Argument from Ignorance – Yeah Right!

April 2017,

Thank you for reading our spring is in the air newsletter of 2017.

Spring is in the air, at least in our region. 2 years ago I wrote about April 1, fool’s day. April 1 means that spring is in the air for a while. Spring is in the air always somewhere and on Canary Islands they say it is always spring, I can confirm that. But how do you know when spring is in the air? If you do an online search on spring is…. it shows:

Spring is the season between winter and summer when the weather becomes warmer and plants start to grow again. We often describe spring as a time of rebirth, renewal and awakening. Many trees are blossoming and early flowers are pushing through the earth. Things are coming back to life! But a spring is also a spiral of wire which returns to its original shape after it is pressed or pulled. And a spring is a place where water comes up through the ground. It is also the water that comes from that place.  And when a person or animal springs, they jump upwards or forwards suddenly or quickly. If you spring some news or a surprise on someone, you tell them something that they did not expect to hear, without warning them. So, spring has multiple meanings.

For me spring is in the air when we have returned from the winter holiday and temperature starts climbing towards 20 degree Celsius, fevers left the house and indeed the plants in the garden grow including the ones you don’t want to grow or have not been planted by you. Then my wife starts asking when I will do the garden activities to remove the weeds, set up the outdoor furniture, etc. etc.

When passing March 14 (PI day!) this is mostly starting.

PI,a very, very interesting irrational number.

3,141592653589793238462643383279502884197169399375105820974944592307816406286 and more…..

and even more. up to infinity….

The number π is a mathematical constant, the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter, commonly approximated as 3.14159. It has been represented by the Greek letter “π” since the mid-18th century, though it is also sometimes spelled out as “pi” (/paɪ/). Being an irrational number, π cannot be expressed exactly as a fraction (equivalently, its decimal representation never ends and never settles into a permanent repeating pattern). I have written on never ending things before, like Hilbert’s Infinite Hotel, a hotel with an infinite number of hotel rooms. These types of numbers and math always trigger me and so does PI. A lot has been written on PI, so I am not going to repeat what has been written already, but infinite series, unknown quantities and fallacy’s always catch my attention.

I am blessed not being sick very often, but this year I caught the spring fever and went to the pharmacy to buy some pills as my workload did not allow to me to stay in bed to conquer the fever. I could choose from various sorts of medicine to homeopathic stuff and the pharmacist to me said: “homeopathy works!” when asking if the drops would help against my fever. “Science never proved it did not work” (this piece is inspired by Suzanne Weusten and her book “Hoe we ons zelf voor de gek houden, ABC van Denkfouten”). Yeah, right. UFO’s exist and my brain is sending non-observable signals as it has never been proved it does not. There is life after death and we recently heard somebody say that climate changes are not caused by people’s influence and we are never sure about religion.

Oh, and Microsoft Dynamics 365 helps drive your digital transformation. Yeah, right. With Dynamics 365 you can grow, evolve, and transform every part of your business to better meet the changing market and needs of your customers. Spring is in the air. “It is up to you, you have to believe in it”

The pharmacist’s reasoning is not correct, but plausible. Genuinely he says we don’t know if homeopathy works. His argument not being relevant and his conclusion is not logical. This is called argument from ignorance or in Latin: argumentum ad ignorantiam), also known as appeal to ignorance (in which ignorance represents “a lack of contrary evidence”), it is a fallacy in informal logic. It asserts that a proposition is true because it has not yet been proved false (or vice versa). This represents a type of false dichotomy in that it excludes a third option, which is that: there may have been an insufficient investigation, and therefore there is insufficient information to prove the proposition to be either true or false. Nor does it allow the admission that the choices may in fact not be two (true or false), but may be as many as four:

1. true
2. false
3. unknown between true or false
4. being unknowable (among the first three)

There is a nice you tube video channel on the topic: https://www.youtube.com/user/ArguingFromIgnorance/videos, a lot on elections.

