One of my favourite TV detectives when I was growing up was Colombo. Although I wasn’t quite aware of it at the time, looking back, I think the thing that made me like actor Peter Falk’s character so much was that he was simultaneously a dishevelled nincompoop and as smart as a whip. It was a great contradiction. Criminals often got tricked by the former trait and then caught by the latter. Call it the old Principle-22-Switcheroo.
I was flicking through the channels the other day and noticed a re-run of an episode called, ‘A Bird In the Hand’. I joined the action after the murder had taken place. Someone was being filmed getting in to their Rolls-Royce and when they started the engine, the car blew up. Colombo had been watching the film. Looking for contradictions.
Lots of people seem to love watching detective programmes. I think its because they’re a type of puzzle. Can we work out who the perpetrator of the crime is before the detectives do. I’d have to say the genre became less appealing to me after I learned TRIZ. Mainly because TRIZ taught me that detection of a crime is all about contradictions. Someone is lying. They’re pleading their innocence, when in fact they did it. Spot the contradiction and you’re well on your way to solving the mystery. Connect the contradiction to an Inventive Principle (or perhaps more than one if the writer has done their job well), and the mystery is solved.
What Colombo had spotted in the film, as the cameraman panned across the car scene was that one of the peripheral characters flinched and closed their eyes tight before the explosion. Only someone with a devil-in-the-detail detective’s eye would’ve spotted it. A fraction of a second in a grainy panning film. But enough to give the game away. The flinching character was flinching before the explosion happened because they knew it was about to happen. Bam. Principle 10, Prior Action. Contradiction solved. Crime solved.
I’m not sure I have the energy to go through all the other 70+ Colombo episodes to reverse engineer the contradictions and their resolution, but I’m willing to make a fairly safe bet that a big part of the success of the series, and the reason I loved it, is that the contradiction resolutions could be connected back to a broad spectrum of the Inventive Principles. Most scriptwriters keep re-using the same old tricks. Colombo’s writing team, in my memory at least, was a cut above.
How about that for a Masters thesis dissertation topic?
Imagine the level of creativity that must have been involved to convince hundreds of millions of people to pay you money to consume something will cause them long term damage. Now imagine how much more cretative you’d need to be to keep convincing them even after they know what you’re doing to them. That’s a lot of creativity. And a big testament to the idea that if you pay people a salary to be creative, they will deliver.
That’s the state much of the world finds itself in these days. Large corporations that have done enormous damage to society by getting society to inflict damage on itself.
Not surprisingly, the public sector eventually woke up to the problem. The large corporations have been terrifically creative at ‘externalising’ a lot of the harm they’ve caused. Encourage 30% of the population to become obese, but don’t worry about it because the healthcare system will take care of it. Encourage people with limited resources to pour most of their money into your fixed-odds betting terminal, but don’t worry about it because Social Services will mop up the broken homes and bankrupcy.
So, the public sector fights back by telling people to be careful. All totally logical. A balance has to be struck. Although – hmm – having successful big corporations in your neighbourhood is also a good thing, because look at all of the jobs they provide, and the taxes they pay. So local governments also play the externalisation game. Even so, there seems to be a growing perception ‘higher up’ that the scales of justice seem to be tipping in the wrong direction.
The large corporations response? The organisations that employ all those creative people? They put the creativity to work. And in a stroke of sublime genius they come up with expressions like ‘nanny state’. They then convince the mass media to pick up on the phrase and turn it into a libertarian meme. And they in turn convince poor Joe Public that the Government is evil because they’re ‘taking away your liberties’. They’re telling you what you can and can’t do. Take back control. Show them who’s boss.
Taken at a certain level, you have to take your hat off to the genius of it all. Get the consumer to defend the evil you’re making them pay to do to themselves. You couldn’t make it up.
You couldn’t make it up, because the journey has taken several decades and dozens of iterations. Each one more subtle than the last. The slippery slope to complete consumer control has been a long and winding one. To the point where it’s now difficult, if not impossible, to see what life was like while we were still at the top of the hill.
