Of Barking Dogs and Missing Bullet Holes

David Bernell

 

My second entry in this blog is about why I write and what I'm trying to do here. The first entry was about the immediate problem that was moving me to write something down to begin with: the political dysfunction in our country. So, what am I doing here? It's what I tell my students their job is after they're done with my classes at the end of the term.

Ideally, they leave with some added knowledge about the subject we studied -- international relations, nuclear weapons and arms control, energy policy -- and also some improved skills, like writing about and analyzing what they read and hear. But I also want them to leave with something more, a sense that they have to pay close attention to the world around them so they notice what's not obvious, what takes a little extra effort to find out, what I call the "barking dogs" and the "missing bullet holes."

The "barking dogs" come from an economist named Hernando de Soto, who tells a story of a visit to Indonesia to advise the government about the need to bring the poor into the formal economy, and how to do it. The government, he says, needs to recognize the land, homes and assets that people hold without formal legal titles, and make the property legally recognized and represented via titles and deeds, through government institutions, banks, insurance companies, etc. The government may not know how to make sense of what people own, but the people know. You have to go meet them on their own terms, where they live. 

To get more familiar with the local context, and to see the beautiful scenery around Bali, de Soto wandered through the countryside prior to his meeting with the government officials. As he walked through the rice fields, he never saw a marker that delineated property lines among the locals. But as he walked from farm to farm, the dogs would bark at him. They knew what property to guard, what assets their owners controlled.

The next day, de Soto says, the Indonesian ministers were floored when he told them that Indonesian dogs already know everything the government needs to know about setting up a formal property system. They know who owns what. If you just listen to the barking dogs, you'll understand how the people live and the rules they follow that the legal system knows nothing about. The rules are actually quite simple and understandable. Even the dogs obey them.

"Listen to the barking dogs" was de Soto's metaphor to tell the government leaders to pay attention. And now it's mine too. Pay attention to what may be right in front of you, and you'll learn a lot. That's the mission I send my students out to accomplish when they leave my classes.

But that's not all. Their mission is actually harder than that. They not only need to "listen to the barking dogs," they also need to "find the missing bullet holes" too.

The "missing bullet holes" come from a story by mathematician Jordan Ellenberg. When his students ask him when they're ever going to need to use the advanced math he's teaching, he tells them that what they're doing is training their minds to think analytically in mathematical terms. It's just like exercising your body. It doesn't matter if they ever use the math later in life, what matters is the learning, the training.

When he's pressed to give an example, he tells the story of Abraham Wald, a Jewish Hungarian mathematician who fled Europe in the 1930's to escape the Nazis, and then joined the US army to fight the Nazis. The army placed him (wisely) in the Statistical Research Group, which analyzed military data and information to improve the war effort. One day the Army Air Corps came to Wald to ask how to save the bomber planes getting shot down over Germany. They wanted to put armor on the underside of the planes, but how much armor, and where? They didn't want to add too much weight to the planes and make them even slower and more vulnerable. The Air Corps told Wald that the largest number and concentration of bullet holes were on the fuselages -- that's the biggest target. Fewer bullet holes were on the wings, and even fewer on the engines, which were the smallest part of the plane that could be hit by the German anti-aircraft fire. Clearly, the Air Corps said, they needed to put armor on the fuselage, since that's what was getting shot the most, but just how much armor?

Wald told them they had it all wrong. They forgot to consider the missing bullet holes. "Where are they?" he asked. Then answering his own question, he told them, "They're on the planes that never came back, that got shot down by the Germans." The one thing you know, Wald told them, is that a plane can take a lot of bullets in the fuselage and still make it back to the base. But planes that get hit on the wings and engines don't make it back that often, which is why the Air Corps saw fewer bullet holes on the wings and engines of the planes that came back. "You want to save the airmen and the planes?" he told them. "Put the armor where the bullet holes aren't."  Of course...

So that's the mission, for my students, and for me.  Find out what's there -- listen to the barking dogs. But also notice what's not there -- find the missing bullet holes. It's much harder than anything we do in class.

I'm not sure how well I'll live up to my own standard here in this blog, just how much I'll notice what's right in front of me, and what's hidden. But that's my goal. It's why I write. 

(The two authors I referenced wrote these excellent books: Hernando de Soto, The Mystery of Capital: Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and Fails Everywhere Else; and Jordan Ellenberg, How Not to Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking.  Also, I made up the quotes from Wald. I don't know what he said, but I would imagine he said something like what I wrote. It's certainly how I would write it as fiction.)