Tri maths

To say I struggle with maths is an understatement but that is not to say that I do not appreciate the problems and puzzles that maths works to solve. On that basis I was reading an interesting book on Philosophy of Maths. I was following a particular line of argument when they were explaining some theory or other using triangles. The theory they were talking about is not relevant here but what got me was when they described starting with a triangle, draw a line to divide the triangle down the middle. This was easy to follow and then they started talking about the 3 triangles.

What 3 triangles? Divide a triangle in two so where is the 3rd triangle. Of course it was obvious (I am slow). The original triangle and the two internal triangles. That makes 3 right? Obvious really.

But it struck me what this means for numbers. I have one thing, I divide it in two and get 3 things. Not conventional maths. 1/2 is 0.5. So where am I going wrong. Well it must be to do with how we treat numbers rather than values. Is the comparison of dividing a triangle down the middle to result in 3 triangles with dividing 1 by 2 and getting 0.5

More brain power is needed on this. But there seems to be a difference between 1 thing and the value of 1. Triangles are 'things' We have one triangle (1 thing) and then divide it and have 3 things. This is actually comparable to dividing 1 by 2. You end up with two halves (2 things) and arguably the original 1. So you have 3 identifiable things.

If this were right then we could also look at subtraction. If you have the divided triangle (3 things) and take away one of the triangles completely you have only 1 thing. Only 1 triangle is left. So equate that to the numbers. You have 1, you divide by 2 to get the 3 things. Take away on of the halves and you get 1 thing left, a half.

So the treatment of 'things' that can be counted is different to numbers and their values.

Good Death Bad Death

The papers seem to be full of statistics about people's views on the right to die. According to the press the majority of people polled thought that people should be allowed to end their life early. But the question is actually not about the right to commit suicide but the right to assist someone without fear of prosecution.

In recent poll 85% supported the right to assisted suicide for specific circumstances and 13% for a blanket right. But be clear, it is not a discussion about the right to commit suicide but the right to assist someone to commit suicide.

What is interesting is the parallel subject of the death penalty. We currently do not support the right to assist someone to commit suicide. The reasons are fairly clear and that is the chances of abuse are non zero. There are safeguards that can be put in place but they are not fool proof. We avoid the death penalty because the loss of one innocent life at the hands of the justice system is seen as too high a price to pay for the benefits execution gives society in terms of deterrents and cost savings of holding prisoners for life.

The argument often goes that although there may appear to be absolute certainty in some cases and some crimes so horrific that there are a few who believe the person does not deserve the death penalty the issue is not those cases. The issue is that the cases are not black and white. There are no clear lines but a gradual grey scale of crimes. The killer who commits horrific crimes but who is mentally ill. Or who appears to be mentally ill, or who appears to have self defense arguments (battered wives). There are no clean lines. So we reject the death penalty in exchange for possibly not giving what certain criminals clearly and inarguably deserve.

So is the right to assist someone to commit suicide really parallel. Let's try and compare the circumstances.

1) If the death penalty was in place the decision would be long drawn out and based upon a legal process of jury and judge. The right to die argument has no such process in place.

2) The death penalty is carried out by the state. The right to assist suicide does not appear to dictate such restrictions. The current proposals vary but they could be in the hands of the individual (helping grandma drop the toaster into the bath), the medical profession, the private sector and the government. There is no understanding how the process would be regulated.

3) The execution of a prisoner, I would guess, is rarely done at the prisoner's request. They have no choice but to be put to death. For assisted suicides it is not clear how to determine whether the patient really wants to die. That is not to say there are not cases which appear clear via the media but for every clear case there are probably dozens of less clear cut cases.

There is no clear answer to these questions. What if the patient changes their mind? At what stage would you try to reverse the process? Is it restricted to only terminally ill patients? How long do you have to be terminally ill before you are allowed to commit suicide? If I someone has 2 years left to live when should they be allowed to die? Who makes that decision? Is it really for those with no hope? If I need a heart transplant in the next 2 years and will live in pain all that time should I be allowed to terminate my life to avoid the pain in exchange for the slim chance of getting a replacement heart match and potentially living in pain for the rest of one's life.

Who gets to decide what quality of life is worth preserving? Who decides what level of mental illness is allowed before the decision to commit suicide is taken away? What level of dementia?

There are lots of difficult grey area questions that simply cannot be answered in generality. Not that they cannot be answered its just that any answer is specific to each case and ultimately is only the opinion of one person. Without a universality to the answers each case must be dealt with specifically and by the right process and people. Neither the process or people to undertake this has been defined.

Another angle worth considering is not just the right to suicide or even the right to assist suicide but the right to prevent it. If you have one terminally ill patient and two children, one wants to assist, the other wants to prevent how is this to be dealt with. Down to the wishes of the terminally ill? Ok if they are fully aware but what about if their wishes are doubted.

The argument would seem to lend itself to the fact that the patient's will to die must be beyond reasonable doubt. But that level of evidence was deemed not good enough to execute someone for crimes.

We need certainty and in this world certainty is just not available and on that basis it would seem the right to assist suicide should not be permitted.

I would add as one final argument that the discussion of animals and pets often comes up. This is a grossly flawed argument. Euthanasia is different. That is about putting those suffering out of their misery. We put down dogs if the quality of life would appear to be too poor and the animal would suffer. I have heard several times in the media "I would not allow my dog to suffer this much (referring to a terminally ill relative) and it would be put to sleep.

But that is surely a very different argument. Are we proposing to move from voluntary suicide to killing the suffering (irrespective of their views)? This a is huge step beyond assisted suicide. It is impossible to go down this route due to the problem of marginal cases. Try and define what an animal is. If you base it on intelligence then you will find animals with clearly more intelligence than say mentally ill children. So are we saying it is ok to put mentally ill children out of their misery if they are suffering?

