The national recalibration caused by this weekend's fall-back to standard time is a reminder of the cliché recently repeated by a friend, that:
“Even a broken clock is right twice a day ….”
Or so it is supposed, for the proposition that some information is better than none at all.
I will spare my friend's identity, since this is not personal. But as studied by my students in Risk Management, it is vitally important to scrutinize both what you know and what you don’t – and not be misled into missing the difference by the invocation of familiar but unexamined verities.
I surveyed my students – who with their PC’s and iPads and smartphones are carrying around an average of 2.5 devices providing them with the hour – of which only a fraction are readable by way of little hands pointing at a circular array of twelve numbers on a dial.
It’s the same in today’s public life: the handsome golden landmark clock in Grand Central Station is an anachronism, superseded by the blinking digital screens of the airport flight announcements, the pulsing scoreboard lights of the sports arenas and the obnoxious talking panels of the typical office elevator.
Even in the classroom for my MBA course, a sleek modern rectangular digital time screen hangs above the door.
Here’s the point: when broken, the ubiquitous digital clocks simply go blank. There is no sense in which, when non-functioning, a dark and empty display can ever be “right.”
So the claim is incomprehensible to anyone raised in a world of digital time-pieces. Baby-boomers are likely the last at risk of being led astray, having grown up with (and still using) analog time-keeping machinery.
At no time in the diurnal cycle is any meaningful time guidance offered by a crashed computer or an uncharged cell phone – or, for that matter, a dead microwave or DVD player or any of the myriad of appliances now equipped with digital clocks on which generations younger than the fogies rely.
The “right twice a day” assertion also suffers a more subtle flaw: How do you know? The question of “right-ness” is only testable by reference to an outside source. Looking at the hands of a broken clocked stopped at the classic “ten-to-two,” you may suspect being late for lunch. But you can’t know without a working alternative. Whatever its format, no informational value is added by viewing the face of a dysfunctional clock.
The inquiry really needs to go down another layer, though, to the reason for calling on the cliché in the first place.
Examples abound where a little information is actually worse than none, especially where users are lulled into a false sense of security and over-confidence.
Unmarked and narrow country roads suffer a lower rate of fatal vehicle accidents, for example, than high-speed expressways, even if the latter are fitted with lane markers and rumble strips and crash barriers, precisely because the rural lanes demand high degrees of focus and attention, prudence and speed discretion.
Equally, day traders seduced by computer-generated graphs and charts of stock price activities are lured into the misapprehension that the flood of data is a reliable measure for predictability, only to crash and fail at the rate of amateur punters in a casino.
And on a global scale since 2007, the road to financial ruin has been littered with the reputational corpses of those who mistakenly believed that the quants’ “value-at-risk” models and their off-spring sufficed to support their portfolios of exotic financial products – among them, Jimmy Cayne of Bear Stearns, Chuck Prince of Citi, Dick Fuld of Lehman Brothers and most lately, Jon Corzine at MF Global.
Which is not to say that there is nothing at all to learn from a clear-eyed acknowledgement of the limits on the knowable. But more likely than an unexamined repetition of a maxim that is both conventional and therefore probably wrong, let the inquiry seek wisdom from the more humble perspective of the counsels of caution.
PS: An invitation: send me your suggestions for other clichés worthy of attention and deflation. Thanks.
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