Sierpinski triangle strikes again

Posted on by John

A couple months ago I wrote about how a simple random process gives rise to the Sierpinski triangle. Draw an equilateral triangle and pick a random point in the plane. Repeatedly pick a triangle vertex at random and move half way from the current position to that vertex. The result converges to a Sierpinksi triangle. This post will show another way to arrive at the same pattern using cellular automata.

Imagine an infinite grid of graph paper and fill in a few squares in one row. The squares in the subsequent rows are filled in or not depending on the state of the square’s upstairs neighbors. For elementary cellular automata, the state of a square depends on the square directly above and the two squares diagonally above on each side. In matrix notation, the state of the (i, j) element depends on elements (i-1, j-1), (i-1, j), and (i-1, j+1).

There are 256 possible elementary cellular automata, and here’s how you can number them. The states of three consecutive cells determine a three-bit binary number. An automaton is determined by what bit it assigned to each of the eight possible three-bit states, so an automaton corresponds to an 8-bit number. In this post we’re interested in Rule 90. In binary, 90 is written 01011010, and the table below spells out the rule in detail.

000 -> 0
001 -> 1
010 -> 0
011 -> 1
100 -> 1
101 -> 0
110 -> 1
111 -> 0

If we start with a single square filled in (i.e. set to 1) then this is the graph we get, i.e. the Sierpenski triangle:

Rule 90 with one initial bit set

This pattern depends critically on our initial conditions. Roughly speaking, it seems that if you start with regular initial conditions you’ll get regular results. If you start with random initial conditions, you’ll get random-looking results as shown below.

 

Rule 90 with random initial conditions

We see the same empty triangles as before, but they’re much smaller and appear scattered throughout.

In order to create a rectangular image, I wrapped the edges: the upper left neighbor of a point on the left edge is the right-most square on the row above, and similarly for the right edge. You could think of this as wrapping our graph paper into a cylinder.

 

A cryptographically secure random number generator

Posted on by John

A random number generator can have excellent statistical properties and yet not be suited for use in cryptography. I’ve written a few posts to demonstrate this. For example, this post shows how to discover the seed of an LCG random number generator.

This is not possible with a secure random number generator. Or more precisely, it is not practical. It may be theoretically possible, but doing so requires solving a problem currently believed to be extremely time-consuming. (Lots of weasel words here. That’s the nature of cryptography. Security often depends on the assumption that a problem is as hard to solve as experts generally believe it is.)

Blum Blum Shub algorithm

The Blum Blum Shub algorithm for generating random bits rests on the assumption that a certain number theory problem, the quadratic residuosity problem, is hard to solve. The algorithm is simple. Let M = pq where p and q are large primes, both congruent to 3 mod 4. Pick a seed x0 between 1 and M and relatively prime to M. Now for n > 0, set

xn+1 = xn² mod M

and return the least significant bit of xn+1. (Yes, that’s a lot of work for just one bit. If you don’t need cryptographic security, there are much faster random number generators.)

Python implementation

Here’s some Python code to illustrate using the generator. The code is intended to be clear, not efficient.

Given two large (not necessarily prime) numbers x and y, the code below finds primes p and q for the algorithm and checks that the seed is OK to use.

    import sympy

    # super secret large numbers
    x = 3*10**200
    y = 4*10**200
    seed = 5*10**300

    def next_usable_prime(x):
        # Find the next prime congruent to 3 mod 4 following x.
        p = sympy.nextprime(x)
        while (p % 4 != 3):
            p = sympy.nextprime(p)
        return p

    p = next_usable_prime(x)
    q = next_usable_prime(y)
    M = p*q

    assert(1 < seed < M)
    assert(seed % p != 0)
    assert(seed % q != 0)

There’s a little bit of a chicken-and-egg problem here: how do you pick x, y, and seed? Well, you could use a cryptographically secure random number generator ….

Now let’s generate a long string of bits:

# Number of random numbers to generate
N = 100000     

x = seed
bit_string = ""
for _ in range(N):
    x = x*x % M
    b = x % 2
    bit_string += str(b)

Testing

I did not test the output thoroughly; I didn’t use anything like DIEHARDER or PractRand as in previous posts, but just ran a couple simple tests described here.

First I look at the balance of 0’s and 1’s.

    Number of 1's: 50171
    Expected: 49683.7 to 50316.2

Then the longest run. (See this post for a discussion of expected run length.)

    Run length: 16
    Expected: 12.7 to 18.5

Nothing unusual here.

