Effect and Cause, Part 2

“It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.” (attributed to Mark Twain)

My friend Randy loaned me a book. I read a chapter or two, then gave it back to him. Why?

The obvious reason would be that I did not like the book. A theory that fits the facts so far, but wrong. I liked it very much.

Or maybe Randy asked me to return it, he wanted to look at something in the book. Wrong again.

Was I too busy to read the book. Nope, that is not the reason either.

Any one of those possible reasons might explain the fact that I returned the book, yet none is correct.

The real reason? I liked that book so much that I went out and bought my own copy.

Knowing a possible cause for something does not prove that to be the actual cause. For most events, there are many possible causes, and the most obvious suspect may or may not be the real cause. We often find ourselves in the position of a detective trying to determine who committed a murder. Was it the man seen fleeing the scene? Should the detective fixate on that one suspect, he may miss the real criminal. That fleeing man may be quite innocent, perhaps running in fear for his own life. Are there other possible suspects? The beneficiary of his life insurance? Someone who held a grudge against the victim? A suspect not yet even on the radar?

In the early stages of the investigation, any competent detective will keep an open mind. If he jumps to conclusions, he will be victim of the blind spot of assuming that one possible villain must be the villain. In most cases, there are many possible villains and he must find the right one.

Likewise, when we seek the cause of some problem, there may be multiple “suspects,” even some we may not know about. Our task is to find the “guilty” party and gather enough evidence to get a “conviction.” Indeed, the first step is sometimes to determine if what we see is really a problem, or just random fluctuations in how things happen.

Just because a theory makes sense does not make that theory true. There may be other theories, as good or better that also fit the facts. And there may be important facts yet unknown that would blow the theory to bits.

For example, I belong to an organization of nearly 100 members. Those members include not a single black person. What can you conclude about that organization? Why the racial imbalance? Many in today’s world would scream “racism,” but could there be other reasons? There are, though I do not claim to know all of them. First this is a mountain rescue team. To do our job, we must recruit from among competent mountaineers, and there are few Blacks with the requisite skills. In my entire life I’ve only met one black person who enjoyed mountaineering, a man who learned the skill as a ranger in the army.

Of course, that raises another question: why are black people so underrepresented in mountaineering. To that I must respond as does Tevye in the musical “Fiddler on the Roof.” “That I can answer. I don’t know.” Surely the mountains and woods care not a bit about the skin color of people enjoying their beauty, nor have I ever seen any evidence that any mountaineering organization is prejudiced. And Blacks in many sports have demonstrated tremendous physical ability, ability that could transfer to mountaineering.

Why are there so few black mountaineers? A good question. I wish I had a good answer.

Part of the answer may be cost, since the gear and training for mountaineering can be moderately expensive, but that cannot be the entire answer. Nor can accessibility. There are plenty of Blacks living near mountains. I can only conclude that, for some reason, Blacks are not as interested in mountaineering as are Whites. That lack of interest might also explain why we have no Blacks on our rescue team. Why are they are not interested? I have no idea.

I do know that anyone accusing our team of racism or sexism would be wrong.

Being Offended

In Grand Junction, Colorado a billboard showing images of President Obama in an unfavorable light was taken down after the owner apparently received threats of violence. Now to be clear about it, I think that billboard was over the top. It did nothing to advance reasonable dialogue and in fact probably aided those who support the president. Though I oppose Obama I think it was counterproductive. However that is not the real issue here. The issue is freedom of speech vs. what some people seem to perceive as a right not to be offended. In fact one opponent of the billboard said, "If it offends people, you do have a certain obligation to take it down...”

Even a little thought should show the fallacy of such a criterion. It implies that people have the right not to be offended. That makes the issue one of how people react rather than of the actions taken by the alleged offender. It gives the “offended” person complete control over what is not allowed. I could say that they way you comb your hair offends me so you better change that. Or I could claim to be offended by the color of your car. I may be offended by advertising for politicians I don't like. Note that those complaints are based on my reaction, not on anything the “guilty” party has done.

Imagine a world in which guilt is based not on the actions of the accused but on how people react to those actions. How might you manage your life so as to avoid trouble in such a world? You cannot, no matter what you do someone may claim it offends him. Even worse, you cannot know how they will react before you take the action. There will always be someone who can claim to be offended. That has the effect of an ex post facto law. You might do something you consider quite reasonable such as planting a vegetable garden. You might even ask your neighbors what they think of the idea and they might agree before you plant it. Then when it starts to grow a neighbor decides he really doesn't like the sight of corn and you should have planted flowers. He is offended and you are guilty of causing offense, even though you could not know beforehand he that would be offended.

