The Screwball Division
solves a mystery
The Screwball Division solves a mysteryWE THE CURIOUS vol.2 no.3
When Nazi propaganda began boasting of a devastating "super weapon" in thesummer of 1943, the Allies didn't know if the threat was real or a scare tactic.Aerial photographs showed a concrete launching pad in northern France, but thatcould have been a decoy target. Allied spies were able to confirm that there werenew weapon factories, but it wasn't clear what was going on inside those factories.Despite this lack of hard evidence, a group at U.S. intelligence came to thefollowing conclusions.It was, they reported, "beyond reasonable doubt" that the weapon existed; that itwas an entirely new class of weapon; that it would shock civilians; and that it couldnot easily be countered. It was also "highly probable" that, by May of 1943, theGermans were already past the experimental stage of development, but thatsomething had happened in August that delayed deployment. Finally, the groupestimated that the weapon would be ready between the middle of January and themiddle of April, allowing for a month's margin of error.The mysterious "super weapon" was, in fact, the V-1 rocket, and virtually everyone of the group's conclusions were true. They did it by listening to the radio. Theywere the Foreign Broadcast Monitoring Service, and they solved the mystery of the"super weapon" by translating and analyzing the Nazi propaganda that wasbroadcasted over the radio.In the spring of 1998, when Enron was about to become the darling of Wall Streetand its stock price about to soar, a team decided to analyze the company. Theirconclusions could be summed up in one word: "sell." Even at that low price, they
thought Enron's stock was overvalued. Not only that, they saw clear signs that"Enron may be manipulating its earnings."Within three years, Enron was bankrupt; its auditor, Arthur Anderson, dissolved;its chairman and CEO in jail. The six team members were students at CornellUniversity's business school. "It was about a six-week project, half a semester,"remembers Jay Krueger, one of the group. "It was a ratio analysis, which is prettystandard business-school fare. You know, take fifty different financial ratios, thenlay that on top of every piece of information you could find out about thecompany, the businesses, how their performance compared to other competitors."Ratio analysis by business students? Propaganda analysis by linguists? It's hard tobelieve that such basic methods could crack such hard problems. Sherlock Holmes,the iconic fictional mystery-solver, always said that it was a mistake for a detectiveto reveal his methods. He knew that people are far more impressed by thedetective's apparent ability to pluck the solution to a mystery seemingly fromnothing. "Excellent!" his sidekick, Watson, would exclaim. "Elementary," Holmeswould reply. "It is one of those instances where the reasoner can produce an effectwhich seems remarkable to his neighbour, because the latter has missed the onelittle point which is the basis of the deduction." Elementary analysis, Holmes tellsWatson, is only impressive in detective stories because of how the author presentsit. The effect depends "upon your retaining in your own hands some factors in theproblem which are never imparted to the reader." In other words, mysteries can beso entertaining because we can hardly believe it: a problem completely baffles us;we can't imagine how anyone could find a solution; suddenly, a brilliant solution isoffered and we're amazed.But, in the real world, we generally don't have the luxury of watching mysteries
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The Screwball Division solves a mystery | WE THE CURIOUS vol.2 no.3
A mystery is an attempt to define ambiguities -- and, when you are defining ambiguities, it's hard to get the respect you deserve.
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