The Irony of Good Intentions

Okay, I'll admit it: Kung Fu Panda is one of my new favorite movies. We must have rented the thing five times (for a buck each from the Redbox) before I broke down and bought a used copy. The best scene is the "noodles; don't noodles" monologue, but the self-defeating attempt to prevent disaster prefaced by "one often meets his destiny on the road he takes to avoid it" line is pertinent to more than just incarcerated cats.

Viz: Suppose, to present an archetype, one really, really wanted to achieve some thing. I'll call it S, just to show that math types don't always pick X.

In order to achieve S, we set up some kind of machinery or processes, we take actions and lay plans--sometimes even in the other order. At the end of the day we very thoroughly ensure--because of the very attention we are paying to the problem--that the opposite of S is achieved. To be pedantic, we'll call the opposite ~S, and a(*) the "attempt to achieve" function, so:

a(S) => ~S

The fact that we have a word devoted to this idea (irony) shows that it's not uncommon. Maybe it's also because we tend to find it funny if the tax auditor gets audited or the plumber's sink leaks. It's not so funny in other circumstances. Often, unintended consequences are the cause of mischief. A couple of examples:

• Kudzu: (source: Wikipedia) "From 1935 to the early 1950s, the Soil Conservation Service encouraged farmers in the Southeastern United States to plant kudzu to reduce soil erosion as above. The Civilian Conservation Corps planted it widely for many years.

  It was subsequently discovered that the Southeastern US has near-perfect conditions for kudzu to grow out of control — hot, humid summers, frequent rainfall, temperate winters with few hard freezes (kudzu cannot tolerate low freezing temperatures that bring the frost line down through its entire root system, a rare occurrence in this region), and no natural predators. As such, the once-promoted plant was named a pest weed by the United States Department of Agriculture in 1953."

• A programming shop wanted programmers to pay more attention to fixing bugs, so they gave rewards for each bug found. The number of bugs found rose quickly, but the paying out of lots of reward money didn't make the code get any better. (Programmers can create bugs even more easily than fix them). [I read this a looong time ago in a programming magazine.]
  
  
• A state began taxing trucks based on the number of axles it had, as a fair way of generating revenue to fix roads: bigger trucks pay more. This caused shippers to use trucks with fewer axles, putting more pressure on each tire, which caused the roads to degrade faster. [I read this in The Economist, I think, several years ago.]
  

I believe that we can create a simple recipe for creating irony. It goes like this:

1. Find some complex S
2. Work really hard at theorizing about S and simplify it to S'
3. Solve S' using the low-complexity model you built
4. Eventually realize that S' isn't S
5. Further conclude that a(S') => ~S
6. (optional) change your name and move to Alaska

We can create an endless supply of B-grade Hollywood scripts using this formula. To wit:

Dr. Zeus thinks he can solve a flu pandemic by releasing a custom-built virus that inoculates the populate via a common cold vector. But it mutates into a deadly scourge instead.

Okay, that was fairly depressing. Moving on to higher education and assessment...

From the 2008 publication "New Leadership for Student Learning and Accountability" from CHEA/AAC&U:

Each college and university should gather evidence about how well students in various programs are achieving learning goals across the curriculum and about the ability of its graduates to succeed in a challenging and rapidly changing world. The evidence gathered through this process should be used by each institution and its faculty to develop coherent, effective strategies for educational improvement.

This is a desire that has been amplified by the Department of Education as well as regional accreditors. What is described in the quote above is S. The next inevitable stop is S'. Quoting again from the same document:

Accrediting organizations should likewise evaluate institutions by their performance in accord with institutional goals and develop consistent strategies for summarizing and making public their findings.

I'm sure you noticed the switch there from learning outcomes to summarized findings. We humans have a big thing for simplifying stuff that's just too messy to deal with on its own terms. Why have five hundred numbers when one will do? So: simplify and standardize. That's how we create manageable, nominally comparable data, and theorize our way down to S'.

