Argumentos visuais

[Florence Nightingale]“That makes her perhaps the first person to grasp that busy, influential people would pay far more attention to a vivid diagram than to a table of numbers.

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As Nightingale quipped when sending one of her analytical books to the Queen, “She may look at it because it has pictures.”

It’s a cynical, almost contemptuous, thing to write. But it is true. A chart has a special power. Our visual sense is potent, perhaps too potent. The word “see” is often used as a direct synonym for “understand”—“I see what you mean.” Yet sometimes we see but we don’t understand; worse, we see, then “understand” something that isn’t true at all. Done well, a picture of data is worth the proverbial thousand words. It is more than persuasive; it shows us things we could not have seen before, revealing patterns amid chaos. However, much depends on the intent of the chart’s creator, and the wisdom of the reader.

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Much of the data visualization that bombards us today is decoration at best, and distraction or even disinformation at worst. The decorative function is surprisingly common, perhaps because the data visualization teams of many media organizations are part of the art departments. They are led by people whose skills and experience are not in statistics but in illustration or graphic design. The emphasis is on the visualization, not on the data. It is, above all, a picture.

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So information is beautiful—but misinformation can be beautiful, too. And producing beautiful misinformation is becoming easier than ever.

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A good chart isn’t an illustration but a visual argument ... If a good chart is a visual argument, a bad chart may be a confusing mess—or it may also be a visual argument, but a deceptive and seductive one. Either way, by organizing and presenting the data, we are inviting people to draw certain conclusions. And just as a verbal argument can be logical or emotional, sharp or woolly, clear or baffling, honest or misleading, so too can the argument made by a chart.

I should note here that not all good charts are visual arguments. Some data visualization is not intended to be persuasive, but exploratory. If you’re handling a complex dataset, you’ll learn a lot by turning it into a few different graphs to see what they show. Trends and patterns will often leap out immediately if plotted in the right way."

Por exemplo, no livro que ando a ler "Unsettled - What Climate Science Tells Us. What it Doesn't, and Why it Matters" de Steven E. Koonin", estou farto de encontrar exemplos como este:

Fontes oficiais apresentam gráficos manipulados, para levar a uma conclusão forçada.

Trechos retirados de "The Data Detective" de Tim Harford.

"a refusal to acknowledge that the world had changed"

 

"This book has argued that it is possible to gather and to analyze numbers in ways that help us understand the world. But it has also argued that very often we make mistakes not because the data aren’t available, but because we refuse to accept what they are telling us. For Irving Fisher, and for many others, the refusal to accept the data was rooted in a refusal to acknowledge that the world had changed. [Moi ici: Recordo logo Drop your tools!!! Ou porque não era o verdadeiro socialismo]

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One of Fisher’s rivals, an entrepreneurial forecaster named Roger Babson, explained (not without sympathy) that while Fisher was “one of the greatest economists in the world today and a most useful and unselfish citizen,” he had failed as a forecaster because “he thinks the world is ruled by figures instead of feelings.” [Moi ici: Recordo logo "Nós fazemos as contas ao contrário"]

I hope that this book has persuaded you that it is ruled by both." [Moi ici: Recordo logo Acerca do optimismo não documentado]

Trechos retirados de "The Data Detective" de Tim Harford.

"The value of the measure will evaporate"

"A few years ago I interviewed General H. R. McMaster, an expert on the mistakes made in Vietnam. He told me that the army used to believe that “situational understanding could be delivered on a computer screen.”

It could not. Sometimes you have to be there to understand—especially when a situation is fast-moving or contains soft, hard-to-quantify details, [Moi ici: Mal li isto recordei logo uma pergunta que me fizeram na semana passada durante este webinar, sobre auditorias remotas no sector alimentar] as is typically the case on the battlefield. The Nobel laureate economist Friedrich Hayek had a phrase for the kind of awareness that is hard to capture in metrics and maps: the “knowledge of the particular circumstances of time and place.”

Social scientists have long understood that statistical metrics are at their most pernicious when they are being used to control the world, rather than try to understand it.

