There was probably a better way to embed this so you could see the tweeted video. Ah, well.Social distancing works. We are all #InThisTogetherOhio. https://t.co/jU4ZAkm3Py pic.twitter.com/uKJtfi4cuP— Ohio Dept of Health (@OHdeptofhealth) April 9, 2020
Even though the illustration is not quite fair, I am passing it along because it is very close to the example I have used about math/physics people for years. In looking at a problem, a math person is likely to look at the extremes, to see if that tells us anything. Imagine there are only two ping-pong balls in a large box. What then? How do they interact? Imagine there are a thousand ping-pong balls in the box? What then? How do they interact? So now there comes a video using ping-pong balls as its example. Excellent. Sometimes the joke is "Imagine a perfectly spherical cow..." Ridiculous, and yet one can learn things from looking at the far edges.
I went to an inservice on creative problem-solving years ago, taught by three instructors. Only one was good, but he was very good. He recommended a technique of imagining your problems as ten times worse, then only one-tenth as bad. If we could see answers to those, however dimly, it would inform our real-life situation. What if you mother was not merely critical by tones of voice, but took out ads in the paper or spent a lot of her time bad-mouthing you in public? Versus What if your mother mostly said very complimentary things, but occasionally let some implied disapproval creep in? Thinking hard about the extremes for five minutes each is likely worth more than a year's worth of rumination about the middle ground you actually inhabit. What if your debt were ten times what it is now? What if it were only one-tenth what it is now? What would you have to do? If you take it seriously and do the brief but intense work, sometimes the correct answer fairly leaps out at you.
The video does not include masks, handwashing, or traveling in its modeling, nor do we have any certainty that the distances used bear much relationship to human social distancing. Granted. Yet the principle holds. And it's got ping-pong balls, or something similar, so I'm all in.
5 comments:
That looks a bit like the old video used to explain nuclear fission.
Perfectly spherical duck:
https://youtu.be/kWruCpSRgos
He recommended a technique of imagining your problems as ten times worse, then only one-tenth as bad. If we could see answers to those, however dimly, it would inform our real-life situation.
That's very good, especially for problems of uncertain magnitude.
Many people believe dogmatically that truth lies somewhere in the middle between extremes. Often it does, sometimes it doesn't. You have to evaluate the models in any case. If you don't know about the models, looking at extreme possibilities is a good starting point.
FWIW, even some of the simplified limit problems like the spherical cow or the flat cow can be daunting to try to solve.
At James - oh, exactly right. It is considering the extremes, which sometimes can reveal obvious or trivial solutions but other times turn out to be very messy indeed, that reveals to us that we may be in deep waters. Consider: What if there is nothing that treats this condition, but people need hope? Or the reverse: What if this condition usually improves on its on in time, but people insist on hurrying it with expensive treatments?
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