The Blums

The first two authors of Blum Blum Shub are Lenore and Manuel Blum. The third author is Michael Shub.

I had a chance to meet the Blums at the Heidelberg Laureate Forum in 2014. Manuel Blum gave a talk that year on mental cryptography that I blogged about here and followed up here. He and his wife Lenore were very pleasant to talk with.

Adding Laplace or Gaussian noise to database for privacy

Posted on by John

pixelated face

In the previous two posts we looked at a randomization scheme for protecting the privacy of a binary response. This post will look briefly at adding noise to continuous or unbounded data. I like to keep the posts here fairly short, but this topic is fairly technical. To keep it short I’ll omit some of the details and give more of an intuitive overview.

Differential privacy

The idea of differential privacy is to guarantee bounds on how much information may be revealed by someone’s participation in a database. These bounds are described by two numbers, ε (epsilon) and δ (delta). We’re primarily interested in the multiplicative bound described by ε. This number is roughly the number of bits of information an analyst might gain regarding an individual. (The multiplicative bound is exp(ε) and so ε, the natural log of the multiplicative bound, would be the information measure, though technically in nats rather than bits since we’re using natural logs rather than logs base 2.)

The δ term is added to the multiplicative bound. Ideally δ is 0, that is, we’d prefer (ε, 0)-differential privacy, but sometimes we have to settle for (ε, δ)-differential privacy. Roughly speaking, the δ term represents the possibility that a few individuals may stand to lose more privacy than the rest, that the multiplicative bound doesn’t apply to everyone. If δ is very small, this risk is very small.

Laplace mechanism

The Laplace distribution is also known as the double exponential distribution because its distribution function looks like the exponential distribution function with a copy reflected about the y-axis; these two exponential curves join at the origin to create a sort of circus tent shape. The absolute value of a Laplace random variable is an exponential random variable.

Why are we interested this particular distribution? Because we’re interested in multiplicative bounds, and so it’s not too surprising that exponential distributions might make the calculations work out because of the way the exponential scales multiplicatively.

The Laplace mechanism adds Laplacian-distributed noise to a function. If Δf is the sensitivity of a function f, a measure of how revealing the function might be, then adding Laplace noise with scale Δf/ε preserves (ε 0)-differential privacy.

Technically, Δf is the l1 sensitivity. We need this detail because the results for Gaussian noise involve l2 sensitivity. This is just a matter of whether we measure sensitivity by the l1 (sum of absolute values) norm or the l2 (root sum of squares) norm.

Gaussian mechanism

The Gaussian mechanism protects privacy by adding randomness with a more familiar normal (Gaussian) distribution. Here the results are a little messier. Let ε be strictly between 0 and 1 and pick δ > 0. Then the Gaussian mechanism is (ε, δ)-differentially private provided the scale of the Gaussian noise satisfies

\sigma \geq \sqrt{2 \log(1.25/\delta)}\,\, \frac{\Delta_2 f}{\varepsilon}

It’s not surprising that the l2 norm appears in this context since the normal distribution and l2 norm are closely related. It’s also not surprising that a δ term appears: the Laplace distribution is ideally suited to multiplicative bounds but the normal distribution is not.

Related

Previous related posts:

Quantifying privacy loss in a statistical database

Posted on by John

bench

In the previous post we looked at a simple randomization procedure to obscure individual responses to yes/no questions in a way that retains the statistical usefulness of the data. In this post we’ll generalize that procedure, quantify the privacy loss, and discuss the utility/privacy trade-off.

More general randomized response

Suppose we have a binary response to some question as a field in our database. With probability t we leave the value alone. Otherwise we replace the answer with the result of a fair coin toss. In the previous post, what we now call t was implicitly equal to 1/2. The value recorded in the database could have come from a coin toss and so the value is not definitive. And yet it does contain some information. The posterior probability that the original answer was 1 (“yes”) is higher if a 1 is recorded. We did this calculation for t = 1/2 last time, and here we’ll look at the result for general t.

If t = 0, the recorded result is always random. The field contains no private information, but it is also statistically useless. At the opposite extreme, t = 1, the recorded result is pure private information and statistically useful. The closer t is to 0, the more privacy we have, and the closer t is to 1, the more useful the data is. We’ll quantify this privacy/utility trade-off below.

Privacy loss

You can go through an exercise in applying Bayes theorem as in the previous post to show that the probability that the original response is 1, given that the recorded response is 1, is

\frac{(t+1) p}{2tp -t + 1}

where p is the overall probability of a true response of 1.