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"When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.") Psychologists turn to Donald T. Campbell, who around the same time explained: “The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor.”

Goodhart and Campbell were onto the same basic problem: a statistical metric may be a pretty decent proxy for something that really matters, but it is almost always a proxy rather than the real thing. Once you start using that proxy as a target to be improved, or a metric to control others at a distance, it will be distorted, faked, or undermined. The value of the measure will evaporate.”[Moi ici: Ainda perguntam porque é que este é um livro a ler em tempos de maioria absoluta?]

Trechos retirados de "The Data Detective" de Tim Harford

Manipulação

"For example, if a group of doctors collect and analyze data on clinical outcomes, they are likely to learn something together that helps them to do their jobs. But if the doctors’ bosses then decide to tie bonuses or professional advancement to improving these numbers, unintended consequences will predictably occur. For example, several studies have found evidence of cardiac surgeons refusing to operate on the sickest patients for fear of lowering their reported success rates.

In my book Messy, I spent a chapter discussing similar examples. There was the time the UK government collected data on how many days people had to wait for an appointment when they called their doctor, which is a useful thing to know. But then the government set a target to reduce the average waiting time. Doctors logically responded by refusing to take any advance bookings at all; patients had to phone up every morning and hope they happened to be among the first to get through. Waiting times became, by definition, always less than a day."

Trechos retirados de "The Data Detective" de Tim Harford.

"we need to realize that our feelings can trump our expertise"

Nestes tempos de maioria absoluta. Nestes tempos de "Lie to me". Nestes tempos de manipulação estatística. 

"I worry about a world in which many people will believe anything, but I worry far more about one in which people believe nothing beyond their own preconceptions.

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Doubt is a powerful weapon, and statistics are a vulnerable target. That target needs defenders. Yes, it’s easy to lie with statistics—but it’s even easier to lie without them.

And more important, without statistics it’s impossible to tell the truth—to understand the world so that we can try to change it for the better,

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when it comes to interpreting the world around us, we need to realize that our feelings can trump our expertise.

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The aim of this book is to help you be wiser about statistics. That means I also need to help you be wiser about yourself. All the statistical expertise in the world will not prevent your believing claims you shouldn’t believe and dismissing facts you shouldn’t dismiss. That expertise needs to be complemented by control of your own emotional reactions to the statistical claims you see.

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We often find ways to dismiss evidence that we don’t like. And the opposite is true, too: when evidence seems to support our preconceptions, we are less likely to look too closely for flaws.

The more extreme the emotional reaction, the harder it is to think straight. 

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We don’t need to become emotionless processors of numerical information—just noticing our emotions and taking them into account may often be enough to improve our judgment. Rather than requiring superhuman control over our emotions, we need simply to develop good habits. Ask yourself: How does this information make me feel? Do I feel vindicated or smug? Anxious, angry, or afraid? Am I in denial, scrambling to find a reason to dismiss the claim?

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The answer to both questions is the same: when it comes to interpreting the world around us, we need to realize that our feelings can trump our expertise."

Trechos retirados de "The Data Detective" de Tim Harford.

Para reflexão

 Aplicável à sua empresa:

"We should all spend more time thinking about the prospect of failure and what we might do about it. It is a useful mental habit but it is neither easy nor enjoyable.

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When we launch a new project we might think about prototyping, gathering data, designing small experiments and avidly searching for feedback from the people who might see what we do not. 

If we expect that things will go wrong, we design our projects to make learning and adapting part of the process. When we ignore the possibility of failure, when it comes it is likely to be expensive and hard to learn from. 

The third advantage of thinking seriously about failure is that we may turn away from projects that are doomed from the out-set. From the invasion of Iraq to the process of Brexit, seriously exploring the daunting prospect of disaster might have provoked the wise decision not to start in the first place."

Trechos retirados de "The power of negative thinking"

Keep Calm and Carry On

Li, e gostei muito de, "David e Golias" de Malcolm Gladwell. Gostei da ideia de que aquilo que para uns é visto como uma desvantagem pode na verdade ser a base para a criação de uma vantagem.