There are high expectations for S. For liberal arts schools, S includes stuff like higher order thinking skills, effective communications, maybe some teamwork and global understanding (AAC&U LEAP) and so forth. This is rather inconvenient, however, for the mass production of sterilized metrics. Complex and standardized are like fish and bicycle, to abuse an expression. The only way to reduce complex data down to a few bytes is to squeeze all the complexity out of it. You can put it in a factor analysis Squish-o-Matic and crank out a principle component, or cook it down to a bland grand average of goop, or apply a fancy economic model and juice it into a parameter with a Greek name. It's all the same. It's the difference between a vine-ripe tomato you take from your garden and one of those pink pasty things from the grocery aisle that look like they came out of a sci-fi movie.

So if S is a well-rounded graduate, S' is a square one. They both have approximately the same area, so we can fool ourselves if we squint. Still, it could turn out right, couldn't it? If we try really hard to apply a(S'), shouldn't we get close to S?

Really, I've been unfair. For most of the things we do in life, we approximate our goal with something simpler and try to reach it. If we spent all our time on the details, we'd never get our taxes done. Simplification is necessary in order to make tasks doable. For lots of cases, a(S') gets you close enough to S. Not everything is ironic.

So the serious question is: can we standardize stuff like critical thinking and creative writing and so on, without losing the essence of the thing? To me, the answer is obviously not. The whole point of complex thinking is the complexity. I've argued ad nauseum on that topic before, and I won't repeat those arguments this morning, but let's say that the standard of proof ought to be very high. Exceptional claims merit exceptional evidence, as the saying goes.

Worst case is that the data-compressed S' is a grotesque caricature of S, and that by amplifying S' through our efforts, we produce only shadows of what it is we're really after. In detail, here it is:

1. We want to create broad-minded critical thinking graduates, our S
   
2. It's hard to define S, let alone assess it, so there's pressure to substitute an assessment of S'--the ability to take a standardized test. It has some face validity, so the top administrators are convinced.
   
3. Having settled on S', we work really hard to train students for the content of the test so we'll look good to the public and the accreditors, a(S')
   
4. At the end, we've drilled our students on the importance of test-taking at the expense of improving S.

That would be ironic and sad.

Here's another possible example. In yesterday's InsideHigherEd "Wannabe U" author Gaye Tuchman is quoted as saying:

Universities are no longer to lead the minds of students to grasp truth; to grapple with intellectual possibilities; to appreciate the best in art, music, and other forms of culture; and to work toward both enlightened politics and public service. Rather they are now to prepare students for jobs. They are not to educate, but to train.

I'm not sure that traditional universities see it that way (certainly not mine), but the for-profits probably do. That's why they launch online nursing degrees and not online philosophy degrees. But this isn't their fault either--they just respond to the market. So the irony derives from the perceptions of the customer:

1. I want at good job when I graduate college. That's my S.
2. I'll never find a job as a dance major, so I better study something vocational. This becomes S'.
3. a(S') leads to the loss of opportunity to have the broad-based education useful at the higher levels of management.
   

I've made some assumptions here, but I have two bits of evidence. First, we had a meeting last week with executives from a large company. We were talking about internships and such, and it became clear from the conversation that all of the half dozen administrators saw the value of liberal arts degrees. Most of the IT hires didn't have IT training in college, for example, they just drifted into it because of interest. The takeaway for me was two-fold: first, general thinking and communications skills really are valuable, and second, attitude and approach to problem solving are just as important as training.

The second bit of evidence comes from research I quoted the other day in "Is General Education Worth It?". It shows that liberal arts degrees really are valuable in a monetary sense. Note that I also argue in that post that if S = {good thinking and communication skills} then our traditional general education may not be the way to achieve it.

If you combine the danger of simplifying a(S) => a(S') with the foibles of human decision-making I wrote about last time, it's a good assumption that administrators of all stripes will continue to provide us with examples of ironic a(S) => ~S. And interestingly, the higher the level of the administrator, the more pressure there is to approximate S with S', and the less assiduously the side effects will be judged, I conjecture. Allow me to name this conjecture after my historian friend Bob.

