Tuesday, May 5, 2015

How good are you at choosing examples for a concept?

Consider yourself lucky if you have never asked yourself the question did I pick a good example to illustrate my point?

In this context, lucky can mean many things, from fortune consistently smiling on you to being in a position of privilege in which hired writers or coaches do all the work for you, from being a natural talent to the sheer dumb luck of never being asked for your opinion in the first place.

The latter is very improbable because people start asking for examples when you are a small child. So, if you have never questioned the choice of an example in your life, "lucky" would be more of a euphemism.

Having established that examples enter human life early and are ubiquitous, let's talk about their importance. We can all agree they have some importance and that their importance depends on the topic of discourse and on the stakes involved, right?

An example for low importance, low stakes?

When your first grade teacher asks for an example of an even number, you can pick any number, starting with the number 2, and your choice is unlimited. Even if you were busy studying the lawn outside of the classroom instead of paying attention to the teacher and make wild guess, you can still come up with a perfect answer 50% of the time.

One for higher importance, higher stakes?

Say you are a high ranking ambitious politician just one step away from the presidency of the most powerful country in the world, and opponents accuse you of taking money and gifts from influential donors, staying just short of calling you corrupt. You give a speech (with or without help from a pro) and explain to the nation how insensitive, how cruel it would be to make your small child give up a dog that was an impromptu gift to you and captured the heart of the little girl. There is a good chance that the choice of the dog as an example for your scrupulous yet human handling of gifts will be a success and become the name under which the long speech is known half a century later, the Checkers Speech.

There are even more dramatic and tremendously important examples, some utterly fake, that made countries go to war and brought death and destruction to millions.

No wonder that entering "how to choose a good example" into a web search engine gives over 80 million hits, with the first four or five pages solely spitting out examples of good passwords, brand names, and documentation keywords.

The grumpy TheEditor of the K-Landnews has its** typical strong opinion. Examples are dangerous, it says, and people may tend to not give them their full due. Yet, examples make or break policies and lives. I won't discuss the merits of a concept without first examining the examples, and if they are fishy or disingenuous, you can take your lofty concept and stick it...

But a concept can be valid, with the example just being a bad choice.

Maybe when you talk about a line of code showing usage of a class, or the size of a screw for an Ikea table, never when you deal with policies and issues that affect large groups of people.

Ikea affects large groups...

Come one, you know what I mean!

The media and citizens often demand examples when changes to existing laws or policies are discussed, and you will notice that whoever is in government loves big "no examples needed" propositions. If you want to be a cynic make everything economic about "prosperity" and everything restrictive about "national security" and you are more than halfway there.

Problems with examples can be funny or frustrating, as the German government found in recent weeks when it announced introduction of a law to retain phone communications metadata (plus mobile website and location data).

The draft says the data are to be used only for resolving "very serious crimes". You know, said proponents, terrorism and organized crime. Then one high ranking conservative added copyright infringement, which kicked off a storm and - just an assumption - an email blast within government telling people to stick to terrorists and pedophiles.

Similarly, the European Union felt the need to demonstrate that the transatlantic trade agreement TIPP would benefit not only international corporations but be great for small companies, too. They published a 10 myths about TIPP flyer, complete with small company benefits. We learned that a small Danish cake maker would see a 60% tariff dropped, that Spanish canned peppers would again be able to compete with peppers from Central and South America, and that the French could sell oysters and the Germans dinner plates.
While factual and correct, the flyer "failed" because of the examples are minute within the context of a trillion dollar trade agreement.

Another example of a thumbs down by the K-Landnews basement newsroom was an article in online magazine Aeon on why people believe conspiracy theories, sadly, not because the concepts discussed there were invalid but because the examples were sloppy.

We end with a question: does this post say something useful about the power of examples?

Did we pick good examples?

** TheEditor insists on gender neutral forms of address.

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