I learned about the statistician David Salsburg when Mainak sent me a copy of The Lady Tasting Tea, a popular science book about the history of 20th century statistics. Imagine my pleasure when I stumbled upon this excellent collection of amusing errors in data analysis, narrated by Salsburg.
It includes eclectic examples of faked data, such as the sizes of families from the Book of Ezra in the Bible, and trivial causes for observed anomalies such as the case of the eldery-white-male-in-foreign-sports-car phenomenon. Enjoy!
In a series of lectures given in Zurich, on the subject of how or why German literature did not deal adequately with the topic of allied bombings of cities; W.G. Sebald while pointing out the strategic irrationality of these bombings inserted few lines on the extent to which they were inevitable. A strategy targeting mainly civilian populations was opted for by Churchill, despite some opposition and lack of prerequisites in 1941. Moreover it was sustained instead of selective attacks on targets such as factories making ball-bearings, oil and fuel installations, railway junctions and the main transport arteries which would soon have, in the words of Albert Speer paralyzed the entire system of production. By spring of 1944 Sebald states, the critics had pointed out that the morale of the population was unbroken while industrial production was “impaired only marginally”.
Why then this strategy? The determinism one can trace in Sebald’s account has two phases. It is presented as the irreversible momentum of production, for a strategy preferred to alternatives. Phase one being the choice (decision-making bias) and phase two, the impossibility of a revision (cumulative causation in a system).
In reference to the historian A.J.P Taylor, Sebald gives a picture of the latter phase as:
“…an enterprise of the material and organizational dimensions of the bombing offensive, which …swallowed one third of the entire British production for war material, had such a momentum of its own that short-term corrections in course and restrictions were more or less ruled out, especially when, after three years of intensive expansion of factories and production plants, that enterprise had reached the peak of its development. Once the material was manufactured, simply letting the aircraft and their valuable freight stand idle on the airfields of eastern England ran counter to any healthy economic instinct”
Yet, Sir Arthur Harris commander-in-chief of Bomber Command was not sacked despite his “inflexible support” for a strategy that was not working. A peculiar hold on Churchill is mentioned and the following as to why his position was unassailable.
“His plan for successive devastating strikes, which he followed uncompromisingly to the end, was overwhelmingly simple in its logic, and by comparison any real strategic alternatives such as disabling the fuel supply were bound to look like mere diversionary tactics the war in the air was pure and undisguised.”
Here Daniel Kahneman’s work on biases in situations of conflict while not a study of crude options (with a simple logic) versus more decisive complicated strategies, seems to provide indirect support for the tone of inevitability in Sebald’s account. The following talk given in the Center for Study of Rationality titled “"Biased Biases: Do Cognitive Biases Give an Advantage to Hawks over Doves” lists predictable errors that favor one category of competing counsel over another. That is, if such a division of alternatives into two broad categories were possible. Outside the scope of situations tested and detailed by Kahneman his use of labels such as “hawks” and “doves” broadens the signification. Hence abuse of the sort indulged in this piece.
The alternatives documented by Sebald may then be considered as instances of these categories, in relative terms not as types but as degrees. One of which can be labeled more hawkish as it was “in perfect sympathy with the innermost principle of every war, which is to aim for as wholesale an annihilation of the enemy with his dwellings, his history, and his natural environment as can be possibly achieved”
Kahneman’s conclusion is not that hawkish advisors are necessarily wrong only that they are likely to be more persuasive than they deserve to be. Adding to biases the accumulated potential of all the capital, labor and intelligence which will then go into a certain plan, it becomes easy to agree with Alexander Kluge’s idea which Sebald quotes:
“…systematic destruction arising from the development of the means and modes of industrial production hardly seems to justify the principal of hope”.
In the lectures an interview is referred to with; Brigadier Fredrick L. Anderson of U.S. Eight Army Air Force, where he is asked the question “weather hoisting a white flag made from six sheets on the tower of St. Martin’s in good time might have prevented the bombing of the city”. In response “he points out that the bombs they had brought were, after all, “expensive items”. “in practice they couldn’t have been dropped over mountains or open country after so much labor had gone into making them at home”
The psychological determinism which may affect the choice of tactics at an earlier stage in the conflict is then overtaken by the techno-economic determinism of the war industry. The biases in turn at later stages can affect the interpretation of the outcome. The tendency therefore is not to consider revisions in tactics and onwards.