Robert's Rule of Disorder: The more powerful a decision-making apparatus is, the more likely it is to produce ironic results.

At this point, I could riff on the damaging influence of theory and ideology, which guarantee that S - S' is large, but I'll leave that for another day. I'm anxious to try out my new shortcut to work.

Why Good Leaders are Rare

The trouble with the world is
that the stupid are cocksure
and the intelligent are full of doubt.

-Bertrand Russell

Russell may have been onto something. There is a line of evolutionary argument that goes like this: we observe behavior X, but X seems to be detrimental to survival. How can X have evolved or persisted given this disadvantage?

In the instance that prompts this post, X = "overconfidence in making decisions." If we view overconfidence as lacking enough knowledge to make a sound decision, then you can see the relationship to the quote above. This is a question of leadership and strategic path-finding--essential qualities of any university administrator.

The researchers are Dominic D. P. Johnson, and James H. Fowler, who posted their article on the physics pre-print server arXiv.org, indexed as arXiv:0909.4043v1. I found it on the MIT Technology Review arXiv blog here. From the abstract:

Here, we present an evolutionary model that shows overconfidence actually maximizes individual fitness and populations will tend to become overconfident, as long as the resources at stake during conflicts exceed twice the cost of competition. This is because overconfident individuals make more challenges when there is uncertainty about the strength of opponents (and thus the outcome of conflicts), while less confident individuals shy away from many conflicts they would win. Where the value of a prize is at least twice the cost of trying, overconfidence is the best strategy. The model suggests that the conditions under which humans would have evolved to have a "rational" unbiased view of their own capabilities are exceedingly rare, and it helps to explain why resource-rich environments can paradoxically create more conflict. Moreover, the fact that overconfident populations are evolutionarily stable may be one reason why overconfidence persists today in politics, business, and finance, even if it causes occasional disasters.

There's a lot to absorb there. There are indications from other sources to support some of the assertions. For example, the implication that most humans can't accurately self-assess their abilities. The Dunning-Kruger effect is the inability to realize one's own incompetence.
From a review at nytimes.com "Among the Inept, Researchers Discover, Ignorance is Bliss":

People who do things badly, Dr. Dunning has found in studies conducted with a graduate student, Justin Kruger, are usually supremely confident of their abilities -- more confident, in fact, than people who do things well.

"Not only do they reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices, but their incompetence robs them of the ability to realize it," wrote Dr. Kruger [.]

From the wikipedia page:

Kruger and Dunning gave subjects specific tasks (logic, grammar and telling funny from unfunny jokes).^[2] Subjects had to judge how well they had done on these tasks, relative to the rest of the group. This enabled a direct comparison of their real and believed ranks. For analysis, the results were divided into four groups, depending on actual task scores.

All groups put themselves above average. This meant that the lowest-scoring group (the bottom 25%) showed a very large illusory superiority. Although their test scores were in the 12.5^th percentile on average, they estimated themselves to be in the 62^nd. Kruger and Dunning explained that those who were worst at the tasks were also worst at recognising skill in those tasks.

It gets worse, because leaders aren't necessarily chosen because they are the most able. A 2008 Live Science article is entitled "Narcissists Tend to Become Leaders." After assessing personality traits, undergraduates were put into groups of four and asked to elect a leader. Conclusions from the research include:

[A] new study shows individuals who are overconfident about their abilities are most likely to step in as leaders, be they politicians or power brokers.

However, their initiative doesn't mean they are the best leaders. The study also found narcissists don't outperform others in leadership roles.

Narcissists tend to be egotistical types who exaggerate their talents and abilities, and lack empathy for others.

Meanwhile, ScienceBlog reports on a study in Sociological Inquiry:

Co-author Steven Hoffman, Ph.D., visiting assistant professor of sociology at the University at Buffalo, says, "Our data shows substantial support for a cognitive theory known as 'motivated reasoning,' which suggests that rather than search rationally for information that either confirms or disconfirms a particular belief, people actually seek out information that confirms what they already believe.

