Clocks and clouds

Jonah Lehrer:

Karl Popper, the great philosopher of science, once divided the world into two categories: clocks and clouds. Clocks are neat, orderly systems that can be solved through reduction; clouds are an epistemic mess, "highly irregular, disorderly, and more or less unpredictable." The mistake of modern science is to pretend that everything is a clock, which is why we get seduced again and again by the false promises of brain scanners and gene sequencers. We want to believe we will understand nature if we find the exact right tool to cut its joints. But that approach is doomed to failure. We live in a universe not of clocks but of clouds.

Hat tip: Richard Oliver

Most of our problems today are "Complex" and "Cloudlike" - so much if our grief and trouble is seeing them as Simple and Clocklike - The Early Years Initiative for instance

The Political Forecasting Unit 'polling tracker' has the Conservatives on 34 per cent, the Liberal Democrats on 30 per cent and Labour on 27 per cent.

Assuming a uniform national swing, the Conservatives would win 262 seats in the House of Commons, Labour would win 256 seats, and the Liberal Democrats 101 seats.

This would leave the Conservatives 64 short of an overall majority. The markets agree that no one party is likely to win a majority in the House of Commons.

The polling tracker is based on recent surveys by different polling organisations, and is adjusted so that the more recent the survey the more weight is attached to the vote shares.

There is also some statistical smoothing which has the effect that outliers or vote shares that diverge most from the general consensus are allocated less weight.

Applying a more sophisticated seats projection methodology, termed ANS (Adjusted National Swing), which allows for the differential impact of swing on different seats, the Political Forecasting Unit projects the following scenario if the election were held today:

Conservatives: 275 seats;
Labour: 234 seats;
Liberal Democrat: 106 seats;
Others: 35 seats;

Here are the current polling results for the UK election. Now look at the seats that such a result would drive. Doesn't make any sense does it?

In Canada we have the same situation with three parties and an emergent Green Party. But the system tends to give the party with a lead a majority when in fact most of the country wants something else.

The result is that I think we lose faith in the system. The irony for me is that when out of power all want PR but in power the party does not.

Maybe in the UK there will be enough "out" to vote PR in?

But that will lead to chaos, many say. What we need is decisive government!

I don't think so. The truth is that we live in a very complex time where the answers are not clear. Where in fact the questions are not even clear. Take immigration in the US as an example.

The simple answer is get rid of the illegals. OK so who is up for deporting 11 - 14 million people? What would that mean? Mean not only to those that are on the "Transport" but to the economy - who will pluck your chickens, make your hotel bed, drive your cab? But also to the ethos of America? To simply deport illegals will demand that the nation become like Germany in the Nazi regime where race will drove everything? But then what about the illegals - can they just stay? What does that mean too?

There is no simple answer. Certainly no answer that is like the one that the Governor of Arizona juist made into law - the Nazi/Race/ID Wear a Star solution.

These are tough calls where party discipline is in fact bad for all of us. Look at the issue of Financial Reform. It is being seen politically as have it or not. Look at health care. Our 2 party system is gridlocked allowing only simplistic questions and answers to complex problems.

Far from being chaotic - PR may allow us to finally have the quality of debate that is demanded by our times.

Sir Francis Galton was a cousin of Charles Darwin.  Born in 1822, he was an early proponent of eugenics. Well, we all make mistakes.  But he was also a scientist who first applied mathematics to social sciences.

He created the first weather maps, he invented police forensic science with an analytical method of deciphering fingerprints, he introduced the notion of IQ tests for intelligence, he was the founder of scientific meteorology and much more.  My interest in him and and his work, however, has to do with journalism – an area he actually never directly touched upon.

Up until now, journalism has escaped the rigors and disciplines of science. This was probably a mistake.

Our story begins at the West England Fat Stock and Poultry Exhibition in 1906. (And here I am deeply indebted to Timothy Ferris, who has written a wonderful book entitled The Science of Liberty.)

While at the fair, Galton watched as nearly 800 people paid sixpence to guess the weight of an ox on display.  The winner, writes Ferris, came pretty close.  When the contest was over, Galton obtained all the entry tickets.  What Galton discovered was that although no one individual actually guessed the accurate weight of the ox, and many were wildly off, the crowd as a whole. and measured as a whole, had concluded, by averaging out all the entries, that the ox weighed 1,197 pounds. The correct weight was 1,198.

“The vox populi – the voice of the people – was correct to within one percent,” Galton reported.  “This result is, I think, more creditable to the trustworthiness of a democratic judgment than might have been expected.”

This turns out to be the case, over and over again.  The Wisdom of Crowds - a book by James Suroweicki, notes that when contestants on Who Wants to be a Millionaire? called their ‘expert’, the expert only got the correct answer 65% of the time. The studio audience got it right 91% of the time.

When Eli Lilly, the drug company, created a web site called InnoCentive to ‘crowd source’ problems that had stumped their R&D teams, more than a third of the problems were solved.

The Dublin based Intrade.com accurately forecast no only the 2004 and 2008 American presidential elections, but congressional results in all 50 states.

The wisdom of crowds.

This is not anecdotal, it is analytical.

Michael Rosenblum is one of my must read folks - coincidentally today - he reinforces my point about how to find the answers to Complex Questions that cannot be known by deduction.

We have to find ways of making the Wisdom of Crowds work.