Everyone remembers the 2000 presedential elections. The Florida confusion, the hanging chads, blurry eyes deciding if the vote was in or out, and the final result where a candidate who won the popular vote ended up losing the election.
The situation was ideal for media - the high stake, clash of ideologies, a very close race, and a controversy to end it all. The much touted y2k had fizzled out without any problems, disappointing the media moguls, but the presedential race delivered. The result was touted as indicative of a "polarized population" and a "failure of the system", because if every vote counted, how come the someone win more votes, and yet lose?
Polarization is a word that media loves. It brings out images of two hard lined grouped in an evenly matched tug of war. A wonderful contest, exciting fight, blow for blow and all the sport related verbiage which often gets used for describing elections.
Yet, how valid is the conclusion? Just because something split 50-50, does not mean there is polarization. In fact completely disinterested population who did not care who won will give exactly the same result. A blind toss of coin will give you those odds. Where does polarization come from? Sure there were some hard core Bush supporters and some who swore by Gore. There always are for all presedential elections. But the fact remains that an election is a social experiment. And just like any other experiment, it has its limitations. One of them is that it is simply counting votes, and not the severity of the voters feelings. So just because the numbers were evenly matched does not tell us anything about how much the voters care.
The other limitation is that of the minimum error margin. Every experiment has it. Scientists try to minimize theirs, but are never able to eliminate it. In social experiment like an election, the margin is fairly large - of the order of 1 to 2 percent maybe. It involves (in decreasing order of importance) who exactly is able to turn up on the election day, how many votes are invalid, how many votes are counted correctly. If a scientist found this result with the error margins involved, she would be forced to conclude that the two candidates are equal within the error margins. If the election commission announced something like this, there would be a huge uproar. It will be unacceptable. We want to think that every citizen's view counts, and hence every vote should be counted. That the citizens don't make the effort for voting to be close to 100% doesn't matter - it's a matter of principles. When someone talks about matters of principles, you should smell a black and white thinker. This is a classic example. For a population of 250 million, if two candidates differ by a few hundred votes, it does not really mean he is preferred. It means he won on that day. Those difference votes can be interpretted as convenient tiebreakers - nothing more.
To me the results simply said that the overall American population did not care whether Bush was elected or Gore got the job. But these kind of statements will not sell newspapers.
Monday, April 21, 2008
Wednesday, April 16, 2008
Tall pencils, short pencils
Some events, ideas, occasions stick in your mind, because of the sheer magnitude of change they cause in your mind, yet being so simple. Like a magician saying "now you don't see it, and now you do" they force us to see things in different light. The world changes ever so slightly. Or sometimes something you knew to be true, is confirmed with such clarity that it is wonderful to just to be there. It is like a poem for the intellect. I have experienced many a moments like this. One of them was this.
On a PBS show about the difficulty of classifying species a scientist gave a neat demonstration. It lasted only 30 seconds, but the effect is etched into my memory forever. He took about 20 pencils, all various sizes, and said we want to separate these into groups. So he picked one at random, and started putting them into three piles of short, medium and tall. He did a very good job. But the reality struck like lightening when he put them all together again, this time in the order of increasing height. Lo and behold, they were simply increasing continuously. Each pencil was taller than the next one by about quarter inch.
The reality is rarely black and white. Pencils usually come in all sizes depending on how much they have been used. Yet we are lured into grouping them into different size buckets? Why?
Part of the reason is the process of discovery. We discover objects or phenomena one at a time. Just like the professor who picked pencils one by one. We look at the first one and say - this is a long one. The second might be short one. These two form seeds of the group. The next one needs to associated with either of them. And there the grouping starts. The pencils that formed a continuous spectrum of lengths going from short to long, become polerized into three groups of short, medium and long.
The other answer could be the language we use to capture this discovery and communicate it. Words are digital in nature. Yet they try to describe an analog world. This adds to the efficiency of the language. We have words like tall, short, long. To acoomodate the shades in between, we say things like midsize, longish, smallish. This increases the categories, but still does not change the digital nature of the meaning. It is like going from very low resolution to higher resolution, or smaller pixel images. Infinite resolution is never possible. For most part the short, shortish, longish, long kind of division is good enough. After all, pencils are not very important things. The important things in human psyche are things that cause danger. There too we divide the analog to digital gap by simply talking more about the event or object.
