Thought for the Day

As delivered (pre-recorded) to the Breakfast Show at BBC Radio Bristol this morning:

In 1895 history was made when a statue was erected to commemorate Edward Colston, some 174 years after his death. A year ago history was made when the statue was deposited in the harbour by some people - frustrated at a failure to acknowledge the truth of the despicable slave-trade which made him wealthy. A dramatic event moved the narrative on.

I was taught much that turned out to be wrong. The teachers weren't trying to confuse me. But their handle on the truth, then, was short of perfect.

Once people saw the Bible as true story. Then theologians and biblical scholars developed skills and found that it contains history, drama, fiction, poetry, proverbs, biography and the wonderfully named - apocalyptic. Source material for historians - yes; but not all strictly factual.

Once people thought the Earth was flat, the planets revolved around it and God lived up in the clouds.

Those things were never true. God-locating is notoriously tricky.

It is not for Thought for the Day to pronounce on controversial matters. But it is the job to remind us all to revisit things we have always thought true. Otherwise historians will enjoy reminding the world that we were wrong.

Advent Thought 4 and Number 45

Who would have thought that so many people would find themselves entertained by putting numbers in boxes?

The trend for Japanese number puzzles which began with Sudoku shows no sign of ending. Far more people now are familiar with there being only two ways to express 12 as the sum of four different integers than there were ten years ago.

24 is 7+8+9
23 is 6+8+9
22 is 5+8+9 or 6+7+9

And so on.

And as each of the nine squares, columns and rows must contain the digits 1 to 9 once and only once we know that each row, column and square must total 45. Much closer to the ultimate answer than 42 ever was.

What is the fascination? For me I think it is keeping the brain ticking over in order not to think about other things because, peculiarly, it is when I am not thinking about other things but am thinking that solutions to other things tend to occur to me.

It is a very zeitgeisty way to wait, hope and rest.

Don't know what a slide rule is for
But I do know one and one is two

Thinking Better

I may have been quoting from this book for many months now but I have recently finished it. In the beginning I thought it would be a work of popular science (the sort I can understand, in other words) but rapidly worked out that it had many more secrets to give out if I read it as advised on the jacket 'slowly'.

I wish I had been handed this book on starting out in adult life and told that a week reading it would make me richer and wiser. It would have.

I am not going to review it. I am going to say that you should buy it and read it.

And here are some things I have learned:

• There are ways of asking a question that make yes more probable.

• We are naturally lazy thinkers. We should, at minimum, develop awareness of the sort of situations where we might intuit the wrong answer.

• The curse of 'manager of the month' awards is simply regression to the mean.

• Anchoring shapes answers. If I ask you if the world's tallest building is higher or lower than 2,000 feet then ask you how tall it is I will generally get a higher answer than if I ask you if it is taller than 1,000 feet, first.

• We over-assess the risk of events that have recently occurred.

• We are risk-averse. No-one should take out any extended warranties if they have more than three appliances that might qualify. Put the premium saved in your own appliance-replacement-fund instead.

• To demolish a case, raise doubts about the strongest favourable arguments. To discredit a witness, focus on the weakest part of the testimony.

• Beware of outcome bias. We are poor at calling to mind non-events (times when things didn't happen).

• Algorithms outperform experts but this is probably not what Michael Gove was getting at.

• We tend to anticipate more regret than we will probably feel.

• Do not passively accept the way decision problems are framed.

• We have organisations because their checks and balances ensure fewer mistakes than individuals would make. Which is why Trump will probably kill us all if left unchecked.

The two papers cited by the Nobel Prize Committee are fully reproduced as appendices. They are completely readable for any one who has made it to the end of the book. Indeed the author comments that we may be '...surprised by how simple they are.'

I love experts who can explain their expertise simply.

It Was Better Yesterday

I am still reading my way, very slowly, through Daniel Kahneman's Thinking Fast and Slow. Each chapter is so profound and informative that, if it wasn't for the annoying statistic that 60% of the population of the UK do not read one book a year, it should be compulsory reading for everyone. Notwithstanding the alleged beauty of democracy it does seem abundantly clear that smart people know more than thick ones.

Hoping to finish it this sabbatical. So here's the latest lesson.

Most of us know that we have a tendency to idealise the past. We recall the good and forget the bad. In massive general terms this leads to sentences such as 'It was better in the old days' even though people got rickets and polio, children died in infancy and there was a war on.

The Match of the Day and Football on Five pundits should all read it as a condition of their contracts. Put simply, they are lazy. Which is not as rude as it sounds because it means they are using System 1 thinking (in Kahneman terms) as it is easier than System 2 and we all do that.

So when they say 'A top striker has got to be putting that away' when a gaping goal is missed, they are fooled by highlights' packages. They have in their heads every goal of last week's top four tiers and those showed, time and again, strikers putting away simple chances. System 1 recalls that. What they do not have is ready head-access to the hours of footage of appalling football. System 2 would do the hard thinking necessary to find that. Highlights are highlights. Lowlights packages don't sell, although this was recently voted the worst twenty seconds of football ever and it is compelling.

So pundits recall many occasions when simple chances were taken and not the far more numerous occasions when they were not.

Someone who cares more than me, enough to do actual research, watched hours of football clips of top strikers recently and found that 'simple' chances were taken on less than half the occasions they presented themselves. Put simply, missing easy open goals is more likely than not.

If our history is told only as a series of 'good things' then we will look back on it more positively.

Odd Socks Anyone?

There's a Facebook-connected game called Odd Socks which I play a lot. To get the truth out there, I have made getting on for 40,000 moves in this low-skill game over the last year or so.

If you haven't seen it don't worry. There is a washing line with socks on it. Touch two that match and they disappear. Random socks then appear from a washing-machine. You can swap socks from other players' discard piles and also with a gamebot called Susie. Swapping with Susie can only happen once a minute.

After discarding five socks you have to use game points to clear the bin. These points are built up 10 at a time by each matching. Clearing the bin costs 250 points. It is a well-designed and delicate game balance. If you don't want to pay real money to continue (I don't and never have) you will get about ten minutes play twice a day. Or one minute twenty times a day.

Why am I telling you this?

Back in the early days of PCs offices were full of people playing Minesweeper, Solitaire, Freecell and the like - during lunch breaks or while waiting for slow printers to work.

A chance chat with a colleague led us both to realise that we were using the games differently. Those games - and Odd Socks is the same - use just enough mental activity to keep your mind keen. But they also allow a lot of free left brain to ponder and think about other things.

I use these games, Odd Socks being the current help, to solve other problems. Whilst playing my mind is wandering over the day to come, anticipating things to look out for, stuff to say and tasks to do. I don't like surprises so try to avoid them. There may be something of the lawyer about me.

It is neither distraction nor displacement.

All non-players mock. They call me a time-waster. They joke that they would never have time for such a thing. Nobody who doesn't get it, gets it.

But I am a better-equipped person for playing. I almost don't expect you to believe me.