Thinking errors in managing athletic performance (a kind of dialogue)

1

The Coach

The man poked his head in and looked around the door. He had knocked but the person inside the office had not answered.

“What do you want?” said the annoyed voice of the person inside the office.

That voice came from a man who was sitting at his desk going over some papers. What he said was a question but the way he said it was a demand.

He was Coach McCloskey and he was a busy man, a successful man, a man who did not suffer fools lightly. Or much of anybody else for that matter.

The office Coach McCloskey sat in was small by top 1A standards. It was big enough for what needed to be done in it and and big enough to house the successful, busy, no-suffering fools coach that worked in it. But it wasn't anything spectacular, anything that befitted a man of Coach McCloskey's caliber compared to other schools.

The décor was what might be called Bauhaus institutional. Left to itself without any kind of attention paid to it, it would have easily decayed into old military drab chic. As it was, the cinder block walls were painted and clean, though the whiteness of it could be overpowering at times especially when the late afternoon sun shone into the room from the large picture window with the nice campus view. But the coach rarely noticed it. If he did, he'd just close the shades.

There was nothing much on those front and side walls, a picture here and there and some scattered paintings. These were tasteful and even interesting but a little on the sparse side as a percentage of the total square footage.

Around the desk where the coach sat, though, it was a different matter. There were pictures of family with the coach in them and pictures of vacations to exotic locations, again with the coach in them. And there were pictures of players including some signed with best wishes from some of them decked out in the jerseys of professional football teams.

These filled the walls, back of the desk and on either side for a few feet.

The desk was executive oak as well as the credenza and they both met on one side in a computer niche that contained one of those revered devices with two larges screens.

There were other touches added here and there—nothing overpowering—that showed someone with some decorative sense had had a say in what went into that around desk space.

In fact that was true. Someone with some decorative sense did have a say. It was the third Mrs. Coach McCloskey.

All in all it was cozy in that part of the office. The rest of it was just okay, nothing much to brag about. But it was the way the coach liked it. He bragged about his success and about his teams and about all the awards they had won together. He didn't need to brag in his office space.

And besides, too Wall Street a space would just get in the way. He couldn't think of any advantage it gave him meeting with prospective players in such an executive suite with expensive furnishings (even though the school would have, at least at one point, put it together for him) that a walk past the trophy case wouldn't do better. He was a coach and that other stuff seemed kind of vanity stoking—a sign of weakness to him. Besides, he'd rather have the difference show up in his paycheck, which it long since had.

“You are Coach McCloskey, right?” said the man still looking in.

“Yes,” said the coach who had set down his papers and was staring hostilely at the man.

“And?”

“And I'm supposed to see you.”

The man didn't wait for the coach to tell him to come in. He pushed through the door, crossed to one of the chairs sitting in front of the desk and sat down.

It happened so fast and so surprised the coach, who had never had his office invaded like this before, that he didn't have a chance to stop him.

No one ever did this kind of thing to Coach McCloskey.

“Wo, wo, wait!” said the coach. “Who said you could just come in here like this?”

“Yes,” said the visitor with a hint of apology in his voice, “I know this is somewhat of a surprise but I thought we ought to just get on with things. So I came over.”

“Look, whoever you are, I don't know you and I don't know what business you think you might have here but no one just barges into my office like this!

“How'd you get past my secretary?”

“Well,” said the man, “there was no one at the desk to announce me and what I have is urgent so I just took the liberty of inviting myself in.”

McCloskey leaned over to a speaker near his phone and pushed the button.

“Karen!” he said. “Karen! KAREN!”

No one answered.

“Where is that woman!” said the coach.

The coach started to get up but then looked down at his watch.

He clicked his tongue.

“Lunch!” he said as if that explained something.

He looked back at the man with a very hard look on his face as he sat back down.

“Well, you've got about ten seconds to give me a good reason for this,” he said, “or I'm just liable to bodily chuck your carcass back out of this office.”

If you looked at Coach McCloskey, examined him from head to foot, you'd see that he was mostly on the verge of going to seed. There were some soft lumps where muscle had likely once been. But there was still enough of the old athlete in there, in a fair assessment of the total man, notwithstanding the lumps, that it looked as if he could go a long way toward making good on that promise.

He tapped the desk top waiting impatiently for a good answer.

“My name is Sawyer Collins. You can call me Sawyer.

“At your service.”

Collins smiled and leaned forward with his hand extended across half the desk. It was within reaching distance of the coach but the coach did not reach for it. He did not even lean forward to attempt to reach for it. What he did do was to sit back in his high backed executive chair and get a very impressive scowl on his face.

“Okay, Mr. Sawyer Collins. I'm a very busy man and you just come in here and plop down on my chair right there without so much as a by-your-leave and I'm supposed to get some kind of thrill up my leg for that or some inkling of who you are and what this is about from your name?

“You haven't answered my question and your ten seconds are over.”

The coach started to get up.

“Well, okay,” said Collins with a smile. “I just hadn't gotten to that part yet. Just wanted to get the preliminaries out of the way first.

“I'm here because of that little incident that happened in the game this past Saturday.”

“What little incident?” said the coach still on his way up.

Collins raised his hand flattened out, extended it so that it was perpendicular to the floor and made a kind of jerked, waving motion with it, as if slapping the air.

To some neutral observer, on seeing that hand movement, it would have been extremely ambiguous at best and would most likely have conveyed no meaning whatsoever to him, but the coach, the very successful coach, the busy coach, the coach who did not suffer fools lightly, seemed to get meaning from it. What was more, though that motion seemed to be neutral in every way and couldn't have objectively been construed as any kind of a hostile shot at him, for whatever reason, with the coach at that moment, it looked like it hit some kind of a bullseye.

