Chapter 2 An Intuitive Measurement Habit: Eratostosthenes, Enrico and Emily

 

SOLID QUOTE FROM MALCOLM GLADWELL ABOUT DOGGEDNESS

The Chapter starts with a lightning bolt of a quote from Malcolm Gladwell,

Success is a function of persistence and doggedness and the willingness to work hard for twenty-two minutes to make sense of something that most people would give up on after thirty seconds. —Malcolm Gladwell, Outliers: The Story of Success

MEASUREMENT MENTORS

Like I was implying in the previous chapter as I referenced Lord Kelvin, the Author specifically utters the word "measurement mentors" here, - individuals who saw measurement solutions intuitively and often solved difficult problems with surprisingly simple methods

In this chapter, the Author describes three such people, from different times...

• One man was from Ancient Greece, who estimated the circumference of Earth, using simple geometry.
• Another man was Enrico Fermi, the Nobel prize-winning physicist, who.. well, who was straight up gangster at this shit.
• And a nine-year-old girl, who set up an experiment to debunk "therapeutic touch"

ANCIENT GREEKS AND GEOMETRY

Measurement Mentor No. 1 - Eratosthenes

This guy had read about a well, whose bottom would be entirely lit up by the sun at 12:00pm on a certain day. This meant that the sun was exactly on the top of this well on that day and time.

Then he erected a pole in the neighboring city some 500 miles from this well and observed that on this specific day and time, when the bottom of the well was lit up, the rays of the sun made an angle of 7.2 degrees with the pole, from there he was able to do some basic calculations and estimate the circumference of the earth, Rough diagram shown below

It took 2000 years to come up with a more accurate measurement for the Earth's Circumference than what our boy Eratos gave us, and that was done with sophisticated equipment, huge grant, and a big staff of people.

This story screams the question, how the fuck was this ancient man was able to pull off something crazy like this?

Answers are frustratingly simple - Basic observations and extracting more information from the few facts that were available instead of assuming that there is only one obvious way to measure the circumference of the Earth, which is the circumnavigate the earth with a measuring tape.

This problem was broken down into a lot of smaller components like our next guy Fermi used to do.. but let's not get ahead of ourselves.

Eratos teaches us that Big is no different from small, A tennis ball is no different from the Earth in the sense that they all obey the laws of physics and geometry and science.

Another more important question it brings up to ask ourselves is that ARE WE EXTRACTING ALL THE INFO THAT CAN BE EXTRACTED FROM THE FEW FACTS AVAILABLE?

It is not as easy as it sounds, for this precise ability do we learn the general behaviors, laws, and phenomenons of the universe.

That's the leisure law gives us, to assume a certain behavior based on past evidence. If you studied the laws thoroughly and its connections to each other, more information can be extracted from the few facts given to you.

RELATED POINT - WHAT DO YOU CURRENTLY KNOW?

For some odd reason, the above question reminded me of this scene from Hangover, where the guys wake up not remembering anything from last night and in the process of understanding things assess what do they currently know..

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8I9TApNosOc

LETS FERMI THE HELL OUT

Measurement Mentor No. 2 - Fermi

This one is particularly a more favorite story of mine because it occurred on my Birth-date in the year on 1945 when American scientists were carrying out their Trinity Test.

Basically, they were igniting a nuclear bomb for the first time in the history of the planet. Nobody knew how powerful this thing was. One the day of the test, when most of the scientists were calibrating their measuring instruments to measure the yield of the blast, Our boy Fermi was making tearing up pieces of paper. As the blast wave rippled out, Fermi dropped the pieces of paper from a known height of his chest and measured the displacement of the paper. With these values along with the distance from the site of detonation, he was able to calculate the energy of the blast to roughly 10Kilotons of TNT.

Here is a TED-ED video describing Fermi Estimations

http://youtube.com/watch?v=0YzvupOX8Is

OLDEST TRICK IN THE BOOK - BREAK IT DOWN AND CONNECT LATER

There are a few things I would like to reference here,

This is from a Blog I was reading up on this same story

His basic method was to break a problem down into many constituent parts, and estimate values for each. By adopting this strategy, thinker benefits in two ways:

First, the component problems frequently can be estimated with more accuracy than just a single shot at the larger whole. If you have no idea of what the Trinity yield might be, you can guess the weight and surface area of your confetti, pace off the distance, know how far you are from the blast, and so on. Second, in the absence of any systematic bias, over- and under-estimates of all components tend to cancel each other out. In curious contradiction to the adage “two wrongs don’t make a right” (stolen, I would admit, from the world of homespun ethics, not physics), you can home in on the correct value (with a bit of luck).

Another reference is from the author and is from this chapter itself

The point of this story is not to teach you enough physics to estimate like Fermi (or enough geometry to be like Eratosthenes, either), but that, rather, you should start thinking about measurements as a multistep chain of thought. Inferences can be made from highly indirect observations.

As you might have seen in the video, Fermi was known to bring up problems like these in his class, Asking random stuff like how many piano tuners are there in Chicago?

