the outcome, and if shouting about thieves produced a significantly different outcome to shouting about other things, then this would be good evidence in support of the hypothesis. However, if shouting didn't affect the outcome, this wouldn't help to disprove the hypotheses because there is a vacuum between the Earth and the Moon and sound doesn't carry in a vacuum. The old lady might have cybertronic ears, but then again she might be deaf.

C - Finding or not finding coins doesn't really help us much. If there are coins, it could mean that the old lady has outwitted the thieves, or that the thieves thought it would be unlucky to take all the coins, or that there aren't any thieves. If there are no coins, it could mean we are looking in the wrong place, or it is the wrong time of the month, or Fred Goodwin's got them.

D - Fingerprints. Same as coins. By the way, are we looking for fingerprints on the coins, or fingerprints on the cloak?

I suspect that any child who really understands science and the scientific method will waste more time on this question than a child who hasn't a clue. So this isn't just dumbing down, it is levelling down.

Stumbling towards utopia

We are often asked to consider radical alternatives to the systems we have today. But I generally find that simple consideration of alternatives is not the most useful viewpoint, even for radical systems thinking.

Here's a simple example to start with. Carlos Gershenson asked what would happen if there was a single currency throughout the world? Who would benefit? Who would lose? Is it a sensible idea? Will it be worth the effort?

When asking whether a single world currency would be a better system than the one we have today, it is always necessary to add (as Carlos does) the supplementary question: Better for whom?

But I think there is a more important question: Is there any conceivable route that would get us to a sustainable world currency system from the current starting point, with its entrenched vested interests?

Change in complex systems is always a political process, finding a path through a sociopolitical space-time continuum. My preferred metaphor for this is a game of dungeons and dragons - you have to navigate a maze, win a series of battles, without losing too many lives.

A lot of radical political discourse is essentially imaginary - inventing fictional systems that are better than the systems we have today. But without a process for getting there this discourse is just utopian fantasy.

Meanwhile some revolutionaries have a fairly explicit programme for realizing their political vision, but this may involve extreme risk or hardship for other people. Of course this raises all sorts of ethical problems; revolutionaries typically try to justify hardship by appealing to such abstract notions as the historical inevitability of change or the greater good.

At the other extreme, there are reformists who focus exclusively on the processes of change - what stepwise improvements can be done today. Many reformists don't have a clear vision of where they are going, and a lot of their reforms can seem stupid or even counterproductive from a systems perspective.

Here's what I think. Complex systems thinking about change needs to involve both vision and process, both politics and ethics. As Erik Proper said to me this morning, "it starts with the question where do I want to position myself. Next question is how to realise this".

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Thinking with the Majority

A.A. Milne "wrote somewhere once that the third-rate mind was only happy when it was thinking with the majority, the second-rate mind was only happy when it was thinking with the minority, and the first-rate mind was only happy when it was thinking". (War with Honour)

I wrote somewhere once that "thinking with the majority" is an excellent description of Google.

'The suggested improvements (in Google) are just great for those people who want to ask the same questions as everyone else, and get the same answers. Google rankings already depend on the clicks of previous websurfers, and this dependency will become more sophisticated. Google will therefore support, with ever-greater efficiency and effectiveness, an intellectual activity characterized by A.A. Milne (author of Winnie-The-Pooh) as "Thinking with the Majority". '

And as Titus-Armand points out, it is also a good description for

'reliance upon authority in which the “authority figure” is represented by the entire population rather than a single individual or a particular group'.

What about thinking with the minority? There is a popular meme known as "thinking the unthinkable", and I think this is what the third-class mind supposes the second-class mind to be doing.

If you are one of those who are happiest when thinking, please subscribe to this blog and also follow me on Twitter.

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Update: within a few minutes of this item's being syndicated on Twitter, Al Chou reminds me of a related quote: "A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices." Was it Churchill or William James? The authority of the majority (aka Google) prefers the latter; who am I to argue?

Negative Evidence

@snowded blogs on Negative evidence and the village idiot syndrome


People who should know better (so-called scientists) make this problem worse by using the phrase "no scientific evidence". For example "no scientific evidence that eating infected meat carries any risk to humans" or "no scientific evidence that mobile phones cause headaches".

This creates the impression that there may actually be lots of evidence, but we can safely ignore it because it hasn't been collected or approved by somebody in a white coat.

Just as some kinds of evidence are inadmissible in a court of law, so some kinds of evidence are inadmissible in a scientific journal. Among other things, this leads to publication bias, where people perform calculations based only on the data that have passed through some publication filter, which is then systematically incomplete.

See my comment to Science isn't about Checklists

Cherish the thing, beware the word

"The more a document contains the term 'innovation', the less likely I am to take it seriously", tweeted Mike Beasley (via A Jangbrand).

Many words are only used when the ideas they represent are absent. When there is genuine trust or empowerment or creativity, you don't find people talking much about Trust and Empowerment and Creativity.

So we may sometimes infer the absence of the thing (real innovation) from the overuse of the word (the term "Innovation").

What other concepts does this apply to? Please add a comment below or tweet me.

Making Sense of the Competition

Two interesting articles from McKinsey on competition (premium membership required for full articles, but the trailers are still worth reading)

• How companies can understand competitors’ moves (January 2009) Even when companies change their strategies spontaneously, their competitors have a good chance of figuring out what they’ll do and when.

• Getting into your competitor’s head (February 2009) To anticipate the moves of your rivals, you must understand how their strategists and decision makers think.

Kim Warren comments: "I’m still puzzled so little is written in this or any other strategy sources about what to actually do against competitors" (via A Jangbrand).

Although the word "strategy" sounds grand and majestic, the true strategists are tricksters (Odysseus). The end supposedly justifies the means, but the means can be pretty mean. Like diplomacy, you may want to look away now.

Strategy can be ethically problematic, so a lot of books on strategic action are set in a safe historical period - like the Japanese samurai, or Sun Tzu's Art of War. Perhaps the best way to learn about modern strategy is to study biographies (not autobiographies) of business leaders. And read between the lines.

Whole Foods

Two contrasting descriptions of the same organization crossed my desktop today.

• Leah describing WholeFoods as an anarchist organization (The Business Anarchist Is The New Entrepreneur via Tom Graves).

• Bruce Schneier describing WholeFoods as a petty-minded legalistic organization (Perverse Security Incentives).

Can these two descriptions be reconciled?

Learning from Experience

Under the heading Big Fish Eat Little Fish, Dave Snowden posts a series of photos, telling a visual story with a dramatic conclusion. (Go on, look at the story, I can wait here until you come back.)

An obvious lesson to draw from this story is one about learning from experience.

However, there is a further twist: the final photo in the series turns out to be faked. (There is further explanation of this on Snopes.)

In addition to learning from experience, another lesson we could draw from this story is to be a little wary of situations whose narrative structure is too good. (When there are forces within a story that make us so want it to be true, maybe that's the time to switch logical levels.)

But of course, even if the story is part-fiction, that doesn't stop us learning from it. We do need to learn from experience, and experience includes fiction. The story is therefore True (at some level) because it is Relevant and Meaningful.