The coach's eyes went wide, his face became distorted—screwed up, was probably more accurate—as he slowly sat back down, all the while exhaling a long, used up breath of air. When he had settled back into the chair, he seemed to recover himself somewhat. He rolled his eyes and threw his hands up.

“That was just a misunderstanding,” he said. “What we had was simply a failure to communicate, that's all!”

“You slapped Williams.”

“Slapped? No, not slapped. It was more like a love tap! I love these players; they know I do. Sometimes I just give them a little love tap! That's all there was to that! Maybe there was some tough love wound up in it a little bit—these guys sometimes make the stupidest mistakes, and this one was a big one—cost us the game—but it's all about the love in the end.”

“It didn't look like one tap to me, coach. It was a couple of openhanded, heavy slaps that you swung out to make, right and left.

“It looked more like a one-two punch.”

“Nah, it was nothing like that!” said the coach leaning forward and quickly wiping the words Collins had just spoken from the air they had been spilled out into with his hand. “It was just a tap. He had his helmet on and I just wanted to put a punctuation mark on what I had told him. That's all!”

“You looked quite upset. Your face was red and it looked to me like the veins were sticking out on your neck—”

“No, no! That wasn't it at all! I told him what I told him. That's it.

“Maybe there was some heat in it somewhere but that was to emphasize my points. And then I just punctuated it with a little love tap.

“He had his helmet on anyway; how could I hurt him! Maybe jiggle his brains a little bit and put them back where they should have been in the first place. But nothing serious.

“The fact is that it hurt me more than it hurt him!

“But it was love. It was all about the love.”

“I don't know about that,” said Collins. “It looked pretty hard to me when I was shown the film. The president and the chancellor said it was lucky the incident wasn't caught on the network's cameras—doubly lucky because, with the stadiums as empty as they are, the camera people are looking for just about anything they can find in the downtime to make the game more interesting.

“And Covid-19 meant that the network didn't have as many people roving the sidelines as they normally do, which was a good thing. And they didn't have the numbers of people and spotters they normally do in the booth for the same reason. It looks like nobody in the booth saw it, either.

“The stands were quite empty, too, mostly. But not a peep from anywhere about it—at least as far as we know at this moment.

“You can thank Covid-19 for that.”

Collins chuckled at this thinking it was funny for some reason but the coach just scowled deeper furrows into his face.

Seeing that the humor of it did not find any correspondence in the coach, Collins cleared his throat and went on.

“They haven't talked to William's parents yet. They think they might have been at the game but they're trying to get a hold of them now to see if they can smooth things over with them—if that turns out to be necessary.

“But they did get the whole thing on film from the athletic department cameras. That was the film I saw.”

“Where'd they get them from?”

“They got them from Jack Daws.”

The coach grimaced. Jack Daws was the interim AD and he just rolled over every time the chancellor breathed. He could expect no support from that direction, for one, because Daws had no spine. For two, he was a fawning little puppy who was only interested in what advanced him and his interests.

He clucked his tongue and resumed his defense.

“It was just a misunderstanding,” he said leaning back in his chair and raising his eyes to the ceiling. What was up there that he might look at or that would care to listen to him was not apparent. But there must have been something there that needed convincing because he now made his case in that direction.

“I talked to Chet after the game. I told him, quote 'I love you, man' and he said, quote 'I love you, too, coach' and it was all fine. I think maybe I'd of rather he'd given me an 'I love you, man' back than what I got but it was all fine. Things are back the way they should be, the way they were before.

“It's all fine.”

The coach waved his hand to emphasize that point and looked back down from the ceiling at Collins.

Evidently, whatever was up in the ceiling must have taken his point. He seemed more confident at that moment.

“Well,” said Collins, “the president and the chancellor think there's a problem. They think it's fortunate that it hasn't gone public but who knows, maybe it still will. What with all this sensitivity to how people are treated these days and all the hashtags and people who aren't liked very well getting taken down for—what is it? Issues of insensitivity?—they thought that there needed to be an intervention of some kind to pinch this thing off quickly.

“Are you liked very well coach?”

Collins said this and it sounded impertinent to the coach but his tone was really one of helpfulness.

The coach responded to this by trying to get something out. But it came out as a kind of rumbled nonsense.

“But, anyway, that's why I'm here,” said Collins, ignoring the coach. “They've given you a second chance. And I'm here to help you take advantage of it.”

The phrase “second chance” was a shock to the coach. He had never heard anything about this. Why he, a successful and busy man, a man who didn't suffer fools lightly, would need to be given a second chance for anything was beyond him. And to have it communicated to him by this, this, whatever he was was just beyond belief.

He was at a loss for words over this and over everything else that had happened since that man had come in. But he succeeded, after a few aborted attempts, in getting a few out anyway.

“Why didn't they call me to tell me this?”

“Well, they both remember some, um, discussions, shall we say, that they have had with you in the recent past. They don't feel like you were as supportive of their position as they would have liked and that it wouldn't be particularly useful to attempt anything like that now not in the mood they're both in. They feel like any run-in with you will just end up provoking them and then they'll just get upset and they'd do something in the heat of the moment they couldn't back down from and it would be a mess they don't need.

“You know the drill.”

The coach didn't really know what drill Collins was talking about but there was something in him somewhere that thought it might be a good idea for him to maybe figure it out.