Acabo de começar a ler as primeiras linhas de “Questions Are the Answer” de Hal Gregersen e o tema fez sentido. Muitas vezes, a resolução de um problema difícil passa por olhar para ele de uma forma diferente, com um olhar diferente e colocar perguntas diferentes, que ajudam a chegar a respostas diferentes.

Também recordo uma frase que me marcou tanto nos anos 90, enquanto estava sentado num banco à espera de companhia para o jantar.

"Não é o que nos acontece que conta, é o que nós decidimos fazer com o que nos acontece."

De manhã li "The Doris Day effect – when obstacles help us" e sublinhei:

"Was the car accident that redirected her career an extraordinary twist in the story of an extraordinary life? Or was it typical of some broader truth about life, that frustrations can actually help us? Perhaps it is true that what does not kill us makes us stronger.
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Often failure is simply failure, and a setback is exactly what it seems. But sometimes the obstacle that has been placed in our path might provoke us to look around, and perhaps to discover that a better route was there all along."

Junto tudo isto e penso na loucura do Brexit...

Vai ser duro para os ingleses e pode dar para o torto de forma duradoura. Sobretudo se já tiverem uma  maioria da população a viver à custa do estado e das pensões e reformas. Mas também pode ser duro, dar para o torto durante alguns anos, até emergir um novo normal de certo modo positivo. Sobretudo se assumirem que o mundo não está contra eles e que os males que vão sofrer foram enviados por uns maus.

Reconfiguração

Lembrei-me logo de um projecto do Victor que agora está de férias:

"Some technologies are truly revolutionary. ... But they take time to reshape the economic systems around us — much more time than you might expect. No discovery fits that description more aptly than electricity, barely comprehended at the beginning of the 19th century but harnessed and commodified by its end.
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Usable light bulbs had appeared in the late 1870s, courtesy of Thomas Edison and Joseph Swan. In 1881, Edison built electricity-generating stations in New York and London and he began selling electricity as a commodity within a year. The first electric motors were used to drive manufacturing machinery a year after that.
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Yet the history of electricity in manufacturing poses a puzzle. Poised to take off in the late 1800s, electricity flopped as a source of mechanical power with almost no impact at all on 19th-century manufacturing. By 1900, electric motors were providing less than 5 per cent of mechanical drive power in American factories. Despite the best efforts of Edison, Nikola Tesla and George Westinghouse, manufacturing was still in the age of steam.
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Productivity finally surged in US manufacturing only in the 1920s. The reason for the 30-year delay? The new electric motors only worked well when everything else changed too. Steam-powered factories had delivered power through awe-inspiring driveshafts, secondary shafts, belts, belt towers, and thousands of drip-oilers. The early efforts to introduce electricity merely replaced the single huge engine with a similarly large electric motor. Results were disappointing.
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As the economic historian Paul David has argued, electricity triumphed only when factories themselves were reconfigured. The driveshafts were replaced by wires, the huge steam engine by dozens of small motors. Factories spread out, there was natural light. Stripped of the driveshafts, the ceilings could be used to support pulleys and cranes. Workers had responsibility for their own machines; they needed better training and better pay. The electric motor was a wonderful invention, once we changed all the everyday details that surrounded it.
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David suggested in 1990 that what was true of electric motors might also prove true of computers: that we had yet to see the full economic benefits because we had yet to work out how to reshape our economy to take advantage of them."

