Food security : framing the real problem

An interesting article in the Economist special report on food security a week or 2 ago. One of the inset boxes contained a short article about food waste at various levels. The developed world waste about 50% of the food produced and the developing world about 20%.

Making agriculture more efficient would be trying to solve the wrong problem. Are vested interests at work to promote the culture of increased production as the only path or is it seen as too hard to change the culture of what and how were eat to cut waste.

I tried to come up with a bias that might explain some of this, but decided I did not know enough about the subject area. Maybe that is a bias in itself?

My name is Clive and I am a self esteem addict.

I was reading John Humphrys book Lost for Words while returning on the train from London last night and this bit from page 268 struck a chord.

Some days I'll spend three hours in the Today studio and go home thinking I did a reasonably good job. Other days - too many of them - I leave wondering why I ever became a journalist in the 1st place. If I am incapable, after forty five years in the business, of doing a half-way decent interview with a not-very-bright politician I really should pack it in and grow carrots.

He then goes on to talk about self-esteem and that anyone who does not experience a lack of it at some point is a smug, self satisfied moon or on some pretty powerful drugs.

I got off the train at Cosford, drove down to Church Stretton and went for a run on the Long Mynd following the course of the rather brutal Long Mynd Valleys race which is 12 miles and 4500ft of up and down as part of my Bob Graham Round training. I got round in a rather pleasing 2 hour 40 without really pushing myself hard, the last hour was in the dark. Mulling over what Mr. H has written it occurred to me that I achieve something, think well done Clive, good lad, then over the next few months my eyes get opened to what possible is beyond that and I start to look down on what I achieved previously. Some examples

• Rock Climbing : in my 20's I ended up doing a few routes of E4 (which is quite hard). Moving up through the grades, each level would feel good for a while and then I felt the need to push myself to the next level. Harder, more sustained and technical, exposed, more necky.
  
• Diving : we ended up as BSAC advanced divers and advanced instructors in pre-children days which was fun in itself. Small steps in getting more experienced, diving deeper and more adventurer and even to the point of just gaining diving knowledge as an end in itself.
  
• Running : From not having run for over 10 years, can I run 10 miles, can I run 16, can I run 22, can I do the Peris Horseshoe (oops extended myself a bit far on this one at the time), 30 miles Wye Valley Ultra and the most daft to date, the 53 miles Highland Fling and now can I do the Bob Graham Round. Along the way you meet people who open your mind to what can be done and you set about closing the gap.
  
• Work : 13 years at Sun as been characterized by more technical and complex customer problems and more volatile customer situations. The satisfaction of fixing a customer issue is short lived as the next one arrives and indeed it becomes a perpetual cycle of fighting cognitive bias as you jump from one issue to the next. I am not power or money motivated, but I do love the challenge of solving hard, complex technical problems
  
• PhD : As one of life's late developers in school with writing and speeling problems which remain to this day finishing a PhD while working was a bit of a prize. It was a war of attrition at the time which dampened much of the satisfaction from being awarded it, but always feel you could have done better, not had re-writes, etc. Started as being a MPhil and as you see others doing a PhD, you start to aspire not believing that you can actually achieve that goal, but pushing on at your own pace.
  

Now don't get me wrong. I am quite content with this aspect of my character, for all the down sides and introspection it prompts, it does drive me to get things done, stretch myself and learn new things. If you are the type of person who tells me I should chill out and be content where I am, I will suggest you are lazy. While that "chill out and be content" view has a point, I get board easily so it is not for me.

Having low self esteem is clearly a problem, very much so for young people. Equally could having a high level of self-esteem, all the time, actually be a limiting factor in achieving your potential as you have nothing to prove to yourself. Without the ebbs and flows of self belief, the motivation to push yourself further and achieve something you previously though was out of your league, will remain distant and weak. You can't be serious about a long term challenge like the Bob Graham Round or a PhD to please or impress anyone else, such motivations are very internal.