“It's the middle of the season,” continued Collins, “and they think it wouldn't be in the best interests of the team for anything to be done that was rash what with the crazy, messed up season, the Covid stuff, and all the rest. They don't want the team demoralized by any of it.

“You know.

“So they just sent me over and said that you should clear your schedule to meet with me. I came right over.”

“That's it?”

“That's it,” said Collins with a smile.

There had been a number of those smiles since that man had come in and the coach was thinking that he didn't particularly like that particular smile or any of the ones that had preceded it. He would have thrown him out of the office just for that smile alone on any other day but he felt he was caught at the moment and couldn't think of a way out of it right then.

“I can show you the letter authorizing me, if you'd like,” said Collins, helpfully.

He reach into his suit pocket, pulled a folded sheet of paper out and handed it across the desk.

McClosky grabbed it, unfolded it, and looked at it.

“You'll recognize the signatures, I'm sure.”

The coach did.

He gave the paper back.

“So you're supposed to help me?” he said, rallying at this for some reason.

Collins nodded.

“With what?”

“Seeing more clearly your relationship with your players and staff and how that can affect the team and your success, fitting means to ends better. Things like that.”

“And what, may I ask, gives you the credentials to help me out—assuming that I need help which I do not accept for one minute, but just for argument's sake?” said the coach trying hard not to notice another big, raging smile staring him right in his face.

“Well, I—”

“You ever coached sports before?”

“No, I—”

“Pop Warner?”

“No.”

“Junior high?”

“No.”

“High school?”

“No.”

“Junior college?”

“Look, coach, I—”

“Any college?

“I'm here to—”

“Ever played any sports?”

“With my kids. That's about it.”

“So the answer is 'no.' You have no coaching experience whatsoever—didn't even play—and yet you are sitting here with a coach, who has one of the best won/loss records in college football, and you're going to help me with player relationships and success?”

“That's right. Sent by the president and the chancellor to do just that.”

The coach didn't hear it come from Collin's mouth but he felt the words in the air:

Second chance.

It was because of the shock he still had from that phrase that he didn't get up and escort that man out of his office at that very moment.

But underneath that shock a great deal of livid was building.

“If you need a label to put on who I am, let's just say that, for our purposes here, I'm an executive coach—”

“You mean,” said the coach throwing his hands up in the air in disgust and looking up again at whatever it was in the ceiling that had given him a decent hearing the first time, “that you're one of those—what's the name?—life coaches?—that you see advertised around. The ones who're supposed to help you smooth out your life?”

The coach wiggled his fingers in the air.

“Life is too hard! Help me! Help me!” he said.

“How do you study for that?” said the coach now down again looking straight at Collins.

There was a sneer on his face overlying the continued and deepening scowl. “Is there a 'life coach' degree? Or is there a college for it like for massage therapy and cosmetology.

“Or is it that if you scratch a life coach you'll find a waiter underneath looking for a better way to make a living.”

He threw his hands into the air again.

“Spare me!”

This was said with an explosion of disgust from the coach's mouth and, though it exploded in the direction of the ceiling—he had looked up again to find whatever he could find up there—its force was directed at Collins.

“That's a life coach and about everybody and his mother offers those services,” said Collins. “Not very useful at all I grant you.

“I'm talking about an executive coach but if I were pressed to tell what it is I actually do, I'd have to say that I help people see reality. I help them see what is before their faces that they should be seeing but because of any number of things that get in the way, they can't see or won't see.”

“For business?” said the coach.

“Business, yes, but I deal with anyone in any institution who needs to make important decisions. I help them see what they should be seeing but don't.”

Collins smiled and Coach McCloskey wanted to punch him.

No love tap.

The coach didn't know what to think of this other than that he had an urge to get pugilistic with the man.

“You want to help me see what's in front of my face, do you? The problem with that is that I win. There's no problem with me or with my program. We win; end of story.

“That alone would speak for itself with any other college president and chancellor.”

“That does speak, yes,” said Collins, “But what it actually says might be something different.”

“What different? Winning is winning. It's the Holy Grail of sports and business, too, I might add. If you're a winner that is success. If you're a loser that isn't. It's failure.

“I win.”

Collins sat forward a little in his seat.

“There's an old story, coach,” he said, now sounding didactic, “about a scientist who was running an experiments on flies.

“One day he caught one that had been flying around his lab and put it in a beaker. He sealed that beaker up with a stopper.

“He waited a moment, then he quickly pulled out the stopper, so that the neck of the beaker was now open, and yelled, 'Fly!'

“The fly flew away.

“He caught that same fly again, put it in the same beaker, stopped it up, then quickly unstopped it and yelled, 'Fly!'

“And the fly flew away.

“He caught the fly again, but this time, he pulled the wings off before he put it back in the beaker. He then stopped it up, quickly unstopped it and yelled, 'Fly!'

“This time, the fly didn't fly away.

“He stopped it again, unstopped it and yelled, 'Fly!' but the fly still didn't fly away.

“The scientist then put away the equipment, went over to his notes and wrote: 'When you pull the wings off a fly, it becomes deaf.'”

Abstraction and context

So, I gather that making a decision based on theory is abstract while making and applying the decision would be context. I thought of an example after reading his post. The upper management makes the decisions about packaging and maintenance of the Client's database which is an abstract view of the implementation. But when we, as database analysts, apply the strategy we find out different results and that is contextual.

Would that be correct?

