Tim Harford: Trial, Error, and the God

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L12 gap-filling test for 1A5 and 1L1 at KU (2012/01/19) prepared by Kow Kuroda

The script below was taken fromTED(http://www.ted.com) and modified by the tester to make it more faithful to the actual speech.

Tim Harford:

Trial, Error, and the God Complex

, Part 1

It’s the Second World War. A German prison camp. And this man, Archie Cochrane, is a prisoner of war and a doctor, and he has a problem.

The problem is that the men under his 1. care are suffering from an excruciating and debilitating condition that Archie doesn’t really understand. The symptoms are this horrible swelling up of fluids under the skin.

But he doesn’t know whether it’s an infec- tion, whether it’s to do with malnutrition.

He doesn’t know how to cure it. And he’s 2. operating in a hostile environment. And people do terrible things in wars. The Ger- man camp guards, they’ve got bored. They’ve taken to just firing into the prison camp at ran- dom for fun. On one particular occasion, one of the guards threw a grenade into the prisoners’ lavatory while it was full of prisoners.

He said he heard suspicious 3. laughter . And Archie Cochrane, as the camp doctor, was one of the first men in to clear up the mess. And one more thing: Archie was suffering from this illness himself.

So, the situation seemed pretty desper-

ate. Uh, but Archie Cochrane was a 4. resourceful person. He’d already smug- gled vitamin C into the camp, and now he managed to get hold of supplies of Marmite on the black market. Now some of you will be wondering what Marmite is. Uh, Marmite is a breakfast spread beloved of the British.

Uh, it looks like crude oil. It tastes, um, zesty. And importantly, ah, it’s a rich source of 5. vitamin B12 . So Archie splits the men ah under his care as best he can into two equal groups. He gives half of them vitamin C. He gives half of them vitamin B12. He very carefully and meticulously notes his results in an exercise book. And after just a few days, it be- comes 6. clear that, whatever is causing this illness, Marmite is the cure.

So, Cochrane then goes to the Germans who are running the prison camp. Now, you’ve got to imagine at the moment— for- get this photo, imagine this guy with this, this long ginger beard and this shock of red hair. He hasn’t been able to shave— a sort of Billy Connolly figure. Cochrane, he starts 7. ranting at these Germans in this Scottish accent— in fluent German, by the way, but in a Scottish accent— and explains to them how German culture was the culture that gave 1

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Schiller and Goethe to the world. And he can’t understand how this 8. barbarism can be tolerated, and he, he vents his frustrations.

And then he goes back to his quarters, breaks down and weeps, because he’s convinced that the situation is hopeless.

But a young German doctor picks up Archie Cochrane’s exercise book and says to his col- leagues, “This evidence is incontrovertible. If, if we don’t supply vitamins to the prisoners, it’s a war 9. crime .” And the next morning, supplies of vitamin B12 are delivered to the camp, and the prisoners begin to recover.

Now, I, I’m not telling you this story because I think Archie Cochrane is a dude, although Archie Cochrane is a dude. I’m not even telling you the story because I think we should be running more carefully controlled randomized trials in all aspects of public pol- icy, although I think that would also be com- pletely 10. awesome . I’m telling you this story because Archie Cochrane, all his life, fought against a terrible affliction, and he re- alized it was debilitating to individuals and it was corrosive to societies. And he had a name for it. He called it theGod complex.

Now I can describe the symptoms of the God complex very, very easily. So the symptoms of the 11. God complex are, ah, no matter how complicated the problem, you have an absolutely overwhelming, ah, belief, uh, that you are infallibly right in your solu- tion.

Now, Archie was a doctor, so he hung around with doctors a lot. And doctors suf- fer from the God complex a lot. Now, I’m an economist, I’m not a doctor, but I see the

God complex around me all the time in my fellow 12. economists . I see it in our busi- ness leaders. I see it in the politicians we vote for— people who, in the face of an incredi- bly complicated world, are nevertheless absolutely convinced that they understand the way that the world works. And you know, with, with the future billions that we’ve been hear- ing about, the world is simply far too complex to 13. understand in that way.

