Opinion

## 2017 : What Scientific Term Or Concept Ought To Be More Widely Known?

— December 28, 2016

As seen in: Stern in the News

![](/sites/default/files/styles/246w/public/assets/images/con_039609.jpg?itok=CCpkQx8H)

By Adam Alter

> The solution is to pay attention not just to the pattern of data, but also to how much data you have.

In 1832, a Prussian military analyst named Carl von Clausewitz explained that “three quarters of the factors on which action in war is based are wrapped in a fog of . . . uncertainty.” The best military commanders seemed to see through this “fog of war,” predicting how their opponents would behave on the basis of limited information. Sometimes, though, even the wisest generals made mistakes, divining a signal through the fog when no such signal existed. Often, their mistake was endorsing the law of small numbers—too readily concluding that the patterns they saw in a small sample of information would also hold for a much larger sample.

Both the Allies and Axis powers fell prey to the law of small numbers during World War II. In June 1944, Germany flew several raids on London. War experts plotted the position of each bomb as it fell, and noticed one cluster near Regent’s Park, and another along the banks of the Thames. This clustering concerned them, because it implied that the German military had designed a new bomb that was more accurate than any existing bomb. In fact, the Luftwaffe was dropping bombs randomly, aiming generally at the heart of London but not at any particular location over others. What the experts had seen were clusters that occur naturally through random processes—misleading noise masquerading as a useful signal.

Read the full article as published in [Edge.org](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27024).

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*Adam Alter is an Associate Professor of Marketing with affiliated appointment in the Psychology Department.*

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