In fact, taken to the extreme this could create the equivalent of a bill of attainder. Someone may decide that he doesn't like you and is offended by the sight of you. He is offended by your person, not your actions. You are guilty based on who you are, not on what you do.

This gets even worse. If you are accused of offending someone how can you defend yourself? There is no external evidence available. If the accuser claims you stole his grocery money the courts will ask for evidence. However what if you are accused of offending him what evidence might be considered? I could claim that you offend me and who is to say if I am telling the truth or lying? I might just be trying to get back at you or to gain some advantage for myself.

People have a right to their feelings and if they feel offended that is also their right. However they should not use that feeling to accuse others or as cause for legal action. They may complain about what someone did or said but their feelings are their own, unverifiable and not useable as a basis for action by anyone else.

There is yet more to this however. Some people seem to be professionally offended. They make a career out of it, either by constant complaining to get what they want or sometimes even by making money from being offended. Jesse Jackson is one that I suspect falls in this category. If there is even a chance a black person has been discriminated against he likes to show up to offer his advice and stir up demonstrators. He seems to do that based on the assumption that racism is involved, ignoring other possible causes for the perceived offense.

For example Jackson (and many others) was professionally offended in 2006 when three Duke Lacrosse players were accused of raping a black woman. He jumped in with complaints about spoiled white boys abusing minorities. I don't know how much his Rainbow/PUSH coalition collected by fund raising as a result but in that case his being offended was the result of a rush to judgment. It turned out that the accused were not guilty. Two of them had solid alibis and the “victim's” story had more holes than a chunk of Swiss cheese. Worse, as an indication of how professionally offended some people were, the taxi driver who provided the alibi was excoriated for telling the truth – and he was a black man. Jackson and others were offended before learning the facts. The result was a suspension of the entire team, heightened racial tension, and several young men having their reputations sullied, all without factual justification. Had the “offended” simply waited for the facts that could have been prevented.

Of course not everybody who is professionally offended gets money for it, at least not directly. Some only get sympathy, others get preferential treatment in hiring, school admission etc. That leads to discrimination, extra costs and other problems for society.

We should look at facts, evidence, and sound logic. And we should never base action only on someone being offended. In fact we should ignore the professionally offended until such time as they present evidence of bad action by their accused offenders.

Lessons from Fort Hood

By now nearly everyone in the U.S. knows that Major Nidal Hasan killed 13 people and wounded over 30 others at Fort Hood. This tragic event almost certainly could have been prevented and we should learn from it. However we should be careful that we learn the right lessons. One thing we should not do is blame all Muslims. Most Muslims in the country have condemned this act as anti-Islamic. They point out that the Koran prohibits such murder of non-combatants. Hasan was clearly an extremist, out of the mainstream of U.S. Islam.

Nor should we blame “quiet loners,” another group often implicated after the fact. The great majority of loners in this country are upstanding citizens and never commit any serious crime.

No, the lesson we should learn from the Fort Hood killings is that we should look at the facts, regardless of what they say. In the case of Hasan, the facts were plentiful and pointed to an officer who could not be trusted. He had posted his anti-American views quite openly on the Internet. It now appears that he had attempted to contact al Qaeda. Why trust someone like that? Would a football team hire a trainer who wanted that team to lose? Would a business hire an employee who was loyal to a competitor?

While nobody could have predicted that Hasan would “go postal” and commit mass murder, there was plenty of evidence that he was not to be trusted. Even had he not committed murder, he would probably have been an ineffective in a combat area and quite likely would have worked against the cause he was paid to support.

In such cases we must reject the temptation to treat employment and similar decisions as though we were in a court of law. There is no automatic presumption of innocence in the employment arena. Instead, employers must do what is likely to be best for the organization. In cases such as that of Nidal Hasan, that means looking at if he was likely to be an effective therapist to the soldiers he was supposed to serve and to help them function effectively in their jobs. Decision makers must look for positive evidence of ability and willingness to do that job, and do it right. Lacking such evidence they should not assign him to the task.

In Hasan's case, the ability was probably there but there was reason for serious doubts about the willingness. In fact, there was reason to suspect that he would work against U.S. interests. He should have been placed in some non-critical assignment or even suspended from duty until all relevant questions were answered. Of course we cannot know what would have happened had that been done. However it is possible that he would never have committed those murders.

