Big Data And My Icemaker
Understanding The Streetlight Effect In Humorous Fashion
Somewhere in hell, there is a demon whose sole purpose is the construction and perfection of a type of shop vac unit intent on soul-sucking the hope right out of a person. I call him Bob, and unfortunately, we are on better first-name relations than I care to admit.
I spent four months trying to parse through a mass of data resulting from a series of chemistry experiments. In this case, the experiments were to monitor and record many data metrics from the analysis of a lot of drugs from human blood samples. For purposes of brevity and boredom avoidance, imagine you are trying to adjust the number of traffic lights and stop signs in a large busy city to reduce traffic congestion. Once you have all the data on traffic and street layouts, you have to create some tools to run a simulation on how things would be different if you made a change on Main Street, etc. I was evaluating something similar only with toxicology data instead of traffic (don’t snore yet).
The point here is to just relate that there is a large amount of tedious work that took about four months to compile and analyze. Many of the data results I examined indicated the experiment was successful. Others indicated the need for more follow-up work. However, in hindsight, I avoided looking at some of the metrics because if they suggested problems, I would have to go back to the drawing board. Instead, I subconsciously focused on looking at all of the others that were more likely to have supported my hypothesis.
By the time I circled back to evaluating the portions of my work I’d avoided examining, I discovered that my entire series of experiments had to be scrapped, and I’d have to start over. This happened coincidentally, as demon Bob came around for a visit to show off this year's model.
I stared at the computer screen for about an hour feeling sorry for myself while filling out Bob's customer satisfaction survey. I tried indicating on the form that I hadn't purchased the S.O.M. model 2 but to no avail. The daemon bot in the chat window kept indicating that I had won a free trial.
"Oh, no, sir don't worry. We are simply giving you a free service and demon-stration (pun intended) of how it works. You don't have to purchase it, we are just giving you a seven-day free trial."
In the end, I had to give her my email address to have the service expire at the end of my seven days. This only served to make me a victim of endlessly unsubscribing from their email distribution list.
After my week-long pity party, I read another article about the processes people use to go about finding out what's true in this world of misinformation. I seem to be a sucker for this kind of headline because I have this growing list of bias types and other articles on the subject that I've yet to find any way to entertainingly write about. That is until the eighth day after Bob had left, and the hope glimmers began to find their way back into my soul again. I immediately told the lady who guards our front desk to not let Bob back into the foyer again, because his sales tactics are way too shady.
Then I re-read an interesting article about what is called the "Streetlight Effect." It's ironic how an article on honest foolishness can breathe insight like fresh air.
The Streetlight Effect
One version of the idea describes a drunk man crawling around on the ground underneath a streetlight at night. A police officer walks by, notices the man is crawling around, and finds the behavior rather curious. The police officer asks,
"What are you doing?"
"Huh? I'm looking for my car keys."
The police officer walks closer and looks around at the bench and the trash can. Then he asks,
"Where were you standing when you dropped them?"
"In the park, I think."
The police officer, mildly puzzled, looks out into the darkness where the black night has enshrouded the park and then turns back to gaze at the drunkard searching among the empty Doritos bags for some hidden prize. The police officer attempts to puzzle out the obscurity of what he thought was obvious. He asks,
"Uh, if you dropped them in the park... why are you looking for your keys under this bench?"
The drunk man looks at the police officer with annoyance and a smug sense of superiority. He indignantly replies,
"Because this is where the light is, you idiot!"
The streetlight effect: trying to solve one problem by deliberately looking for the answer precisely where you know it isn't.
“It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble.
It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.”
—Mark Twain
I like the conciseness of Nagesh Beludi's description of the streetlight effect which he writes about in this post.
“The streetlight effect refers to the propensity for people to look for whatever they’re searching in the easier places instead of in the places that are most likely to yield the results they’re seeking. This is a widespread observational bias that manifests itself frequently in research and investigative methods.”
Before I dive into my comical experience of the phenomena, here are a few links to more seriously investigate the notion.
Further Reading on the Streetlight Effect (cognitive bias).
The “Streetlight Effect”: A Metaphor for Knowledge and Ignorance
Why Scientific Studies Are So Often Wrong: The Streetlight Effect
The Drunkard’s Search or the Streetlight Effect [Cognitive Bias]
The Icemaker And The Waterfall
Newsflash! Kids don't like to pay attention to their parents' instruction (at least mine don't)
I got up one Saturday morning and while attempting to make a pot of coffee I stepped into a puddle of wet-something on my kitchen floor. Given that two dogs live in my house, I braced for the worst. As it turns out it wasn't a failure to housebreak my dogs but rather my youngest son. No, he hadn't urinated on the floor, but he had failed to obey me in regards to removing ice from the freezer. The cubes have tended to freeze together into large chunks lately, and he decided to break them apart by using a spoon handle as an icepick. The ratio of cubes in the floor to cubes in his cup was about five to one. I had just soaked my sock in a puddle from the ice cubes he had failed to pick up (he picked none of them up).
Now here is where an honest observation of foolishness ought to be clearly visible. I could have a conversation with my son about why listening to me is a good idea, and why he should do what I ask so that we can do more fun things together instead of having more uncomfortable talks about making messes. But history has shown me this endeavor is often fruitless even with some discipline to help teach him responsibility.