You could say digital transformation helps as it has never been proven that it does not help. And so you could say it does not help as some might argue it has never been proved scientifically that it helps. Both reasoning’s are probably not true. If a statement is true or not depends on the proof supporting or refuting it and not on lacking supporting the opposite. The argument from ignorance is often used rhetorically by people believing in something without the proof. It does not make sense and it is not necessary to suggest arguments against that. And behind every argument is someone’s ignorance. You could simply say it is a sophistry although this probably does not help improve the discussion either… It is better to ask questions on proof of the statement instead of accepting an invalid reasoning. Is a customer ready to go live with the new system? Since the project team and the end users had no questions concerning the topics discussed, the customer is ready to go live…… Yeah, right.

And so it is with the benefits of digital transformation. Every company is talking about DT and think they should do something with it to benefit from it. And so did many companies a couple of years back with the concept of Big Data and how much more (IT related) trendy things have we seen passing by over the years. I think the majority of these companies talked about this based on FoMO, the fear of missing out. FOMO is a pervasive apprehension that others might be having rewarding experiences from which one is absent. This social anxiety is characterized by “a desire to stay continually connected with what others are doing”. It comes from unhappiness or the feeling that things can be done better. Also, companies lead to a compulsive concern that one might miss an opportunity for social interaction, a novel experience, profitable investment or other satisfying events. In other words, FOMO perpetuates the fear of having made the wrong decision on how to spend time, as “you can imagine how things could be different”. Do we miss the train? Maybe more on FOMO next time….

Anyway, I do believe that data is gold and the next best fixed asset you can have and so does digital transformation. The proof that companies can benefit from digital transformation is certain as I witnessed Jeffrey Immelt explaining how the industrial giant GE is transforming to a digital business during 2016 Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference (now renamed to Inspire) in Toronto. Sure, that story inspired the audience.

That digital transformation not only helps this industrial giant proves, that a company comparatively smaller size in size to GE called Priva are also benefiting from their journey to digital transformation

Digital transformation, like many attractive prizes, comes with its own unique and significant challenges. These issues, which amongst others revolve around IT infrastructure and skills, are putting the brakes on the digital transformation train. Start small and realistic and you will be to start that journey and be able to transform your business. With Dynamics 365 enhanced with our solutions you can grow, evolve, and transform every part of your business to better meet the changing market and needs of your customers. Spring is in the air. “It is up to you, you have to believe in it”.

Like in personal life, the unknown is not always a sophistry. In most courts the suspect is not guilty until being guilty is proven. Similar is the evidence based healthcare industry a medicine or  therapy is only acknowledged when there is scientific proof. Unfortunately this leads to promising medicine programs being stopped where some guinea pigs benefited from it.

As mentioned PI has a special day, 3-14 or March 14. For those of you interested I think more interesting numbers deserve their own special day like:

• e or 71828182845904523536028747135266249775724709369995 (constant of John Napier, a mathematical constant that is the base of the natural logarithm: the unique number whose natural logarithm is equal to one. It is the limit of (1 + 1/n)ⁿas n approaches infinity, it can also be calculated as the sum of the infinite series: https://brilliant.org/wiki/the-discovery-of-the-number-e/
• 1.62 (the golden ratio, two quantities are in the golden ratio if their ratio is the same as the ratio of their sum to the larger of the two quantities)
• γ or 57721566490153286060651209008240243104215933593992… (the Euler constant (gamma) is defined as the limit of the expression (1 + 1/2 + 1/3 + 1/4 + … + 1/ n ) – ln ( n ), as n approaches infinity)
• 1.4142135623730950488016887242096980785696718753769480731766797379 … (Pythagoras’ constant, the square root of two, the first irrational number ever discovered)
• 5.29 x10^-11(Bohr Model, A finite or infinite square matrix with rational entries. If the matrix is infinite, all but a finite number of entries in each row must be 0. The sum or product of two Bohr matrices is another Bohr matrix)
• g or 9.81 m/s² (force of gravity which means, if you let a body fall freely (on earth), then this is the rate at which it will gain in speed towards the ground. It’s called the acceleration due to gravity.)
• 6.022140857 × 10²³ (Avogadro’s number, number of units in one mole of any substance (defined as its molecular weight in grams),
• c  – 299,792458 (speed of light in vacuum)

Spring is in the air and the numbers count. Enjoy it as much as you can.

Kind regards,

On behalf of Dynamics Software

Eric Veldkamp