A Possible solution to the DRS Imbroglio

by Girish Menon

The DRS debate, definitely on the netosphere and to some extent on TV and print media, appears to be a conversation of the deaf. These warriors appear to have wrapped themselves in national colours with scorn and ridicule being the weapons used. Does this win over their opponents? I doubt it, because both groups are dominated by users of terms like 'Luddites' and '100 % foolproof' which instead of persuading the dissenter actually antagonises them. In this piece I will attempt to try to mediate this debate and attempt a possible solution to the imbroglio.

It is a principle of rhetoric that the side demanding a change from the status quo must provide the burden of proof. To that extent I will agree that the pro DRS lobby have already proven that DRS does reduce the number of umpiring errors in a cricket match. I'm sure that BCCI will admit this point. However the ICC's claim that DRS improves decisions by 93 % is in the realm of statistics and it is possible to find methodological grey areas that will challenge this number. So for purposes of this argument I'm willing to discount ICC's claim and willing to start on the premise that DRS does reduce errors by at least 70 %. The debate should actually be more concerned with the next question i.e. 'at what price does one obtain this 70% increase in decision accuracy and is it worthwhile?' This question is ignored by net warriors and media pundits alike and I wonder why?

Before I proceed further I wish to remind readers of the MMR scare scandal, not many years ago, that prompted a mass scare in the UK about a triple jab vaccine and its links with autism. Some may recall Andrew Wakefield, an expert, on TV exhorting viewers to avoid the vaccine. The saga ended with Wakefield being discredited and found to have multiple undeclared conflicts of interest in propagating the scare.

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To avoid a similar hijacking of the DRS debate I suggest that all protagonists declare their interests in the matter. I for one have no truck with any cricketing body or media organisation or a technology provider or a provider of a competing technology. Also, I'd like a reduction in umpiring errors at a price that will sustain and grow cricket all over the world.

Similarly it is incumbent on the likes of Michael Vaughan to declare their links with the purveyors of such technologies so that the cricket loving public know that their views are without any profit or personal motive.

While the reliability and validity of DRS technologies has been well debated, the monopoly profits that derive to these suppliers has been largely ignored. I suspect this is the real issue where the BCCI is at loggerheads with the others. As an outsider, I think national cricket boards have their own technology suppliers which they wish to back. They may even have an investment in them which may expose their reluctance to adopt alternative and cheaper solutions to a problem. Jagmohan Dalmiya's argument against the esoteric Duckworth-Lewis method is a case in point.

It is a truism that in the market for technologies, unfortunately, the best technology does not always win.  Economics students will be aware that Dvorak keyboards have never made much headway against their QWERTY rivals and  Betamax became a cropper to VHS. So just like the well ensconced Duckworth Lewis method, Hot Spot  and Hawk Eye hope to become monopoly providers of technology services to the ICC. This will enable them protection from cheaper alternative service providers and will guarantee their promoters life long rents.

There is another dimension to this issue viz. 'Cost'. In 1976 the FIH (International Federation for Hockey) replaced natural turf with astroturf to improve the game. Today, while the game looks good on TV and is fast etc it provides no competition to cricket in countries playing both sports. One possible cause is the decline of the sport in India and Pakistan, the two nations who did not have the financial resources to create adequate 'astroturf based' infrastructure among the lovers of the sport. Along similar lines, the prohibitively expensive DRS technology may bankrupt the smaller cricket boards of the world. I'm sure no warrior on either side of this debate wants a reduction in the numerical diversity of cricket lovers.

I suppose as a way out of this imbroglio would be for the ICC to take ownership of the current technologies and make the technology 'open source'. Allow competitive bidding for DRS services instead of paying monopoly rents to the patent owning suppliers. I'm sure this will reduce the costs for DRS and even the BCCI will be keen to support such a venture.  

Dodgy Academic Papers - the link between Austerity and MMR

 

Both sagas have their roots in dodgy academic papers, the agenda-pushing press and politicians – and willing believers

• 
• • Aditya Chakrabortty
  • The Guardian, Monday 29 April 2013 19.11 BST

A measles outbreak in Swansea has affected 900 people. Photograph: Alamy

Dodgy research pushed by publicity-happy academics. False claims burnished into golden truths by irresponsible newspapers, apparently trying their hardest to manufacture a panic. Finally, the repercussions: bad decisions and, years later, huge worries about the harm posed to the public.