"In fact," he says, "for the most part people completely ignore contrary information.

This is echoed in a similar piece in Kellogg Insight:

People have preferences. But they cannot choose any old thing they like because they have to be able to rationalize the choice[.]

Rationalization means that people are constrained optimizers, and one of the constraints [in the way of choosing a preference] is that they have a psyche that requires a rationale[.]

Russell was also right in that too much information allows creation of bad theory. Other research shows that fear leads to aversion of pain and bad decisions as in "scared money never wins", and the pull of irrational behavior is strong.

To summarize:

• When the stakes are high, taking risks is beneficial on average to the individual (but not to the group, necessarily)
• Ignorance is a fixed point under observation: you don't know it when you have it.
• Leaders tend to be those who over-rate their own abilities
• Decisions tend to be based on internal biases
  
• Once decisions are made, even on insufficient evidence, people stick to them with explanations that reinforce their decision
• Decisions tend to be degraded by fear and too much information.
  

I guess this explains why good leadership is such a premium. Regarding Russell's quote--it's no good to have either bold ignoramus in charge or a genius who can't make a decision. Something in-between is called for in a leader. Machiavelli had some insights and solutions about this problem, which you can read in my previous post "Be More Machiavellian."

Case study: Russia's 1917 offensive. Kerensky was the Minster of War in the coalition government. As Orlando Figes puts it in A People's Tragedy: (selected quotes, starting on page 410)

All the nation's hope and expectations rested on the frail shoulders of Kerensky [...]

Kerensky reveled in his role. He had always seen himself as the leader of the nation, above party or class interests. The adulation went to his head. He became obsessed with the idea of leading the army to glory and of covering himself in honor. He began to model himself on Napoleon.

There were indications that the fighting men were not crazy about his idea of the offensive that the Minister had his heart set on, however:

[A]mong the vast majority of the rank and file, the mood of the soldiers was much more negative. Kerensky was frequently heckled by such troops during his trips to the Front, yet he never seemed to register the warning that this conveyed.

The general in charge, Brusilov, had second thoughts too:

[H]e found the troops in a state of complete demoralization. According to one of this senior aides, Brusilov had to avoid using the words 'offensive' or 'advance' in case the soldiers attacked him.

As Brusilov saw it, the soldiers were so obsessed with the idea of peace that they would have been prepared to support the Tsar himself, so long as he promised to bring the war to an end.

Despite these warning signs, the attack went ahead. Figes sums up the effect of the offensive (pg 408):

With hindsight it is clear that the military and political leaders of the Provisional Government were deluded by their own optimism. [...] [One prediction was] that the Russian losses would be in the region of 6,000 men; but the actual number turned out of be just short of 400,000, and the number of deserters perhaps even greater. This was a huge human price to pay for a piece of wishful thinking. Politically, the costs were even higher. For there is no doubt that the launching--let alone the failure--of the offensive led directly to the summer crisis which culminated in the Bolshevik seizure of power in October.

It's impossible to know how the 20th century would have turned out differently if better leadership had been exhibited, but certainly this example of narcissism and willful ignorance led to one of our greatest tragedies.

---

Note: If you're at all interested in Bertrand Russell and his quest to put mathematics on a logical foundation, then do yourself a favor and check out Logicomix--a most unlikely graphic novel about this very topic.

Be More Machiavellian

I'm heading off to an all-day retreat for the deans today. As the Dean of Academic Support Services, I'm invited as sort of the court jester, which suits my personality. This got me thinking about leadership last night, and I retrieved my copy of Machiavelli's The Prince from my car. It's a different translation from what's found here on gutenberg.org, but the quotes are similar.

