Galileo and the Oscars

Remember those award ceremonies where the person on stage reads out the winner after opening an envelope? In 2016, at the Oscars, the winner of the best movie was called out wrongly on stage… and to millions on TV.

 

Tim Harford’s podcast explores how that happened. Far more importantly (and scarily), it cites the same pattern to be behind other far more disastrous events. And to top it off, that pattern had been pointed out by good old Galileo!

 

So what led to the Oscars gaffe? The Best Movie envelope had the name of a movie and an actress. Why the actress name? Because it was the wrong envelope! But wait, there’s more. The previous award had been for the Best Actress: this envelope was for that category. Wait a minute, wouldn’t the previous award not have been called out wrongly in that case? Aha, they kept duplicates of each envelope. It was the wrong duplicate that had been handed on stage. But why did they keep duplicates? As a safety measure, as a backup system.

 

See how complicated it was? Duplicate envelopes as backup. The copy read on stage disposed by the announcer, the backup disposed by someone backstage. The backups got misaligned with the onstage ones, and we had the gaffe.

 

Galileo had warned centuries earlier that as we add more and more layers to avoid disaster, sometimes those very layers then introduce new risks! Further, over time, especially for complex topics, those safety layers may get inadvertently stacked like dominos: if one falls, all the others start falling. And then the dominos start falling so fast that there’s no time to react.

 

Harford cites the Three Mile Island nuclear accident as another example of this. The control room had a gazillion pieces of info displayed. Lights next to many of them would glow to indicate status. Unfortunately, since they’d been developed by different vendors and at different times, there was no standardization. Did green mean a valve was open or closed? The overall effect was thus dizzying and incomprehensible info, a disaster waiting to happen. The safety layer of lights on top of status info had created confusion.

 

Or take the more recent 2008 financial crisis. AIG had insured most of the top Wall Street firms for a ludicrous sum of $2.7 trillion. Yes, that’s trillion with a “t”! There was no way it could ever pay that much. On the other hand, the insured firms thought they had a safety net: insurance with AIG. But as firms started to go belly up, it became clear that AIG could not pay out all of them. This in turn made the still solvent firms realize they weren’t insured anymore! And so they started selling. With everyone selling, prices nosedived. This drove yet more firms into bankruptcy. Insurance was a safety layer, but it then encouraged firms to take more risks because, hey, they were insured. Until they weren’t.

 

And to think Galileo had noticed this pattern centuries back…

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