For a problem like these, you start with something you know that is indirectly related to the quantity in question. It could be bottom-up like an individual's measurement or a top-down like a mass population

This kind of question are sometimes asked in Interviews, of course, nobody like always told us the source of where these problems come from, it was a Fermi Problem. Most of the time its also not made clear that the point of asking these questions is to get a sneak peek into your methods to solve a problem, which like I mentioned before can start from something personal, or known to you.

MATH MADE IRRELEVANT TO EXPLORE RELATIONSHIPS

These are very interesting problems in my opinion because sideline the math out of the equation, it makes Math less important and focuses on the relationship of various interrelated quantities.

Even a simple statement we used a lot in school "Let the answer be X" indicates a similar thought process, where the answer is in some way assumed to be known, and then the questions are asked around it, as in if the answer was X what else would be true? In other words, the relationships around the answer are explored.

Solving the problems in this fashion is called Fermi Decomposition.

NOT PERFECT BUT DEFINITELY IMPROVED

Another Reference from the book on Fermi Decomposition the Piano tuner problem. It's not Perfect but its an incredible improvement.

When this number was compared to the actual number (which Fermi would already have acquired from the phone directory or a guild list), it was always closer to the true value than the students would have guessed. This may seem like a very wide range, but consider the improvement this was from the “How could we possibly even guess?” attitude his students often started with.

FAILING IS ALSO WINNING

In the most classic fashion of "I feed off of everything, even the losses are in some ways wins" you can actually use the component breakdown of a problem to identify the most uncertain part of the problem, which can then be a good scapegoat of your wrath.

Another direct reference from the book

The lesson for business is to avoid the quagmire that uncertainty is impenetrable and beyond analysis. Instead of being overwhelmed by the apparent uncertainty in such a problem, start to ask what things about it you do know.

ADD SOME GOOGLE SEARCHES TO VIGOR THE REACTION

Then the book gives an example of Fermi Decomposition done for business by some guy called Chuck McKay. Someone asks McKay if getting into the Car insurance business in a certain city will be profitable or not.

McKay decomposes this question using a bit of Google Searches, which is really the point of me noting this stuff. Google Search Catalyses Fermi Decomposition to an insane degree because you are not limited to starting off from a familiar experience, instead, you can start from a Google Search of an important unknown component.

SETTING EXPERIMENTS - THE HIGHEST OF SKILL THERE IS

Measurement Mentor No. 3 - Young JAMA girl, Emily

I think this girl's story was put in this book to contrast it from the other two stories and to prove the point that these thought processes are not limited to deep thinking professionals. Nonetheless, her work is not unimpressive at all.

She was featured on the TV show Scientific American Frontiers, I didn't find that particular episode but I found something else on YouTube that features her and her experiment.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mNoRxCRJ-Y0

The Video explains her simple experiment so I would try to explain it here with my limited vocabulary. Instead, I will skip to the lesson from this story.

NO CHANGE, NO MEASUREMENT

Another Chapter Reference -

Emily’s example provides more than one lesson for business. First, even touchy-feely-sounding things like “employee empowerment,” “creativity,” or “strategic alignment” must have observable consequences if they matter at all.

Second, Emily’s experiment demonstrated the effectiveness of simple methods routinely used in scientific inquiry, such as a controlled experiment, sampling (even a small sample), randomization, and using a type of “blind” to avoid bias from the test subject or researcher. These simple elements can be combined in different ways to allow us to observe and measure a variety of phenomena.

The first bit is important, Things matter only if they create a change of any kind. This was also brought up briefly in the previous chapter, driving the point that Anything that causes a change, should be able to be measured in some way or the other.

SIMPLE QUESTION KPI

The author also stresses the point that the simplicity of Emily's experiment proved a more important point than it seems. She could have set a huge clinical trial, companies would have. She could have tested if therapeutic touch really heals.... but instead, she asked a more fundamental and a more basic question, which was, Forget about healing, can you even feel the energy fields?

Absolute Basic and commonsensical KPI here was the point really and that's what the author wants the readers to learn from this story.

IF THERE HAS BEEN A CHANGE, THERE CAN BE MEASUREMEMENT

The Author also gives a Case Study example from his career about a IT company - Mitre Information Infrastructure. Stress of the point is again, if there has been a change, there can be a measurement.

Reference

If MII really improves the quality of deliverables, then it should affect customer perceptions and ultimately revenue. Simply ask a random sample of customers to rank the quality of some pre-MII and post-MII deliverables (make sure they don’t know which is which) and if improved quality has recently caused them to purchase more services from Mitre.

Like Emily, I proposed that Mitre not ask quite the same question the CIO might have started with but a simpler, related question.

Remember measuremement is a multi-chained process

Going forward, we will learn how to reduce current uncertainity, use new sampling methods and simpler calculations.

ANOTHER CRUX

The concept of measurement as “uncertainty reduction” and not necessarily the elimination of uncertainty is a central theme of this book.

In this context, Fermi’s value to us is in how we determine our current state of knowledge about a thing as a precursor to further measurement.