Bias of the week : They looked OK technically, but they seemed to be rather pushing the Oracle message.

I have been invited to present at a Industry Testing Conference in a few weeks time. I submitted my slides in good time using the Oracle approved slide template. I got this email from one of the organizers this evening.

On 10 May 2010, at 17:41, XXXX XXXXXXXX wrote:

Hi Clive

Thanks for sending your slides. They looked OK technically, but they seemed to be rather pushing the Oracle message. In our experience this often has a very negative impact on the audience, as they object to feeling that they are being “sold to” and tend to turn off. Do you think you could revise them to make them more as a case study and more neutral? We need the final version by 12 May at the latest.

Otherwise, you will be pleased to know that plans for the above event are all in place and we are looking forward to a very interesting event.


>rest deleted as not interesting<>So taking the feedback on board (if you have ever seen me talk you will know selling is not my preferred speaking style) I went through the presentation again and found the following images

• A Sun 3/160 from 1989
• A Cray T3E from 1997
• A Sun E10K from 1996
• A Sun E15k from about 2003
• The founder of Motorhead (it is a talk on stress testing after all)
• A lion eating a wildebeast
• A slide which shows the workings for a guess at how many lines of code it takes to support you buying something you don't need on Ebay after getting home drunk from the pub on a saturady night
  

Hence my reply.

Hi XXXX,

I am surprised by that observation as none of the systems in question have been on the price book for at least 2 years. Most discussed are over 10 years old, 1 is over 20 years old, one was never an Oracle (or past Sun) system and that it is the concepts that I am discussing highlight past shortcomings, you might want to have an other look at the presentation. The founder of Motorhead has yet to strike a deal promoting Oracle products as far as I am aware, but stranger things have happened.

Other than the slide template which I am required to use, you might want to take a 2nd look and if you still feel that they "push the Oracle message", then please call me
and explain which bits are "selling Oracle" to the audience and I will make the changes accordingly.

Very happy to cooperate, but for the reasons above, I don't get the "selling" bit and its not my style.

Best regards

Clive

So what is going on here. I suspect we have a reviewer who looks at the slides and see images of systems next to the Oracle logo and assumes that I am in some way promoting those systems. There was no reason from someone with no background in Computers and their history, who is just looking at the images to work out that a Sun 3/160 was 1st sold in 1989. If they had read the text next to it they might have got a clue, but they can't be expected to do this. If all your world is a Windows P.C. and you don't know what Enterprise class systems look like and which era they come from, then you can understand this mistake being made. After all, such events have to put up some reasonable defense against sly sales pitches.

The nearest bias I can find is Projection Bias, but it does not fit, so maybe it is just a bit of deletion, distortion and generalization, something we are all guilty of.

The approach I take to writing slides is provide to anchors for topics when I then discuss, so it should be quite hard to get the thread of the talk from just the slides. I do this to make the
talk itself more interesting and engaging, though as shown above there are downsides to taking this approach. Avoiding "death by Powerpoint (or OpenOffice)" is a constraint, not a goal.

Over the shoulder problem solving

I am not really sure that this week bias is really a bias, but it is worthwhile being aware of.

I was writing some code (C) to reproduce a customer problem while in the office near Reading this week and needed to parse an argument, so used the function atoi. I got strange results when I entered large numbers on the command line. Overflow (the size of the number was larger than the type would accommodate) entered my head, but I checked it and carried on debugging the problem as it appeared. After about 10 minutes I ambled off to ask Lee, who I work with, if he would just stand there and after I explained the problem to him, he could point out the daft error I had made.

Within 15 seconds of starting explaining the problem to Lee, I had caught the problem myself, it just jumped out while explaining the issue. He smiled and wondered off knowing that the next time it may occur in reverse.