I'm describing the MMR scandal, the story of how one paper published in a top medical journal prompted a mass scare about a possible link between the triple jab and autism, and led to around one million children being deprived of full vaccinations against measles, mumps and rubella. It's been in the news again this week, following a measles outbreak in Swansea affecting 900 people, and worries that London may be next.

Yet listening to the radio discussions, a feeling nagged at me. Didn't this saga, with its origins going back more than a decade, sound similar to a more recent episode in a different field – the economics of austerity? Over the past fortnight, an academic paper regularly used by George Osborne to justify his cuts, public-sector redundancies and tax hikes has also been exposed as riddled with errors and dubious statistics.

At first, I'll admit, the comparison felt like too much of a stretch. On the one hand, there was Andrew Wakefield, the MMR heretic whose image would regularly flicker up on the 10 O'Clock News; on the other, there was Carmen Reinhart and Ken Rogoff, two Harvard economists of great renown – but hardly box-office. Wakefield was struck off for malpractice; Reinhart and Rogoff are guilty of no such breaches and their book on banking crises, This Time Is Different, will be considered a classic. MMR was a scare foisted on New Labour (remember those stories about whether baby Leo Blair had been injected?), which it had to defuse; this coalition has pushed austerity. The MMR debate boiled down to a question raised by every parent: should I vaccinate my child? The arguments about austerity can't be rendered in personal terms.

So much for the obvious caveats (there's one more, which I'll come to later). Yet whenever I raised the comparison with colleagues or others who had watched the cuts debate, nearly all saw the parallels. At the root of both sagas lies research, heavily contested then and now discredited, but given excessive credibility by outsiders in politics or the press – and used to push distinct agendas. That public-health scare from the turn of the noughties, and this public-finance panic from the start of this decade share common themes. Combined, we could call these lessons: how to flog a terrible idea.

Lesson 1: Have a suspicious public

For a terrible idea to take flight, the public must be in a receptive mood. The MMR scare was preceded by the mad-cow scandal, in which the government had kept insisting that British beef was safe. The arguments over austerity followed on the great bust of 2007-8 – and hadn't then-prime minister Gordon Brown promised to abolish boom and bust? In both cases, the press had been gulled by the official expertise. Do you remember those spreads in the Daily Mail about the coming chaos at RBS? No, I don't either.

Lesson 2: Bad ideas sound like common sense

The press had trusted establishment scientists and the economic technocrats; by the time MMR and the banking bust came along there was a market for policies that sounded easy to understand. So David Cameron really could get away likening the British economy to a household that had maxed out its credit card. It was nonsense, of course, but it was easy to understand nonsense. Unlike Bloomsbury-style Keynesianism, which was much more sensible amid a slump but was treated as far-out science to do with money supplies and fiscal multipliers.

Lesson 3: Bad ideas need strong supporters

My memories of the MMR story were to do with Wakefield. But when academics Tammy Speers and Justin Lewis looked at the news stories, they found that Wakefield got fewer mentions than baby Leo. The scare about MMR was never centred around a paper in the Lancet; rather, the research was recruited into the service of a general scare. That goes much more so for austerity, where the government here and the European troika used available research to push the cause of cuts and lay-offs. The Reinhart-Rogoff paper was published two years after Osborne had adopted austerity as his policy; academia provided justification, but they didn't change minds. And austerity has been fully cloaked in the language of morality: of debt being a bad thing, of southern Europeans being feckless.

The final caveat is: pure science lays much more emphasis on reproducing tests to see if the results bear up; macroeconomists can't run big experiments on entire countries to see which policies work, meaning that fights in the dismal science are necessarily more ideological (however disguised) than methodological. Yet so many economists hanker after hard science status there's even a term for it: "physics envy". Indeed, that key finding from Reinhart-Rogoff – that countries with debt of more than 90% of their GDP experience sharply slower growth – sounds like something you'd hear at the back of a school lab. But it isn't a rule at all: high debt can mean slow growth, but obviously so too can slow growth produce high debt. Still, whether MMR or austerity, the bottom line in both is that plausible science can make bad decisions seem sensible. When the science no longer seems implausible, the game is up. Wakefield was rumbled; slowly but surely the same is happening to the austerity-mongers.