Blind Bathoes and Elephants

A number a years ago a woman held up my neighborhood bank with a handgun. She was quickly arrested, tried and convicted. The judge--a bathoes character if there ever was one--sentenced her to nursing school.

I have never forgotten this story because it so typifies modern thinking. The judge felt that nurses were as a group upstanding, responsible, hardworking citizens. The distinguishing characteristic that separated nurses from others was their nursing degree. Therefore, he reasoned, this criminal would be improved by a nursing degree. You can catch almost anything in a hospital, why not responsibility and integrity. Indeed perhaps the entire community would be improved if everyone was conferred a nursing degree at birth.

Observations lead to generalizations. Sometimes these are brilliant, like Darwin. Sometimes they are only bigotry, like blacks are lazy or Asian girls can't drive. No observation is worth anything unless it is confirmed, critically. Science is not consensus, it is contentious. It is the battlefield of argument over inference. Information never, ever, implies; we infer. It is only after brutal analysis that information becomes meaningful.

Our current culture does not understand this and we will suffer for its ignorance. We look at home ownership and see that people who are homeowners seem to be better invested in their communities. We ask no further questions; we assume --infer--that home ownership is beneficial in itself. We ignore all the other possibilities--the buyer saved for his down payment so he was disciplined, the buyer did not buy until he had a good and stable job, the buyer had a stable family--all perfectly reasonable circumstances that might contribute to the successful homeowner demographic success. No, the house is the thing. People with college degrees earn more than their fellows without a degree, thus a degree is good for you. (Not a nursing degree this time around.) Do we have any idea if a 120 IQ woman with a degree out earns a 120 IQ woman without a degree? No, that study has never been done. So we slog on and encourage home ownership and college degrees with only the most superficial evidence.

Poor scientific thinking is more than erroneous, it distracts us from the truth. It misleads us as surely as an intentional, malicious lie. Years ago a seminal study was done on the mortality rates in cities versus farm communities in Great Britain. It showed a significantly higher mortality rate in urban communities. The conclusion was that pollution was very bad for you and plans were initiated to curb smog. Now it might well be that smog is terrible for one's health but the study omitted one point: It did not correct for smoking. When the statistics were later reviewed to eliminate the factor of smoking among the subjects, the difference went away; the survival rate among the two communities was identical. Smog might be bad for you but there was no evidence in this study for that; but there was real evidence that cigarettes were killing people.

We are less insightful than we think. And we are less kind. Basing plans and programs on shoddy thinking traps everyone in the shoddy results. More, it distracts us from the true answers to our questions. One can hope that with time we, as a community, will get better at this thinking but one worries. Shoddy thinking, like bigotry, is easier.