Trechos retirados de "Tim Harford: what we get wrong about technology"

Keith Jarreth e as PME

Na passada quarta-feira, enquanto descia o Marão, literalmente, resolvi espreitar o último livro de Tim Harford, "Messy: The Power of Disorder to Transform Our Lives".
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O autor sabe como captar o interesse do leitor, começando com uma estória:

"On the 27th of January, 1975, a seventeen-year-old German girl named Vera Brandes stepped out onto the vast stage of the Cologne opera house. The auditorium was empty, and lit only by the dim green glow of the emergency exit sign, but this was the most exciting day of Vera’s life. She was the youngest concert promoter in Germany, and she had persuaded the Opera House to host a late-night concert of improvised jazz by the American pianist Keith Jarrett. The concert was a sellout, and in just a few hours, Jarrett would stride out in front of 1,400 people, sit down at the Bösendorfer piano, and without sheet music or rehearsal would begin to play.
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But that afternoon, Vera Brandes was introducing Keith Jarrett and his producer Manfred Eicher to the piano—and it wasn’t going well.
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“Keith played a few notes,” recalls Brandes. “Then Eicher played a few notes. They didn’t say anything. They circled the instrument several times and then tried a few keys. Then after a long silence, Manfred came to me and said, ‘If you don’t get another piano, Keith can’t play tonight.’.
Vera Brandes was stunned. She knew that Jarrett had requested a specific instrument and the Opera House had agreed to provide it. What she hadn’t realized was that, caring little for late-night jazz, they’d failed and didn’t even know it. The administrative staff had gone home, the piano movers hadn’t been able to find the Bösendorfer piano that had been requested, and so they had instead installed, as Brandes recalls, “this tiny little Bösendorfer, that was completely out of tune, the black notes in the middle didn’t work, the pedals stuck. It was unplayable.”
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Brandes tried everything to find a replacement. She even rounded up friends to push a grand piano through the streets of Cologne, but it was raining hard, and the local piano tuner warned her that the substitute piano would never survive the trip. Instead, he worked to fix up the little instrument that was onstage already. Yet he could do nothing about the muffled bass notes, the plinky high notes, and the simple fact that the piano —“a small piano, like half a piano”—just didn’t make a loud enough sound to reach the balconies of the vast auditorium.
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Understandably, Jarrett didn’t want to perform. He left and went to wait in his car, leaving Brandes to anticipate the arrival of 1,400 soon-to-be furious concertgoers. The best day of her life had suddenly become the worst; her enthusiasm for jazz and her precocious entrepreneurial spirit brought the prospect of utter humiliation. Desperate, she caught up with Jarrett and through the window of his car, she begged him to play. The young pianist looked out at the bedraggled German teenager standing in the rain and took pity on her. “Never forget,” Jarrett said. “Only for you.”
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A few hours later, as midnight approached, Jarrett walked out to the unplayable piano in front of a packed concert hall, and began.
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“The minute he played the first note, everybody knew this was magic,” recalls Brandes.
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That night’s performance began with a simple chiming series of notes, then quickly gained complexity as it moved by turns between dynamism and a languid, soothing tone. It was beautiful and strange, and it is enormously popular: the Köln Concert album has sold 3.5 million copies."

Quando cheguei aqui parei e fiquei maravilhado.
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Há cerca de 10 anos o meu amigo Eduardo apresentou-me Keith Jarreth e foi amor à primeira vista. E o Köln Concert é pura magia que aprendi a apreciar como companhia durante muitas horas de trabalho ou de viagem.
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Ontem de manhã bem cedo, durante uma caminhada matinal debaixo de chuva miudinha junto aos esteiros de Estarreja, fiz uma ligação entre esta estória e as PME.
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Continua.

Liars, bulshiters e enganados (parte I)

A primeira parte desta série irá abordar precisamente a parte do título que não é considerada no excelente artigo "How politicians poisoned statistics" de Tim Harford.
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O artigo é sobre os que usam a estatística e mentem sabendo que estão a mentir e, sobre os que a usam recortando informação para usarem os resultados de forma interesseira sem estar a mentir.
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Quem são os enganados? Os enganados são um terceiro tipo de utilizadores da estatística, gente que usa os números de boa-fé mas é enganada nas conclusões que retira porque não se apercebe que os números retratam uma realidade diferente daquela que retratavam antes.
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Por exemplo, quando se comparam os números do emprego hoje e no passado. O que é que lemos acerca do desenvolvimento de novas formas de trabalho? Cada vez mais gente trabalha por conta própria. E essas pessoas entram nas estatísticas do emprego? O INE não conta com elas. Recordar "Estou sempre a aprender". Como é possível comparar os números do emprego hoje com os números do emprego em 1997 sem ter em conta quantas pessoas descontam para a Segurança Social e não estão incluídas como empregados?
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Quando se olha para a evolução salarial na Alemanha fala-se muito de estagnação dos salários. E se olharmos para a idade média dos alemães?