The privacy loss associated with an observation of 1 is the gain in information due to that observation. Before knowing that a particular response was 1, our estimate that the true response was 1 would be p; not having any individual data, we use the group mean. But after observing a recorded response of 1, the posterior probability is the expression above. The information gain is the log base 2 of the ratio of these values:

\log_2 \left( \frac{(t+1) p}{2tp - t + 1} \middle/ \ p \right) = \log_2\left( \frac{(t+1)}{2tp - t + 1} \right)

When t = 0, the privacy loss is 0. When t = 1, the loss is -log2(p) bits, i.e. the entire information contained in the response. When t = 1/2, the loss is -log2(3/(2p + 1)) bits.

Privacy / utility trade-off

We’ve looked at the privacy cost of setting t to various values. What are the statistical costs? Why not make t as small as possible? Well, 0 is a possible value of t, corresponding to complete loss of statistical utility. So we’d expect that small positive values of t make it harder to estimate p.

Each recorded response is a 1 with probability tp + (1 – t)/2. Suppose there are N database records and let S be the sum of the recorded values. Then our estimator for p is

\hat{p} = \frac{\frac{S}{N} - \frac{1-t}{2}}{t}

The variance of this estimator is inversely proportional to t, and so the width of our confidence intervals for p are proportional to 1/√t. Note that the larger N is, the smaller we can afford to make t.

Related

Previous related posts:

Next up: Adding Laplace or Gaussian noise and differential privacy

Randomized response, privacy, and Bayes theorem

Posted on by John

blurred lights

Suppose you want to gather data on an incriminating question. For example, maybe a statistics professor would like to know how many students cheated on a test. Being a statistician, the professor has a clever way to find out what he wants to know while giving each student deniability.

Randomized response

Each student is asked to flip two coins. If the first coin comes up heads, the student answers the question truthfully, yes or no. Otherwise the student reports “yes” if the second coin came up heads and “no” it came up tails. Every student has deniability because each “yes” answer may have come from an innocent student who flipped tails on the first coin and heads on the second.

How can the professor estimate p, the proportion of students who cheated? Around half the students will get a head on the first coin and answer truthfully; the rest will look at the second coin and answer yes or no with equal probability. So the expected proportion of yes answers is Y = 0.5p + 0.25, and we can estimate p as 2Y – 0.5.

Database anonymization

The calculations above assume that everyone complied with the protocol, which may not be reasonable. If everyone were honest, there’d be no reason for this exercise in the first place. But we could imagine another scenario. Someone holds a database with identifiers and answers to a yes/no question. The owner of the database could follow the procedure above to introduce randomness in the data before giving the data over to someone else.

Information contained in a randomized response

What can we infer from someone’s randomized response to the cheating question? There’s nothing you can infer with certainty; that’s the point of introducing randomness. But that doesn’t mean that the answers contain no information. If we completely randomized the responses, dispensing with the first coin flip, then the responses would contain no information. The responses do contain information, but not enough to be incriminating.

Let C be a random variable representing whether someone cheated, and let R be their response, following the randomization procedure above. Given a response R = 1, what is the probability p that C = 1, i.e. that someone cheated? This is a classic application of Bayes’ theorem.

\begin{eqnarray*} P(C=1 \mid R = 1) &=& \frac{P(R=1 \mid C=1) P(C=1)}{P(R=1\mid C=1)P(C=1) + P(R=1\mid C=0)P(C=0)} \\ &=& \frac{\frac{3}{4} p}{\frac{3}{4} p + \frac{1}{4}(1-p)} \\ &=& \frac{3p}{2p+1} \end{eqnarray*}

If we didn’t know someone’s response, we would estimate their probability of having cheated as p, the group average. But knowing that their response was “yes” we update our estimate to 3p / (2p + 1). At the extremes of p = 0 and p = 1 these coincide. But for any value of p strictly between 0 and 1, our estimate goes up. That is, the probability that someone cheated, conditional on knowing they responded “yes”, is higher than the unconditional probability. In symbols, we have

P(C = 1 | R = 1) > P(C = 1)

when 0 < p < 1. The difference between the left and right sides above is maximized when p = (√3 – 1)/2 = 0.366. That is, a “yes” response tells us the most when about 1/3 of the students cheated. When p = 0.366, P(C = 1 | R= 1) = 0.634, i.e. the posterior probability is almost twice the prior probability.

