The Useful Idiots

My parents had terrible stories about polio. They saw one too many friend and family fall victim to the disease. Quite fortunate for the following generation, science quickly found a way to help eradicate the nightmare. Jonas Salk was the scientist, to be precise. But two generations later, false equivalence and couch-baked correlations are attacking the science, pegging autism to vaccines. They're not actually questioning the science, mind you. Questioning science is a good thing, in fact welcomed by true scientists. They are attacking it without real research or credible peer review.

Unqualified attacks are fueled in part by faded memory. When children are born in disconnected families with little or no memory passed on down from grandparents, and when home schooling intercepts any chance a child may have to hear about science, the recurring nightmare of ignorance emerges all over again.

During the pandemic I started an informal poll of my own: every time I would meet an anti-vaxxer I would ask them if they knew what an iron lung was. Not only did none of them know it had anything to do with polio, more than one thought it had to do with scuba diving equipment. 

For whatever it’s worth here’s the thing about conspiracies: unfortunately they do exist, in the form of a LOBBY. Powerful, political lobbies. They have small empires to protect, and a lot of money to throw at defending their existence. But in every case, science is the David against the lobby Goliath. It is NEVER the other way around. Conspiracists become the useful idiots of competing lobbies when they buy into their strategic distortions of science. 

The perception that science can be corrupted or bought is a gross misunderstanding of how science works. When people of science are corrupted they cease to be scientists. The ONLY purpose of science is seeking the truth, not hiding it. It’s no different than bad cops, bad generals, bad teachers, etc. In a relatively free and democratic society you do not shut down the institutions of teaching, police, or military because of corruption. Not unless you’re hell bent on wiping out freedom and democracy.

The tragic flaw of the useful idiot is that when they become fixated with an irregularity they can't explain they don't follow the science. They follow the noise and convince themselves that their "no one's gonna fuck with me" swagger is their claim to a noble survivalist crusade. The mother of all ironies of course is that fuck with them is exactly what lobby overlords do to and with them.

When I step into a car, or an airplane, I actually understand the science behind them. You don't have to be a scientist to do so, and I don't claim to be as smart as the scientists who developed those technologies. Pioneering scientists are amazing humans: they are super-intelligent, relentless students of science, highly respectful of the scientific method and process. Entire generations enjoy amazing improvements to quality of life thanks to scientists. But ultimately it is not the scientist I follow, it is the science.

The exact same logic applies to vaccines.

The Goliath lobbies manipulate the credibility of science, as long as they can get away with it. Examples are too many to list, but the most infamous ones include the tobacco lobby, the coal lobby, gun lobby, segregationist lobbies, etc. Only when science overwhelms the lobbies do they die or retreat. The death of a toxic lobby is a good thing. But when they  on't die and simply retreat it poses a major problem for evolution. They become sleeper cells. A generation or two later the cells are awoken as memory fades, and it’s anti-science movements, fascism, etc. all over again. The classic definition of insanity on a planetary scale.

If you ever find yourself fighting the science as opposed to the lobby that’s smearing the science, it gives me no pleasure to inform you that you have become a useful idiot. The larger tragedy being, your behavior and choices do not merely impact a pandemic, as terrible as that is by itself. Next time you are watching the news about war or insurrection "crimes", know that the leaders of those actions are NOTHING without their armies of useful idiots.

The Outside Of The Box Fallacy

There’s a classic story about a truck that had become wedged at the entrance of a tunnel, and it goes something like this:

One day, traffic had come to a stop in a metropolitan tunnel. A huge 18-wheel truck exceeded the clearance of the tunnel and got stuck. It couldn’t move forward or backward. The emergency crew were at a loss, scratching their heads as tempers began to fray. Finally a little boy on the sidelines spoke up: “Why don’t you just let air out of the tires?” They promptly did exactly that, allowing the truck to be free.

The moral of the parable is intuitive enough: fresh and simple thinking can dramatically win over entrenched and complex thought processes. I first heard the story back in the late 80’s, which is just about when the business management establishment started using the expression “think outside the box”. While the expression served its purpose for a few years, like all overused jargon it finally lost its meaning. Yet the real problem with this particular jargon lies not in its overuse, but in the logic contained within the jargon itself. 

The box represents a process that has already been designed, tested, and under execution for some time. Clear thinking, or a good strategy, actually created the process and therefore the box. Managers and employees are hired to mind the box – until bugs in the process begin to appear. These bugs can be internal (design) issues, or external (competitive) threats. Corrective pressures ensue, and suddenly everyone in the box is asked to think outside of it. This might be akin to building a house for your family, then when things start to go wrong with the house you ask your family to step outside and pretend the house does not exist. Sounds more like a Chinese fire drill than strategic thinking.