From a TRIZ perspective, of course, the current corporation-versus-nanny-state battle is merely a contradiction. Albeit one that looks a lot like a David versus Goliath fight. Quite romantic in some ways, except for the fact that we all remember the story because it’s the rare exception rather than the rule. 99 times out of a hundred, Goliath beats David to a pulp.
Perhaps the real point of the parable is that David wins by being creative? If the odds are stacked against you, the only way you win is by being able to out-smart than your opponent.
It’s time for the Nanny State to step up to the plate. No more public information diatribes, no more ill-thought penalising taxes, no more ‘expert opinion’, because all they do is play the game the creatives at the big Corporations want you to play. Time instead for the public sector to get properly creative. Play the corporations at their own game. Think about it, if they managed to convince all of us to pay to harm ourselves for their benefit, surely it must be possible to convince the population to get the pendulum swinging in the win-win direction where everyone actually wins instead of killing themselves?
We can all start by remembering that each time someone uses the expression ‘nanny state’ to argue against a point you’re trying to make, your job is not to argue back, it’s to reveal to them which Corporate puppeteer has snuck the empty phrase into their head.
A quick follow-up from yesterday’s blog about Tipping Points. I’ve had occasion to ‘assist’ more than one FMCG organisation in their ill-starred attempts to encourage the British public to take on board the habit of drinking iced tea. They’ve all failed. I haven’t been involved for a few years now, but I still keep watch of the market closely enough to know that – regular as clockwork – one player or another will make a futile re-launch attempt at the start of each summer season. A new brand name. A new twist. A new camera angle. The next inevitable failure.
It’s always been my hypothesis that the combination of (relatively) cold-climate and highly ritualised drinking of tea at work (‘builders’ tea’) just mean that iced-tea makes no sense to the vast majority of British consumers. Iced-tea makes complete sense if its 30degC outside in the same way that hot tea makes no sense if you try and make it with lukewarm water. And yet the FMCG companies keep plugging away trying to get a product past it’s early-adopter Tipping Point to become – commercial heaven – a staple of the British fridge.
I still kind of believe that mis-fit is there. These days, I also know that getting past Tipping Point has little or nothing to do with external contradictions, but is rather about the FMCG companies resolving some of the internal ones. They’d be far better off, in other words, looking at Bruce Springsteen’s Born To Run or U2’s Joshua Tree as a model for success as the latest piece of expensive, ill-conceived consumer feedback from the advertising agencies.
When we’re trying to reduce the world and how it works down to first principles, there aren’t that many universals. One of the clearest – if you know what you’re looking for – is the S-Curve. S-Curves are literally everywhere. Because they describe the fundamental behaviour of systems, and systems are everywhere. When a system experiences a (positive feedback) virtuous cycle, we get the first, rising, half of the curve, then, eventually the system will experience a (negative feedback) vicious cycle which will cause the second – diminishing returns – part of the curve.
Most ‘systems’ aren’t planned, but emerge naturally. A murmuration of starlings being a good example. Our planet, to take a rather bigger example, is another emergent system. That’s what James Lovelock’s ‘Gaia’ idea is all about (despite the fact that the woo-woo, Pagan-gods-and-incense, New Age brigade would like to thing otherwise).
Any system that humans intentionally create is subject to the laws of the S-Curve, but because we’re deliberately trying to design a successful new product, or encourage customers to subscribe to a new service, if we want to achieve a successful climb up the curve, we need to understand what we need to do (and not do) at each critical stage. How to create a virtuous cycle? How to delay the arrival of vicious cycles? Or, better yet, how to overcome the vicious cycles and enable a discontinuous shift to a new curve?