Leadership is a big topic, of course, and I mean to narrow it to the interaction between a leader and his or her direct reports, as we would call them. Machiavelli calls them ministers or servants. The first thing is their selection:

The choice of servants is of no little importance to a prince, and they are good or not according to the discrimination of the prince. And the first opinion which one forms of a prince, and of his understanding, is by observing the men he has around him; and when they are capable and faithful he may always be considered wise, because he has known how to recognize the capable and to keep them faithful. But when they are otherwise one cannot form a good opinion of him, for the prime error which he made was in choosing them.

Second is how to assess their performance:

But to enable a prince to form an opinion of his servant there is one test which never fails; when you see the servant thinking more of his own interests than of yours, and seeking inwardly his own profit in everything, such a man will never make a good servant, nor will you ever be able to trust him; because he who has the state of another in his hands ought never to think of himself, but always of his prince, and never pay any attention to matters in which the prince is not concerned.

And how to motivate them. Note that Machavelli recommends fear over love when necessity requires it, but not hatred. But there he is speaking about subjects. With ministers it is very different:

[T]o keep his servant honest the prince ought to study him, honouring him, enriching him, doing him kindnesses, sharing with him the honours and cares; and at the same time let him see that he cannot stand alone, so that many honours may not make him desire more, many riches make him wish for more, and that many cares may make him dread chances. When, therefore, servants, and princes towards servants, are thus disposed, they can trust each other, but when it is otherwise, the end will always be disastrous for either one or the other.

But bringing ministers into the leader's circle of trust has its own problems, one of which is flattery. Herein lies a dilemma:

Because there is no other way of guarding oneself from flatterers except letting men understand that to tell you the truth does not offend you; but when everyone may tell you the truth, respect for you abates.

Machiavelli's solution is ingenious. First, don't take unsolicited advice:

Therefore a wise prince ought to hold a third course by choosing the wise men in his state, and giving to them only the liberty of speaking the truth to him, and then only of those things of which he inquires, and of none others;

But solicit advice on everything! And listen carefully.

[B]ut he ought to question them upon everything, and listen to their opinions, and afterwards form his own conclusions. With these councilors, separately and collectively, he ought to carry himself in such a way that each of them should know that, the more freely he shall speak, the more he shall be preferred; outside of these, he should listen to no one, pursue the thing resolved on, and be steadfast in his resolutions.

This solution leaves control with the leader, avoids flattery from the masses by not inviting their opinions, and creates a decision-making engine that doesn't invite contempt. The gloomy alternative is also spelled out:

He who does otherwise is either overthrown by flatterers, or is so often changed by varying opinions that he falls into contempt.

How Machiavellian is your leadership?

1. Do you choose wise and respected subordinates? (yes)
2. Is your circle of trusted advisors less than eight? (my interpolation here, since eight is the kiss of death for committees) (yes)
3. Are they committed to your success? (yes)
4. Do they only give advice when asked? (yes)
5. Do you ask them about wide-ranging topics? (yes)
6. Do you get truthful, frank answers? (yes)
   
7. Do you take advice from those outside your leadership team? (no)
   
8. Do you stick to decisions, once made? (yes)

If you scored a perfect eight, congratulations! You may be qualified to run a small Italian principality. Tryouts for CBS's new reality show "The Prince" are just around the corner...

Ignorance => Meta-Ignorance

In the last article here, I speculated about "unknown knowns," those bits of institutional knowledge that may be locked away by silos and rigid processes. I suggested that it might be in the institution's best interests to shake those out. It's a natural effect of a new administration taking over, or probably should be. Someone passed along the following advice about new administrations: keep the best one third of the current leadership, bring in one third new from the outside, and promote one third from within. It seems to me that this combinatorical shuffle would have the effect of breaking up old processes and modes of thought and allowing a temporary meritocracy of ideas to prevail. If only we could do that with the tax code!

It all surely comes down to the continued development of professional expertise of everyone on the job, I think. Encouraging subordinates to challenge our ideas may slow things down a bit occasionally, but in my experience is a good way to improve decisions. Isn't that what academia is all about anyway? You can't create new knowledge without challenging an existing mode of thought or 'best practice.' (The label 'best practice' makes me grit my teeth--surely any practice can be improved, no? It sounds like an admission of failure. 'Accepted practice' is more honest.)

