Defenestrating Thoughts from the Bivouac

Back on the topic of framing… I was talking to a college professor about students and the state of education. I mentioned that I feel we don’t teach people to look at the larger picture and think through problems from the full end to end. For example, take corn-based ethanol, it seems like a smart idea to make gas out of corn. After all, corn is cheap and gas is expensive; may as well turn something cheap into something expensive. :-)

Now though, the price of tortillas in Mexico has almost quadrupled. And the price of meat is on the rise. It seems obvious now; if you drive up demand of something really fast, you’re going to raise the price and that will be reflected in the price of other things made out of corn. But, why didn’t we think of that at the start? Probably because we didn’t think through the problem and instead went for a myopic analysis.

The professor said that this is part of larger problem of not asking the right questions. Or more precisely, defining questions with a artificially limited scope. For the issue of ethanol, the question was, “Which crops should we make ethanol out of?” The question should have been more along the lines of, “Should we make ethanol out of crops?”

I was watching the Today Show yesterday morning and one of the stories was, “Is the government doing enough to protect our kids?” This framing was interesting because it assumes that it is the government’s job to protect our kids. A more valid question is, “Who’s job is it to protect our kids?”

A better example is the “surge” in the Iraq War. For weeks all the analysts were debating, “Should the surge be 20,000 or 50,000?” or “Should the surge last 2 months or 6 months?” These questions are limited in scope; they are tactical questions about a strategy. In other words, they assume the strategy (the “surge”) is the correct course of action and limit the scope of the conversation.

A better question would be, “What are our goals in Iraq?” and then ask, “How do we best accomplish them?” Once you have a good answer for this, then you start tackling the tactical concerns like troop size and deployment schedule.

To put this in terms that geeks can understand, if you start a project debating, “C# or C++”, your project is doomed. First figure out what your project is trying to accomplish, then figure out which language is best for it. Next time someone asks you whether you prefer C# or C++, ask them what you’re using the language for. Without the right context, that’s like asking, “Do you prefer a spoon or a hammer?” :-)

Yesterday a friend of mine mentioned Hanlon’s razor: “Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.” And though it’s a not completely related, it reminded me of a discussion I had with a sociology masters student a while ago.

She mentioned she was working on a study analyzing the circumstances of when a bystander will come to the aid of a victim. I was intrigued since I don’t feel that the conventional explanation for the Bystander Effect (diffusion of responsibility) adequately explains the phenomena.

It turns out that her research wasn’t about the number of bystanders, but the type of crime. The findings showed that bystanders statistically helped more often when the victim screams, “Help, there’s a fire!” as opposed to “Help, I’m being attacked.”

Her conclusion is that people are “horribly selfish”: if there’s a fire, they come running to help because they are afraid that their possessions are at risk. But in the case of a person being attacked, they just don’t care.

Granted I haven’t seen the raw data or the exact analysis, but I feel the conclusion is wrong. While you could argue that there are a small amount of people for whom selfishness is a factor, I doubt it would be the primary factor.

I think it’s about risk. Interfering with any situation has some degree of risk. In the case of the fire, the risk is relatively low. I generally know what to do in this case: help people move away, call the fire department, etc. By making myself available to help, I take very little personal risk.

In the case of someone being attacked, let’s say I go help… what if the attacker has a gun or a knife, or is much bigger and stronger than me? There’s not much I can do and I might even make things worse. Just by going to investigate I could get myself killed. It seems the most reasonable thing to do is call the police and stay away.

Also, consider if the experiment is using real crime data, then you have the risk of comparing apples and oranges. Violent attacks tend to happen in bad neighborhoods, while fires are more indiscriminate and could be anywhere. I imagine that people in bad neighborhoods are less likely to help random strangers regardless of circumstance, compared to people in a nice neighborhood. That fact alone could completely throw off your data.

