Human Error

Ever since Eve ate the apple, human error has been a critical component in everything from historical events to the birth of children. We've spent a lot of time in our lives answering the questions that are hardest, and eventually we reason it out either by trusting someone else or by getting things sorted out in our own head. But regardless of how we reason things out, are we right?

This weighed heavily on my mind as I drove home and just prayed that the guys tailgating each other through the 35F sleet on the highway wouldn't decide to swerve and avoid an accident, totaling Scoot and I in the process. I never took drivers education classes but it doesn't take a rocket scientist to have it figured that if you tail someone in sleet at 70 mph, you will hit them or someone/something else in the case of an accident.

It led to me think about just why planes are so much safer to travel in than cars. For a long time, the idea of flying was rooted in my head as a hugely risky and death-wish type of endeavor, but statistically, it's actually safer than driving your car to work. (Also of interest, more people die of car accidents in the US than die in Iraq from violence.) Key to all of this is still the issue of human error. With so many independent drivers on the road, every person's individual error in judgment is basically multiplied on the road whereas flying puts your life into the hands of just a few.

We sit 3 days a week in the sauna of a classroom on campus and hear about all of the statistical models, rules, assumptions and suggestions that statisticians use every day to justify or reject research claims but it all shakes down to the same thing - human error. And there's no way to put a limit on this noise amidst the analysis. Everything from a bad project design to unforeseen consequences of a treatment, inexperienced employees to a mis-type during data entry can lead to a misconception from research results. And yet, we seem to think that the justifications we propose to sort out this error will not in fact be as erroneous as the original. So in the end, in an effort to avoid human error, aren't we ironically also putting our own trust in it?

The carryover into today's society is apparent everywhere. The best-laid plans do fail, good intentions don't work out like expected, the predictions and estimations of BP's impact on the gulf coast is most likely erring on the side of optimism, and there is of course the potential for intentional error as well. And who knows what someone was thinking with this food idea?

So what hope is there in all of this? We've put our faith and based our reasoning on the assumption that someone knows what's going on, or that a group of people can reason with each other to finally figure out a truth in the big world which can be used to form all those other truths which we need to operate on a daily basis. So the final question, how much do you trust those Greek philosophers?