Well, let me give you an example. Imag- ine for a moment that, instead of Tim Har- ford in front of you, ah, there was Hans Rosling presenting his graphs. You know Hans, y’know, the, the Mick Jagger of TED.

(Laughter) And he’d, he’d be showing you these 14. amazing statistics, these amazing animations. And they are brilliant; it’s wonderful work. But a typical Hans Rosling graph: think for a moment, not what it shows, but think instead about what it leaves out.

So it’ll show you GDP per capita, popula- tion, longevity, that’s about it. So three pieces of data for each country— three pieces of data. Three pieces of data is 15. nothing . I mean, have a look at this graph. This is pro- duced by the physicist Cesar Hidalgo. He’s at MIT. Now you won’t be able to understand a word of it, y’know, that it’s just— but this is what it looks like. Cesar has trolled the database of over, over 5,000 different products, and he’s used techniques of network analysis to 16. interrogate this database and to graph relationships bet– between the different products. And it’s wonderful, wonderful work. You show all these interconnections, all these interrelations. Ah, and I think it’ll 2

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be profoundly useful in understanding how it is that economies grow. Brilliant work. Um, Cesar and I, ah, tried to write a piece for The New York Times Magazine explaining how this works. And what we 17. learned was Cesar’s work is far too good to explain in The New York Times Magazine.

But, heh— five thousand products— that’s still nothing. Five thousand products— imagine counting every product category in Cesar Hidalgo’s data. Imagine you had one second per product category. In about the length of this session, you would have counted all 5,000. Now, 18. imagine doing the same thing for every different type of product on sale in Walmart. There are 100,000 there. It would take you all day. Now imagine trying to count every different specific product and service on sale in a major economy such as Tokyo, London or New York. It’s even more difficult in Edinburgh because you have to count all the whisky and the tartan. If you wanted to 19. count every product and service on offer in New York— there are 10 bil- lion of them— it would take you 317 years.

This is how complex the economy we’ve created is. And I’m just counting toasters here. I’m not trying to 20. solve the Mid- dle East problem. The, the complexity here is unbelievable. And just a piece of context—

the societies in which our brains evolved had about 300 products and services. You could count them in five minutes.

So this is the 21. complexity of the world that surrounds us. This perhaps is why we find the God complex so tempting. We tend to retreat and say, “We can draw a picture. We

can show some graphs. We get it. We understand how this works.” And 22. we don’t . We never do.

Now I’m, I’m not trying to deliver a ni- hilistic message here. I’m not trying to say we, we can’t solve complicated problems in a complicated world. We clearly can. But the way we solve them is with humility—

to 23. abandon the God complex and to ac- tually use a problem-solving technique that works. And we have a problem-solving technique that works. Now, you show me a suc- cessful complex system, and I will show you a system that has evolved through trial and error.

Here’s an example. This baby was pro- duced through trial and error. I realize that’s an 24. ambiguous statement. Maybe I should clarify it. This baby is a human body:

it evolved. What is evolution? Over millions of years, variation and selection, variation and selection— trial and error, trial and error. And it’s not just biological systems that produce miracles through trial and error. You could use it in an 25. industrial context.

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調査

授業の方設計するために，以下の二つの点に関して意見を述べてください．

(1) 問題の量は適切でしたか？

1. ^多過ぎた

2. ちょっと多かった 3. ちょうどよかった 4. ^{ちょっと少なかった} 5. 少な過ぎた

(2) 聴き取る箇所の難易度は適切でしたか? 1. 難しいところが多すぎた

2. 難しいところが多かった 3. ちょうどよかった 4. 簡単なところが多かった 5. 簡単なところが多すぎた

他に意見があれば書いてくれてよいです．

今後の授業に生かします(成績には影響しません)．

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