Ignorance is meta is the conclusion of an article in the New York Times' science section from January 18, 2000 called "Among the Inept, Researchers Discover, Ignorance Is Bliss." The article suggests that there is a double-whammy to being uninformed. The ignorant don't know, and they don't know they don't know. That is, they are confident in their knowledge, even when they have little. Author Erica Goode explains:

One reason that the ignorant also tend to be the blissfully self-assured, the researchers believe, is that the skills required for competence often are the same skills necessary to recognize competence.

Cornell Psychology professors Dunning and Kruger, who researched this idea, make some interesting points, as quoted in the article:

• Not only do they reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices, but their incompetence robs them of the ability to realize it.
• This deficiency in "self-monitoring skills," the researchers said, helps explain the tendency of the humor-impaired to persist in telling jokes that are not funny.
• Some college students, Dr. Dunning said, evince a similar blindness: after doing badly on a test, they spend hours in his office, explaining why the answers he suggests for the test questions are wrong.

If you have followed this blog on the topic of noncognitive assessment, you may recall that realistic self-appraisal is one of the predictors of success. On the other hand, the most able subjects in the study conducted by the researchers were the most likely to underestimate their own abilities.

The researchers attributed this to the fact that, in the absence of information about how others were doing, highly competent subjects assumed that others were performing as well as they were -- a phenomenon psychologists term the "false consensus effect."

There is some hope: Kruger and Dunning were able to 'train in' more realistic self-appraisal skills for those lacking them. The problem, they suggest, is lack of feedback. If you're doing a lousy job and no one tells you, how will you learn otherwise? A certain amount of humility is a good thing.

Of course, there has to be a balance. Paralysis through analysis is no good either. Being too timid to act on a new idea because there is no way to find out if it's good or bad prevents real leadership. After all, if all decisions are obvious, why are they paying you that fat administrative salary? Unfortunately, the Total Quality Management model that accreditors are fond of these days assumes that with enough information, good decisions can be made. That isn't always the case--just look at the stock market. A lot of very smart people with a lot of very good information get it wrong about half the time.

Therein lies the key to good leadership: entertaining new ideas on the one hand, but in spite of little information to go on, intuiting which of them are disastrous. I think this is a very rare trait. As Niccolo Machiavelli wrote in The Prince:

There is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things.

Readers of this column will not be too surprised that I have an anecdote to supply on this general topic. It was first published in a small college literary magazine, probably a decade ago. I will not insult your intelligence by highlighting my own examples of meta-ignorance in the story. You'll find them easily enough.

Geniosity

I’m a genius. Well, perhaps I should modify that statement just a tad. I was a genius. In fact, on two separate occasions during my life, I have had pure Eureka! moments that lifted me from the mundane to the ethereal. The descent was just as sudden, but at least I got a glimpse of what it must be like to be a real genius—you know, the kind that wakes up and goes to bed still in the bug-eyed goddamn I’m smart state. I suppose some people must find it addictive, having instant blinding flashes of that leave them gasping. I wouldn’t want it to happen all the time, though, or I might drive into a tree just as I’d solved the global deforestation problem, for example. All in all, I found it to be quite pleasant, although I noticed right away about how other people aren’t very interested in moments of clarity, unless it’s their own, in which case it’s hard to get them to shut up afterwards. So I got a bumper sticker that reads My dog had its day that I put right beside the Towers will be violatedand Don’t void where prohibited stickers. It’s a little obscure, but I figure that’s okay because obscurity is hard to tell from profundity sometimes.

