Random Thought

Few things piss people off more than something good happening to people they don't like.

Subtle Bias at Microsoft?

An observation from posting:

I use a tablet PC for blogging. Sometimes the handwriting recognition is a little wonky. Those of you who know my handwriting are now saying "Ted, a computer that could read your handwriting would be a contender for the Turing Test." But that's beside the point.

Until I programmed in Obama into the dictionary, it kept reading it as Osama.

So, Mr. Gates, are there some sneaky Republicans in your labs?

In Defense of Stupid Studies

Last weekend I was hanging with friends when the topic got around to the government wasting money on stupid studies. Their gripe was about a study that showed that the rate of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder is more common among troops who had done multiple tours in Iraq than those who had done fewer.

While I agree that the government should not be paying for these studies, I tried to argue that the studies themselves aren’t wastes. Even ones that show “well duh!” conclusions like proving that people watch TV to alleviate boredom are not a waste of time or money.

Over the past week I’ve come up with two arguments against what is fundamentally a failure to appreciate different qualities of knowledge.

First: What you might call obvious, I might call an assumption. It comes down to different requirements in what it takes to “know” something. My first retort to my friends’ questioning of doing this study is that conventional wisdom gets slammed quite frequently by someone rigorously examining the evidence. Unfortunately, I couldn’t come up with an answer to the retort “When have you ever heard of such a case?” At the best I could recall nothing better than how everyone “knew” that the sun revolved around a flat earth. It took a couple of days to remember reading about experiments showing that being physically chilled does not make one more likely to catch a cold, or that eating less than half an hour before swimming does not increase the rate of getting cramps. Imagine if either of these experiments had confirmed the conventional wisdom? Then the old hindsight bias kicks in and the money spent on is declared “wasted”.

Second: A stupid study tests not only the obvious conclusion but the concepts that go into the creation of the obvious conclusion. To butcher an old expression: Scientific discovery is not heralded by “Eureka” but by “What the (bleep), that doesn’t make any sense.” The result of a study is said to make sense if it fits with the previous conclusions that make up the dominant theory. If the data makes sense, then the paradigm is just hunky-dory. If not, one of those pesky paradigm shifts is in the offing, or at least will be once the parameters of the experiment have been verified down to the last measure. The tricky part is that one never knows just which conclusion is the one that will be the thread that unravels the whole conceptual sweater.

So next time you hear about a study that leaves you saying, “I could have told you that,” think instead that you have been given proof that you were right all along. That and future generations won't think you quaint for believing something just because it was superficially obvious.

Now That I Can Think …

Caffeine is proof that God doesn’t want human sacrifices first thing in the morning.

The Return of a Dirty Word

The word for today is Responsibility.

From Merriam-Webster:

Main Entry: re·spon·si·bil·i·ty
Pronunciation: ri-"spän(t)-s&-'bi-l&-tE
Function: noun
Inflected Form(s): plural -ties
1 : the quality or state of being responsible : as a : moral, legal, or mental accountability

One of the greatest pastimes in the world today is to stick others with it so that you don't have to. We have a real peach of an example in the car crash in Gary, Indiana. There is definitely some stink on this story for the police over the sloppy handling of the scene. But that does
not let the driver, Darius Moore, off the hook for his part of the event.

Too bad that he doesn't seem to agree.

"I'm angry at police because I thought they could have found my friends, and they probably would be alive today if [police] had just done their job," he said.

And here's the real winner:

"A lot of people tell me that it wasn't my fault, that there was nothing that I could do," said Moore, a senior at Gary's West Side High School. "I realize that it wasn't my fault, but sometimes I feel like it was -- it really wasn't -- but it's just how I feel sometimes."

Let us look at that first quote. "Probably would be alive." Aside from flat denying what the coroner reported that the injuries would have been fatal instantly, there is still the fundamental conditional in effect. "Probably would be alive" applies just as well to making sure your passengers were wearing their seatbelts (something that the passengers should have taken on themselves).

More to the point "Certainly would be alive" would apply if young Mr. Moore had not been drinking. The violence applied to the guardrail in one of the photos at CNN certainly doesn't look like 40 MPH after several rolls. Either alcohol impaired his ability to react to a 40 MPH blowout, or he was going the 80 MPH earlier reports indicated.

At the very least, Darius' friends put their lives in his hands when they got in his car. If he had shown more care, they would not have had their fates rest in the hands of sloppy cops in the first place.

As for the second quote , there might not have been anything he could have done after the accident, but there was plenty he should and shouldn't have done before.

Update: Speaking of responsibility, I neglected mine to link to Venomous Kate's Bite Me before sending my trackback . I apologize for the discourtesy and dread the thought that the bite will be harder than I can handle.

Did Tim Taylor Kill the Do-it-Yourselfer?

Let’s take as our starting point the Popular Mechanics article by Glenn Reynolds about the decline of manual skills in society. He ends the article with point that I had to admit came very close to the mark personally:

Most people can do more than they think they can, and it’s often fear of failure as much as lack of skill that keeps people from tackling hands-on tasks.

Speaking from experience, I know how easy it is to fall into the mindset of better to do nothing than do something wrong. Been there, done that, would have bought the T-Shirt but wasn’t sure it was the right thing to do.

Fortunately I have a job that allows me to start with the engineering I went to school for and expand my more manual skills in the course of setting up tests. Confidence in a great thing, I recommend it for everyone.

And there lies the rub. Many people fear being caught out in false confidence. The show “Home Improvement” rested entirely on the premise of the Do-it-Yourselfer who is totally clueless despite his self-professed competence. After that, a leaky faucet suddenly looks like a chance to be branded as a Doofus Dad for the rest of one’s life.

One other factor that plays into to hesitancy to practice manual skills is that when you make or repair something, you take the responsibility that you have done it right. Responsibility is a dirty word the days. I think that many people find a sort of comfort in the thought that if something goes wrong when someone else does it they can sue. That safety net is gone when you do it yourself. The cynic in me is waiting for the first lawsuit to come from someone botching a home repair after taking one of those classes at Home Depot.

And to end this post on a barely related thought: Who does the repairs at John Edwards’s estate? You would think that a contractor would have to be insane to risk the liability repairing any trial lawyer’s home.

Update: Greetings to all of you coming from Instapundit. I would invite you all to take a long look around, but this site is just now coming off hiatus.