Any economic theory can be made to fit any fact by incorporating additional assumptions
That’s why it’s important to remember that when putting cheese in the mousetrap, always leave room for the mouse. That’s also why it is said that if you build a better mousetrap, the world will beat a path to your door.
First, there was brinkmanship with its devious diplomacy, calculated deceptions and sabre-rattling. Then, there was one-upmanship, the fine art of getting an advantage over others or showing that one is better than them without actually cheating. Then, along came gamesmanship with its attendant books, including one entitled “The Games People Play” explaining the intricacies of such favourite pastimes as power games, social games and business games.
The latest in this long line of fads is researchmanship. As the name implies, researchmanship has to do with the ins and outs of research – a key ingredient in achieving success in today’s high-tech business world.
The Americans are great ones for researchmanship. In the days when the US and the Soviet Union were feverishly competing with each other in the space race, the Americans spent hundreds of millions of dollars on research to develop a ballpoint pen that would write in the gravity-free environment of space, thereby allowing their astronauts to jot down notes while on space missions. The Russians spent no money on the problem. They solved it by giving their cosmonauts pencils with which to write.
In the 1990s, the US government gave a group of scientists a grant of a hundred million dollars to conduct research into the nature of complexity. Three years of research later, the scientists concluded that complexity (wait for it) is “essentially simple.” I suppose, next we’ll hear that the same group of scientists has been given another hundred million dollars by the US government to conduct research into the nature of simplicity and will eventually conclude that simplicity is essentially complex.
Like other fads, researchmanship has its own set of rules, laws and postulates. Here are some of them.
Bates Law of Research: Research is the process of going up alleys to see if they’re blind. Some people spend years going up alley after alley without ever discovering that all the alleys are dead-ends. Others spend their time trying to re-invent the wheel and tend to get very upset when they’re told that the wheel has already been invented. A lot of the research carried out in Pakistan tends to be of this sort. That’s why the wheel keeps being re-invented here.
Von Braun’s Credo: Research is what you’re doing when you don’t know what you’re doing. This school of thought, too, has a lot of adherents here. We are a people who are only too happy to go out of our way to show other people the way, even up to the point where we end up getting lost ourselves.
Westheimer’s Discovery: A couple of months in the laboratory can frequently save a couple of hours in the library. Public libraries in this country are now passé. The vast majority of people here don’t read books anymore, preferring to wait for the movie version. We’re in good company, however, because George W. Bush doesn’t read books either. By his own admission, he doesn’t even read newspapers. Condoleezza Rice reads them to him. Bush may be commander-in-chief of the US military, but it’s Condi who is reader-in-chief.
Land’s Lemma: When the experiment doesn’t work, distrust the experiment; when the experiment works, distrust the theory. One of the most popular theories in this part of the world is the conspiracy theory. The foreign-hand theory is also very popular here. Combining the two, you get the foreign-hand conspiracy theory – a sort of portmanteau theory that explains just about everything that goes wrong. England has its Flat Earth Society, whose members subscribe to the theory that the world is flat. We, in this country, however, subscribe to the theory that you can go anywhere you want if you look serious and carry a clipboard.
Thompson’s Theory: Any theory can be made to fit any fact by incorporating additional assumptions. That’s why it’s important to remember that when putting cheese in the mouse trap, always leave room for the mouse.
Horwood’s Sixth Law: If you have the right data, you have the wrong problem. So when you set about trying to solve a problem, it is very important to ensure that you select the right problem. Otherwise, you could end up barking up the wrong problem for years. As for Horwood’s five other laws, more about them on some other occasion.
Feyneman’s Law: Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts. An expert, of course, is somebody who knows more and more about less and less. Finally, he ends up knowing everything about nothing. That’s when he gets a job as a government consultant. Islamabad is full of such consultants, one more highly paid than the next.
First Rule of Applied Mathematics: Ninety-eight per cent of all statistics are made up. That’s why we have statistics like the one about the average Pakistani household consisting of 6.7 people. Has anybody ever met these 6.7 people? When a statistician was once asked in court whether he swore to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, he replied, “I do – 66.66 per cent of the time.”
