Re: Election dilemma from a process

[Jonathan Siegel <jmsiegel.info.research@worldnet.att.net>]

> Subject:         RE: Election dilemma from a process
>    Date:         Tue, 05 Dec 2000 02:32:59 -0600
>    From:        Tony Polito <TonyPolito@mindspring.com>
>      To:         den.list@deming.ces.clemson.edu
>
>
>
> I concurred with Steve Prevette's perspective that the Election situation speaks to Dr. Deming's admonishment that "there is
> no true value"

I agree with Tony Polito and Steve Prevette. I wanted to add a "theory of knowledge" point about what I believe to be some
thinking underlying the principle.

In this view, a "vote" represents an interaction between a system (a voter) and a measuring device (the voting machine.) The
interaction is what's real, what we can observe.  This reality is a single whole. We can no more split it into "the behavior of
the voter" and "the behavior of the machine" than we can split a physics experiment into "the behavior of the 'particle'" and
"the behavior of the detector." Like 'particles' in physics, voting intentions in people's minds represent a wave of
possibilities which has no definite or certain existence until it interacts with a detector of some kind. Like detectors in
physics, vote detectors are participants as well as observers. It is the interaction of the two that becomes the thing
observed. Detectors create a reality that wasn't there before.

The machine says one thing and the pollster another. Did the machine (or the pollster) err? Or does the context  create a
different result -- voter-machine is different from voter-pollster. The policy behind the secret ballot suggests the latter.

The same is true with ballets and the counting machine. They affect each other. Run the votes through the machine a second time
and the count is different. Perhaps some chad falls out. Was the chad really in before? Or was it a wave of in and not-in?  The
ballot looks solid and continuous when we observe it with our eyes from a distance, but interaction with our eyes is not the
same thing as interaction with a voting machine. From the point of view of a voting machine it is much less solid, and has a
wave-function that is very real. The solidity is illusion. Have a manual recount, and then there is a different wave function
that takes into account several people holding and examining the thing. And there is a little plastic bag of chad from the
floor. It wasn't so solid after all. Different examining team, different results.

Revote a week later, and one will get a different result. Everything is changing all the time. The wave of undetected intentions
has its own dynamic and other things are interacting with it in the time in between. The machine (and the examiners) don't sit
sit still either. This is very easy to see with the examiners, who change their approach as they gain experience (the observed
changes the observer, not just the other way around). But it's just as true of the machine as well, just harder to see. The
detector is affected by what it detects.

I think this also helps explain part of Deming's critique of traditional statistics. If detectors are affected by what they
detect, then errors cannot be randomly distributed. One observation can never be truly independent of another when each act of
observing changes the observer. This is why approximately probabilistic behavior can never be simply assumed in any kind of
system as complex as the world of our ordinary experience.  Approximately probabilistic behavior requires stability, which in a
chaotic world must be created by some kind of management.

I think one of Deming's most fundamental points was that our interactions with systems we experience in ordinary life have many
of the same properties as interactions in quantum physics. Once we change our view of the world so that we start seeing
interactions as what is fundamentally real, and the "things" that we previously saw as the building-blocks of reality become
simply ideas inside our heads -- theories we derive from our observations and not anything that we actually observe -- then the
notion of a "thing" having a value is no longer even meaningful. Values represent measurements, interactions between phenomena
and detectors. They do not represent things, truly or otherwise, any more than they represent detectors. This a very radical
change in ones point of view.

I've come to believe that the "no true value" principle, and much of Deming's commentary about many of the assumptions
underlying traditional statistics, are not themselves basic teachings. I think they are derived from, and pointers to,
principles that are much more fundamental. I think these ideas come from Deming's background as a physicist. Once one takes the
ideas out of their physics context and starts applying them to ordinary life,  I think this is exactly what Deming tried to do.
Once one does this, I think "no true value", "no independence,"  and many other Deming ideas become conclusions, not starting
principles.

Jonathan Siegel