Beware the Woozle-Hunters

Tales of Expertise and Disinformation

A.A. Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh (1926). Chapter 3: "In which Pooh and Piglet Go Hunting and Nearly Catch a Woozle"

NOTE: In the coming months, I’m posting excerpts from my not-yet-published book, “Fifty-Million-Dollar Baby: Economics, Ethics, and Health.” The goal is to edit the manuscript in plain view, and to ask for your comments, corrections, suggestions, and criticisms.

Late at night in his study, the Statistician discerned in his data an inexplicable pattern. In certain quarters of Miami, in the State of Florida, a great proportion of the young were of Latin-American and Iberian origin. Yet incongruously, the elderly in those same precincts were predominately Jewish and of Northern European extraction. “At what point in life, and by what unfathomable process,” the Statistician wondered, “do young Latinos become elderly Jews?” It is a great mystery, he thought, and pondered this until the first hint of dawn was evident in the east.

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In the 1980s, I was the Sub-Saharan Africa Economist for Chase Manhattan Bank—one of the largest lenders on the continent. One day, I had a sequence of calls that went something like this: Economist A— at Chemical Bank called to tell me, “Nigeria is now producing 1.3 million barrels per day of oil.” … “How do you know that?” I asked. … “Our friend B— at Citibank told me so.”  … I called B— at Citibank who said he had learned this fact from C— at Manufacturers Hanover Bank. … I made no more calls, as I remembered having had a conversation with C— a week or so earlier. In that conversation, C— had asked me, “How many barrels of oil do you suppose Nigeria is producing per day?” … “I don’t know,” I told him. “Maybe 1.3 million. Just a wild guess.”

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In A.A. Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh, Pooh and Piglet hunt for a woozle—a weasel-like creature. They spy some footprints and follow them around a tree. Coming back around, they see even more footprints than before – evidence of the woozle’s immediate presence. Each time they circle the tree, there are more footprints than before, confirming in their minds that the woozle is almost within grasp. Ultimately, Christopher Robin explains that they are merely seeing their own ever-multiplying footprints. In science, the Woozle Effect is also known as Evidence by Citation, and science has many woozle-hunters. 

Your author atop Table Mountain, Cape Town, South Africa, December 1984.

On another occasion, an oil company economist called my office at Chase, asking: “When our company invests $1.00 in Cameroon, by how much does the Cameroonian economy grow?” … “Just a second, and I’ll tell you,” I answered. … (long silence with intermittent clicking on my keyboard) … “The multiplier is 3.4, so $1.00 of investment by your company will cause the Cameroonian economy to grow by $3.40.” … “Fantastic!” he said. “Exactly what I was looking for. Where did you get that multiplier?” … “I just made it up out of thin air.” … (brief silence) … “No, seriously, where did you get it?” … “Seriously, I just made it up.” … “But then what good does that do me? I can’t use that.” … “Of course you can. A multiplier of 3 would sound trivial, since most reported multipliers are around 3. A multiplier of 3.42 would sound too precise – as if you were making it up out of thin air. 3.4 sounds just accurate enough to be credible. And I chose 3.4 because it’s a little higher than the usual multipliers. So, it makes your investments sound like a very nice deal for Cameroon.” … “But you just made it up.” … “Yes. But so does everyone else. In general, they use computers and heaps of data to do so. I just skipped that step. And my number is every bit as meaningful as theirs.” (If you’re wondering, I didn’t actually want him to use the number. It was more a matter of persuading him to stop asking me to provide him with multipliers.)

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“87% of all statistics are made up out of thin air.”

       — A good friend of someone-I-used-to-know’s cousin (1987, maybe)

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In 1919, the Smithsonian published Robert Goddard’s A Method of Reaching Extreme Altitudes. The book contended that rockets could operate in the vacuum of outer space and even reach the moon.

On January 13, 1920, the New York Times mocked Goddard’s thesis in a scalding editorial. The editors stated that, “After the rocket quits our air,” its engines would have no effect on the trajectory of the rocket. To claim otherwise, the Times continued, “is to deny a fundamental law of dynamics, and only Dr. Einstein and his chosen dozen, so few and fit, are licensed to do that.” Twisting the rhetorical shiv, the editorialists concluded, “That Professor Goddard with his ‘chair’ in Clark College and the countenancing of the Smithsonian Institution, does not know the relation of action and reaction, and of the need to have something better than a vacuum against which to react—to say that would be absurd. Of course he only seems to lack the knowledge ladled out daily in high schools.”

A half-century later, on July 17, 1969, the New York Times issued a ha-ha-hee-hee erratum. “Further investigation and experimentation have confirmed the findings of Isaac Newton in the 17th Century and it is now definitely established that a rocket can function in a vacuum as well as in an atmosphere. The Times regrets the error.”

Three days after that that correction was issued, July 20, 1969, Neil Armstrong spoke from the surface of the moon. “Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed.”

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“There is not the slightest indication that nuclear energy will ever be obtainable. It would mean that the atom would have to be shattered at will.”

