Frames of reference
Two news items caught my attention today, and not for the reasons you might think. A video clip of the Chilean earthquake and an article on back pain.
What both showed were examples of reference-free information. Another name for this would be "worthless information."
For the case of the earthquake, we have a video clip which purportedly shows the violent shaking due to the quake. And the image in the video surely does jump around. But, then again, so do the films made by countless families with their camcorders. And movies that use a hand-held camera for effect. Shake the camera just a little and the image shakes a lot. So. Was the camera that was recording those images fixed in space? Of course not. It was attached to something – likely a flexible support which was itself attached to a building. Buildings shake quite a bit, even in small earthquakes. And I'd expect a camera that lacks any kind of stabilization (as a security camera will) to take very, very shaky pictures when it's being shaken.
So how much of what we see is the earth moving and how much is just the camera shaking? No way to really know.
This article on back research shares this deficiency in a different way. Note that "those who had CBT showed a 2.4 point improvement on one disability test" and "Those who had no therapy saw a 1.1 point improvement …"
Seriously, I have zero idea of how to interpret this because I have NO idea how many "points" are on their scale. If the scale goes from 1 to 1,000,000 then both results are meaningless and are lost in statistical noise. If the scale goes from 1 to 5 then these results are huge – just amazingly significant. Without a way of scaling them, though, they become … utterly meaningless. There's no point in writing them down at all. In fact, there's a negative value, in my opinion, since there's the sense that something's been conveyed whereas the reality is that no useful knowledge has been transmitted.
For both these cases the problem is the reference frame, or lack thereof. Was the camera's reference frame unmoving? Then those films really show something. If not, then I'd suggest the whole exercise was of vanishingly small worth, other than in proving that SOMETHING moved (maybe the camera, maybe the photographed area, probably a mix of the two). And in the second case we have non-data because we have nothing to gauge how big or small those numbers really are.
The takeaway is simply an awareness that framing matters. When you hear numbers without context – you should either dig deeper to GET the context, or flush them from your mind as useless clutter. And with our society's current informational overload, what you surely don't need is more clutter.
- And that's today's word from the bird