One of the more subtle, but nevertheless fundamentally-present and critical points on the curve is what we currently know as the ‘tipping point’. This is the point when a system successfully transitions from the early struggle and on to the steeply rising part of the curve. This Tipping Point is usually very subtle in nature since natural systems often emerge over quite long periods of evolutionary time. The easiest way to see them therefore involves zooming-out and looking at things over long periods of time. If we zoom out far enough, the human Tipping Point begins to look very obvious:
One could say that for most of our evolutionary history, humans played a tiny role in the ecology of the planet. Humans were a niche and the S-Curve of human population shows near stagnation. We only hit our Tipping Point after our long-ago ancestors invented farming. Once we stopped having to be nomadic and started building stable settlements that we started to achieve the economies of scale that meant new born infants were more and more likely to survive, and then, post Tipping Point, began the steep rise to levels that appear today – somewhere near the top of the curve – to no longer be sustainable.
A bit like the way biologists do a lot of their experiments with fruit-flies because the breeding time is so rapid, one of the best places to see a more detailed picture of the dynamics of the Tipping Point is to look at popular music. An industry where we get to see many thousands of attempts to create ‘hit’ artists every year. Almost every musician strives to be popular (if only to pay the bills), but the vast majority find themselves unable to get past a Tipping Point of popularity that allows them to sustain a long term career. Better yet from a study perspective, every artist is expected to create new music on a regular basis. Musicians are in many ways the fruit-flies of the S-curve world.
Take one of the best selling artists of all time, the band Pink Floyd. Here’s a chronologically ordered list of the sales of their albums:
The band hit the world in the late 60s and made an immediate impression on the record-buying public. They sold enough of their debut album to be afforded the opportunity to record a second. The second one, by all accounts, wasn’t as good, but it still sold enough copies that the record company sanctioned a third. This did a bit better. The fourth did better again. And so did the 5th. But it was only when 8th album, Dark Side of the Moon hit the shops in 1973 that the band found their Tipping Point. 5 million sales per album now jumped to 43 million. The band was, quite literally, set for life.
We can plot similar trajectories for other artists that successfully crossed this ‘set for life’ Tipping Point. Here are a few you, depending on your age, probably know:
The main thing to note with all of them, I think, is that Tipping Points don’t happen right away. Radiohead managed to go stratospheric after only their 3rd album, but it took Stevie Wonder 15 attempts before he properly climbed his popularity S-Curve and became a global superstar. On average, artists seem to need somewhere between five and six attempts.
So, one characteristic of the journey to Tipping Point seems to be trying different things. The other, more subtle one is that in each case some kind of internal (i.e. directly related to the artist rather than their audience) contradiction was solved. With Dark Side Of The Moon, the band finally worked out how to write songs, and, crucially, Roger Waters had the good sense to connect them all to an over-arching theme that would resonate with large swathes of music fan. With Stevie Wonder it was successfully fighting against his record company that he was a serious album artist and not just about pop singles. With Radiohead it was being allowed to produce the album themselves and not be bound by a similar record company pressure for singles. Aretha signed with Atlantic and went to Muscle Shoals. Springsteen stopped trying to be Van Morrison, dumbed-down the words, turned up Clarence’s saxophone and started listening to music journalist come-strategist, Jon Landau. And so on. The basic – universal, first principles – message being, if you want your system to get successfully beyond its Tipping Point, you need to find the internal, sub-system, contradiction(s) and solve them.
After enjoying William Deresiewicz’s book, ‘Excellent Sheep’ (see this month’s SI ezine ‘Best Of’), I thought I’d continue the journey and go straight in to one of his earlier books, ‘A Jane Austen Education’.
It didn’t take me too long to make a connection to Deresiewicz’s connection that Austen’s six novels have something to say about ‘love, friendship and the things that really matter’. Austen tells us about life, Deresiewicz says. She tells us that it is a system is what I say.
TRIZ tells us, via the Law of System Completeness, that ‘a system’ must comprise six essential elements. Six Austen novels, six elements. Hmm.