You could go through a similar exercise with Bayes theorem to show that P(C = 1 | R = 0) = p/(3 – 2p), which is less than p provided 0 < p < 1. So if someone answers “yes” to cheating, that does make it more likely that the actually cheated, but not so much more that you can justly accuse them of cheating. (Unless p = 1, in which case you’re in the realm of logic rather than probability: if everyone cheated, then you can conclude that any individual cheated.)

Update: See the next post for a more general randomization scheme and more about the trade-off between privacy and utility. The post after that gives an overview of randomization for more general kinds of data.

If you would like help with database de-identification, please let me know.

Why don’t you simply use XeTeX?

Posted on by John

From an FAQ post I wrote a few years ago:

This may seem like an odd question, but it’s actually one I get very often. On my TeXtip twitter account, I include tips on how to create non-English characters such as using \AA to produce Å. Every time someone will ask “Why not use XeTeX and just enter these characters?”

If you can “just enter” non-English characters, then you don’t need a tip. But a lot of people either don’t know how to do this or don’t have a convenient way to do so. Most English speakers only need to type foreign characters occasionally, and will find it easier, for example, to type \AA or \ss than to learn how to produce Å or ß from a keyboard. If you frequently need to enter Unicode characters, and know how to do so, then XeTeX is great.

One does not simply type Unicode characters.

Related posts:

Pascal’s triangle and Fermat’s little theorem

Posted on by John

I was listening to My Favorite Theorem when Jordan Ellenberg said something in passing about proving Fermat’s little theorem from Pascal’s triangle. I wasn’t familiar with that, and fortunately Evelyn Lamb wasn’t either and so she asked him to explain.

Fermat’s little theorem says that for any prime p, then for any integer a,

ap = a (mod p).

That is, ap and a have the same remainder when you divide by p. Jordan Ellenberg picked the special case of a = 2 as his favorite theorem for the purpose of the podcast. And it’s this special case that can be proved from Pascal’s triangle.

The pth row of Pascal’s triangle consists of the coefficients of (x + y)p when expanded using the binomial theorem. By setting x = y = 1, you can see that the numbers in the row must add up to 2p. Also, all the numbers in the row are divisible by p except for the 1’s on each end. So the remainder when 2p is divided by p is 2.

It’s easy to observe that the numbers in the pth row, except for the ends, are divisible by p. For example, when p = 5, the numbers are 1, 5, 10, 10, 5, 1. When p = 7, the numbers are 1, 7, 28, 35, 35, 28, 7, 1.

To prove this you have to show that the binomial coefficient C(p, k) is divisible by p when 0 < k < p. When you expand the binomial coefficient into factorials, you see that there’s a factor of p on top, and nothing can cancel it out because p is prime and the numbers in the denominator are less than p.

By the way, you can form an analogous proof for the general case of Fermat’s little theorem by expanding

(1 + 1 + 1 + … + 1)p

using the multinomial generalization of the binomial theorem.

Making a problem easier by making it harder

Posted on by John

In the oral exam for my PhD, my advisor asked me a question about a differential equation. I don’t recall the question, but I remember the interaction that followed.

I was stuck, and my advisor countered by saying “Let me ask you a harder question.” I was still stuck, and so he said “Let me ask you an even harder question.” Then I got it.

By “harder” he meant “more general.” He started with a concrete problem, then made it progressively more abstract until I recognized it. His follow-up questions were logically harder but psychologically easier.

This incident came to mind when I ran across an example in Lawrence Evans’ control theory course notes. He uses the example to illustrate what he calls an example of mathematical wisdom:

It is sometimes easier to solve a problem by embedding it within a larger class of problems and then solving the larger class all at once.

The problem is to evaluate the integral of the sinc function:

\int_0^\infty \frac{\sin(x)}{x}\, dx

He does so by introducing the more general problem of evaluating the function

I(\alpha) = \int_0^\infty \exp(-\alpha x) \frac{\sin(x)}{x}\, dx

which reduces to the sinc integral when α = 0.

We can find the derivative of I(α) by differentiating under the integral sign and integrating by parts twice.

I'(\alpha) &=& \int_0^\infty \frac{\partial}{\partial \alpha} \exp(-\alpha x) \frac{\sin(x)}{x}\, dx \\ &=& \int_0^\infty \exp(-\alpha x) \sin(x) \, dx \\ &=& - \frac{1}{1 + \alpha^2}

Therefore

I(\alpha) = - \arctan(\alpha) + C

As α goes to infinity, I(α) goes to zero, and so C = π/2 and I(0) = π/2.

Incidentally, note that instead of computing an integral in order to solve a differential equation as one often does, we introduced a differential equation in order to compute an integral.