You are finding out what actually works. We tend to think that what upper management is doing is analysis and it is. But it is a certain type of analysis based on abstract methods of seeing reality. Numbers are the one that come readily to mind. Analysis is based on numbers in the offices above, more often than not, and the assumption is that those numbers represent reality and represent the whole of reality. But they are abstractions only. Do they never match reality? No, they can but some times or at least they don't represent the whole of reality. The ones though who are on the front lines are in contact with that reality and can see readily if it will work or not. They are the ones in context.

Reminds me of the old story of a man who is out walking at night and comes upon a woman on her hands and knees under a street light evidently looking for something.

"What's the matter," he asks.

"I lost my ring and I am trying to find it," she says.

"Well, where exactly did you lose it?" he asks.

"Over there by that bench," she says pointing to a bench 30 feet away.

The man amazed says, "Well, why are you looking for it over here?"

"Because the light is better."

A lot of design considerations are made in the abstract. Computer modeling and simulations have narrowed the gap some between conception and reality but it still exists.20

The Challenger Commission investigated the accident of the shuttle by that name but a lot of it was intended as a whitewash of NASA. The problem was that they appointed a man named Feynman, a physicist and Nobel Prize winner. The panel was given all the statistics on the O-ring seal, all the test data on it and the gist of it all was that the O-ring could not have failed.

Feynman took a piece of that O-ring, put a clamp on it and placed it in a cup of water sitting on the table in front of him. He took it out a few minutes later and you could see with your eyes how the O-ring would not return to shape at temperatures near freezing. It was that ability, the ability to return to shape, that the shuttle depended on to seal the rocket boosters. Feynman showed the world that it could not do it.20

What the panel had been presented were abstractions, Feynman gave them context.

We shouldn't overplay the context issue because you cannot ever come to any generalizable conclusion if you do not engage in some abstraction. But there is really no risk that people will think purely contextually; we are made up to think abstractly. The problem is that we tend to take this too far along the continuum and prefer abstractions to anything else. In other words, the risk is that we might think purely abstractly instead. But thinking abstractly in context would be the ideal.

If you can see when you do it it will be a real help in your thinking.

Abstraction and context continued

Scott

The Feynman and O-ring illustration quite fit the explanation of the difference between abstraction and contextual analysis. But is it possible to use the 2 approaches in combination?

It is possible if you think of them as falling along a continuum with abstraction being at one end and context being at the other. The further along you go in one direction the weaker the one is over the other. The problem is that we have gone to far in the direction of abstraction.

It might be put this way: Generalize from context. That would mean looking at the context and generalizing from there. Or maybe this way: Check your work with the facts on the ground. That would mean making your assessments with abstract methods but then checking the results against what is actually happening on the ground.

Problem with that though is that you the result can be so out of context that there might be a tendency to look for facts or use what are essentially assumptions to fit it.

With some disciplines, abstract methods are all you have. But with others, there is a lot you can learn by actually going and looking or doing an interview or by watching how people interact with the thing. You can learn a whole lot about things by just doing that.

What we know

How do we know anything we know.

Do you actually know what you think you know or are you relying on what someone else knows about the subject? Do we have to be there to actually know something?

You could take this skepticism a bit further along couldn't you? Will the sun come up tomorrow? If you say yes and your criteria for knowing something is that you are there and experience it yourself, then how could you say that it will? You aren't there in the future right now to be able to make that statement are you? And if you say that the past is the key and that you were there for past incidences of the sun coming up, how is it that past incidences of a thing happening necessarily means that the thing will happen again? If a chicken is fed every day at a chicken farm, wouldn't his expectation be that the very next day he will be fed again? That day just might be the dressing out the meat day--the kill it for food day. This is the induction problem that Hume identified.

This is a problem not only for history but also for just about every piece of knowledge that we say we know. Was the atom split? Do you really know? Have you ever seen one split? How could you tell if an atom is split even if you were there to experience it? And if you see the mushroom cloud from an atomic explosion, an explosion, by the way,which not many have seen in person, can you be sure that it is because of the splitting of the atom? Aren't you taking people's word for that? The same thing can be said about: anatomy. How many have ever seen a human heart in person--pictures don't count because they can be falsified; geography--how do you know that there is such a thing as a France or a Russia?; the birth of babies you haven't seen yourself; illness--"That cold is caused by a virus" says the doctor. How do you know? Have you ever seen a virus? Does a microscope count? Isn't there an assumption that the microscope actually lets you see microscopically small things? Do you know that is true? And even if you have seen a virus--how do you know that the cold is caused by that virus or a virus?;political history--how do you know that George Washington defeated the British, that there was a Revolutionary War in the first place, or that there was even a "British" or a George Washington? His home is there with his pictures in it but how do you know that it was really his home? or how do you know there was a Constitutional Convention or that there was even a signing of the Declaration of Independence at all? If we have a document does that prove that it was in fact signed as is purported to have happened?; psychology--"The brain is the seat of the mind." Have you ever seen a brain, in person that is?--pictures can be falsified and if you see a brain without having seen it in relation to a person, that is, having been exposed from a cutting into the skull, how do you know that it in fact comes from the skull?; love--how do you know that your husband or wife loves you? You can't get into their minds can you to know?; or any other thing that we do not know from firsthand experience, which is about everything we know.

The point is that we have to rely on others, and to some extent on the honesty of others for the very knowledge that we have. If we had to rely on firsthand experience for our knowledge, that knowledge would be very limited.

