By Peter Cochrane, 26 July 2007 15:44
COMMENT
Written on BA2487 flying from Barcelona to London, and dispatched to silicon.com from an open corporate network in London
For the last week my wife and I have been living in and working from a 22-story hotel in Barcelona. Our room was on the sixteenth floor and getting an elevator always seemed to be a big deal. We always seemed to be in a hurry and had to wait a long time for a car to arrive, and then it would stop at four or five floors on the way up or down.
After about three days this became really frustrating and I have no idea why but my wife started holding down the door-close button.
Bingo! On every trip we always went from floor sixteen to the ground floor, or from the ground floor to sixteen non-stop.
I couldn't see any reason why this should be a purposely engineered facility as it would defy all queuing theory design, not to mention service-time targets and fairness objectives applied in these cases.
But in the selfish interest of getting to our destination floors fast, we persisted. It worked without fail!
Had we stumbled on something strange but useful, or was it a succession of chance occurrences? Basic statistical analysis said this phenomenon was rapidly approaching as close to certainty as it needed to convince me it did indeed work.
At this point it would have been very easy to believe but the scientist in me kept waiting for a failure to disprove this growing evidence base.
Sure enough - on the sixth day it happened! We boarded on the sixteenth floor, and the car stopped for a call on the fourteenth. So was it a fluke? Did we fail to press the 'door close' button quickly enough? We soon found out. Over the next two days the failures came thick and fast in both the up and down directions, at all times of the day and our belief rapidly dissipated.
So how did we enjoy such a long run of success? Hotel occupancy seems to have been the culprit. There had been a dip in the number of residents that led to a smaller demand for cars. And of course, elevator systems, like so many transport systems, fail catastrophically. That is, they go from a satisfactory service level to a perceived failed state (ie irritatingly slow) in a matter of a few extra customers.
The moral of this experience is of course that correlation does not automatically infer causality. As a student one of the most important things I was taught was to always try and prove things theoretically and practically from many different directions, and always try and destroy the argument from even more. If the case survives this assault, then in all probability it is likely to be correct.
One really nice, comical example of correlation and no causality popped onto my screen while I was looking at venganza.org the other day. Below you can see a graph from that site which shows the relationship between global average temperature and the number of pirates.
If we believed the facts as presented we would start recruiting more pirates in order to stop global warming. But common sense tells us this is nonsense.
Unfortunately there are many cases like this, where people want something to be true and then go on to build up a belief that is unshakable.
Tragically in many cases no amount of scientific, engineering or mathematical proof will shake that belief. This leads to bad decisions and huge waste for society and spans every aspect of politics, healthcare, business, environment, technology and behaviour.
A good case in question is the mobile phone headache syndrome.
Hundreds of scientific studies and reports fail to find any positive evidence that mobiles cause health problems.
And of course these err on the conservative side in providing qualified statements because reputations are at stake and we now live in a blame culture, which only affords an opportunity for a blitz of criticism from the believers.
Just look at all the reporting and investigations for bias. It is clearly evident in the pro-problem direction and can be easily construed in the con-problem direction - and even more so if you want to believe. Right now I am definitely in a dense RF environment and have a bit of a thick head but that I think is more to do with a series of late nights and a lot of travelling!
Is there anything we could do to help? I think not! Belief systems are more powerful than truth and always lead to long-sustained ignorance and waste. My prognosis for the mobile, and other similarly inflicted industries is that they are up against 'Flat Earthists' and the debate and waste will rumble on for decades.
In the meantime the real problems in society that see thousands of deaths a year and a lot of suffering will continue to go unaddressed and neglected. To my mind that is the real tragedy. We only have a finite amount of time, money and skill - and it ought not to be wasted.
Comments
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1. Robert James
Have you read Freakonomics (Steven D. Levitt & Stephen J.Dubner). It doesn't mention pirates but does discuss correlation and causality and the sometimes surprising truths.
For example, the effect of Roe vs. Wade on the crime rate in the US, described in the introduction.
2. Richard
So, that's why you moved to an area so far from mobile phone masts!
Of course, the low received signal will force your mobile phones to transmit at maximum power; maximum battery drain; minimum battery life.
ps. The late Douglas Adams explored the lift problem.
Perhaps their software contained an element of "AI"? <grin>
Perhaps the lifts were re-programmed following complaints from other guests? <grin>
3. anonymous
You may be interested to hear what two professors specializing much of their research in evidence-based forecasting have to say about global warming:
Kesten Green and J. Scott Armstrong recently examined the validity of the climate forecasts. To date, they have found no scientific forecasts to support global warming. Their paper "Global Warming: Forecasts by Scientists versus Scientific Forecasts" is forthcoming in Energy and Environment. The paper can be found at a new site designed to encourage a scientific approach to forecasting for public policy issues, publicpolicyforecasting.com. Reactions to the paper can be found at theclimatebet.com.
-Rachel Zibelman on behalf of J. Scott Armstrong
4. Joe Whitehead
With the name of that website, it's pretty clear they were kidding. :)
5. Peter Cochrane
Robert = Yep - and a lot more of the same over the past 40 years or so. Peter
6. Peter Cochrane
Richard = I am definitely a country boy - I like open spaces, big skies, and a total lack of crowds.
There are plenty of phone masts by the way, it is just that I cannot see them - vis my diagram.
As for the elevators - well they seemed poorly designed from a service point of view and I think they actually needed some AI or adaptability.
Peter
7. Peter Cochrane
Anonymous - Wharton School
The big problem with global warming is the vested interested interests on both sides of the argument. We have the Fiends (no that isn't a typo!) of the Earth with there 'told you so' message, and a big business/political lobby in total denial no matter what.
What we do know for sure - something is happening. What isn't yet clear - did human kind cause/drive it, trigger it, or are we just spectators.
My inclination is to say that we should err on the safe side an at least clean up our act and get our own back yard in good shape.
No organism can survive in its own manure!
Peter