Quantifying the information content of personal data

Posted on by John

It can be surprisingly easy to identify someone from data that’s not directly identifiable. One commonly cited result is that the combination of birth date, zip code, and sex is enough to identify most people. This post will look at how to quantify the amount of information contained in such data.

If the answer to a question has probability p, then it contains -log2 p bits of information. Knowing someone’s sex gives you 1 bit of information because -log2(1/2) = 1.

Knowing whether someone can roll their tongue could give you more or less information than knowing their sex. Estimates vary, but say 75% can roll their tongue. Then knowing that someone can roll their tongue gives you 0.415 bits of information, but knowing that they cannot roll their tongue gives you 2 bits of information.

On average, knowing someone’s tongue rolling ability gives you less information than knowing their sex. The average amount of information, or entropy, is

0.75(-log2 0.75) + 0.25(-log2 0.25) = 0.81.

Entropy is maximized when all outcomes are equally likely. But for identifiability, we’re concerned with maximum information as well as average information.

Knowing someone’s zip code gives you a variable amount of information, less for densely populated zip codes and more for sparsely populated zip codes. An average zip code contains about 7,500 people. If we assume a US population of 326,000,000, this means a typical zip code would give us about 15.4 bits of information.

The Safe Harbor provisions of US HIPAA regulations let you use the first three digits of someone’s zip code except when this would represent less than 20,000 people, as it would in several sparsely populated areas. Knowing that an American lives in a region of 20,000 people would give you 14 bits of information about that person.

Birth dates are complicated because age distribution is uneven. Knowing that someone’s birth date was over a century ago is highly informative, much more so than knowing it was a couple decades ago. That’s why the Safe Harbor provisions do not allow including age, much less birth date, for people over 90.

Birthdays are simpler than birth dates. Birthdays are not perfectly evenly distributed throughout the year, but they’re close enough for our purposes. If we ignore leap years, a birthday contains -log2(1/365) or about 8.5 bits of information. If we consider leap years, knowing someone was born on a leap day gives us two extra bits of information.

Independent information is additive. I don’t expect there’s much correlation between sex, geographical region, and birthday, so you could add up the bits from each of these information sources. So if you know someone’s sex, their zip code (assuming 7,500 people), and their birthday (not a leap day), then you have 25 bits of information, which may be enough to identify them.

This post didn’t consider correlated information. For example, suppose you know someone’s zip code and primary language. Those two pieces of information together don’t provide as much information as the sum of the information they provide separately because language and location are correlated. I may discuss the information content of correlated information in a future post.

Related: HIPAA de-identification

Negative correlation introduced by success

Posted on by John

Suppose you measure people on two independent attributes, X and Y, and take those for whom X+Y is above some threshold. Then even though X and Y are uncorrelated in the full population, they will be negatively correlated in your sample.

This article gives the following example. Suppose beauty and acting ability were uncorrelated. Knowing how attractive someone is would give you no advantage in guessing their acting ability, and vice versa. Suppose further that successful actors have a combination of beauty and acting ability. Then among successful actors, the beautiful would tend to be poor actors, and the unattractive would tend to be good actors.

Here’s a little Python code to illustrate this. We take two independent attributes, distributed like IQs, i.e. normal with mean 100 and standard deviation 15. As the sum of the two attributes increases, the correlation between the two attributes becomes more negative.

from numpy import arange
from scipy.stats import norm, pearsonr
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

# Correlation.
# The function pearsonr returns correlation and a p-value.
def corr(x, y):
    return pearsonr(x, y)[0]

x = norm.rvs(100, 15, 10000)
y = norm.rvs(100, 15, 10000)
z = x + y

span = arange(80, 260, 10)
c = [ corr( x[z > low], y[z > low] ) for low in span ]

plt.plot( span, c )
plt.xlabel( "minimum sum" )
plt.ylabel( "correlation coefficient" )
plt.show()

Highly cited theorems

Posted on by John

Some theorems are cited far more often than others. These are not the most striking theorems, not the most advanced or most elegant, but ones that are extraordinarily useful.

I first noticed this when taking complex analysis where the Cauchy integral formula comes up over and over. When I first saw the formula I thought it was surprising, but certainly didn’t think “I bet we’re going to use this all the time.” The Cauchy integral formula was discovered after many of the results that textbooks now prove using it. Mathematicians realized over time that they could organize a class in complex variables more efficiently by proving the Cauchy integral formula as early as possible, then use it to prove much of the rest of the syllabus.

