Lost and (not) Found

Speaker A: 00:00:00

Hello and welcome to the Cognitive Engineering Podcast produced by me, Fraser McGruer for Aleph Insights. In this series of podcasts we take a look at interesting topics and discuss what we think they tell us about analysis and decision making. I'm here with Peter Coghill and Nick Hare of Aleph Insights and this week we're discussing Peter's lost passport.

Speaker B: 00:00:24

Peter, so you're not going anywhere, you've lost your passport. No, actually it's not lost and it never was lost. But it was temporarily misplaced. End of podcast. Temporarily misplaced. So it was last week we took my five-week-old daughter to get registered. Where, in France? Yeah, well yeah, we should have done really. She now enjoys all of the drawbacks and problems of being a British citizen along with the rest of us. We're talking about proof of identity here, aren't we? Yes, so I needed some sort of, well the website, so it's another issue, not for this podcast, but the website said bring some photographic ID. Turns out you don't actually legally need it, so don't bother if you can't find it. But yeah, so it said bring a passport or driving license. So I have my driving license, so it wasn't a problem, but I couldn't find my passport anywhere and you know when you can't find something important like that, you start worrying about it and start trying to search for it and even if you don't really need it. But turns out, so in my office, home office, I've got a shelf and on that shelf are sort of a general class of small, important, but easily lost things. Like your new baby. Well, she's not so small actually, she's a real chunk, but that's where the passport lives and it lives alongside things like USB sticks and the little thing you use to get the SIM card out of your phone. All the little things that would just fall between cracks and disappear, so stuff like that lives up there. Anyway, I went to get my passport about 10 minutes before we left the house. It wasn't there, it was invisible. But anyway, so we decided to go anyway and I just used my driving license, we didn't need it anyway. But when I got back, I thought I'll just check one more time, having checked about four or five times before we went out the house. It was only bloody there, wasn't it? So it was temporarily invisible, but actually what had happened, it was tucked under something that I just didn't think to move. Had I just lifted this box, I would have seen it. So it got me thinking, why is looking for stuff so hard? Even when I knew where it was, I couldn't find it. The thing that really bugs me is the

Speaker C: 00:02:48

mysterious pocket vortex, where you're looking for a pen, which you know is in your pocket. And so you rummage around in your pocket feeling for a pen and there's coins and there's keys and there's a card and there's no bloody pen at all. And you're like, I'm sure there's a pen in here, is there a hole in my pocket? So you rummage around some more and it's not there. And then you take things out one by one and then the bloody pen appears. Where's it been? It drives me mad.

Speaker A: 00:03:14

It's in that vortex, isn't it?

Speaker C: 00:03:15

In the vortex.

Speaker A: 00:03:16

Yeah. Unfortunately, like so many of the podcasts we do, they seem to sort of reveal certain negative characteristics about myself. And certainly this is one of them, because I am dreadful at losing stuff.

Speaker C: 00:03:28

I bet you're great at losing stuff.

Speaker A: 00:03:30

Oh yeah, exactly that. I'm great at losing stuff, terrible at finding stuff. And even worse, kind of like what both of you are saying, looking for stuff that I cannot find that is actually right in front of me. Just ask my wife, because she will happily go on about this for hours.

Speaker B: 00:03:45

Okay, so maybe we need a podcast on Fraser's failings and we'll get Karina in as the expert.

Speaker A: 00:03:52

Yeah, it could be quite a long podcast, that one. So yeah, where do we go? What's the question we want to answer? Why is it so difficult?

