SilasBarta comments on The usefulness of correlations - Less Wrong

13 Post author: RichardKennaway 04 August 2009 07:00PM

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Comment author: pjeby 11 August 2009 03:03:55PM -1 points [-]

I would guess Marken is respected; I have not read the paper, only his brief mention of the results in a talk he gave summarizing his 25 years of PCT-related research. I have no idea whether you would consider it "strong evidence". However, here is a portion of that synopsis:

One surprising result of this modeling effort was the discovery that environmental disturbances, such as look alike/sound alike drug names are expected to have very little effect on prescribing error rate when the error rate is already low. This result is surprising because it contradicts a basic tenet of the field of human factors engineering – a field in which I have also worked. Human factors engineering is based on the premise that the main cause of human error is environmental disturbance in the form of poor system design (such as a poorly designed medication naming system, which gives similar names to very different medications). A control model shows that such environmental disturbances cannot be a major contributor to error when error rates are low because, the fact that error rates are low means that the control process is already effectively compensating for these disturbances.

Comment author: SilasBarta 11 August 2009 05:22:54PM 0 points [-]

A control model shows that such environmental disturbances cannot be a major contributor to error when error rates are low because, the fact that error rates are low means that the control process is already effectively compensating for these disturbances.

Sorry, but that doesn't sound like an interesting result that vindicates PCT. You can even rephrase the general insight without controls terminology!

Like this: "given a system that is demonstrably robust against failure mode X, it's unlikely to fail in mode X".

Positing a "control system" is just unnecessary length and unnecessary delimitation of the general rule. PCT doesn't get you this insight any faster. And while human factors engineers would discourage similarly named, very different drugs, even they would admit it might not be worth fixing if the system has already operated without ever swapping out the drugs.