Here goes…
Mansfield Park (COORDINATION) – being entertained is not the same as being happy. Perpetual amusement leads only to the perpetual threat of boredom. The keys to true happiness, purpose and meaning lie elsewhere. Il faut souffrir. We all need to find our direction and navigate accordingly.
Emma (TOOL) – pay attention to the everyday things – those little things that happen hour by hour to the people in your life: what your niece said, what your friend heard, what your neighbour did. This is what the fabric of our really consists of. This is what life is really about. The devil in the detail.
Persuasion (INTERFACE) – be honest with your friends. Unconditional acceptance is not real friendship. A true friend wants you to be happy, but being happy and feeling good about yourself are not the same thing. A true friend points out your mistakes – even at the risk of losing your friendship.
Northanger Abbey (ENGINE) – Stay awake; don’t take things for granted. By renouncing certainty and cynicism, by opening yourself to new experiences, you can turn your life into an adventure that will never end.
Pride & Prejudice (TRANSMISSION) – you aren’t born perfect. You are born with a whole novel’s worth of errors ahead of you. But making mistakes is the only way to grow up, the only way to connect your need for new experiences with the daily grind. Being right might get you a pat on the head, but being wrong is the only way to help you find out who you really are.
Sense & Sensibility (SENSOR) – Love is about growing up, not staying young. It means a never-ending clash of opinions and perspectives. A true lover is someone who is different from you and willing to challenge you. If your lover is already just like you, then neither one of you has anywhere to go. Being aware of (sensing) differences is essential.
It’s like a whole new world… “But, in spite of these deficiencies, the wishes, the hopes, the confidence, the predictions of the small band of true friends who witnessed the ceremony, were fully answered in the perfect happiness of the union.”
More of those worried emails from people looking at breakthepatentstranglehold.com:
If the TRIZ Trends tell us all the future and prevents any future patentable inventions, what happens to my creativity? Why do we need creative people? What do the creative people do? Is there a point to our existence any more?
Sometimes, I wonder whether there ever was. I can be too sceptical sometimes.
I think creative people have a place in life. Albeit not the one most of them think it ought to be. If they don’t know TRIZ, frankly they’re not going to help anyone ‘be creative’. If they do know TRIZ, their creative value is in going beyond the Trends. It is in revealing the Trends we don’t know are Trends yet.
It is jumping off the intellectual cliff, finding the new ‘creativity S-Curve’.
It is about thinking harder and better than we currently do.
Perhaps the real problem with so-called creative people is they’re the ones – in my experience at least – who are least willing to get outside the ‘comfort zones’ they’re always accusing others of being stuck in.
It seems the least creative people I ever encounter are the people working in the creative professions. Most of them seem blind to the problem. All they seem to see is a world full of non-creative people that never listen to their ‘out of the box’ ideas. Never realising that the reason no-one listens is lack of ideas was never the problem. The real issue is lack of good problem definitions. Definitions like, ‘what happens when we go beyond this Trend pattern? Why does the Trend end here? What’s the contradiction between this Trend and that one?
Finding answers is easy. The true creatives are the ones who create better questions. That’s the new job. Same as the old job. Except now TRIZ confirms it for us.
Has something gone wrong recently in the milk bottling industry? Someone taken their SixSigma training too far? I don’t know what’s happened, but suddenly I find myself in need of sharp implements to open my milk when the convenient pull-tab on the seal is somehow no longer very convenient.
It’s a classic ‘if the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail’ issue I think. That plus the bigger issue of the way process engineers (and actually all of us) have been taught. When the process engineer is trying to get the seals to stick on the top of the bottle, there aren’t many process variables they can play around with. The main one in fact is how much glue to place between the rim of the bottle top and the seal. As soon as this becomes the case the only available hammer then becomes the Goldilocks and the Three Bears strategy: Not too much glue, not too little. And the desire to find ‘just the right amount’.
