George Boole’s 200th Birthday Doodle
George
Boole was born 200 years ago and whether you celebrate or lament the
mathematician’s life depends on your point of view. Yes, he made a profound contribution
to today’s technological society; but
one can also argue that he helped to entrench a damaging way of thinking that
permeates society.
One of
his lasting contributions came in his 1854 book, An Investigation of the Laws
of Thought, introducing what we now know as the Boolean algebra crucial to most
computers. This applied the systematic language of algebra to the field of
logic a unification of two disparate fields into something much more powerful.
It centres on the simple idea of statements that are true or false.
There is
an appealing simplicity about true versus false, and it is this characteristic
that makes Boolean algebra so useful for computer engineers, who can work in “on” and “off” rather than exact voltages
with all their variability. Boole’s logic predicts what
happens for each of these binary states.
What is
so unexpected is that “true”, “false” and a few simple logical operations such as “and”, “or” and “not” can be combined to make an
equation that can add, multiply, compare, remember and much more. Indeed 80
years later Alan Turing the British mathematician who developed the first
electronic computer would prove you needed only these simple operations to
compute anything (if it was at all computable). From the great simplicity of
base logic, we have built the most complex of machines.
However,
this same attractive simplification is commonly behind poor decisions in other
fields. We should not really blame Boole. Human nature has always tried to
reduce the world to binary states good
and evil, friend or foe. But Boole gave strength to such thinking at a time
when seemingly exact laws of physics promised to make the universe simple and
predictable.
Politicians
argue their policies are the “right thing to do”, that their opponents have the “wrong” ideas. We worry about which
foods are “good” or “bad”; lawyers demand yes or no answers. Yet few situations are black
or white. Medicines do “good” and “harm” simultaneously; wars do not just involve “good guys” and “bad guys”; political decisions are
often less about what to do than how to do it.
The
problem with binary thinking is that it leads to binary decision-making. We are
drawn into reductive “if this, then that” reasoning. The UK’s In or Out debate on EU
membership will leave little room for creative ways forward.
Perhaps the
fight-or-flight approach to decision-making served humanity well in our
evolutionary past but leaves us ill equipped to handle today’s multidimensional problems without the tempting reduction to
binary versions.
Paradoxically,
Boole’s legacy also gives us the
tools to escape our human limitations through the automated computation of
rising tides of data. But to use the tools well we also need to adjust our
binary mind set.
One focus
for change should be the “key targets” culture that pervades organisations. This reduces
multidimensional data to the “true or false” test of whether a single arbitrary value has been reached.
Stripping out complexity makes it easier to direct people to a common goal. But
this in itself creates problems. Hitting a waiting time target in the accident
and emergency department may prove detrimental to quality of care, staff
retention or funding preventive treatment. Targeting carbon reduction in cars
has arguably resulted in more nitrogen oxide pollution from the switch to diesel
vehicles, not to mention opportunities for cheating when incentives are
attached to a single measure.
An
alternative is a world of agile metrics. We can hold big data on a situation but
instead of those responsible for originating the data pre-computing the
metrics, decision makers can, with agility, invent their own measures.
So how
can we change our thinking? Maths education is pivotal. Rather than use modern
computing to allow open-ended, complex problem-solving it insists on reducing complexity to the point that all problems can be
solved with pencil and paper to yield an answer that is right or wrong. The
real world is not like that. We need a curriculum that accepts practical
problems do not necessarily have a single correct answer.
Source : Financial Times
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