This is an impossibly hard set of questions to deal with and so the only way to err is to not go down this route at all. No death penalty, no assisted suicide.

Pronounce this!

Here is an interesting experiment you can do on yourself. I woke this morning and was (for some unknown reason) thinking about thinking. I was wondering which parts of the brain deal with thought. What I mean by this is how could you isolate the parts of the brain that deal with thinking. Pick a word. I was thinking about the word 'Harrow'. Try saying, only in your head the word Harrow. No problem right? Sounds fine. Now put your tongue flat on the bottom of your mouth (tip of tongue pressed against your bottom teeth). Now try and think the word 'Harrow' again.

Stunning. Your mind is unable to pronounce the word in your head (I get hawwow)! I am sure this is a well documented phenomenon but I have not seen it before. If you think about what this means. The thought processes that go on in your head must be directly connected to the speech controls. So you do not think words (cannot) that you cannot say. Your physical limitations of your mouth dictate the thinkable words. What is more worrying is that your mind cannot think a word correctly if it detects ahead of time that it would be prevented from saying it correctly due to the tongue being out of position.

It will take some working out. Your mind is hearing (it seems) what WOULD come out if you were to attempt to say the word, even if the speaking is not actualized. What this means to me is that your mind hears the output of your brain of what would be said if you were to actualize it (i.e. go on to speak it).

Weird.

Back to uncertainty

Following on from the post about Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb I thought I would outline an interesting section to do with project success and failure.

Taleb outlines the life expectancy profiles from life insurance tables.

A newborn female in the developed world is expected to live to around 79.
When she reaches 79 her life expectancy is another 10 years
At 90, she should live another 4.7 years
At 100 she has about 2.5 years
At 119, about 9 months.

He outlines that life expectancy is subject to mild randomness. It is not scalable since the older we get the less likely we are to live.

For projects though he states the opposite is the case. Projects are a scalable

If a project is expected to end in 79 days, on the 79th day if it has not ended it will another 25 days to complete.

If on the 90th day of the project, it has not completed it will have about 58 days to go.

On the 100th day it will have another 89 days to go.

On the 119th it will have another 149 days to go.

On the 600th day of the project it will need an extra 1590 days.

It would be interesting to measure Government IT projects in this way. At what point does one pull the plug?

IT Rocks

One of the main challenges I like about Philosophy is to try and make it relevant to everyday life. So where does the Myth of Sisyphus sit in the real world? Well, I talked a bit about the meaning of life to you personally but there are less deep questions that this applies to.

The world of IT has increased its pace year on year. One regularly hears the statement that change is the norm. What does this mean? There are two challenges. The first one is how does one keep up with the latest technology? The relentless quest for change and renewal means that your average expert of any technology will be out of date within 3 to 5 years. The second challenge is the that IT is now BAU. It is not groundbreaking, it does not 'save lives' and the outcome of most IT projects is to keep up and not get ahead.

This leads to enormous pressure on your IT department? How do you motivate people to keep on building, learning and delivering when the outcome is largely meaningless and any positives quickly become out of date as the 'next new thing' invalidates everything you have accomplished.

How do you keep people rolling that rock up the hill?

Learning the lesson outlined in the Sisyphus blog entry we must look at how to get the IT department to be valued on things other than the explicit outcomes of the IT project. They should look less at the shiny new technology and more on the process. Take pride in the way something was delivered and not what was delivered. If change is the norm then focus on how agile the department can be and the staff within it.

They must understand their reason for being and be rewarded on that basis. Otherwise morale will suffer.

As always, this is easy to say but hard to implement. Getting staff rewarded and appreciated in this way requires a huge leap for the average HR department. Satisfaction must come from a different place for both staff and employer. If you want change, projects WILL go wrong. Do not focus on when things go wrong but how well people react to these challenges.

Give your staff meaning and you will have a satisfied and happy staff.

Sisyphus

For those not familiar with the myth of Sisyphus it is a simple tale of a guy who, to cut a long story short, annoys the gods. His punishment is to spend eternity pushing a rock up a hill. Before it reaches the top it rolls back down and Sisyphus must start the task again. The concept of his punishment is eternal labor pursuing a pointless and unaccomplishable task.

So what was his punishment? Traditional interpretations seem to revolve around the eternal labor. To be a punishment one must be able to determine the negative and that negative must be one which is wholly different from normality. To look at our everyday lives mankind struggles on day by day completing hard labor of some form or other, whether mental of physical. Sisyphus is aware if his fate. He sees eternity ahead of him and understands the futility of his work. He is aware of the meaning his life has (or rather does not have). By contrast mankind tends not to understand its end goals, has little or no clue what meaning their life has (or does not have). Sisyphus had everything he needed to be happy, or at least, had no less than the rest of us to be happy. So his punishment is not the eternity of fruitless labor, but his inability to understand that his life is no worse than it was.

All pretty deep stuff. But think about what this means to you. While most of us don't have the joy of rolling rocks up hills, we work in similarly pointless projects or jobs where little of any consequence is actually accomplished. When that job is done we look to the next bigger job that will always seem to be more satisfying, better paid (although we don't have time to spend it), accomplish more (will make a difference). But the grass is rarely greener. We face a new rock, another hill.

So like Sisyphus, to avoid a life of punishment through eternal (or at least life long) labor we need to understand the value of what we do. Not in terms of the rock we roll but why we roll the rock. If we understand that then we can see that happiness does not come from the size of the rock or the size of the hill. Accepting the futility of rock rolling and being happy anyway is the only way to avoid the punishment of Sisyphus.