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The world really is run by geeks >> Invisible profession of Poindexters meets in Montreal to plan our lives by PHILIP PREVILLE
Imagine for a moment that you are a hyper-intelligent brainiac with a PhD in Operations Research,
Kent Kostuk spends his gathering all the scores from every match played at the Canadian curling championships over the last 12 years and plugging them into a database. Then he runs the database through a computerized mathematical model known as a "Markov process." He even isolates the scores for the first end of each match (like an inning in baseball) and plots them on a bell curve to create a normative distribution. The end result? "As you can see," Kostuk tells his seminar audience, "the Markov process shows that winning the opening coin toss is worth about one point in any curling match." Kostuk's research, and its inane conclusion, was conspicuous only for its uselessness. His was one of 300 presentations given at the annual conference of the Institute for Operations Research and Management Sciences (INFORMS), held in Montreal earlier this week and attended by 2,000 of the pointiest heads in North America. And while few people care about Kostuk's curling coin-tosses, most of his colleagues' research has such an impact on almost every aspect of ordinary people's lives, it was eerie. Operations researchers are a kind of invisible army, deployed by governments and corporations to reshape the world we live in. They are society's number-crunching élite: give them a topic, any topic, and they will chew up the data and spit out a new and improved version: How to make factory assembly lines work faster, produce even more cans of tomatoes and bring prices down. How to re-organize the lineup at the bank so the wait is shorter, or so people think it's shorter. Where to build subsidized housing projects in order to avoid creating racial ghettos. How to make hospitals cheaper through "system efficiencies" like outpatient surgery. How to increase the probability of winning a military confrontation, depending on how many troops you have and what technology you're using. There was even a presentation on how to calculate the ideal length of the warranty on, say, a toaster, taking into account how quickly they break down, how much more money people are willing to pay for six more worry-free months, and how many toaster owners will actually bother to complain anyway. Holy crap, nerds really do run the world. "We're not your average geeks," says conference-goer John Blake, a 33-year-old professor at Dalhousie Technical Institute in Halifax. "At first look it has an esoteric, angels-dancing-on-the-head-of-a-pin quality. But the true stars in the profession do work that has a tremendous impact." Blake is one to talk. While at the conference, he presented his research on how much doctors get paid and how many patients they are willing to treat in a day, compared to who uses hospitals most and why. One of the problems he's trying to solve is this: he believes the demand for health care will always exceed the supply. In other words, there will never be enough doctors, nurses and hospitals to take care of everyone. He's trying to figure out how to get the greatest number of people treated with the least amount of services, or at least with the services currently offered. Like most others in his profession, he approaches his topic with complete disregard for what his topic is really about; he transforms it into pure numbers. "I always say a widget is a widget. A production process is a production process. People who work in health care think their field is unique, but it's not. Putting someone in a hospital is like putting a car together." Except that cars don't cry or scream in pain. "They don't have grieving families either, it's true. But that's not what I look at. When I started in health care, people didn't like what I was trying to do, they said to me, 'When someone enters a hospital, anything can happen.' Not really. You can flow-chart 90 per cent of what goes on in a hospital." Blake concedes that he does have to take human beings into account in his work. But he has that figured out, too. He uses "multivariate analyses" that can take into account dozens of different issues all at once. Based on studies in psychology, he has created his own hierarchy of what motivates people: earning money, professional fulfilment, contributing to society. In that order. Even for doctors. "There are different ways of weighting and emphasizing different factors depending on the situation," he explains. This is enough to freak out anybody who's ever had to visit a hospital, which is pretty much everybody. Do we want people like this deciding how our hospitals should be run? "Hell, no," Blake says reassuringly. "You don't want to let me run the system. I'm just the numbers guy."
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extremely talented in manipulating raw numbers. You are also the child of a farmer and you live in Saskatchewan. How would you spend your spare time?