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Why Being Wrong Makes Humans So Smart
Hugh Pickens sends in an excerpt in last week's Boston Globe from Kathryn Schulz's book Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error. "The more scientists understand about cognitive functioning, the more it becomes clear that our capacity to make mistakes is utterly inextricable from what makes the human brain so swift, adaptable, and intelligent. Rather than treating errors like the bedbugs of the intellect — an appalling and embarrassing nuisance we try to pretend out of existence — we need to recognize that human fallibility is part and parcel of human brilliance. Neuroscientists increasingly think that inductive reasoning undergirds virtually all of human cognition. Humans use inductive reasoning to learn language, organize the world into meaningful categories, and grasp the relationship between cause and effect. Thanks to inductive reasoning, we are able to form nearly instantaneous beliefs and take action accordingly. However, Schulz writes, 'The distinctive thing about inductive reasoning is that it generates conclusions that aren't necessarily true. They are, instead, probabilistically true — which means they are possibly false.' Schulz recommends that we respond to the mistakes (or putative mistakes) of those around us with empathy and generosity and demand that our business and political leaders acknowledge and redress their errors rather than ignoring or denying them. 'Once we recognize that we do not err out of laziness, stupidity, or evil intent, we can liberate ourselves from the impossible burden of trying to be permanently right. We can take seriously the proposition that we could be in error, without deeming ourselves idiotic or unworthy.'"
This was foreseen by Laurence Peter as "in a hierarchy every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence." [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Principle]
>>>It's pretty obvious that BP didn't intend to cause a spill.
Is it? I'm hearing stories coming-out where engineers wrote e-mails warning this blowout would happen. But the managers, based-upon their vast PoliSci degree knowledge, pushed forward anyway with drilling. Later engineers' emails read like this: "I told you this would fucking happen."
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
I put err in quotes because if they are doing something wrong purposely with evil intent, it's not an error.
which is totally what she said
That's something that computers cannot do (at least not yet).
Wake up and smell the coffee:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naive_Bayes_classifier
Also, search for Machine Learning, Statistical Learning Theory, Artificial Intelligence, Neural Networks, Fuzzy Logic, Support Vector Machines, etc.
Well, not exactly. The difference between the Peter Principle and the Dilbert Principle is that the Peter Principle has to do with the promotion of people who are competent at their current job, while the Dilbert Principle is concerned with the promotion of people who are incompetent at their current job.
If you actually read "The Peter Principle" (which is quite funny as well as insightful), you'll find out that Lawrence Peter describes this phenomenon as "Percussive Sublimation" (a.k.a. being kicked upstairs). He also describes one case in which the company in question, who's operations were based in LA created a new "Head Office" in New York and promoted all the useless people to the "Head Office". As he describes it, the people in the Head Office are busy drafting memos, scheduling meetings, conferring with each other, etc, while everyone back in LA actually gets the work done without having to worry about all the drones.
I am officially gone from
Mark Twain disagrees. http://www.crossmyt.com/hc/linghebr/awfgrmlg.html
I still cannot find the droids I am looking for...
Or deliberately ignoring your own engineers saying, "This is a bad idea. The wellhead will blow out."
Nobody said that, and if they thought it they had the authority and the duty to stop the operation. I work as a contractor for BP, and they pound it into your head over and over that everyone has the authority and obligation to stop a job if they think it is unsafe. It is one of BP's eight "Golden Rules" of safety. Everyone on-site - BP employee or not - has this authority and duty, it is a condition of employment for BP and all its contractors. If there were engineers who believed the wellhead would blow out because of the course they were taking, they should be held liable for the deaths of their coworkers, because it was their job to stop it, especially if management thought the job was safe.
To be clear, blow outs happen. They are a fact of life in the oil industry, and to think you will be able to prevent them 100% of the time is idiotic. From what I've heard so far, most everything that happened on that rig was within industry standards, and while hindsight makes it clear there were some serious mistakes there, those mistakes were not at all obvious at the time.
That's why they invented Blow-Out Preventors, they are specifically designed to prevent exactly this type of catastrophe, and they are installed on every single well in the gulf (and any other off-shore rig). This is where the real problem happened. It seems that the combination of pipe and BOP were not conducive to actually sealing the leak, and this is a serious error. The cost issue is somewhat of a red herring. The three easiest ways to get funding at BP for a project are safety and compliance issues, environmental issues, and production issues, in that order. Among these, BP will try to get the most "bang for their buck" on any given project. This usually means completing the task at the lowest possible cost. That's where it bit them this time - the low cost option is normally fine, but obviously under 5,000 feet it is not acceptable. That was not known before hand (though most companies do go with the more expensive option in this case, just to be safe), and in fact the US Government signed off on everything BP, Anadarko, Haliburton, and TransOcean did every step of the way. BP did nothing without approval from regulators, which is how all oil fields operate. Everything must be in compliance, and everything at the DeepWater rig was (at least according to MMS at the time).
As always happens after a catastrophe, industry standards will be changed, and the initial blow out will be less likely. This will always be their though, and the BOP's are designed to stop that.
Security is mostly a superstition... Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. - Helen Keller
That's a really poor way to look at it, since you're basing the vertical scale based on the one wealthiest person, throwing off the scale of the rest of your graph making it impossible to estimate an integral. Play with the income tax stats yourself. In 2007:
The lower half(below $40k) representing 45.8% of taxpayers accounted for 9.1% of taxable income, and 5.6% of income tax revenue.
The top half ($40k-$1 mil), representing 53.2% of taxpayers accounted for 70.4% of taxable income, and 58.3% of income tax revenue.
The upper crust (over $1 mil) are 0.9% of taxpayers and accounted for 20.5% of taxable income, and 36% of income tax revenue.
So the bulk of income tax revenue comes from the moderately wealthy, those making $40k-$1 mil.* Arguing that the wealthiest individual doesn't pay enough, as your l-curve site does, and using that as a reason to raise income taxes on the moderately wealthy doesn't really make a lot of sense since the people you're proposing to raise taxes on aren't the wealthiest individual. Cranking up the tax rate on people with incomes over $10 mil (a "merely" 33-foot tall stack of $100 bills 0.72 inches from the goal line according to your site) may make you feel better, but it won't increase income tax revenue significantly since they only represent 8.2% of taxable income and 9.8% of current income tax revenue. It's very difficult to raise income tax revenue significantly without dipping into the lower-upper class (to $100k as Obama campaigned on) and upper-middle class ($40k-$99k). (And no, arguing that they're using tax dodges so their gross income is much higher than their taxable income doesn't work either. I ran those numbers as well and the people with the biggest ratio of gross to taxable income were in the $4k-$12k range. Those earning $1+ mil had the smallest ratio. Apparently the AMT is working.)
*(The cutoffs are somewhat arbitrary; I chose them because they broke up taxpayers into roughly 50% blocks. Feel free to pick $30k or $50k or whatever you like from the IRS figures and run the numbers yourself. The median seems to be around $45k.)