Within days of a new government taking charge of Karnataka earlier this month, S R Patil, a 65-year-old man, was sworn in as minister of information technology and bio-technology. Two powerful voices in the business world attacked him - 60-year old Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw from the biotech world, and not-much-younger Mohandas Pai. Their grouse: Patil was too old for the job.
Patil, barely a day into his new role felt pre-judged, and sulked about how his predecessors had been even older. Following widespread outrage, the celebrated critics apologised to Patil.
Just a day later, 66-year-old Narayana Murthy returned to head Infosys, once India's most-envied listed company, as its executive chairman, his under-30 son in tow as his "executive assistant". His return ran counter to all notions built up about Murthy and Infosys: that Infosys was an institution not synonymous with its founders; that Murthy had built a true institution and had moved on unlike other "lala" promoters; and that blood was not thicker than water for Infosys and Murthy.
In poetic irony, Shaw and Pai publicly joined many who welcomed the return of the saviour (indeed invoking imagery of the Hindu Kalki, the Islamic Mahdi, and in Rahul Gandhi's metaphor, "a man on a horse"). So, how do eminently sensible and technically competent minds judge Patil and Murthy so differently on the metric of age although Patil was legitimately appointed to office while Murthy's appointment (equally legitimate) was arguably falling short of standards higher than legitimacy that society had come to expect from him?
The answer lies in the common problem of the "false positive", which trips the judgments of even the best among judges. The field of appreciation of evidence is replete with ruins of decisions infected by this problem. In his book The Drunkard's Walk, Leonard Mlodinow dedicates a chapter to "False Positives and Positive Fallacies" to articulate such errors of judgement. Explaining the false positive in the famous criminal trial of sports star O J Simpson, accused of murdering his wife, he points out how the prosecution focused enormously on Simpson's track record of inflicting physical violence to suggest that it was reasonable to conclude that he went on to kill her.
In defence, his lawyers impressed the jury with statistics that four million American women were estimated to be battered annually by their partners, but only 1,432 were found to have been murdered by such partners - a probability of 1 out of 2,500. They convinced the jury that few men who slap or beat their domestic partners go on to murder them.
The relevant number, says the author, is not the probability that a man who batters his wife would go on to kill her (one in 2,500) but rather how many battered woman who were murdered, were murdered by their abusers. Those statistics showed that 90 per cent of such women were in fact killed by their abusers - a statistic the prosecution should have pressed, but did not even think about.
Prosecutors, too, routinely relied on such fallacy to convict those accused of crime. Mlodinow cites the case of Sally Clark, a British mother who lost two infant babies within weeks of their respective births, and was convicted for infanticide.
The probability of two consecutive infants dying a natural death within weeks of birth (the "sudden infant death syndrome") was ridiculously low: in the estimate of an expert pediatrician, one in 73 million. Three-and-half years into her prison term, during appeal, it was discovered that the prosecutors' pathologist had withheld a finding that the second infant had had a bacterial infection at the time of death, a factor never considered. The conviction was set aside.
Discovery and inspection of the full record would have saved her from being convicted.
Since information about the bacterial infection was out of bounds, the only analysis in trial was of the improbable chance of two infants of the same mother dying a natural death, and the seeming probability that the mother was a murderer.
Such a fallacy is in active operation in India too in regulatory matters. Positive evidence that could create doubts about the prosecution's case is often suppressed on the ground that is not evidence "relied upon" to press the charges, and therefore, "irrelevant".
In much the same way, even sane minds blank out the need for considering other attendant circumstances when jumping to conclusions about what is good and bad and support the perceptions they are more comfortable with.
American Nobel laureate Herbert Simon, a political and social scientist coined a term "bounded rationality": in simple terms, the process by which people make judgements that are "good enough" to suit their perceptions within the bounds of their comfort zones. Shaw and Pai did not trust or like Patil, a wannabe intruding their space.
Therefore, the high probability that old people are unsuitable for a high-tech portfolio pressed into service in their minds, and no further evidence was considered relevant to examine.
However, they trust and like Murthy, one among them who shares their space. Therefore, his age (nearly the same as Patil) was irrelevant, and so was any need to consider if he had abandoned occupying the high moral ground of his past.