Explaining a problem to someone else who is fresh is a very powerful problem solving technique, even if they make no direct contribution. Prehaps the bias is a tendency to carry on and not ask for someone to spend a few minutes looking over your shoulder while you explain the pathology of a problem.

Incumbent MP bias : Cambrian News highlights a new cognitive bias

I buy the Cambrian News (local paper for mid Wales infrequently, much in the same way I buy the Farmer's Weekly every few months to keep an eye on what is going on in the area. I was out of Aberystwyth the day of the 1st set of "hustings".

From the comment section by Patrick O'Brien in the paper based Cambrian News this week, it was probably a good thing I was away. I can't find a web based version of this article, but the story goes along the lines of "they all agreed on just about everything. Questions were submitted upfront, the audience was well behaved, the 4 candidates were all careful not to say anything which could offend".

What was interesting was the last few paragraphs where the writer suggested that the incumbent MP looked most comfortable and being on face value the stronger candidate. This is what I think is the bias.

Lets examine what the 4 of them have spent the last 5 years doing

• Plaid : Penri has spent most of the last 5 years lecturing in agriculture and being part of the Plaid party machine
• Luke : has I guess spent most of last 5 years either doing a law degree or Solicitor training, with some element of being part of the party machine
  
• Richard : has I guess spent most of the last 5 years either in school or being a student (assume this from him being 20) and been a town counciler.
  
• Mark : has spent most of the last 5 years being an M.P. at Westminister where he had practise walking the walk. He made speaches, saw others make speakers, draw out the good and bad, helping people with problems, dancing around the local council. He will appear a stronger canidate because he is already in that world. If you want to train for something, then do it.

This makes the decision of suitability(where you vote) for the office of Ceredigion M.P. a difficult one unless you already party aligned. I meet with both Mark and Penri in my role as acting chair of the C.A.B. Both were proactive and very supportive. I have meet them both in other contexts and exchanged a few emails. Apart from Mark having the experience of the last 5 years, both would be equally competent at helping local people with their problems, the MP's surgery. Give Penri a year to find his feet, learn the train timetable off by heart, I suspect they would be at parity in terms of constituency level work.

For me the real question is which one is going to be a better strategic thinker, be part of driving their parties policy, tell their whip to **** off when they feel strongly about an issue, indeed to feel strongly about an issue beyond keeping their job and to be a real pain in the arse to the likes of George Osborne and Ed Balls.

Hustings are not a suitable medium to see beyond "Incumbent MP bias" and to really get inside the head of each candidate to understand what they might be capable of. A candidates blog which gives informed comment is a far better indication of a active and capable mind and of what the candidates really stand for.

Patrick was no doubt on the money, but I think forgot this rather important bias. Unless we take it into account, there is little point in having elections until an MP dies or retires.

Cognitive bias of the week : Information bias

To some extent my job of fixing broken/slow computers is a constant fight against cognitive bias; both mine and other peoples. The use of Rational Process from Kepner Tregoe has been a very fine tool in avoiding some of the bias associated with the diagnosis of complex IT systems and the wider environment they run in.

The usual source defines cognitive bias as

A cognitive bias is the human tendency to draw incorrect conclusions in certain circumstances based on cognitive factors rather than evidence. Such biases are thought to be a form of "cognitive shortcut", often based upon rules of thumb, and include errors in statistical judgment, social attribution, and memory. Cognitive biases are a common outcome of human thought, and often drastically skew the reliability of anecdotal and legal evidence.

So as an exercise to imprint these on my brian and to write something a little more interesting, I shall endeavor to pick out a cognitive bias which I have found myself being guilty of. I shall try to do this at least once a week.

There is quite a rich source here, but I intend to add some value by giving context and the reason why I found myself guilty of that bias and how I might avoid it.

I am probably guilty of information bias by beliveing that by learning more about a range of congative biases that I may make future decisions which are better and that I shall reduce the number of events where I fail to take make the right diagnosis first time.

So will this feature on this blog be itself an example of cognative bias?