Speaker C: 00:03:59

Well, first of all, let's talk about losing stuff and how much of a problem that is. Okay. Right. Now there is very little in the way of high quality data out there, snippets from which we are forced to make inferences. Okay. There's a lot of crappy surveys about how much people lose stuff, you know, put in things like the Daily Express. Losing things costs us three and a half days of productivity a year kind of stuff. But not very much data. I mean, just well, on the crappy surveys time, allegedly, so one of them says that we spent 10 minutes looking for misplaced items a day and that the average person surveyed loses nine items daily. There's just- Who are these people? Yeah. And then there's another- Who lose nine items daily? Even for me, that's a lot. Another thing called, right, mosey.com, I don't know what that is, published an estimate that people lose 1.24 items per year. Well, so this is the problem with this kind of data is I've got no idea. There's a bit of a discrepancy there, right? Unless you lose- Was that nine a day or one a year? Yeah. If you lost 9p, would you call that nine separate losses of 1p? You know, there's an issue there. But there's something of a discrepancy. But while we're on actual, so trying to use real data and making inferences from it. So the New York Metropolitan Transit Agency has apparently 19,000 new items are turned in each year, right? Now, New York has a population of 8 million. So that suggests that each person has about a 0.2% chance of losing an item on the metro each year. Now, if you sort of think, well, perhaps a New Yorker spends an hour on the metro a day, and probably, you know, they're more likely to lose stuff while they're out and about. You're probably looking at, you know, something like 2%, 3%, 4% chance of losing something a year. It feels about right. So passport applications, this is now, again, it's back of the envelope stuff, but about 7 million passport applications per year. Now, I can't work, they don't tell you how many of those are applications for renewal and so on. But apparently, about 40 million people have a passport, which means that on average each year, about 4 million will be renewing because they come to the end of their passport. So we'll assume that 4 million of those applications. What about new ones? New people, birth rate is about a million. So we're talking about a million people who need one for the first time. So I think about 3 million people a year are asking for a passport to be replaced, which comes to a 7% annual chance that someone will lose their passport. Now, that sounds very high to me. Yeah, it feels a bit high. Yeah. But on the other hand, of course, passports are more likely to get lost. I think, you know, because you take them with you to places where you're moving around a lot. But also moving hotel rooms and repacking luggage and all of those things. So it's plausible that passports actually are, passports put themselves in high loss environments. They do. But also, in addition, they do the same

Speaker A: 00:07:14

by doing exactly what happens with PETA is passports get put in special places where it

Speaker C: 00:07:18

will never get lost. Right. And those special places always suck things into the void. Yeah. And then finally, I just I looked at birth certificates. Now, obviously, they get far fewer airings. But they do always end up, they live in the special place. And again, it's all about inferences. But about 1.2 million people a year order new copies of birth certificates. Now, if the birth rates are about 0.7 million a year, which means that about half a million people per year are ordering new copies. So we're looking at, you know, under 1% of birth certificates go missing a year. I mean, I've done, I've taken a lot of liberties there in the inference process. But what I'm saying is, these numbers are not one in a thousand, nor are they one in three. You know, they're all about the same. What we're saying is that for a given object, you have around a 3%, 3, 4, 5% chance a year. So say between one and 5% chance of a year of losing it. And I would say probably, that's, that's obviously considerably higher for things

Speaker A: 00:08:22

you take out and about. I was going to say, unless you were lucky enough to be born as an umbrella, and at least one into it two times, you're going to get lost. Exactly. I suspect that

Speaker C: 00:08:32

most umbrellas end up being lost. Yeah. Maybe umbrellas generate the vortex. I think we're getting to a theory here. Yeah.

Speaker A: 00:08:41

Yeah. Maybe it would be one that could encompass everything. What can we call that? An umbrella theory, maybe. No one's going to love my brilliant joke. Sorry, I missed it. I was thinking about something else. A theory that encompasses everything. Maybe we could call it an umbrella theory. Oh, it's good. It's good. Peter, you're going to come in with something.