This means that all of the information that you have learned in school has been information that you yourselves have not verified or experienced firsthand. All of it. (If you say, "the same thing happened to me at work that I learned about in class" is that the same thing as being able to generalize about it? The knowledge you have learned is generalized and generalizable to most other situations. If you weren't there for these other situations then you can't say firsthand.)

What does this mean? Does it mean that we should discount everything we know that we have not experienced? No, but it might mean that we should not treat everything we know as the once-and-for-all truth. We should test what we know as we go along. If it keeps happening, or recurring then we can be more confident that it is the case. Or if it keeps showing up we can be more confident.

Of bullet holes, bombers and survival bias

It was World War II and Europe was under Nazi control. The American military and the Allies were trying to destroy the German industrial might in a bid to hasten the end of the war so bombers struck targets from the air.

But they couldn't fly into German controlled airspace unopposed. German gunners shot to kill and enemy fighters, closer to their supply lines and able to fly multiple sorties against the same Allied bombing run, closed with them in the air. With bombing missions pushing further and further into Germany, they exceeded the ability of Allied fighters to escort them in and back out. This left only the guns they had on board to defend them.

As a result, these bombers were shot down at high rates. With some missions, it was as high as forty percent.

This was day of Strategic Daylight Bombing and it was dangerous. In its beginnings, in 1942, it quickly became apparent that it was statistically impossible for flight crews to complete twenty-five missions over Europe before being shot down.

That was too much so the military had a problem: They had to better protect these bombers.

But how could they do it?

A long range fighter would be a solution. But they wouldn't have one until later in the war with the introduction of the P-51.

So that was out.

That left only one other option: Armor.

Armor the planes.

This was a simple sounding fix. But it wasn't simple at all. It had problems.

First of all, you couldn't just armor the whole airplane. That made it more vulnerable. Full armor made the planes heavy and heavy meant they couldn't maneuver as well to take evasive action. And, since that amount of armor wouldn't make the bombers bulletproof or flak proof anyway, only more bullet and flak resistant, that meant that enemy gunners and fighter planes could get a bead on them, keep them in their sights for much longer, and concentrate their fire. The result would be more downed planes anyway.

The second problem was that these heavier bombers would use more fuel which meant less range. That increased the risk of ditching the plane before they made it home. Or there would be more of a trade off with the third problem.

Payload. Heavier bombers couldn't carry as many bombs. Less bombs carried were less bombs dropped on the targets so more planes would have to be flown or more missions sent to get a particular job done. And if payload had to be sacrificed to take on more fuel, even less bombs would be available.

The end result would be more planes sent out and more planes shot down.

So armoring the whole plane wasn't going to do it.

But what about armoring parts of the planes? What if they could find out which parts were taking the most hits and armor those? They could armor only those parts that needed it, the parts that were sustaining the most damage, the most vulnerable parts. Doing this would protect the plane and not add all that much weight so they wouldn't need to sacrifice maneuverability, payload or fuel consumption.

But which parts?

They didn't know but they had some data.

They had the planes that returned.

They could examine the damage on the planes that came back and see where they took the most hits. Those would be the spots to armor.

That's what the military researchers went out and did. They examined the returning planes and found that the greatest number of bullet holes and shrapnel damage were to parts of the fuselage and to the wings and tail.

That was where they'd add the armor.

They took this assessment to the top brass. But the top brass wanted confirmation. They wanted the Statistical Research Group (SRG) to weigh in on it.

So the researchers took their data and their conclusions to the Statistical Research Group, to the man many considered to be the smartest of the smart people in that group.

That man was Abraham Wald.

Abraham Wald was a Jewish mathematician who was born in what is now Romania of the European Union but what was then the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He went to the University of Vienna for his academic studies and earned a degree in mathematics.

But it was the 1930s and Austria, like the rest of the world, was in economic distress. Things were tough all around and jobs were hard to come by. But what made it worse for him was that he was both a foreigner and a Jew.

German ideas of racial superiority and purity marching hand in hand with German nationalism “uber alles” were making an appearance then and anti-Semitism had had some respectability since at least Wagner in the 1800s. And maybe even before that.

There were some in Austria at the time who looked to Germany for their inspiration and many of them aspired to unify the country with the German fatherland so anti-Semitism was rife.

That made things difficult for Abraham Wald. But a friend who worked in the Austrian Institute for Economic Research, intervened. This friend, Oskar Morgenstern, who would later immigrate to the United States and help develop game theory, put in a good word for him and the Institute hired Wald.

In 1938, when the Germans invaded, Wald fled to the U.S. to escape Nazi persecution, a persecution that would begin in the ghettos and end for millions of Jews in the concentration camps with the Nazis' unspeakable Final Solution.

He took a position first at an economic institute in Colorado Springs and then left there for a position at Columbia University in New York.

When World War II broke out, Wald became a member of the Statistical Research Group.

The Statistical Research Group was a cluster of very smart people gathered together to help solve the problems of war fighting. According to Jordan Ellenburg, the SRG “where Wald spent much of World War II, was a classified program that yoked the assembled might of American statisticians to the war effort —something like the Manhattan Project, except the weapons being developed were equations, not explosives.”

A number of other groups were housed in the same building with the SRG. They worked on things like the optimum maneuvers for fighter pilots in a dogfight, protocols for strategic bombing, Columbia's part of the atom bomb project, among other things.

Pretty important stuff in their own right.

But, according to Ellenburg: “[T]he SRG was the most high-powered, and ultimately the most influential, of any of these groups...

“It was the 'the most extraordinary group of statisticians ever organized, taking into account both number and quality...' This was a group where Milton Friedman, the future Nobelist in economics, was often the fourth-smartest person in the room.

