The Mugwumpery

No one else seems to be saying it, so I will.

The hysteria about run-away Toyotas is driven by a xenophobic witch hunt.

There is nothing wrong with Toyota vehicles.  They do not accelerate uncontrollably.  Ever.   There’s nothing wrong with the floor mats, electronics, etc.  Claims to the contrary are lies.

I’m not going to focus on the engineering reasons why such claims are utterly unbelievable – the chance that the accelerator, brake, gearshift, and ignition all fail simultaneously in a way that allows acceleration and nothing else, then miraculously correct themselves afterward so that there is no sign of any flaw – is as close to zero as anything gets in this world.

It is interesting that Toyota is having these “problems” only in the United States.   Not in Japan, China, or Thailand.  Not in Australia or New Zealand.  Not in the UK, not in Sweden, not in Spain, Germany, Russia, or Romania.  Not in Nigeria, South Africa, Botswana, Uganda.  Not in Canada.  Just in the USA.  Even though they sell the same cars in all these places.

And that all the publicity about deadly flaws in Toyota vehicles started in 2009, just after headlines like these:

Toyota Passes General Motors As World’s Largest Carmaker (Washington Post, January 21, 2009)

Toyota Ahead of G.M. in 2008 Sales (New York Times, January 22, 2009)

Toyota now the largest motor-car manufacturer of the world (BusinessWeek, April 11 2009)

I know what you’re thinking.  Surely all the claims of malfunctioning cars, actual crashes, etc. can’t be simply made up by jingoistic Americans annoyed that the national champion has been bested by the yellow devils.

No.  That’s not what I’m claiming.

There are something like 300 million cars in the USA.  If each one is driven once a day, that’s 110 billion trips each year.

When a driver starts a car, there is some small but finite chance she’ll step on the gas by mistake when aiming for the brake.  It’s happened to me, and to most people I’ve asked.  Most of the time we notice and think “oops – wrong pedal”, and that’s the end of it.

But sometimes, rarely, people don’t notice.  Instead they panic.  They press harder on the gas, instead of pressing on the brake.  They think they’re already pressing on the brake, and the car is going too fast.  So they press harder.  On the gas.

This doesn’t happen very often.  But 110 billion trips/year.  Maybe 20% of them in Toyotas.  It does happen sometimes.

If the driver is on a highway, usually even if this happens the driver will think to turn off the ignition.  Or put the car in neutral.  But not always.  Some people are just panicky and don’t think clearly in emergencies.  Some are bad drivers.  And even good drivers can have a bad day.

Eventually, one of two things happens – the car hits something or the driver figures out what happened and lets go of the gas.  If there is a crash, the driver may very well believe afterward, in all honesty, that there was something wrong with the car.  If there wasn’t an accident, the driver may have made a fool of themselves, caused someone else to have an accident, or got caught speeding.  Most people are honest, and will admit they made a simple mistake.  But 110 billion trips/year.  Not everyone is honest.

This is exactly what happened with Audi in the early 1980s – a few reports made the media and confused or dishonest people suddenly had an excuse to blame someone else for their accidents.  Or to sue for damages.  There was nothing wrong with Audi’s cars, other than having the gas and brake pedals a little closer together than some drivers were used to.  But sensation and terror sells advertising, and most people are stupid enough to believe everything they see in the media.

So – a few Toyota drivers make this kind of mistake, and blame it on the car (mostly in honest confusion).  Happens all the time, to all makes and models of car.

But – Toyota Passes General Motors As World’s Largest Carmaker !!  For the first time in 77 years!

Some in the media, and many in politics, are carrying a chip on the shoulder – America’s champion has been shamed and defeated by the hated Asian devils!  So these claims are not ignored.  They’re hyped.  Toyota is killing people – their cars are deathtraps!  Congressmen demand NHTSA investigations.  Soon the CEO of Toyota is committing rhetorical hara-kiri in front of Congress and the TV cameras.

Of course, floor mats can get stuck.  So can accelerator pedals.  It happens to every make and model.  But Toyota’s patient explanation that there is no problem doesn’t work.  Reason never works when you’re in a witch hunt.  So to protect their reputation and avoid even more expensive punishment, Toyota reluctantly negotiates a recall to glue down floor mats and grease accelerator pedals.  Under duress – a sort of plea-bargain with the American government (which is unlikely to honor its end of the deal).