Anyway, I wish I could find the study to see the details. But it seems weird that the student and her advisor would jump to such a strange conclusion. I would say that they are doing it on purpose to increase the chance of their findings being published, but I shouldn’t attribute malice to something that can be explained by stupidity. :-)

The other day I was talking to a friend that said that he doesn’t read fiction, because there’s so much history to learn so he’d rather stick with what’s more important. I’ve been rolling this around in my head and have been trying to figure out if history is more inherently valuable than fiction?

Of course, there’s the old adage, “history is written by the victors. Lots of important things end up getting deemphasized as a result. The Bataan Death March and Firebombing of Dresden were both horrible atrocities, but the former is much more well known than the latter. This, despite the fact that Dresden was arguably much worse than Bataan.

There is also the problem with just the scale of the history. My middle school history teacher, Mr. Luther, had been teaching for over 40 years when I had the privilege to be his student. One day he remarked to me that when he started he didn’t have time to teach his students everything they needed to know, and now 40 more years of history were added to his burden.

The problem that results is that history is simplified to make it more efficient to learn. For example, every American student will say that the American Civil War was fought over slavery. But this is really a gross over-simplification: at issue were different viewpoints of federalism, economics, modernization, and separatism. All these were brought to a boiling point when the issue of slavery was considered. Many facts are overlooked; like the fact that the Emancipation Proclamation came a full year after the Civil War started.

And, of course, the relevant Simpsons reference. Apu is trying to get his US citizenship and the following occurs during his verbal exam:
Proctor: All right, here’s your last question. What was the cause of the Civil War?
Apu: Actually, there were numerous causes. Aside from the obvious schism between the abolitionists and the anti-abolitionists, there were economic factors, both domestic and inter–
Proctor: Wait, wait… just say slavery.
Apu: Slavery it is, sir.

Lots of people say that it’s important to learn history so that we don’t repeat the mistakes of the past. But even people who study history but think they can do it right themselves. After all, we all now know to “never get involved in a land war in Asia“, but that really hasn’t stopped anyone lately.

Anyway, if we can learn from the mistakes in history, why can’t we learn the mistakes of others in fictional works and try not to repeat them. I can think of a bunch of fictional works that have amazing relevance, whether its Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Quartet, Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, or even Battlestar Galactica.

I suppose the main distinction is that the lessons from fiction can be dismissed by saying, “that would never happen.” Of course, that defense can also be applied to history with some modifications. People will often say, “Well, now we know better.” or “Those people were just crazy.”

Still history, or even fiction disguised as history, tends to be more relevant, because people like us made those decisions and had to deal with the consequences of their actions. And sometimes we’re still dealing with the consequences.

So does history have more intrinsic value than fiction? I’d have to say no. The main differentiation is how we choose to interpret and value it.

This does lead into another interesting discussion: when does fiction become fact and, of course, it’s related cousin, can anything be fact? But this is now getting too metaphysical, so we’ll have to talk about this some other time. :-)

A recent study has made a big splash in the news with eye-catching headlines like: Raunchy Lyrics Prompt Teens to Have Sex. In what should be a simple example of correlation does not mean causation, we have a media sensation that rocking local newscasts and newspapers. I’m sure Oprah will chime in soon.

In the above linked article, compare the headline and then read the article’s first sentence: “Teens whose iPods are full of music with raunchy, sexual lyrics start having sex sooner than those who prefer other songs, a study found.” The headline implies causation and the leading sentence implies correlation.

After all, it’s seems like common sense that teens that have sex tend to listen to music with sexual lyrics.

If the journalist actually read the study, they would see the following in the conclusion, “Our results suggest that the relationship between exposure and behavior may be causal in nature; however, our correlational data do not allow us to make causal inferences with certainty.”

My guess is that the headline implying causation sells more papers or gets more viewers. It’s another reminder that media companies exist to make money; not necessary to deliver the full truth. Which is a shame; the research study has lots of interesting info in it.