It happened while I was doing dishes. The sink in my kitchen is divided into two stainless steel basins, with a faucet arm that can be swiveled to either side. Both sides drain down the same pipe. The problem is that every time you turn on the garbage disposer, which is attached to the right side, it backwashes filthy water up into the left basin. Since that’s usually where I place the dishes to dry, it’s a less than perfect situation. Before my instant of genius, I resorted to turning on the disposer in short bursts so as not to give it time to spew much water back up the other side. I had done this for years. But last week, I had finished stacking the last plate into the rack in the left basin, and was contemplating the pool of foaming dirty water in the right basin waiting to be drained when I had my geniosity (one of the perks of geniushood, even if only a part-timer, is the permission to create new words). I realized that if I ran some clean water into the left basin before turning on the garbage disposer, at the very worst only clean water would come back up! It worked beautifully, and I have switched entirely to my new method of draining the sink.

I was beginning to wonder if I’d lost the touch, because my only previous geniosity had occurred when I was in kindergarten, some thirty years before. There was the possibility that that earlier one had been a fluke, but now I’m convinced that if I wait another thirty years something equally profound will occur to me. I’m thinking of starting a newsletter. Anyway, back to kindergarten: it was one of those special days when something extraordinary happens. In this case, we had a magician coming to perform for us in the auditorium. I was hoping it would be the good kind—magicians that do magic tricks, instead of the bad kind—magicians that just play music. It was some time before I realized that musician is a whole different word. We were led into the auditorium in single file, and row-by-row filled up the folding chairs set up on the floor. They started with the back row, and I ended up in the second row, a prime spot for watching the tricks, if they were to materialize. As I planted myself into the child-sized folding chair, I noticed the kids who were being led into the row in front of me. The child about to sit directly before me was Bobbie. This was before last names were invented. Bobbie was a troubled child. He had announced one day on the playground that his real name was Robert, for which the rest of us laughed him to scorn. Really! We might have only been five, but we weren’t stupid enough to believe that you’d call a thing something other than what it was. A Bobbie was a Bobbie, and a Robert was something quite different.

As Bobbie prepared to sit, I had my geniosity. If I were to pull his chair back, I thought, he would miss it and end up on the ground! No sooner had inspiration struck than did I put it into action, and to my amazement it worked! Bobbie plopped right on to the floor, and then looked around with the most bewildered expression, which could be interpreted as how did I miss a twelve-inch wide chair with a six-inch wide butt? His universe had changed forever, as had mine. He had discovered The Unexplained, and myself a profound moral question:

Are some geniosities best left unimplemented?

Sadly, this question hasn’t gotten the attention it deserves, despite my well-received article (cf. “Gravitational effects of translation while sitting,” Kids Today 1969, v102, pp 87-89) which raised the issue. It is even more important today that it was then. Do you think those guys at Los Alamos, mucking around in the desert, really thought they could build an atomic bomb? Ironically, the typical defense used when a geniosity is misapplied is the stupidity claim. I’m ashamed to say that’s exactly what I used to explain Bobbie’s unexpected contact with the floor. The resulting Q&A with my teacher Miss Birdbalm is instructive. My comments are in brackets.

Q: Did you pull Robert’s chair out from under him? [Direct question, a tough nut.]

A: That’s not Robert it’s Bobbie! [First attempt—misdirection, obfuscation]

Q: Did you? [Miss Birdbalm was not easily distracted.]

A: Yes, but I didn’t know that Bobbie would sit on the ground. [The stupidity defense.]

Q: Why did you pull the chair back? [Her first mistake, questioning my intentions.]

A: I thought it would help. [Who can argue with good intentions?]

Q: How would pulling Bobbie’s chair back help him? [She’s a gonner now.]

A: I noticed that he walks with a limp, so I calculated the moment of inertia about his ankles and concluded that his head would be whiplashed against the back of the chair upon sitdown. Unfortunately I overcompensated and pulled the chair out too far. Believe me, it would have been worse if I’d done nothing at all. I’ve got all the bugs worked out now... [You get the idea.]

The problem with geniosities is that they are too precious not to be implemented, so that Whoa, I could do THIS!, is inevitably followed in short order by Whoa, I did THAT! Maybe this is the march of progress, but I’d like to propose a moratorium on geniosities until we get this sorted out. Except for mine, of course. I only have helpful ideas now.