This is classic optimization territory. But it is also bad news from the customers point of view because it leads the designers to do dumb things. Not putting enough glue on the bottle is worse news than putting too much on. If the milk leaks, everyone complains, but if the seal needs a knife or fingernail to get it off, the customer is probably frustrated but not sufficiently to actually write an email (or blog article!) to complain about it. Consequently, ‘just the right amount’ of glue tend to err on the side of too much.
Then, of course, the process engineer knows there is variation in the glue dispensing system. So that gets cunningly compensated for too. More glue. Not so good from a cost perspective, but definitely better than those troublesome customer complaints about leaking bottles. Just more annoying seal-removal frustration.
What’s so idiotic about this whole scenario is that the designer thinks they’ve done a good job. They used maths. They did their Design of Experiments. They drew a distribution curve. They worked out their safety margin. They ‘proved’ they’d done the best they could possibly do. They were taught – SickStigma Black Belt-style – how to optimize a situation that wasn’t actually an optimization problem.
When you find yourself playing Goldilocks, it ought to be a pretty good indicator that you’re working on the wrong problem. Goldilocks was an optimizer. Smart people recognise there’s no such thing as ‘just right’ and instead look to solve the contradiction. Which in this case is ‘we want more glue AND we want less glue’. Something like this:
Now at least we’re working on the right problem. The ‘best of both worlds’, solve-the-contradiction problem. Now we have some chance of making progress. And not have to have thousands of customers spend time fishing out fragments of broken seal and excess glue from their milk.
Here’s another reason the global patent system doesn’t make any sense. One of the main criteria against which an inventor’s application will be assessed is the ‘obviousness’ of the solution being proposed. If it’s deemed to be obvious, it can’t be granted.
The ‘obviousness’ test is one of those lovely grey areas that helps reinforce the only real rule in the patent system: the lawyers get rich and the inventors don’t.
The real stupidity in play, however, is that ‘obviousness’ is one of the best tests of whether a solution is a good one or not. If it’s a good solution it should – in retrospect – look obvious. The ‘why didn’t I think of that before’, palm-clasped-on-to-forehead’ moment.
There are multiple tricks patent lawyers can deploy to resolve this problem (we wrote about several in Issue 116 of the SI ezine), but the simplest is effectively the murder-mystery novel technique. A good murder mystery writer successfully obscures the identity of the murderer until a big exciting final reveal. We the readers hadn’t guessed who it was going to be, but when he or she is revealed, we should rapidly realise it had been obvious all along. The butler did it.
Fortunately for the patent lawyers most inventions are rubbish and so they don’t have to be too smart in terms of playing this novelist trick. If its actually a good solution, however, then its likely you’ll see evidence of the trick being played. If it’s a lazy lawyer, you’ll see it used most frequently with words like ‘surprisingly’ or ‘unexpectedly’. As in, ‘we mixed the two combustible chemicals together and when we tried to burn them, unexpectedly, they now completely refused to combust.’
So here’s the real problem. It’s one that comes from TRIZ. And specifically the Trends of Evolution part of the toolkit. Here’s the part that gives inventors and (if they chose to listen) Patent Examiners a clear road map defining successful solution directions. We’ve found 38 of them so far. Here’s one of the more simple ones:
This is known within the TRIZ World as ‘Space Segmentation’. It’s the Trend that basically says all physical objects, for as long as they still exist, will have an advantage if they add progressively more and more holes, that in turn get smaller and smaller, and eventually, get some kind of ‘active’ element added to them. It’s a classic ‘doing more with less’ trend. There are multiple different reasons for adding the holes – making things lighter, for example, or increasing surface area, or improving material transfer. Lots of reasons. But the point from a patent ‘obviousness’ perspective is that any inventor that becomess the first to realise that adding a hole to, say, a semiconductor ball grid array is a good thing can’t be allowed to have that holey-solution patented, because even though it’s the first time in a semiconductor, the TRIZ Space Segmentation Trend tells me that adding holes is totally obvious because that’s precisely how tens of thousands of prior-art inventions have been successful.