In most cases, the efficiency advantage that we get far outweigh the inaccuracies it produces. However there are some very charged words that force the categorization on the concepts themselves. Living and Nonliving are two such categories. We discovered that most things are either living or nonliving. Humans, tigers, dogs are living and rocks, water, soil are nonliving. These are very useful categories, because they posed different sorts of dangers, and advantages.
However, people start discovering objects in between, they need to belong either here or there. If living things are the ones that move, what about trees? And is river alive? Trees were firmly put on the living side and river on the nonliving side.
But onces these words are entrenched, and most known objects are classified in two groups, that's when the concepts start getting clobbered too. Everyone holds on to this polarization, because it is so useful. Then the question arises - how did life originate? Another such question is that of the missing link. The posing of the very question smacks of grouping. If you put humans and monkies into two poles, then you start asking where is the middle animal? It is like putting the pile of pencils into two groups of long and short and asking where are the midsize ones?
This is not a trivial, pedantic discussion. Humans have spent huge resources because of the problems created by this type of polarization. Just the question of how life originated has given birth to large number of religions, philosophies, cosmologies. The concept of evolution was simply ruled out of contention by this polerization. If it remained simply theoretical difference, it wouldn't matter too much. But millions of people have died in wars and persecutions that started with these differences.
On a PBS show about the difficulty of classifying species a scientist gave a neat demonstration. It lasted only 30 seconds, but the effect is etched into my memory forever. He took about 20 pencils, all various sizes, and said we want to separate these into groups. So he picked one at random, and started putting them into three piles of short, medium and tall. He did a very good job. But the reality struck like lightening when he put them all together again, this time in the order of increasing height. Lo and behold, they were simply increasing continuously. Each pencil was taller than the next one by about quarter inch.
The reality is rarely black and white. Pencils usually come in all sizes depending on how much they have been used. Yet we are lured into grouping them into different size buckets? Why?
Part of the reason is the process of discovery. We discover objects or phenomena one at a time. Just like the professor who picked pencils one by one. We look at the first one and say - this is a long one. The second might be short one. These two form seeds of the group. The next one needs to associated with either of them. And there the grouping starts. The pencils that formed a continuous spectrum of lengths going from short to long, become polerized into three groups of short, medium and long.
The other answer could be the language we use to capture this discovery and communicate it. Words are digital in nature. Yet they try to describe an analog world. This adds to the efficiency of the language. We have words like tall, short, long. To acoomodate the shades in between, we say things like midsize, longish, smallish. This increases the categories, but still does not change the digital nature of the meaning. It is like going from very low resolution to higher resolution, or smaller pixel images. Infinite resolution is never possible. For most part the short, shortish, longish, long kind of division is good enough. After all, pencils are not very important things. The important things in human psyche are things that cause danger. There too we divide the analog to digital gap by simply talking more about the event or object.
In most cases, the efficiency advantage that we get far outweigh the inaccuracies it produces. However there are some very charged words that force the categorization on the concepts themselves. Living and Nonliving are two such categories. We discovered that most things are either living or nonliving. Humans, tigers, dogs are living and rocks, water, soil are nonliving. These are very useful categories, because they posed different sorts of dangers, and advantages.
However, people start discovering objects in between, they need to belong either here or there. If living things are the ones that move, what about trees? And is river alive? Trees were firmly put on the living side and river on the nonliving side.
But onces these words are entrenched, and most known objects are classified in two groups, that's when the concepts start getting clobbered too. Everyone holds on to this polarization, because it is so useful. Then the question arises - how did life originate? Another such question is that of the missing link. The posing of the very question smacks of grouping. If you put humans and monkies into two poles, then you start asking where is the middle animal? It is like putting the pile of pencils into two groups of long and short and asking where are the midsize ones?