Assim, como na agricultura portuguesa, todos os anos reformam-se muitos mais alemães no topo da carreira salarial e os que entram são jovens que vão directos para a base da carreira salarial. O que é que os analistas que só olham para o número agregado concluem? Os salários alemães não crescem!
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Medina Carreira quando compara as taxas de crescimento do PIB em Portugal nos anos 60 com as taxas actuais nunca considera o efeito que tinha o simples crescimento da população.
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Acredito que muitos macro-economistas que olham para os números do Japão interpretam-nos sem considerar o efeito da demografia, por exemplo: Será que o Japão teve mesmo uma década perdida?
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BTW a Itália é vista como outro país europeu com uma economia doente... tem a segunda idade média mais alta...
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Continua.

"Don’t trust your intuition"

Este trecho, retirado de "A Discussion on the Work of Daniel Kahneman":

"There’s an overarching lesson I have learned from the work of Danny Kahneman, Amos Tversky, and their colleagues who collectively pioneered the modern study of judgment and decision-making: Don’t trust your intuition."

Serve de boa base para a leitura de "How investors get it wrong":

"‘We trade too often because we’re too confident in our ability to spot the latest bargain’
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Yet illuminating as all this might be, such reporting draws a veil across what we might call the Investor’s Tragedy: that the typical investor doesn’t do nearly as well as the typical investment."

Evolution is smarter than we are

"As the biochemist Leslie Orgel famously remarked, ‘Evolution is cleverer than you are’, meaning that when an evolutionary process is let loose upon a problem, it will often find solutions that no human designer would have dreamed of. But there is an unhelpful corollary to Orgel’s maxim: if the problem is misstated then evolution is likely to find loopholes few of us could have imagined. In biological evolution, of course, there is no one to misstate the objective. Genes succeed if they are passed down the generations. But with Karl Sims’s virtual evolution, it was Sims who set the criteria for reproductive success and the results were sometimes perverse. There is a revealing moment in the video which displays a creature that evolved to move quickly on land. The creature, a crude slab of a body with two blocks loosely attached, simply rolls around and around in a wide circle, its ‘head’ staying still while its ‘legs’, crossing and uncrossing, mark out the circle’s circumference. The virtual creature looks like one of life’s losers, but it isn’t: it’s a winner, because it is achieving the goal Karl Sims set: move quickly on a flat plane.
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we discovered that the economy is itself an evolutionary environment in which a huge variety of ingenious profit-seeking strategies emerge through a decentralised process of trial and error. As Leslie Orgel’s rule suggests, what emerges is far more brilliant than any single planner could have dreamed up. But as the dark side of Orgel’s rule predicts, if the rules of the economic game are poorly written, economic evolution will find the loopholes. That is why sensible-seeming environmental rules can produce perverse results: rainforest chopped down to produce palm oil; trucks laden with woodchips braving the congestion of central London; the rise and rise of the SUV. Evolution is smarter than we are, and economic evolution tends to outsmart the rules we erect to guide it."
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Trechos retirados do capítulo V do livro "Adapt" de Tim Harford

Adapt - últimos recortes

"Disruptive innovations are disruptive precisely because the new technology doesn’t appeal to the traditional customers: it is different and for their purposes, it’s inferior. But for a small niche of new customers the new disruptive product is exactly what is needed.
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The problem for a market leader in the old technology is not necessarily that it lacks the capacity to innovate, but that it lacks the will. When a disruptive technology appears, it may confound an existing player because the technology itself is so radically different
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More often, Christensen found, the problem was not technological but psychological and organisational: it is hard for a major organisation to pay much attention to a piddling new idea that makes little money and invites a yawn or a blank stare from important customers."