In appreciation of evidence, perceptions indeed play the most significant role in creating reality.
Patil, barely a day into his new role felt pre-judged, and sulked about how his predecessors had been even older. Following widespread outrage, the celebrated critics apologised to Patil.
Just a day later, 66-year-old Narayana Murthy returned to head Infosys, once India's most-envied listed company, as its executive chairman, his under-30 son in tow as his "executive assistant". His return ran counter to all notions built up about Murthy and Infosys: that Infosys was an institution not synonymous with its founders; that Murthy had built a true institution and had moved on unlike other "lala" promoters; and that blood was not thicker than water for Infosys and Murthy.
In poetic irony, Shaw and Pai publicly joined many who welcomed the return of the saviour (indeed invoking imagery of the Hindu Kalki, the Islamic Mahdi, and in Rahul Gandhi's metaphor, "a man on a horse"). So, how do eminently sensible and technically competent minds judge Patil and Murthy so differently on the metric of age although Patil was legitimately appointed to office while Murthy's appointment (equally legitimate) was arguably falling short of standards higher than legitimacy that society had come to expect from him?
The answer lies in the common problem of the "false positive", which trips the judgments of even the best among judges. The field of appreciation of evidence is replete with ruins of decisions infected by this problem. In his book The Drunkard's Walk, Leonard Mlodinow dedicates a chapter to "False Positives and Positive Fallacies" to articulate such errors of judgement. Explaining the false positive in the famous criminal trial of sports star O J Simpson, accused of murdering his wife, he points out how the prosecution focused enormously on Simpson's track record of inflicting physical violence to suggest that it was reasonable to conclude that he went on to kill her.
In defence, his lawyers impressed the jury with statistics that four million American women were estimated to be battered annually by their partners, but only 1,432 were found to have been murdered by such partners - a probability of 1 out of 2,500. They convinced the jury that few men who slap or beat their domestic partners go on to murder them.
The relevant number, says the author, is not the probability that a man who batters his wife would go on to kill her (one in 2,500) but rather how many battered woman who were murdered, were murdered by their abusers. Those statistics showed that 90 per cent of such women were in fact killed by their abusers - a statistic the prosecution should have pressed, but did not even think about.
Prosecutors, too, routinely relied on such fallacy to convict those accused of crime. Mlodinow cites the case of Sally Clark, a British mother who lost two infant babies within weeks of their respective births, and was convicted for infanticide.
The probability of two consecutive infants dying a natural death within weeks of birth (the "sudden infant death syndrome") was ridiculously low: in the estimate of an expert pediatrician, one in 73 million. Three-and-half years into her prison term, during appeal, it was discovered that the prosecutors' pathologist had withheld a finding that the second infant had had a bacterial infection at the time of death, a factor never considered. The conviction was set aside.
Discovery and inspection of the full record would have saved her from being convicted.
Since information about the bacterial infection was out of bounds, the only analysis in trial was of the improbable chance of two infants of the same mother dying a natural death, and the seeming probability that the mother was a murderer.
Such a fallacy is in active operation in India too in regulatory matters. Positive evidence that could create doubts about the prosecution's case is often suppressed on the ground that is not evidence "relied upon" to press the charges, and therefore, "irrelevant".
In much the same way, even sane minds blank out the need for considering other attendant circumstances when jumping to conclusions about what is good and bad and support the perceptions they are more comfortable with.
American Nobel laureate Herbert Simon, a political and social scientist coined a term "bounded rationality": in simple terms, the process by which people make judgements that are "good enough" to suit their perceptions within the bounds of their comfort zones. Shaw and Pai did not trust or like Patil, a wannabe intruding their space.
Therefore, the high probability that old people are unsuitable for a high-tech portfolio pressed into service in their minds, and no further evidence was considered relevant to examine.
However, they trust and like Murthy, one among them who shares their space. Therefore, his age (nearly the same as Patil) was irrelevant, and so was any need to consider if he had abandoned occupying the high moral ground of his past.
In appreciation of evidence, perceptions indeed play the most significant role in creating reality.
(The author is a partner of JSA, Advocates & Solicitors. The views expressed herein are his own.)
somasekhar@jsalaw.com
somasekhar@jsalaw.com