Speaker B: 00:09:04

Yeah, well, so yeah, losing stuff is clearly, it's big business. I mean, there are some technological solutions, like little key rings that are Bluetooth or GPS enabled, that you can clip on your keys. And of course, you know, where's WALL-E books? And the whole point is to find something that isn't immediately obvious. So there's a thing, we want to do it. And Nick is holding one up right now. Wow. Just to give you an idea of how prevalent they are. Ironically, I was able to find the Where WALL-E book really quickly. Yeah, yeah, yeah. What was frustrating, I think Nick alluded to, is trying to research this, you know, searching for things like missing things or looking for things. You very, very quickly bump into the massive paranormal guff that's on the internet. But also a load of health stuff. Maybe this is just because of my advancing years, but sort of health related things like saying, oh, do you have ADHD? Because you can't look for things properly. Or have you got dementia? Because you keep losing things. It's really impossible to research. And then there's losing control of your bladder, which is a given. Well, that's just a given. It happens, you know. But I think the, I mean, for me, losing stuff is like the quintessential example of a constant frustration I have with the physical world. You know, it's a massive disadvantage in the physical world that you can't put your passport in more than one place. Right. So I put, I put the passport in, if I could create a sort of symbolic link to my passport, I put it in my pocket when I needed it in my pocket. But it would also be in the safe or in the filing cabinet. But also you would have

Speaker C: 00:10:49

in real, what you would want in real life is a search function. Yes. That's clearly, you know, the response to only having one thing in one place is just having a good enough search function that you can just type in passport and it'll tell you where it is.

Speaker B: 00:11:02

Well, that's what I mean, I'm thinking like that would be handled by the same thing as being able to have it in more than one place at once, because the search results are essentially a place that the passport also appears in. I've got another solution, which is that it's sort

Speaker A: 00:11:17

of tech, but sort of low tech, which is, I always tell my wife where I'm putting stuff. So I will say, you have an index, you have an index. Your wife acts as an index. Yeah. But it's almost

Speaker C: 00:11:28

a sort of blockchain based solution. She will never forget. Where the, where the thing has

Speaker A: 00:11:32

gone. You know, I can ask her where I put something, you know, where's that thing that's super important I put there. And I did it three years ago, but I will have told her, this is where I'm putting this right now. So you remember, and three years later, I'll ask and she'll go,

Speaker B: 00:11:43

well, it's there. Yeah. And it is. She's got super human abilities. Yeah. Before we,

Speaker C: 00:11:48

before we get on to the sort of practicalities and how we can fix it, which I think Peter has probably got loads of interesting ideas about that. I just want to chip in with a bit of philosophy. What do you think it means to describe something as lost? So you're wrong. Intuitively, I would say it's something that I can't find. Right. But see, now the reason that I think that's wrong is because actually we, you, you, you can find it, can't you? Well, it still exists. Right. So, so hopefully see what it might, your first thought might be, well, it's if you don't know where something is, but actually often you don't, you can't say exactly where something is. So if there's a particular book that you own, for example you wouldn't describe it as lost just because you couldn't tell me exactly which shelf it's on. Correct. Because the point is that you have a good idea. It only comes lost when I try to find it and I can't. Right. But actually, you know, the thing is that when you try, when you look in a certain place, let's say the place you think it's most likely to be, which it would be a rational search strategy to start with the place where it's most likely to be, you eliminate that, the probability distribution updates. And so now it becomes, you know, it's probable that it's in some other place. And you look in the next sort of highest, the next highest bit of the, of the probability distribution and you eliminate that, but you still got the probability distribution is still a hundred percent that it's out there somewhere. Right. But hold on, if I haven't got it, it's lost. If it's not in my hand. No, that's not true. No, because you wouldn't describe something which you know where it is right now, which, you know, your wallet or something, which is maybe in your bag. You're not going to describe that as lost. What I'm trying to get to. Well no, because I've got it. What I'm trying to get to. Yeah. No, you haven't. It's not in your hand though, is it? And you probably don't know exactly where in your bag it is. What I'm saying is, lostness is a matter of degree and not of kind. That's my, this is my argument that actually, I think we describe things. We tend to describe things as lost. If we have reached a point where we judge the cost of searching for them to outweigh the probability of finding them. So, you know, obviously you start by looking for your passport and there's a huge amount of probability in the place where the things go. And so you look there first, but if it's not there, then it's, okay, well, maybe it's in an in tray, you know, all the, one of the piles of paper that you have in your house. And there's maybe five of those. So you search those five, then it starts to get a bit worrying and you think, well, I'm going to start. And now I'm going to have to start looking on shelves, just random shelves and drawers to see if it's there. But when you, after that, you know, actually you then have a huge long tail of probability, which encompasses more or less everywhere in your house, including behind cupboards and those kinds of things. And then of course, when you eliminate that it's well somewhere else in the world. And now it's not, it's no, in a sense, like it's still in that bit of the probability distribution you haven't seen, but it's now no longer worth trying to search for it. So, so there you go. That's what I'm just thought I'd put that in there.