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Eheheh... e quem é que recebe os apoios e subsídios?

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A empresa grande, onde mais postos de trabalho estão em risco, onde há toda uma autoridade da tradição, do que sempre funcionou, sempre foi assim que fizemos... ou o tiro no escuro?

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Pois, é isto que as políticas de apoio aos centros de decisão nacional, de apoio aos campeões nacionais, promovem.

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Ultimo recorte do livro "Adapt - Why Success Always Starts With Failure" de Tim Harford.

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Preocupante, acabar de ler e ouvir um livro que defende a tese de que tudo o que é demasiado grande para falhar, não testa, não experimenta, não selecciona, não se adapta... o mais provável é viver numa constante negação e em intrincados processos mentais que protegem a visão da realidade crua e nua:

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"While denial is the process of refusing to acknowledge a mistake, and loss-chasing is the process of causing more damage while trying to hastily erase the mistake, hedonic editing is a subtler process of convincing ourselves that the mistake doesn’t matter. One way we do this is by bundling together losses with gains, like a child trying to eat some disliked healthy foodstuff by mashing it up with something tasty until the whole mess is palatable but unrecognisable. (Moi ici: Faz lembrar a última entrevista de Vitor Gaspar e a sua afirmação sobre o Estado Social)

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A different psychological process, but with a similar effect on our ability to learn from our mistakes, is simply to reinterpret our failures as successes. We persuade ourselves that what we did was not that bad; in fact, everything worked out for the best."  (Moi ici: Faz lembrar Cravinho, Paulo Campos, Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa, ...)
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Sim... viver sob o poder de um Estado cada vez maior... sob a ilusão que a informática tudo resolve... oh boy! Kafka is so much alive! Kafka rules!!!

Experimentação

Não há coincidências, todos os acasos são significativos...
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Enquanto oiço "Adapt" de Tim Harford, onde encontro coisas como:
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"we’ve already seen that bottom-up often beats top-down, and we’ll see even more powerful examples of that tendency later. But this is the point: the world is complicated. What works in the US Army may not work in a rural Javanese village. The lesson is to keep experimenting and adapting, because a single success may or may not replicate in other contexts.)" (Moi ici: Um apostar na humildade e na experimentação)

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"‘We should not try to design a better world. We should make better feedback loops’" (Moi ici: Há dias, ao ler algures uma notícia num jornal sobre a quantidade de gente que procura casa para alugar no Porto e, sabendo que há muitas casas vazias no Porto, lembrei-me de Goldratt e da teoria das restrições. Pensei, "Os políticos não deviam lançar-se em tentativas de mudar o mundo, podiam começar por coisas mais comezinhas, como, removerem as restrições que as partes numa sociedade encontram. Que constrangimentos impedem que oferta e procura não se encontrem?" O mesmo para o secretário do Estado para o empreendedorismo... removam barreiras, não queiram deixar heranças)

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Vou encontrando na net mais e mais exemplos desta abordagem experimental em pequena escala:

• "Thinking Big? Then Think Little Bets" ("Everyone wants to make big bets. Be bold. Go big. But the irony is that people routinely bet big on ideas that aren’t solving the right problems.")
• "Intuition Can't Beat Experimentation" ("You can imagine how disappointed he was when, having spent some time with him (and his wine), we told him we had no idea what the “right” price was and that the magic number didn’t exist. He almost took away the wine he’d already poured for us.
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  In an attempt to save our drinks, we did offer him help. The help was a method – no magic, equations, or superior knowledge – just a simple experimental design. This article provides a brief introduction to a new and exciting field in behavioral economics: experimentation in firms... The main takeaway is that in many market instances, experimenting (rather than guessing) is the most accurate, simple and often the cheapest way to know how to approach a challenge, be it the pricing, presentation or promotion of a product. ... So why don’t businesses experiment more? ... Another barrier is that managers feel they’ve been hired to provide solutions and make tough decisions to enhance the firm’s performance. In other words, they feel they are expected to have ready answers for the challenges the firm faces. Opting for experimentation may appear to imply they don’t and could compromise their level of expertise – as if they have failed to do their job.")

