Reflections on Life and Leadership
A town hires a new sheriff and in the next three years the theft rate drops twenty-five percent. In appreciation of the reduced theft rate, the city council votes to give him a hefty raise. But are they confusing correlation with causation? Perhaps the theft rate is down because thieves have been so good at …
Continue reading “False causality – it’s hard to know what caused what”
The mother asked, “Where have you been?” Her little girl replied, “On my way home I met a friend who was crying because she had broken her doll.” “Oh,” said her mother, “then you stopped to help her fix the doll?” “No,” replied the little girl, “I stopped to help her cry.” This story …
I saw the following statement on the front of a T-shirt (a notable and always reliable source of profound information). A goldfish is the happiest animal on earth because it has a 10-second memory. The statement is false (scientific studies debunk the idea), but it does make a good point: There’s value in leaving the …
During World War II, the American military asked mathematician Abraham Wald to study how best to protect airplanes from being shot down. The military knew adding extra armor would help, but adding thick metal to the entire plane would make it too heavy to fly. Initially, their plan was to examine the planes returning from …