When a system’s mechanism is remotely dialectical it’s difficult to resist the temptation not to import more obfuscation. Thankfully Sebald does the kind job of telling us that Alexander Kluge captioned a photograph of a ruined city in one of his works with the following quotation from Marx.
“We see how the history of industry and the objective existence of industry have become the open book of human consciousness, human psychology perceived in sensory terms …”
This all is too easy and deliberate, decision making histories can never be reduced to an account of competing alternatives. But bias plus the momentum of production leave little elbow room to suggest "a natural history of destruction" which is really the summary of technical, organizational and political prerequisites for its unfolding.
In crystallization, assembly of initially unordered molecules is paid for by a transfer of thermal energy from the crystalline phase to the solution. To demonstrate a similar compliance with the 2nd law of thermodynamics in the reproduction of highly ordered structures an experiment closely comparable to crystallization for living organisms can be considered.
Jacques Monod, 1970, Chance and Necessity:
“We take a milliliter of water having in it a few milligrams of simple sugar, such as glucose, as well as some mineral salts containing the essential elements that enter into the chemical constituents of living organisms (nitrogen, phosphorus, sulfur, etc.). In this medium we grow a bacterium, for example Escherichia coli (length, 2 microns; weigh approximately 5×10-13 grams) inside thirty six hours the solution will contain several billion bacteria. We shall find about 40 per cent of the sugar has been converted into cellular constituents, while the remainder has been oxidized into carbon dioxide and water. By carrying out the entire experiment in calorimeter, one can draw up the thermodynamic balance sheet for the operation and determine that, as in the case of crystallization, the entropy of the system as a whole (bacteria plus medium) has increased a little more than the minimum prescribed by the 2nd law. Thus while the extremely complex system represented by the bacterial cell has not only been conserved but has multiplied several billion times, the thermodynamic debt corresponding to the operation has been duly settled.”
Monod meditates further on this phenomenon in the following lines:
“Nonetheless, something unfailingly upsets our physical intuition…Why? Because we see clearly that this process is bent or oriented in one exclusive direction: the multiplication of cells. These to be sure do not violate the laws of thermodynamics, quite the contrary.They not only obey them; they utilize them as a good engineer would, with maximum efficiency to carry out the project and bring about the “dream” (as Francois Jacob has put it) of every cell: to become two cells”
Now, recovering from that metaphor (i.e. the dream) one is left with two thoughts. The first has to do with, the cost of order or the transfer of thermal energy to the periphery. The other a bit less sound has to do with the possibilities of a transplant; as any analogy may be described as one.
Let us take a short story "The Quantity Theory of Insanity" by Will Self which I haven’t read but whose plot is relevant to the operation (transplant). A theory is put forward in the story that there is "only a fixed proportion of sanity to go round in any given society" so it follows; if you cure an asylum full of schizophrenics in Turku, a group of perfectly sane people will go crazy in Saarbrucken. Not quite the 2nd law as the system does not evolve towards a degradation of order, the sanity remains constant.
However it leads one to think of the cost of sanity/intelligence, and its relative growth in terms similar to any system of invariant replication and its energy demands. Can such metaphors be applied to information processing or the memeosphere? If codification and copying of knowledge comes at a cost is there a loss in the sum total of codified exchange and apprehension? If so where do we draw the boundaries? Which apprehending systems should we consider?
Reduction in biodiversity is also coupled by an increase in the scale and power of computing or sensory systems produced by mankind that are to measure, record, analyse, warn etc. These do not yet have the apprehending power or complexity of many life forms in tracing phenomenon and reacting. So the question is how much loss has accompanied this local increase in apprehending power or sanity in some components of the biosphere.
To further define sanity as any processing power for a purpose, I am tempted to use Gregory Bateson's definition of “information” as “a difference which makes a difference”. With a slight difference between the first difference and the second, the first implying any pattern in the universe which can be discerned or sensed the second being the significance as in “what difference does it make to …my life, survival or whatever aims a component of a system can have”.
Here it becomes a bit more tricky, as the metaphors start to distract the “…dream of every cell to become two cells” is no more conscious or deliberate than say the dream of the water pouring down a waterfall or that of a river reaching the sea. So the differences that make a difference to cellular multiplication are not objectively different than the differences in topography which create a waterfall, or are they? How much more does it matter to a cell to multiply, than it does to water under the influence of gravity to fall off some edge? This makes the earlier definition of sanity or apprehending power as the processing of a difference that makes a difference less natural or purposeful even at higher levels. I have a feeling that this line of thought can only conclude in a variety of reverse panpsychism, which will invalidate the attempted transplant.