—Albert Einstein, "Atom Energy Hope is Spiked By Einstein: Efforts at Loosing Vast Force is Called Fruitless," Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (29 December 1934) 

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Vannevar Bush was among the most distinguished American scientists of the 20th Century. He was instrumental in the development of the analog computer and helped establish the Manhattan Project, which developed history’s first nuclear bombs. In Foreign Policy, Thomas Ricks wrote:

… Stephen Peter Rosen, in Winning the Next War, disses the hell out of the revered Vannevar Bush, civilian defense scientist and founder of Raytheon. … Contrary to Bush’s rep as a genius in seeing the way forward after WWII, Rosen portrays Bush as someone who in 1949 published a book that stated, among other things, that:

— ICBMs were an unscientific pipe dream, promulgated by “some prominent military men, exhilarated perhaps by a short immersion in matters scientific”

— Likewise, said that missiles so fast that they could launch satellites was a pipe dream

— Atomic bombs wouldn’t transform warfare because they were too expensive to build and so would remain scarce

— Nuclear warheads small enough to be fired by artillery pieces were “Buck Rogers” fantasies

— Jet engines used too much fuel to be worthwhile for using on long-range bombers

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On May 1, 1983, I attended a performance of the New York City Ballet. The announcer warned the audience that the performers might not give their very best performance that day since “their father” – George Balanchine, founder of the company, had died the night before of Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease. … Some time later, a friend reported that Balanchine’s brain resided in the laboratory where she worked—but at that time, the scientists were too concerned about the communicability of the disease to study the brain.

In the 1960s, radiation biologist Tikvah Alper and mathematician John Stanley Griffith had theorized that certain diseases of the brain (such as Creutzfeldt–Jakob) might be transmitted by way of agents composed entirely of misfolded proteins. Roughly speaking, these were cell-like entities that had no nuclei, DNA, or RNA. This view was heretical. Propagation, as all knew, was the sole dominion of nucleus-bearing cells. In 1982, neurologist and biochemist Stanley Prusiner expressed doubt that viruses were to blame for these diseases and christened the impossible agents “prions,” derived from “proteinaceous infectious particle.” Prusiner’s was pilloried as a scientific heretic. Writing for The Guardian, Zoë Corbyn wrote:

The word and the concept elicited what he describes as a "firestorm" of criticism and sceptics began staking careers on hunting down the scrapie virus (it has never been found). One particularly low moment he recalls was a 1986 article in the science magazine Discover, which accused him of being more interested in fame than science. He adopted a policy, which he maintained for years, of not speaking to the press.

Subsequently, prions were confirmed as the infectious agents in scrapie, bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE, or mad-cow disease), and Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease. In 1997, Stanley Prusiner received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his research on prions. But, as Prusiner told The Guardian, “A Nobel prize doesn't wipe the scepticism away.”  

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Boy Scouts of America, Farm Arrangement merit badge, 1960s. Proof positive of your author’s sublime expertise in matters agricultural.

While a Boy Scout, I needed to accumulate merit badges. At some point, I was one badge short of achieving the rank of Life Scout and was having difficulty finding one that was easily achievable in a short period of time. Then, my eyes alit on “Farm Arrangement.” My knowledge of agriculture was approximately nonexistent. (I did have a little vegetable and flower garden in my backyard.) Nevertheless, I rode my bike a few miles out to a farm, drew a diagram of the layout, asked the farmer some questions, and then drew another diagram with the barn, chicken coops, etc. moved to different places. The Scouting official to whom I submitted my merit badge application ventured a guess that I knew rather little about arranging a farm. But since he knew no more than I, he signed the application and I got my merit badge, which I still have to this day. Washington, DC, is filled with people pursuing Farm Arrangement merit badges and others signing their approval forms.

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Myron Scholes and Robert Merton helped invent the field of modern finance. In doing so, they changed the way scholars and financial professionals viewed the workings of markets. Fortunes were made, based on their findings. In 1994, Scholes and Merton were among the founders of Long-Term Capital Management LP, a hedge fund management firm. In 1997, they shared the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Science for work they had done (in partnership with the late Fischer Black). In 1998, LTCM began collapsing and, for a time, seemed to threaten the stability of the nation’s financial system; in the end, losses totaled $4.6 billion. Scholes’ and Merton’s involvement in a spectacular financial disaster in no way diminshes the magnitude of their scientific accomplishments—and they richly deserved their Nobel Prize. Knowing and doing are different things altogether.

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In The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Thomas Kuhn challenged the notion that science is an evolutionary process in which scientists accumulate new data and increasing evidence persuades scientists to change their minds. In contrast, Kuhn argued that scientific consensus changes because older scientists, inured to old data, die off and new scientists, trained in an era of new data, replace their elders’ consensus with their own. 

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Long ago, someone dear to us told us a story of her very young child’s mastery of bodily functions. The child had taken an annoyingly long time to cease soiling his diapers and was extraordinarily proud when he finally made the transition. A few days afterward, a slightly younger child came for a visit. In the course of the visit, the visiting playmate demonstrated that he had not yet acquired the same skill. The older child fled the scene in horror and nausea and wondered aloud how on earth any child could have so little self-control and self-respect. Such is the structure of expertise and scientific revolutions, writ small.

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Robert F. Graboyes is president of RFG Counterpoint, LLC in Alexandria, Virginia. An economist, journalist, and musician, he holds five degrees, including a PhD in economics from Columbia University. An award-winning professor, in 2014, he received the Reason Foundation’s Bastiat Prize for Journalism.