But that sounded like a path that involved some possible parenting arguments with “The Mrs.” about what we agreed to let them do, and then possibly some more discussions or arguments with the eight-year-olds in like fashion. I didn't expect either to provide much hope for a fun Saturday. Instead, I've noticed that sometimes having a decent carrot in front of my boys helps motivate them more effectively to do what is asked. My experience though is that carrots offer short-term motivational encouragement towards obedience, but aren't always the best methods for teaching responsibility. On this day, however, I wanted the problem to magically fix itself. And I, in my streetlight-biased wisdom, felt going away with my family to do something fun together would make them happy. Therefore, I mused, their natural display of gratitude towards me would result in a reluctance to make messes all the time. Now you might be asking,
"Did you really think this would work?"
Well, I would point out that smarter folks than you or I have still fallen short in the same principle famously noted by Daniel Kahneman in his book, "Thinking Fast and Slow" (I know, I quote this line all the time).
“The confidence that individuals have in their beliefs depends mostly on the quality of the story they can tell about what they see, even if they see little. We often fail to allow for the possibility that evidence that should be critical to our judgment is missing—what we see is all there is. Furthermore, our associative system tends to settle on a coherent pattern of activation and suppresses doubt and ambiguity.”
—Daniel Kahneman
And so, hiking with my family to see a waterfall seemed like a good way to spend an afternoon. The waterfall as it turned out was much much larger than we had expected and it offered a swimming hole at its base which my kids absolutely loved. We hadn't planned on any swimming, but the place really was pleasant and the opportunity wasn't to be passed up. The slimy boulders approaching the falls however proved to be somewhat tricky. I stepped onto a grouchy stone that didn't like the feel of my foot and it decided to pitch me loose. Both feet were nearly parallel to the ground as I fell backward into a small pool of water the size of a bathtub, surrounded by large rocks. I was completely submerged in about three feet of water. When I emerged, all I could think about was how lucky I was not to have painted the rocks with my scalp. I was going to remind my wife and kids to be careful when I realized they already had their phones out taking pictures and trying to catch their breath at my near-death experience.
Yes it was funny and I too wanted to laugh, but I'd hoped that someone would have at least checked to see if I was okay before the ensuing laughter. Of course, when I hear my wife re-tell this part of the story, she seems to remember offering some concern that completely escapes my memory altogether. Regardless, I’d fallen flat on my back with no major injuries other than some bruises and scrapes. The whole of the afternoon from then on was about how funny it was that Daddy fell in the water that way.
I'd nearly had enough at this point. I reminded my wife how I don't think she has a very good sense of humor. She doesn't get most of my jokes, and she doesn't care much for wit or sarcasm in the TV Shows we watch. But boy, oh boy, does she love to watch those YouTube videos where people slip and fall down. So this had aggravated me all the way home. And when we got home I'd stewed over it long enough.
"I'll show her something that's really funny. I will make her laugh so hard she pees on herself."
I looked at myself in the bathroom mirror. I was wearing nothing but my underwear. I grabbed a baseball cap and put it on somewhat backwards. I found a large pair of sunglasses and put those on. Then in my mind I started playing a loud percussion rythm and I began to bounce and practicing my most ridiculous dance moves in front of the mirror. I changed my routine several times until my facial expressions, my hand gestures and my ridiculous attire made me look like some reject from the beastie boys doing a saturday night live skit. And I stayed in character. In my mind I was going to bring my routine into the kitchen while she was talking on the phone, and my little routine would make her laugh her butt off. I'd show her real comedy.
I peeked round the corner into the kitchen and she was leaning on the counter, chatting away on the phone with her back facing me. I was a little nervous, and jumped out into the kitchen with a wild version of my routine that accidentally turned into a poor version of “the running man dance”. As my wife attempted to turn in my direction, my right foot stepped into a puddle of melted ice cubes, both feet shot straight up into the air, and my body went completely horizontal in the air for the second time in one day.
My wife turned around just in time to miss my routine and hear the “smack” of my head and back against the floor. She looked at me lying there nearly unconscious in my underwear with my sunglasses dangling sideways on my face.
And guess what she didn't do?
She didn't ask if I was alright. She did not ask if I'd split my head open. She didn’t bother to rush over and check to see if I was even conscious. Nope, she just fell over against the counter laughing so hard that she couldn't catch her breath. She’d missed my real comedic performance and instead laughed raucously at my falling down and hurting myself: a sadist if ever there was one.
I stared at the ceiling and just lay there giggling at my own foolishness. I had come full circle with the problem of my kids and their misuse of the icemaker.
So both my icemaker conundrum and my data science problem at work suffered from the same streetlight effect bias: deliberately looking in the wrong places for validation that I was successful in addressing a problem until I was inevitably left with the problem still being there. Luckily for me in both cases, I was forced to hit that speedbump and accept it instead of continually avoiding it and going in circles. A consolation prize rests in my hope that in reading this you laughed heartily at my expense. I sure did.
Lol, I really enjoyed the laughs. Nothing more funny than people in misery it seems ... lol