O socialismo científico - alive and kicking

Tenho idade suficiente para ter ouvido na TV pessoas, como Mário Soares e Vítor Constâncio, falarem com ar sério e compenetrado sobre as vantagens do socialismo científico.
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Ontem, na fita do tempo do twitter, via @GabrielfSilva, encontrei esta tolice decidida pelo Chavismo que está a arrastar a Venezuela para os Infernos:
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«firms will have to report production costs so officials can set what is deemed a fair price.»
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Hoje de manhã, durante o jogging descobri esta pérola sobre o socialismo científico:
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"Allende was elected President of Chile in 1970 on a Marxist platform, and went on to sponsor one of the most surreal examples of the planner’s dream, Project CyberSyn. CyberSyn used a ‘supercomputer’ called the Burroughs 3500, and a network of telex machines, in an attempt to coordinate decision-making in an increasingly nationalised economy.
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Workers – or more usually, managers – would telex reports of production, shortages and other information at 5 o’clock each morning. Operators would feed the information into the Burroughs 3500, and by 5 p.m. a report could be presented to Allende for his executive input. As with the effects-based operations it predated, CyberSyn would allow for feedback and second-order effects. Some CyberSyn defenders argue that the system was designed to devolve decision-making to the appropriately local level, but that does not seem to be what Allende had in mind when he said that, ‘We are and always shall be in favour of a centralised economy, and companies will have to conform to the Government’s planning.’
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The project was not a success. Chile’s economy collapsed, thanks to a combination of the chaos brought on by an ambitious programme of nationalisation, industrial unrest, and overt and covert economic hostility from the United States."
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Só que o socialismo científico travestiu-se e contaminou até os Estados Unidos:
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"Donald Rumsfeld had better computers at his disposal than Salvador Allende, but the dream was much the same: information delivered in detail, real-time, to a command centre from which computer-aided decisions could be sent back to the front line. Rumsfeld pored over real-time data from the theatre of war and sent memos about minor operational qestions to generals such as Abizaid and Casey. But even had Rumsfeld been less of a control freak, the technology was designed to empower a centralised decision maker, be it the secretary of defense or a four-star general.
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But such systems always deliver less than they promise, because they remain incapable of capturing the tacit knowledge that really matters."
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Esta mania do planeamento centralizado... CyberSyn... faz-me lembrar Citius na Justiça por cá.
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Graças a Deus que estamos a entranharmos-nos num mundo, Mongo, onde cada vez mais estas tentativas centralizadoras vão ser ridicularizadas, abandonadas, para darem lugar a um toque local... Ghemawatt e o seu "World 3.0" são apenas mais um exemplo disso.
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Trechos retirados de "Adapt" de Tim Harford que se arrisca a ser a minha melhor leitura de 2011, e mais, é mais uma leitura que vou aconselhar aos meus filhos.
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BTW, H.R. McMaster e David Petraeus, oficiais americanos no Iraque são duas personagens...
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Dedico estas duas citações a todos aqueles que pedem uma estratégia para o país e para a sua economia, a todos aqueles que pensam com uma candura e inocência que a "retoma" (detesto esta palavra) está assente nas acções do ministro Álvaro.
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‘It’s so damn complex. If you ever think you have the solution to this, you’re wrong and you’re dangerous.’ – H.R. McMaster
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‘In the absence of guidance or orders, figure out what they should have been … ’ – part of a sign on a command-post door in west Baghdad, commandeered by David Petraeus

Adapt: Why Success Always Starts with Failure

Comecei esta semana a ouvir, durante o jogging, um livro muito interessante que recomendo:
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"Adapt: Why Success Always Starts with Failure" de Tim Harford

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Ainda só vou no 3º capítulo mas julgo que já posso resumir a intenção do autor na seguinte frase:

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O livro descreve a doença do modelo soviético que contaminou as sociedades ocidentais. A crença num governo central poderoso, a crença nas grandes empresas, a crença nos grandes projectos, a crença nas obras de regime.