The technical term for the whole thing is bullshit.

[In the interest of full disclosure: I am a shareholder of Toyota Motor Corp.  Also of Daimler AG and Honda Motor Co., both of which stand to gain sales from this garbage.  As well, I own, among other vehicles, a Toyota Prius.  Which I am not going to drag to the dealership for a shamanistic rain-dance to make the evil unintended-acceleration spirits go away.]

February 14, and again we are afflicted with a swarm of these hallucinogenic creatures.

Obviously LSD wasn’t the first psychedelic.

There’s a story on Slashdot today about “a complicated pattern that has to do with the way humans do violence in some collective way“.

Surprise.  The size and frequency of terrorist attacks follows a power law – lots of little attacks, a few big ones.

What doesn’t?  Quoting from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_distribution:

The sizes of human settlements (few cities, many hamlets/villages)

File size distribution of Internet traffic which uses the TCP protocol (many smaller files, few larger ones)

Clusters of Bose-Einstein condensate near absolute zero

The values of oil reserves in oil fields (a few large fields, many small fields)

The length distribution in jobs assigned supercomputers (a few large ones, many small ones)

The standardized price returns on individual stocks

Sizes of sand particles

Sizes of meteorites

Numbers of species per genus (There is subjectivity involved: The tendency to divide a genus into two or more increases with the number of species in it)

Areas burnt in forest fires

Severity of large casualty losses for certain lines of business such as general liability, commercial auto, and workers compensation.

I could add a bunch more, but won’t bother.

Why is this considered news?  Why does it get published in Nature?  If terrorist activity didn’t follow a power law, I think that would be interesting enough to merit publication in a prestigious journal.  But this?

Is it just me, or is the quality of editorial work in science journals dropping?  I constantly see papers in Science and Nature that make the most basic scientific mistake possible – confusing correlation with causality.  And then the “quality” press such as the New York Times and the Economist pick it up and repeat the same nonsense.

See also:

• Zipf’s law
• Benford’s law

Today I got an email from Buy.com asking me to review a cell phone battery I’d bought.

Happy with the battery, and feeling like procrastinating for a few minutes, I decided to do it.

I clicked on the link in the email.  Buy.com immediately asked for my email address and password.

Now, which of my 5 different emails did I use for that purchase?  I guessed – wrong, apparently.

So, forget it.  I was going to do them a favor, but now I’m not.

Why do I have to authenticate myself to review a product I bought?  They know I bought it.  They know who I am – they sent me the email.  So why ask again for authentication?  They should have included a unique ID in the link, allowing me to write one (1) review for that one product.

Either some idiot at Buy.com thinks it’s necessary to re-authenticate me (likely following some corporate rule set down by God) or they’re just too lazy to bother to think about the situation.

This kind of corporate incompetence is all too common.

A friend forwarded me Orson Scott Card’s recent essay Would the Last Honest Reporter Please Turn On the Lights?, in which Card complains about journalistic bias (in this case, concerning the causes of the mortgage loan crisis).

Card writes:

If you had any personal honor, each reporter and editor would be insisting on telling the truth — even if it hurts the election chances of your favorite candidate.

Because that’s what honorable people do. Honest people tell the truth even when they don’t like the probable consequences. That’s what honesty means. That’s how trust is earned.

Card is a great science fiction writer (if you haven’t heard of him, go read Ender’s Game), but oddly, he seems to expect journalists to care about the truth.

I’m guessing he didn’t study journalism in school.

Professional journalists are trained to worry about “fairness”, not truth.  Reality, they are told, is socially constructed, and there is no such thing as objective truth.

Fairness means reporting “both sides” of a story even when there are 3 or 4 sides, or when it’s obvious who is lying and who isn’t.

If journalists were interested in truth, they wouldn’t pretend to be impartial (they’re human, of course they have opinions of their own).  Instead they’d openly admit their viewpoint and let the reader judge their arguments.

There are still countless newspapers in the US with “Republican” or “Democrat” in their title.  I suspect the relatively high esteem which journalists enjoy is a legacy from the era when these newspapers were founded.

Before the rise of “professional” journalism in the middle of the 20th century, truth was assumed to exist (even if it was difficult to find), and publishers were proud to announce their political allegiance.