In functional analysis, it’s the Hahn-Banach theorem. This initially unimpressive theorem turns out to be the workhorse of functional analysis. Reading through a book on functional analysis you’ll see “By the Hahn-Banach theorem …” so often that you start to think “Really, that again? What does it have to do here?”

In category theory, it’s the Yoneda lemma. The most common four-word phrase in category theory must be “by the Yoneda lemma.” Not only is it the most cited theorem in category theory, it may be the only highly cited theorem in category theory.

The most cited theorem in machine learning is probably Bayes’ theorem, but I’m not sure Bayes’ theorem looms as large in ML the previous theorems do in their fields.

Every area of math has theorems that come up more often than other, such as the central limit theorem in probability and the dominated convergence theorem in real analysis, but I can’t think of any theorems that come up as frequently as Hahn-Banach and Yoneda do in their areas.

As with people, there are theorems that attract attention and theorems that get the job done. These categories may overlap, but often they don’t.

 

Width of mixture PDFs

Posted on by John

Suppose you draw samples from two populations, one of which has a wider probability distribution than the other. How does the width of the distribution of the combined sample vary as you change the proportions of the two populations?

The extremes are easy. If you pick only from one population, then the resulting distribution will be exactly as wide as the distribution of that population. But what about in the middle? If you pick from both populations with equal probability, will the width resulting distribution be approximately the average of the widths of the two populations separately?

To make things more specific, we’ll draw from two populations: Cauchy and normal. With probability η we will sample from a Cauchy distribution with scale γ and with probability (1-η) we will sample from a normal distribution with scale σ. The resulting combined distribution is a mixture, known in spectroscopy as a pseudo-Voigt distribution. In that field, the Cauchy distribution is usually called the Lorentz distribution.

(Why”pseudo”? A Voigt random variable is the sum of a Cauchy and a normal random variable. Its PDF is a convolution of a Cauchy and a normal PDF. A pseudo-Voigt random variable is the mixture of a Cauchy and a normal random variable. Its PDF is a convex combination of the PDFs of a Cauchy and a normal PDF. In fact, the convex combination coefficients are η and (1-η) mentioned above. Convex combinations are easier to work with than convolutions, at least in some contexts, and the pseudo-Voigt distribution is a convenient approximation to the Voigt distribution.)

We will measure the width of distributions by full width at half maximum (FWHM). In other words, we’ll measure how far apart the two points are where the distribution takes on half of its maximum value.

It’s not hard to calculate that the FWHM for a Cauchy distribution with scale 2γ and the FWHM for a normal distribution with scale σ is 2 √(2 log 2) σ.

If we have a convex combination of Cauchy and normal distributions, we’d expect the FWHM to be at least roughly the same convex combination of the FWHM of the separate distributions, i.e. we’d expect the FWHM of our mixture to be

2ηγ + 2(1 – η)√(2 log 2)σ.

How close is that guess to being correct? It has to be exactly correct when η is 0 or 1, but how well does it do in the middle? Here are a few experiments fixing γ = 1 and varying σ.

Team dynamics and encouragement

Posted on by John

When you add people to a project, the total productivity of the team as a whole may go up, but the productivity per person usually goes down. Someone suggested that as a rule of thumb, a company needs to triple its number of employees to double its productivity. Fred Brooks summarized this saying

“Many hands make light work” — Often
But many hands make more work — Always

I’ve seen this over and over. But I think I’ve found an exception. When work is overwhelming, a lot of time is absorbed by discouragement and indecision. In that case, new people can make a big improvement. They not only get work done, but they can make others feel more like working.

Flood cleanup is like that, and that’s what motivated this note. Someone new coming by to help energizes everyone else. And with more people, you see progress sooner and make more progress, in a sort of positive feedback loop.

This is all in the context of fairly small teams. There must be a point where adding more people decreases productivity per person or even total productivity. I’ve heard reports of a highly bureaucratic relief organization that makes things worse when they show up to “help.” The ideal team size is somewhere between a couple discouraged individuals and a bloated bureaucracy.

Related post: Optimal team size

Relearning from a new perspective

Posted on by John

I had a conversation with someone today who said he’s relearning logic from a categorical perspective. What struck me about this was not the specifics but the pattern:

Relearning _______ from a _______ perspective.

Not relearning something forgotten, but going back over something you already know well, but from a different starting point, a different approach, etc.

Have any experiences along these lines you’d like to share in the comments? Anything you have relearned, attempted to relearn, or would like to relearn from a new angle?