Gerrold’s Laws of Dynamics: (1) An object in motion will be headed in the wrong direction. (2) An object at rest will be in the wrong place. (3) The energy required to change either of these states will be more than you wish to expend, but not so much as to make the task totally impossible. The difficult takes time. The impossible takes a little longer.
Pugh’s Law: If the human brain were simple enough for us to understand, we would be too simple to understand it. The story goes that a man once took a friend to a dinner party and kept introducing him to the other guests thus: “Meet my friend X, the well-known amateur brain-surgeon.” When Bush leaves the White House, he can always get a job as Professor of Amateur Brain-Surgery at the Bush Medical Research Institute in Crawford, Texas. And if there’s no such institute, they can always build one. Dick Cheney’s former employers, US oil services giant Halliburton, would probably be only too happy to put up the money. It’s the least they can do after all the billions of dollars in contracts that the Bush administration has awarded the company in Iraq.
McFee’s Maxim: Matter can neither be created nor destroyed, but it can be lost. That’s why nature uses as little as possible of anything.
Proof Techniques: (1) Proof by referral to non-existent authorities. (2) Reduction ad nauseam. (3) Proof by assignment. (4) Method of least astonishment (aka the non-eureka method). (5) Proof by handwaving. (6) Proof by intimidation. (7) Method of convergent irrelevancies. The proof technique you chose depends on the size of your research budget. It should be noted, however, that proof by referral to non-existent authorities is very popular in this country, where non-existent authorities are pretty thick on the ground. Then, of course, there is the term “competent authority” – a very well-known category of authority in bureaucratic circles in Islamabad, where nothing moves without the approval of the “competent authority.”
Dyer’s Law of Relativity: Not to be confused with Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, Dyer’s Law says life is short, but a three-hour movie is interminable. One such movie was 1959’s “Ben Hur”. Jerry Lewis said he only got to see half of Ben Hur because the kid sitting in front of him in the cinema grew up.
Thornley’s Law: What we imagine is order is merely the prevailing form of chaos. Chaos Theory holds that a butterfly flapping its wings in the Philippines can cause a hurricane in the Caribbean. Work that one out if you can.
First Rule of Environmental Protection: The species is protected only after it is hopelessly depleted. Have you noticed, however, that people that talk about population planning have all already been born.
Second Rule of Environmental Protection: The most efficient way to dispose of toxic waste is to reclassify the waste as non-toxic. This is an invaluable rule for industrial polluters as it enables them to become environment-friendly companies without having to spend any money. There are many such industrial companies here, one more environment-friendly than the other. To cite only one example of what such companies can achieve with their environment-friendly policies, Karachi’s Lyari River now enjoys the dubious distinction of being the most polluted river in the world – having taken over the top spot from England’s Mersey River a few years ago. Some 200 million gallons a day of untreated, highly toxic sewage now flows into Karachi Harbour. This is yet another feather in the cap of our environmental protection agencies. If I had my way, however, I’d sack all the people working for these agencies.
Third Rule of Environmental Protection: Anything done to improve one area of the environment will cause corresponding damage in another area. This rule is also known as the Catalytic Convertor Principle.
Walder’s Observation: A mathematician is one who is willing to assume everything except responsibility. This observation applies equally to politicians and bureaucrats. Both of them are categories of people that run from responsibility as if it were some form of bubonic plague.
Albinak’s Algorithm: When graphing a function, the width of the line should be inversely proportional to the precision of the data. Thus, the more imprecise the data the wider should be the lines on the graph.
Perlis’s Postulate: The computing field is always in need of new cliches. On-line tech support is one such cliche. It is designed to provide everything short of actual help. That’s why there is no computer language in which it is the least bit difficult to write bad programmes.
Einstein on Math and Science: (1) Technological progress is like an axe in the hands of a pathological criminal. (2) If A is success in life, then A equals x plus y plus z. Work is x; y is play; and z is keeping your mouth shut. (3) As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain; as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality. Happy researchmanship, everybody.