This is not a trivial, pedantic discussion. Humans have spent huge resources because of the problems created by this type of polarization. Just the question of how life originated has given birth to large number of religions, philosophies, cosmologies. The concept of evolution was simply ruled out of contention by this polerization. If it remained simply theoretical difference, it wouldn't matter too much. But millions of people have died in wars and persecutions that started with these differences.
Monday, April 14, 2008
What are gray matters?
I don't know why, but the world is obsessed with classification. There is almost a perverse, anal need for people to keep things (and ideas) in neat compartments. Whether there is an evolutionary reason that helped the well organized caveman to become the sophisticated human that he (or she) is now, or whether it comes from the parental bombardment of "keep your room clean" "keep things in their place" one will never know. [And one may spend billions of dollars of reasearch budget in trying to put the cause sqaurely in the bucket of nature or nurture!]
Given the complexity of the world, compartmentalization is inevitable. I guess it does have its advantages. We owe our existense and our level of civilization to those millions of unsung heros who spent a lifetime separating harmful things from beneficiary things.
But a good thing can be taken too far. It is this broad, naive separation that allows our leaders to talk in terms of "good versus evil" "us versus them" "black versus white" "tall versus short"... Well I made up the last one, but really, when you dig a little deep there is hardly any difference between an average Joe from "us" and a similar average Salim from "them" that a quick, mild makeover can't fix.
Gray matters are those concepts, ideas, people on the boundary. When I say boundary, it seems like a line - and that is a victory of those classification people right there. It is usually not a line, but a huge region that accounts for majority sometimes. You see these matters in every scientific endeavors. In biology you have to draw arbitrary lines between species, genra that are far from obvious. Even the "clear" demarkation amongst living and non living is no so clear when you examin the viral world. In economics we have the celebrated classes that are supposedly in struggle with each other. In politics there is nothing but classification - demographics, caste, religion, parties... The media that reports on all these further "simplify" matters by drawing polarizing conclusions from a neutral data. They give the beautiful science of Statistics, which alone has the idea of the complxity and continuity of all distributions; a bad name. I have not seen a more ironical irony - and believe me I have seen many!
It would not matter too much if all this simply led to minor differences of opinions, some quirks of human thinking, and polarization of people who watched "Lost" vs people who sweared by "Nips and Tucks"... We will simply dismiss it as a collective intellectual zit on a humanity that is still yet to mateur. However, these compartmental thinking traits cause wars, hatreds, and miseries. And that is why the gray areas matter.
Given the complexity of the world, compartmentalization is inevitable. I guess it does have its advantages. We owe our existense and our level of civilization to those millions of unsung heros who spent a lifetime separating harmful things from beneficiary things.
But a good thing can be taken too far. It is this broad, naive separation that allows our leaders to talk in terms of "good versus evil" "us versus them" "black versus white" "tall versus short"... Well I made up the last one, but really, when you dig a little deep there is hardly any difference between an average Joe from "us" and a similar average Salim from "them" that a quick, mild makeover can't fix.
Gray matters are those concepts, ideas, people on the boundary. When I say boundary, it seems like a line - and that is a victory of those classification people right there. It is usually not a line, but a huge region that accounts for majority sometimes. You see these matters in every scientific endeavors. In biology you have to draw arbitrary lines between species, genra that are far from obvious. Even the "clear" demarkation amongst living and non living is no so clear when you examin the viral world. In economics we have the celebrated classes that are supposedly in struggle with each other. In politics there is nothing but classification - demographics, caste, religion, parties... The media that reports on all these further "simplify" matters by drawing polarizing conclusions from a neutral data. They give the beautiful science of Statistics, which alone has the idea of the complxity and continuity of all distributions; a bad name. I have not seen a more ironical irony - and believe me I have seen many!
It would not matter too much if all this simply led to minor differences of opinions, some quirks of human thinking, and polarization of people who watched "Lost" vs people who sweared by "Nips and Tucks"... We will simply dismiss it as a collective intellectual zit on a humanity that is still yet to mateur. However, these compartmental thinking traits cause wars, hatreds, and miseries. And that is why the gray areas matter.
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