“The smartest person in the room was usually Abraham Wald. Wald...functioned as a kind of mathematical eminence to the group. Still an 'enemy alien,' he was not technically allowed to see the classified reports he was producing; the joke around SRG was that the secretaries were required to pull each sheet of notepaper out of his hands as soon as he was finished writing on it” because he wasn't cleared to read it.

It was to this Abraham Wald that the military took their conclusions and supporting data.

Wald looked at the data and came back with his own recommendation.

It was not the recommendation the military was looking for.

Wald told them they had got it wrong, that they were going to armor the wrong parts of the bombers. They were going to armor where the bullet holes were. But, he said, they should do the opposite; they should armor the places where the bullets holes weren't.

The places where the bullets holes weren't? This was a stupid answer. These military men had the data and knew which parts of the airplanes were sustaining the most damage—how could they possibly be wrong about that?

They were wrong, Wald insisted, because they were operating under an assumption that was wrong. They were assuming that the returning airplanes were a representative sample of all the planes that had sustained damage. But that just wasn't true. What they actually had was only a sample of those planes that had returned, the planes that had survived.

These were the planes that had been hit but were still able to make it back home. The data they had came only from those planes.

But the planes that had not survived, the ones that had been so damaged by enemy fire that they could not return?

According to Wald, they had sustained damage in the places where the bullet holes were not found on the returning planes. If you could sample these planes, the downed planes, he argued, you'd find that the damage would be on the other parts of the plane, the cockpit and the engines.

The military had in fact made an assumption when they thought they were relying on facts and that assumption wasn't reasonable. The enemy wasn't shooting at and hitting only the wings, fuselage and tail of these bombers. This was especially true of the anti-aircraft fire which was designed to explode and rip the plane open with shrapnel. They were shooting at the planes themselves, at the whole plane, not specific parts of it. That fact would have created a more even distribution of bullet holes and shrapnel damage across the whole airplane if the downed planes could be examined.

Armor the places where the bullet holes weren't. That was Wald's recommendation and he ended up convincing the military. They armored where the bullets weren't, the engines and cockpit, and the purported result was that more planes survived.

What Wald saw was what is called survival bias. Survival bias is the error that occurs in thinking when attention is focused only on the people or things that have crossed a certain selection threshold; everything else is simply ignored. Only those that cross that threshold are considered relevant to the issue, not those that do not cross it, that do not survive.

Survival bias is a cognitive bias, a bias that can skew the results of critical thinking. It not only affects the military but it can bias any thinking in any area. That means it's a potential problem for business, manufacturing, finance (including personal finance), economics, investments, marketing, the study of history, medicine, and the fields of architecture and construction, as well as any attempts to enlighten you about the habits of highly successful people, for instance.

But notice what Wald did here. He saw the survival bias but to find a solution to the military's problem he had to make some assumptions himself. The military's assumption wasn't any good but he himself couldn't get away without making assumptions either.

His assumptions, however, were more reasonable.

Let's look at them.

The first assumption he made was that the greater number of planes were being downed by enemy fire rather than by mechanical failure or pilot error. In a war where the enemy was shooting back this was a reasonable assumption. It was more likely that enemy fire was the cause of the downed airplanes and not a failure of that plane's systems or pilot mistakes.

Wald's second assumption was that the bullet holes would be more evenly distributed along all parts of the plane if all the planes could be examined.

Again this was a reasonable assumption. It's like I said before, the gunners were shooting at the planes not at specific parts of the planes. That would mean that bullet holes would be found all over if the planes were considered in the aggregate.

Without both of these assumptions, Wald couldn't have come up with an answer. This just goes to show that assumptions can be useful as long as they are made knowingly and they are made with the best approximation of reality that you can come up with at the time. But assumptions are often rejected as something that will only make an ass out of you and me.

Don't believe it. But we'll talk about this more later.

For now, though, count the bullet holes. But make sure you don't just count the ones that survived.

I'm Scott Clark. And this has been On Thinking.

Provisional answers, decision-making and over-analysis Part II

Part I

If you are looking to establish what is the once-and-for-all truth of a thing, you will be waiting around forever. If you are looking to make the best decision possible, you will take the information available, the best information available, and make a decision based on that. But you will realize that that decision is provisional, that it is subject to change when better information comes along. The good thinker will be ready to make the change when that better information comes along.

The other problem comes with the fact that there is no way to decide one solution is better than another in the abstract. The trash bin of history is full of ideas that looked very good on paper and that were even brainstormed and had the support of smart people. But in the end how do you know that it is any better than any other idea that might have been thought up? On paper, the arguments can be made and those arguments can be extremely rational. But the only way you can tell is if it actually works on the ground or when you "fire it up." That means that good critical thinking and good solutions are always made with an eye on the ground or, to put it another way, with an eye to context. If it doesn't work in reality, or in the reality you are working with (the market, the environment, etc.) it is not a good idea no matter who was behind it at first, no matter the brain power that went into it at first and no matter how much money it took to come up with at first. If it does not work on the ground or in context, it is a bad idea. Period.

This may seem to be obvious but again, history is full of ideas that looked good in the brainstorming sessions and worked out wonderfully on paper but crashed and burned when they were implemented.

Isn't that something we won't be able to figure out until we actually fire the thing up? We cannot completely tell that yes. But there is a lot we can understand about it even in the developmental stages if we do keep the context in mind from the start.