Now, for some reason, the patent lawyers don’t seem to want to know about these 38 Trends. I’ll leave you to work out why that might be. From my perspective, I’ve stopped worrying why they will or won’t listen, because what we’re doing is publishing all of the ‘obvious’ evolution jump ideas that the TRIZ Trends tell us will happen at some point in the future.
Even better, I have a piece of software that will do it automatically for me: Take the Space Segmentation Trend. All I need to do is read through all the Claims in all the patents of the world looking for nouns that describe physical objects – scalpel, pill, shoe, compressor blade, toothbrush, you name it – and write a new set of Claims that add ‘at least one hole’ to each of them.
Repeat for the other 37 Trends, for all the patents, and we’ve just defined the future evolution path of every component, process and system on the planet. Now each one is undisputably ‘obvious’ so even the blindest rent-seeking leach of a Patent Lawyer has no choice but to acknowledge the fact. And in the process of making that happen, I firmly believe we will end the patent stranglehold the large enterprises of the world have on the rest of us.
I’m still thinking this one through. A way of measuring a person’s thinking maturity. A brain analogue to what ‘RealAge’ does for a person’s medical age. RealAge is a way of letting people know how healthily they live. Having a RealAge lower than your calendar age is a way of saying you’re living healthily. And vice versa. I’m imagining a similar thing for your brain. Or rather how effectively we do or don’t make use of it.
I think I’ve got several of the necessary components of a ‘Mastery Age’ measure in place. One definite is the Malcolm Gladwell ’10,000 hours to achieve mastery’ meme. Not so much the 10,000 hour number per se because, as I’ve written elsewhere, it seems possible to me to achieve ‘mastery’ of something in a lot less than 10,000 hours if a person works smartly enough. And similarly – as with my guitar-playing efforts – it is very possible to devote 10,000 hours to a subject and quite clearly not achieve mastery. The difference is about how many discontinuous learning experiences you’re able to put yourself through. When I’m playing guitar, I find it too easy to stay in my comfort zone, noodling my way through the same things time and time again. On the other hand, when it came to getting up to speed with some of my innovation-adjacent domains of expertise, I deliberately put myself in contradictory situations to stimulate faster learning.
If the 10,000 hour number means anything, it is perhaps a datum. Like the number of calendar years a person has lived. If we assume a 40 hour-week devoted to mastering a subject, ‘mastery’ of that subject should – assuming a 10,000 hour average – be achieved in around five years. Then, assuming we say the first 20 years of life are about mastering the mechanics of being a sort-of-functioning adult, that leaves, on average, fifty years of adult life in which we could – on average – envisage mastering ten subjects.
In this way, the average person who lives an average actively life to the age of 70 and has used this time to master ten things, they might be said to have achieved a Mastery Age of 70.
A person mastering fewer things could then be said to have a lower Mastery Age. And, conversely, the person that sets out on a journey of pro-active contradiction-chasing mastery could conceivably achieve a Mastery Age considerably beyond their 70 calendar years.
So far so good. But not quite. Because I also think another piece in the jigsaw needs to be some of the #-shaped people model I’ve talked about in this blog and elsewhere (https://triz-journal.com/shaped-people/). The underlying idea of #-shaped is the need to combine both ‘vertical’ domain specialist mastery and ‘horizontal’ domain-bridging generalist knowledge mastery. Somehow the Mastery Age measure needs to account for this parallel need and how well a balance has been achieved. A person that masters 10 domain subjects ought to have a lower Mastery Age than a person that masters five vertical and five horizontal subjects. Now the calculation gets complicated. To the point, I think, where it needs to be done as some kind of automated survey. That’s what we’re working on right now in PanSensic Land.
