Posted by Bob on 11/19/2007, 6:57 am
72.243.26.154
All in a Good Cause
By Orson Scott Card
Editor’s note: This article first appeared in The Rhinoceros Times of Greensboro, North Carolina, and is used here by permission.
Here's a story you haven't heard, and you should have.
An intelligence source, working for a government agency. He's not a spy, he's an analyst. He uses computers to crunch numbers and at the end of his work, out pops the truth that was hiding in the original data. Let's call him "Mann."
The trouble with Mann is, he has an ideology. He knows what he wants his results to be. And the original numbers aren't giving him that data. So the agency he works for won't be able to persuade people to fight the war he wants to fight.
Well, that's not acceptable.
Cooking the Figures
He starts with his software. There are certain procedures that are normal and accepted in his line of work. But if he makes just one little mistake, his program does a weird little recursion and if there's any data at all that shows the pattern he wants it to show, it will be magnified 139 times, so it far overshadows all the other data.
He can run it on random numbers and it gives him the shape he wants. Unfortunately, the real-world numbers aren't random — they have a very different shape. All the numbers. Even his jimmied program won't give the results he wants.
All he needs is any data shaped the right way. And so he looks a little farther, and ... here it is. It looks, on the surface, like all the other data that he's been working with. Other researchers working in his field, just glancing at it, will assume it is, too.
But it isn't. Because the source that gathered this batch of data had some other key information that takes it all away. The numbers don't mean what they normally mean. In fact, this number set is absolutely false.
If you use these numbers along with all the other data, however, the clever little program will pick them up, magnify them radically, and voilá! The final report shows exactly the shape he needs the numbers to have.
The trouble is, these numbers are supposed to be double-checked. Anybody who looks closely at his numbers and at his program will see what he's done. It's not hard to find, if you have the original data sets and can examine the program. He will be exposed as a fraud. It will do his cause more harm than good, if it's made public.
But he's not afraid. He knows how this works.
He doesn't show the program or the lists of his data sources to anybody.
Second, he is given a big boost by the fact that another researcher — we'll call him "Santer" — had his own axe to grind. He was also the author of a questionable report and got himself appointed to a position that allowed him to get to the final report before it's published, delete all statements about how "there is no way to reach a definitive conclusion," and replace them with his own conclusion, which is absolute.
And it works. Santer's report is accepted, even though it has since been proven false. Mann's report continues to be relied on, and no one questions it. The government agency issues the report which they know has been altered to fit preconceived conclusions.
Vast sums of money are expended on the basis of what he claims to have found. People's live are put at risk.
Mann and Santer didn't do it for the money, though grants do flow in their direction.
They did it for the cause. It's a noble cause. And even though the data don't actually say what they wanted them to say — in fact, they say the opposite — they are untroubled by that. Because the government actions that are being taken are the Right Thing.
[continued next post]
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