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Griffiths / Reducing the excuse for being plain wrong

IN the last five years between two different jobs in the area (and two different houses at the other end), I must have cycled the route between Civic’s East Row and O’Connor at least 1000 times.

John Griffiths.
John Griffiths.
And for all of those 1000 times I’ve bounced around Alinga, Moore and Rudd streets before joining a crush of cyclists to cross Barry Drive.

Pedestrians have sworn at me for being on the footpath and fat blokes in utes have sworn at me for being on the road, despite it being completely legal in the ACT for a bicycle to be on both the road or the footpath.

And then, this week, for reasons I don’t completely understand I asked Google Maps for what it thought was the best route.

Straight down East Row, straight up Barry Drive.

That can’t possibly work, I thought. But I gave it a go and it was a revelation. All the crossing traffic giving way to me, far less interaction with traffic and pedestrians, and in the order of three minutes carved off the 15-minute journey.

Now, I’m not stupid and over the years I’ve thought a lot about the best way to cycle home.

But Google put no specific thought at all into my route, the maps’ software though had access to more data and the ability to plan out the whole route rather than react to the specific moment, as one does when rubber is on road.

Having access to lots of data is something we’re really having to struggle with as a species.

For all of our history, up until 20 years ago, we roughly knew what was in our heads and that was about it.

Donald Rumsfeld was mocked for musing about known-unknowns and unknown-unknowns, but it’s a very important concept for our time.

It’s the work of seconds now to check any fact before we put it down in writing.

This is a mixed blessing for opinion column writers. Certainly, we can avoid making howlers more easily, but the risk of disappearing for hours down research rabbit holes has massively increased.

However, it does reduce the excuses for being just plain wrong.

“I’d heard that…”, “When I was in school they said…”, “My grandad told me…”, a whole class of rhetorical justifications vaporised in the cold reality of: “Why didn’t you look it up?”.

However, for our political classes this is a bit of a problem. Overarching ideology used to provide a road map for policy in the absence of data.

But now we have data and it’s obvious, in all sorts of areas, that no single ideology has all the answers all the time.

Religion’s got some problems here, too.

The old religious books provided a pretty handy (and successful) guide to how to run a happy healthy society with the technology of their time.

The problem being that their time was thousands of years ago and now we have instant communications, fast transport, cheap manufacturing, refrigeration and effective medicine.

Hot running water wipes out half the societal utility of the Old Testament let alone the impact of the internet!

Sadly, I’m not here with any solutions. Except to say that any idea you’ve had for more than five years is well worth taking apart and scrutinising from first principles against the available data.

Also check your route home on Google Maps; chances are you’re missing a trick.

 

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4 Responses to Griffiths / Reducing the excuse for being plain wrong

André says: 4 March 2015 at 4:22 pm

An interesting point of journalism that goes for bike riding to Google Maps, but then strays into Googling and goes right off topic when it has a jab at religious texts! Delete those four paragraphs and it’s a good read, otherwise it’s ramble.

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Stanza Matic says: 4 March 2015 at 4:46 pm

The Gospels are still relevant, despite running water and Google…how we use computers, or the roads, even, is still a moral issue, not only an empirical one. The selfishness hasn’t changed, hence people not wanting to share either footpaths or roads, or posting (or watching) cruel things on the interwebs. Also: Lycra.

I like these more open-ended pieces.

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