Take one example of “boxed” strategic thinking: Iridium was a $5 billion satellite-telephone venture investment by Motorola that filed for Chapter 11 less than a year after the wireless phone system went live. Pundits have been all over the Iridium case study, for the most part agreeing that it was a case of falling in love with a technology idea at the expense of a market reality: Motorola was betting on a wireless technology that had been proven for more than 30 years, with a guarantee to cover the entire globe, regardless of what the market need was for businessmen in the middle of the Sahara desert desperately needing to make a call.

If there is something that Motorola was good at – and still is to be fair – it is boxes. Radio boxes, more precisely: from the first automobile radios, to RF (Radio Frequency) communication devices for the military and for commercial use. But it didn’t just master the production of communication boxes; it also pioneered the Six Sigma process, the mother of all operational quality control processes. So given this track record in strategic as well as process excellence, what went wrong with Iridium? Had Motorola fallen blindly in love with the promise of satellite communications technology, or with its own capability to build the perfect box?

My bet is that neither of those two indictments is as relevant as the fact that Motorola had lost sight of how to think -- never mind where to think. Motorola’s founder Paul Galvin came from the Michelangelo Buonarotti school of visionary thinking: when guys like Michelangelo stand in front of a huge block of marble, they don't see a chunk of rock like the average mortal, they see the David inside of it; Galvin looked at a car radio and didn't just see an RF receiver box, he thought about the driving experience inside the car. Almost seventy years later, Galvin’s successors looked up to the skies and dreamed of sixty-six satellites covering wireless communications for the entire surface of our planet. Apparently they forgot to look back down at earth and find their David, or at least, the ultimate communication experience. 

If only there had been a little boy standing in the sidelines to remind Iridium guys that not much more than 10% of the surface of our planet is actually inhabited -- 1% if you consider only urban areas.

The Shortest Yard

"The NFL and its fans have no right to profess concern. It's hypocrisy. Yes, I understand that the sport may not have caused Hamlin's condition. That's not my point. My point is that the sport destroys bodies and lives, and we love it.

Stop telling me you're concerned, or stop watching. Am I pissing you off? I hope so."

- Scott Wilson, attorney for NFL concussion case

“The sport”. 

I mean, you’re not really pissing me off Mr. Wilson, but you have poked my morbid curiosity. As a numbers guy I had to conduct my own due diligence. And sure, I was just called a hypocrite. By a lawyer, but l’ll let that one slide for now. 

I’m sure I’ve been a hypocrite from time to time, like most mortals. But like anything else it’s not about falling for hypocrisy, from time to time. It’s what you do about it. 

I’m a little stumped by the contradiction of data available on the subject. Credible sources like the Mayo Clinic and similar agree that ”most” TBIs (Traumatic Brain Injury) are caused by falling. Especially elderly and children. One law firm sets falling at 47%, consistent with the label of “most”. The other categories include traffic accidents - 16%, “struck by something - 15%” (which could be sports), assault - 9%, other - 13%. 

But then it gets sloppy after that. The TOTAL incidents in the US are listed at around 2.8 million (between 1.5 million and 3 million). So far so good, except some credible sites say ALL of those are sports related, while others say that 47% of the 2.8 million are from falls. So which is it??

Regardless of the sloppiness from credible sources on OVERALL numbers, there is some consistency on how SPORTS break down.

American football accounts for just under 11% of either sports TBIs or all TBIs. Either way it’s not the highest incidence within sports: rugby has a higher rate at just under 13%. American football is 2nd, followed by women’s ice hockey and then men’s ice hockey. 5th place is women’s soccer, 6th is men’s soccer. 

So as far as I can tell, the leading causes ranking of TBI looks like this (USA):

1. Falling

2. Traffic Accidents

4. Assault

5. Rugby (men)

6. American Football (men)

7. Hockey (women)

8. Hockey (men)

9. Soccer (women)

10. Soccer (men)

“The sport”. Which one are we talking about, Mr. Wilson? 

The reasons athletes are drawn to sports vary from fun to passion, but money takes center stage among the top performers. Which also means there’s huge profit to be made by the owners of sports franchises, leagues, events, broadcasters and related (merchandise, etc). And that’s where it gets “stupid”. For every greed dollar that turns a blind eye to the risks carried by the athletes, there’s a greed dollar for those that would sue by distorting the same risks. 

There’s no excuse for turning a blind eye to the risks of sport injuries. But that also means the nature of sports may one day end up looking like a chess game. Don’t touch me, don’t even look at me. And we better sit down before one of us gets hurt.  

For their part, distorters and hyperbole artists live by the “ends justifies the means” rule of war. So technically in the name of a good cause (defeating an evil enemy or defending an injured athlete) the truth can be sacrificed. To the point of fighting symptoms without understanding the cause.

The shortest yard is the first one. The last yard is the longest. Go deep or go home.