Provisional answers, decision-making and over-analysis Part I

When you push people to think critically, which I tend to do both my students and those in business, there are questions that tend to come up. By critical thinking, I mean everything being subject to evaluation and reevaluation a point made in a few posts already. There is no final answer in this way of thinking, there are only provisional answers. But students and businessmen, who aren’t used to thinking this way, come back with a question about over-analysis. Is it possible? Isn’t that a bad thing? Here’s my answer:

What about a tendency to overanalyze? Doesn't any push to think critically mean that people will be prone to overanalyze things? Won't people be more likely to overanalyze if they are pushed to think critically about the issues? And is this a good thing?

My position is that you can't really overanalyze a thing. If you use analysis, it is the strength of the evidence that is the issue and the strength of the conclusions based on that evidence and not anything else. When the term over-analysis is used, people are really saying something like "second guess." This is really a lack of confidence in the analysis that has been made, which can be a problem and is a bigger problem with the argument I make about the change in what are considered to be facts. If facts have a tendency to change, which they do, how then can I be confident that the conclusion I make will hold up?

The way around this is to say that it holds up now if it is based on the best possible evidence and analysis. That it might not hold up later is simply an invitation to look for information that falsifies the position that you have taken now. Companies should do that anyway and people like Tom Peters have been shouting at the top of their lungs for years for companies to do this. But what actually happens is that a position is taken that hardens into something close to a fundamental truth about the nature of the universe and is only revisited when there is a downturn in business (or a defeat on the battlefield.) Not a good way to manage.

A good thinker however will be looking for that information which will contradict the position already taken. When that information is found the conclusion can be drawn based on that new information and a course correction made. But isn't that new information subject to the same defect that it might later be contradicted by something else? Yes, but that simply means that the thinker must be thinking all the time and be constantly on the lookout for better information. That makes thinking critically one of endless effort. And that is one reason why people don't want to do it.

Part II

What do we know--and when did we know it?

When someone tries to prove something to me and I don't agree I always ask "Were you there? Was I there?" If we were not there to experience the facts I suppose it is simply an assumption.

You could take that skepticism a bit further along couldn't you? Will the sun come up tomorrow? If you say yes and your criteria for knowing something is that you are there and experience it yourself, then how could you say that it will? You aren't there in the future right now to be able to make that statement are you? (And if you say that the past is the key and that you were there for past incidences of the sun coming up, how is it that past incidences of a thing happening necessarily means that the thing will happen again? If a chicken is fed every day at a poultry farm, wouldn't his expectation be that the very next day he will be fed again? That day just might be the dressing out the meat day. This is the induction problem that Hume identified. And, by the way, how many times have you actually seen the sun come up?) If I were to ask you if the sun will come up tomorrow in the Ukraine, could you tell me it will based on your experience? Or will you even be able to say that I am in Ukraine or that there is even a Ukraine at all?

This is the problem not only for history but also for just about every piece of knowledge that we say we know. Was the atom split? Do you really know? Have you ever seen one split? How could you tell if an atom is split even if you were there to experience it? And if you see the mushroom cloud from an atomic explosion, an explosion, by the way, which not many have seen in person, can you be sure that it is because of the splitting of the atom? Aren't you taking people's word for that? The same thing can be said about: anatomy (how many have ever seen a human heart in person--pictures don't count because they can be falsified); geography (how do you know that there is such a thing as a France or a Russia, even if you are there on the ground?); the birth of babies you haven't seen yourself; illness ("That cold is caused by a virus" says the doctor. How do you know? Have you ever seen a virus? Does a microscope count? Is it a direct experience? Isn't there an assumption that the microscope actually lets you see microscopically small things? Do you know that is true from your experience? And even if you have seen a virus how do you know that the cold is caused by that virus or a virus?); political history (how do you know that George Washington defeated the British, that there was a Revolutionary War in the first place, or that there was even a "British" or a George Washington? His home is there with his pictures in it but how do you know that it was really his home? or how do you know there was a Constitutional Convention or that there was even a signing of the Declaration of Independence at all? If we have a document does that prove that it was in fact signed as is purported to have happened?); psychology ("The brain is the seat of the mind." Have you ever seen a brain, in person that is?--pictures can be falsified and if you see a brain without having seen it in relation to a person, that is, having been exposed from a cutting into the skull, how do you know that it in fact comes from the skull?); love (how do you know that your husband or wife loves you? You can't get into their minds can you to know?); or any other thing that we do not know from firsthand experience, which is about everything we know.

The point is that we have to rely on others and, to some extent, on the honesty of others for the very knowledge that we have. If we had to rely on firsthand experience for it, that knowledge would be severely limited.

All of the information that you have learned in school, for example, has been information that you yourselves have not verified or experienced firsthand. All of it. (If you say, "the same thing happened to me at work that I learned about in class" is that the same thing as being able to generalize about it? The knowledge you have learned is generalized and generalizable to most other situations. If you weren't there for these other situations then you can't say firsthand.)

If that sounds a lot like a sort of faith, guess what? It is impossible to be an absolute skeptic and learn. You must have faith in someone's abilities or someone's knowledge or his truthfulness to start learning in the first place. Every discipline, including science, requires the learner to suspend skepticism and to accept things because "they just are" for the beginner to begin learning. In my critical thinking class, I take the position that we are a little too believing in our school experience, believing too much in the absolute nature of our knowledge and our discipline and our instructors, for our own good. This is because knowledge tends to change quite a bit even in the sciences. But the fact is that it is believing nonetheless.