The lesson applies elsewhere. Except as required by such things as union contracts, employers need not give employees the benefit of a doubt. If there is reason to suspect that an employee is damaging the company, the employer can and should investigate. And there is no requirement of “proof beyond reasonable doubt.” If there is no evidence that the employee is doing the job as it should be done, that employee has no right to a presumption of effectiveness.

Likewise, we as consumers are in the position of employers when we decide whom we will employ by purchasing their products or services. We need not assume that advertisers or sales people are totally honest. It is up to us to evaluate their claims and refuse to “hire” them if we find the evidence insufficient.

We must all learn to investigate pertinent evidence for cases that affect our lives.

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And the Facts Mean? (Part 4)

The EEOC has set an 80% standard for hiring and promotion. If a company hires 50% of the white people who apply, it must hire at least 80% of that or 40% of the minorities who apply. Failure to do so is considered prima facie evidence of discrimination. That rule might be useful in determining which companies bear investigation, but it is a terrible method of determining who is actually discriminating.

I've already discussed the fact that different groups have different characteristics. Some minorities, especially in the inner cities, have a culture that discourages education. Why should a company be forced to hire any certain number of them if the job requires cognitive skills? However there are also statistical problems with that rule.

Suppose for example 10% of the people living in a town are black and 90% white. A company in that town has four people doing a certain job. Now 10% of those four employees would be 0.4 people and 80% of that is 0.32 people. It is rather difficult to hire a fraction of a person. If they have one Black among the four employees, then 25% of the people there would be black, far in excess of the 10% of the population that Blacks represent.

Even if the company has 40 people doing that job, statisticians would tell us that it is unreasonable to expect exactly four of them to be black and 36 white. In fact statistically it would not be at all surprising if there were anywhere from zero to eight Blacks among those 40 workers. If you have the time, you can demonstrate this to yourself if you can find a few marbles of different colors. Put 9 of one color and one of a different color in a box and shake it up. If you don't have marbles you can use something else, maybe coins with a coin from a particular year representing the minority. You could even put a dot of fingernail polish on the minority coin.

This experiment is to simulate hiring at random, with the marbles representing the applicants. The nine majority color marbles represent the 90% white population in the town and the odd marble (or coin of a particular date) represents the 10% black population. Now without looking, randomly draw one marble from the box and record what color it is. Replace the marble, shake the box and draw again. Repeat this 40 times to simulate hiring 40 random people. How many times did you draw the odd marble? Probably not exactly four times.

Now repeat the above experiment at least ten times, each time recording how many times you drew the odd marble. Most likely once or twice you will draw the odd marble only once or not at all. Once or twice you will draw it 6 to 8 times out of the 40. Most of the time you will draw it three, four or five times out of the 40 tries. However even only drawing it three times fails the EEOC test of 80%, that means you only “hired the minority” 75% of the times that the minority “applied” for your job opening. Would you like to be exposed to charges of discrimination for the times you drew zero, one, two or even three minority marbles?

If you took the time to do this experiment what you have seen is normal statistical fluctuations. You can see something similar by tossing a coin ten times as I described in a previous blog. The most likely result is five heads and five tails. However there are many other possible results. Each of those other results is less likely than the five heads and five tails, but there are more of those possibilities so together they outweigh the probability of equal heads and tails. In fact the probability of getting exactly five heads and five tails is less than 25%.*

“But wait,” you say. “Don’t large companies hire more than 40 people, even more than 400?” Yes they do, but each work area usually has a much smaller number of people. Furthermore, even for larger numbers we would expect some deviation from the most expected value. The larger the number in the group, the less deviation we would expect percentage-wise, but there will be some. On top of that, as we go up the corporate ladder to more lucrative jobs, the number of employees gets smaller. A company may have 10,000 employees but will probably only have fifty or so in top management and fewer than ten at the vice presidential level or higher.

To say that a company is guilty of discrimination on the basis of statistics alone is to ignore those statistical fluctuations, as well as the fact that we cannot expect people of different backgrounds to have identical qualifications. Such a declaration of guilt ignores science. While statistical differences may raise questions, we should insist on actual evidence of biased actions before claiming that anyone or any company is guilty.

Now on somewhat of a personal note: I’ve been publishing five blogs per week and have enjoyed it. However there are also other things I would like to do, including complete a novel I started some time ago. To free up time for those projects I plan to cut back, initially to only three blogs per week. They will probably to be published on Monday, Wednesday and Friday. I’ll see how that goes and hopefully I won’t have to cut down to twice per week.

*For the mathematically inclined, the probability of getting exactly m heads out of n coin tosses is

P = (0.5)^n [n!/{(n-m)! m!}]

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