Meanwhile, I’m figuring, guitar-non-prowess notwithstanding, Mastery-wise, I’m batting below average. My calendar age is 56. My ‘RealAge’, last time I did the assessment, was 48. Which I’m pretty happy with. My Mastery Age, though, seems to be hovering around the 35 mark. Which doesn’t sound so good at all.
Not so long ago, just as I was about to set off on a cross-country drive, a friend emailed me to warn me to drive carefully. Unfortunately, the email arrived just as I was shutting down the computer so I never got to ask what the problem was.
Anyway, I somehow made it safely to my destination and got to ask what the issue was in person. Turns out the problem was in the heavens. Venus and Jupiter were both in the same house. Something like that. Two of the planets that shouldn’t have been where they were.
The scariest part was that she believed it. That the convergence of the two planets was going to cause gridlock on the roads of Britain. And I assume everywhere else.
I checked the papers the following morning, but it seemed like the forewarning had paid off. That was her thinking anyway. To my mind she was in a Popperian ‘no lose’ situation If there had been carnage on the roads, her prediction was right; if there wasn’t it was because the forewarnings paid off. Heads astrology won, tails I lost.
In my mind, bringing matters back to Earth for a second, the ‘drive safely’ warning was a bit like safety legislation. Which for the most part these days has exactly the opposite of its intended effect. Telling people to hold onto the handrails when they go down a flight of stairs, it turns out, is a great way to ensure that more people fall down flights of stairs. Telling people to pull over to the side of the road if they feel sleepy is a great way to ensure more drivers end up snoozing their way into a car-wreck.
Investigators and legislators, sadly, find themselves in rock-and-hard place positions when these kinds of thing go wrong in society. They’re under pressure to do something whenever they investigate an accident or an incident. Usually, the easiest thing they can do is to add more legislation or instruct that warning signs are put in place. Or more labelling on packaging. And so on until we’re all of us completely surrounded by cotton wool exhortations to be more careful.
The first problem with this strategy is the investigation team, as far as I can tell, have little or no understanding of the difference between special and common cause problems. Nor the idea that if we mix the two up any response we design will have the opposite impact to what we intended. Treat a special cause problem as common cause and you make the system worse. Treat a common cause problem as special and you fail to change a dysfunctional system. Either way, irrespective of whether the legislators understand common and special causes or not, the population at large almost definitely don’t. Which means that the legislators have to be seen to be doing something irrespective of whether the situation is special or common.
That ends up being a recipe for a great downward spiral for society because the even bigger problem is that what happens when we’re bombarded with safety information all the time is that we become collectively more anxious. And if there’s one thing to guarantee more accidents and unwanted incidents it’s a population full of anxious people. The downward spiral looks something like this:
Astrology, meanwhile, is yet more anxiety-causing bunkum. The reason deluded friends continue to believe our future is written in the heavens is predominantly about confirmation bias. The actual reason Pisceans (or whichever Sign it is – I can’t be bothered to look up the statistics) are more ‘accident-prone’, for example, is because they’re more anxious than other star signs. And the reason they’re more anxious is because they continually get told by other astrology-delusionals that they’re more accident-prone.
Maybe I’m being a bit harsh here. Maybe the position of Venus in the sky really does have a genuine impact on our lives like the Moon actually does. I’m open to the possibility. Or at least I am if I can be shown an experiment where all of the other related effects – confirmation bias, etc – are properly controlled for.
If I had to assemble a theory based on what we know so far prior to such experiments, if I wanted to be generous to astrology I might hypothesise that the position of Venus has a 0.000001% effect on me crashing my car this afternoon. The likelihood of me crashing my car because a friend tells me to be careful, meanwhile, based on actual scientific evidence relating to the effect of anxiety on errors, will increase by around 5000 times that amount. The anxiety caused by being told to drive carefully, in other words, is about 5000 times more potent as a cause of accidents than the orbital position of Venus.
Which, all in all means, maybe the legislators might start decreasing the rate of harm they’re currently causing if they spent more time reading horoscopes and less time designing counter-productive signs. Or something like that.