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A solução passa por pequenas experiências, passa por seguir a estratégia da biologia, variação e selecção em pequena escala. Realizar testes que podem correr mal sem pôr em causa o sistema.

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Sobre o livro encontrei os seguintes comentários:

• "Best Business Books 2011: Management"

Não posso deixar de pensar que os problemas da Saúde e da Justiça resultam desse gigantismo, dessa sovietização do pensamento... 

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A biologia dá-nos sempre a lição da divergência, da cladística, ... por isso, acredito que o futuro não é uma mega-farmácia ao estilo do Continente, mas a especialização... por isso, sorri ao ler esta intervenção de Christensen sobre a Saúde:

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“If we simplify the problem, we simplify the development of solutions,”
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Every time the number of pathways is doubled, the cost of overhead increases by 30 percent because of the complexity of intersecting pathways. The average hospital has 110 different pathways, he said. Typically hospitals’ overhead is 85 percent of the total cost of business and only 15 percent goes to caregivers working to help patients.

Christensen exemplified Shouldice Hospital, located outside Toronto, which specializes in hernia repair. Shouldice’s overhead is $1,600 compared with $6,030 at a general hospital; the cost of supplies and labor is $700 versus $970; and the total cost for length of stay is $2,300 versus $7,000. New England Baptist Hospital in Boston is following a similar path by specializing in orthopedics. The facility can perform a hip replacement at 45 percent of a general hospital’s cost.

Christensen wrapped up his talk by reiterating the need for simplicity. “If we simplify the problem, then simple solutions will emerge. “

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BTW, ao ler este título "Na informatização da Justiça, Portugal é comparado com os países do primeiro mundo" lembrei-me logo do que ando a ouvir...

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Qual a finalidade, qual a razão de ser da Justiça?

Tudo na Justiça devia contribuir para o cumprimento da finalidade...

Quais os resultados da Justiça?

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Mas os políticos podem vangloriar-se "comparado com os países do primeiro mundo"...

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Pois, equívocos (parte I e parte II)

O mecanismo de selecção natural no modelo capitalista.

"At the dawn of the automobile industry, two thousand firms were operating in the United States. Around 1 per cent of them survived. The dot-com bubble spawned and killed countless new businesses. Today, 10 per cent of American companies disappear every year. What is striking about the market system is not how few failures there are, but how ubiquitous failure is even in the most vibrant growth industries. 

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Why, then, are there so many failures in a system that seems to be so economically successful overall? It is partly the difficulty of the task. Philip Tetlock showed how hard it was for expert political and economic analysts to generate decent forecasts, and there is no reason to believe that it is any easier for marketers or product developers or strategists to predict the future. In 1912, Singer’s managers probably did not forecast the rise of the off-the-peg clothing industry. To make things even more difficult, corporations must compete with each other. To survive and be profitable it is not enough to be good; you must be one of the best. Asking why so many companies go out of business is the same as asking why so few athletes reach Olympic finals. In a market economy, there is usually room for only a few winners in each sector. Not everyone can be one of them. 

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The difference between market-based economies and centrally planned disasters, such as Mao Zedong’s Great Leap Forward, is not that markets avoid failure. It’s that large-scale failures do not seem to have the same dire consequences for the market as they do for planned economies. (The most obvious exception to this claim is also the most interesting: the financial crisis that began in 2007. ... Failure in market economies, while endemic, seems to go hand in hand with rapid progress.

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The market has solved the problem of generating material wealth, but its secret has little to do with the profit motive or the superior savvy of the boardroom over the cabinet office. Few company bosses would care to admit it, but the market fumbles its way to success, as successful ideas take off and less successful ones die out."

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Retirei estes trechos de "Adapt - Why Success Always Starts with Failure" de Tim Harford e gosto de os relacionar com o discurso de todos aqueles que pedem apoios e subsídios... protecção contra o mecanismo de selecção natural no modelo capitalista.