iLog – Amit Srivastava

For quite some time I had been longing to write on this, but was looking for an appropriate example from personal experience. I got a good one a while ago.

For a backdrop; every phenomenon or activity happening in this universe has got some effect(s) on the surroundings for some time. Some effects are short-lived, while others may last indefinitely. Some are confined to a small region, while others may extend infinitely. An example of a long-lived far reaching effect would be what happened and has been happening after the Big Bang. If the Big Bang theory is correct, it may very well be the cause of everything which has happened to date. Even me writing this post is an effect of the same, though it can’t be co-related directly. Without explaining any further I propose the following theory:

“The universe is interwoven in a fabric of causes and effects where a particular event could be a cause or an effect depending on our frame of reference and the set of events considered within that (the frame of ref.).”

Cut it to the experience I wanted to share. I was working on a Blackberry project a while ago. The application was going on pretty well until, just a couple of days short of a critical release, we discovered that it doesn’t work on the Blackberry Pearl! The reason for this conclusion was the fact that the application failed on 3 different Pearls handsets. Just to mention I couldn’t test it out myself on  Pearl as I didn’t have it handy during that period. With the release pressure, I spent no stone unturned to figure out if Pearl didn’t support anything specific we were using in the application. Of course I was not to find any concrete answer to this as I had completely misdiagnosed the problem.

So what was it which was making the application fail on Pearls? Well we took a step back and tried to think as to what all could cause this. Suddenly it struck that could it be the OS version in those devices? We quickly ran a check, only to figure out that coincidently all the Pearl devices on which the application was tried  had an earlier version of the OS which we never intended to support. Upgrading the OSes did the trick.

This is just an example of misdiagnosing an effect as a cause. In this case the OS was the cause of the application not running on it. Just that it manifested through the Pearl. I took a big lesson out of this. A problem may manifest in various ways all of which are effects and not the cause. It is important to take a step back, and think through the artifacts available to be able to figure out the cause. Many a times, I’ve ended up spending more time on eliminating the effects as opposed to getting down to the root cause and eliminate it. No matter how hard you try to suppress the effects, things will keep troubling unless the cause is eliminated.

Easier said than done! Sometimes it is virtually impossible to discriminate between the effects and the cause(s). What if there are multiple causes?

Consider this:

“A study suggests that 78% of men who have lung cancer have an ash-tray at home.”

Does that mean ash-tray causes lung cancer? Well, obviously not. In this case we can easily make out that it is smoking which could be the cause (of both cancer as well as the ash-tray being at home). However it is not so simple to deduce this always.

Is there a trick to get down to the cause?  Well, I don’t have a specific answer to this. It is embedded in human nature to get rid of the trouble as soon as possible, which prevents us from the appropriate diagnosis. Most of the time we try to suppress the effects.

Before I sign-off on this one, just wanted to emphasize that the dilemma exists in every aspect of our lives, whether personal or professional. While some uncertainty would still be there, it’s worth taking a step back to review when we are next stuck at such a situation and try to indentify the cause rather than supressing the effects.