The truth of the matter-- Part III

Part I

I am not saying that there is no reality. Far from it. As a matter of fact, any of these supposed conundrums that philosophy types throw up from time to time disappear when you look at things from this, a more pragmatic, point of view. "If a tree falls in a forest with no one around, does it make a sound?" Stump ya'? It shouldn't. How do you define "sound"? If you define it as the creation of differential air pressure without any effect on the eardrum, then there is sound. But if you define it as the workings of that air pressure on the eardrum, then there is no sound because there would be no eardrum to sense it. The problem is the attempt to find a position from which there is an absolute perspective and that is something we cannot do and cannot know. (That is also the problem with the argument that the sun does not rise.)

My point is to take the assumption and reason through it to determine if what underlies it is valid. If it is, put it aside for another day--it still remains an assumption--to examine it in the light of better evidence. This will make you a good critical thinker and an asset to a company (or to any other organization you might be a part of) that might be prone to lurch from one fad to the next as the next comes out. A critical thinker like this can steady the ship.

The truth of the matter-- Part II

Part I

The problem is that each of these programs (or points of view) replaced a program that itself was the once-and-for-all truth of the matter. This should give us pause. Each of the programs that are now in use replaced some other program that was considered to be the truth before but now is not. So why do we believe that the new program is now the truth? There are cultural reasons for why, some of it having to do with recency--what is newer is better, an unconscious analogy to evolution and to its child, progress. But there is no more reason to accept uncritically the new than there was to accept the old the same way. In science the new might address more data and that is a good thing, but to accept what is promoted now as the once-and-for-all-, everywhere-and-everyplace-in-the-universe-, kind-of-truth isn't sufficiently skeptical to be of any long-term use. And for those who do accept it uncritically and apply it to every circumstance and to every scenario, there is little critical thinking going on to do this. Someone else supplies the thinking; you just apply it. No heavy lifting.

That your eyes may be blue is a truth but it is a truth itself that is provisional. To say that your eyes are blue under any and all circumstances, everywhere and anywhere in the universe, you of course could not do. That makes it an assumption if there is an attempt to extend it to other circumstances. But in the context in which you assert it, it is the truth of the matter.

I once went the rounds with a student, about whether the sun comes up. He said that it is in fact stationary, that the earth revolves around it, so it doesn't "come up" at all. My point was that it does but only from a specific point of view, not from all possible points of view. In fact, from a galactic point of view, the sun is not stationary but moves along with the other solar systems in the fringe along with us at a certain speed and direction. And from a universe perspective, the sun doesn't move in that same direction and with that same speed. In other words, it is perfectly true to say that the sun does something from a particular point of view and that is the reason why saying it rises is perfectly legitimate, from our point of view.

Part III

The truth of the matter-- Part I

There are some things that could be considered indisputable but there are quite a lot of others that we rely on that are entirely disputable. We accept them as facts because they have always been accepted as facts. My point, and it is a point of others make who make scads and scads of money for saying it, is that we take entirely too many things as fact that are not. This is true a lot in business. Someone--a trendsetter usually-- says that using teams in business is the way to profitability, so everyone moves to using teams in their business. It becomes the new truth and everyone acts as if it is the once-and-for all truth. But there are a lot of studies out that say a reliance on teams is misplaced and can consume assets of a company that might better be spent elsewhere. But no one listens because the truth has already been established.

Or someone says that Six Sigma is the way to increase the profitability of a company and that GE had a turnaround in profitability because of it. So now everyone moves to Six Sigma as the new once-and-for-all truth and apply it to their business. But again, there are some problems with that that have been raised which suggests a wholesale adoption of Six Sigma might not be the best thing for a company. Six Sigma however is the new truth so any criticism will not be heard.

And there are many other programs and positions taken in business, government, the military and other organizations that are the same. They represent the once-and-for-all truth. And this is even true for science, a discipline that is supposed to give us the once-and-for-all truth.

Part II

A FAQ

What is this place (he says and his own words echo back to him)?

This place is a place for some thinking on thinking.

What kind of thinking?

The only kind there is. It tends to have a first name these days--"critical"--but it is the same it has always been. We will make that point here more than once I imagine.

Why the reference to Prometheus? Didn't he bring fire to humans? He wasn't known for thinking was he, like Socrates was? Why use him and not call this "Socrates' Brain" or something like that? Doesn't Prometheus stand these days for technology and maybe a loss of innocence? Why use him?

You're right, he isn't known as the thinker in history. And of course he is a myth which most likely means he was a real person faced with real problems whose life was mythologized. But that aside, the reference is there for a reason. It is a kind of a label for the type of thinking that ought to be happening but isn't. That will probably be clear some time around here. But until then, this is all your gonna get.

So, it's philosophy huh? In other words, things will get muddier and muddier the more they are talked about?

I don't think so. My approach to thinking is highly pragmatic and more down to earth than philosophical. And I think it a good antidote to what is currently being served up in the schools of the academy. They pump out a lot of management professionals that think an awful lot and put out an awful lot of paper, but not much real thinking is going on. I hope to be able to show this here.

So no gobbledygook here?

Some of it might sound like gobbledygook but that will be mostly about the underpinnings of thinking and serve as a way to get back to first principles, to the foundations of thinking, so we can clear away all the brush. The rest will be quite practical.

So who is this for?

Anybody who thinks. Since I am a business consultant, I might tend to favor more thinking about business issues. But it also applies to the military, to government policy makers, to anybody who needs to think and think clearly. And that is everybody.

So practical, clear and no confusion here? That's what we'll get?

That's it.

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