Speaker A: 00:14:50

So it's a spectrum with a kind of seesaw moment, right?

Speaker C: 00:14:52

I think, and I think it, and that's where it comes down to the question of, you know, the search costs. So lostness is an economic category of things where the cost of searching is higher than the, you know, the cost of replacement.

Speaker A: 00:15:05

There's something slightly comforting about that, actually. Yeah, we're all lost, but some of us are more lost than others. Exactly. Yeah. Exactly. Where do we want to go? Peter?

Speaker B: 00:15:14

Well, just to build on that, but when you, as you're looking in places and updating your probability distribution of where the thing is, always bear in mind that there's uncertainty in your observations as well, which is certainly the case when I was looking for my passport. So I thought I'd looked in the place and it wasn't there, but it actually was there.

Speaker C: 00:15:32

Right. This is the issue of, yeah, a very, and that's extremely important that at some point, that remaining bit of probability out there to the right becomes actually, actually become sort of outweighed by the probability it's somewhere you've already looked. And, and of course the, the size of that, it depends on the thoroughness of your search capability and a very, like give you a practical example of MH370, which is a project that we've done some work on looking, we did a sort of incidental bit of work supporting some analysis of sort of reviewing the analysis that had been done. And one of the issues of, you know, when you take a probabilistic approach to trying to assess, you know, so the probability distribution of where it actually might be, is that you can't actually totally eliminate, you know, the area they've searched. And they, you know, it's well understood that there's still probably some percentage, small number of percentage probability that it's somewhere that that's already been looked at. And, and so, you know, at some point you, it just becomes more likely that it's somewhere you've already looked than somewhere you're going to look. And, and, you know, so yeah, that's, I mean, there's a lot of, a lot of, you know, you could, you could, you could attack this using mathematical modelling to identify an optional, optimal search strategy for Peter's passport. But I think we all intuitively understand that. I think we've evolved to do this. And Peter, obviously, you know, the fact that he looked for a fifth time suggests that, you know, he was still, that the amount of probability left in that spot was still, was still higher than the amount anywhere else. And despite one place. Yeah. And despite the

Speaker A: 00:17:20

naysayers, he is actually highly evolved. Yeah. Doesn't look it or smell it, but he is. So look, let's, we need to kind of more or less get to a conclusion. There is a question I want to ask.

Speaker B: 00:17:35

Peter, what do you want to say? Well, just a sort of, just a sort of lament, really, that, well, a couple of things, a lament first, that it's second decade in the 21st century, and we still rely on bits of mashed up tree to prove our identity. Surely, you know, it's about time we kind of digitised all of this. A lot of it is, though. Yeah, I know. It's an astonishing amount. I mean, I, so, so it's related to proving identity. But when we registered Ada, we could have been two random people with a baby just registering a baby. Yeah. There was no proof, there's no sort of way that they checked who we were. Yeah. So the process of forging bits of identity like that could be relatively easy. Yeah. Because, and indeed, about six months ago,

Speaker A: 00:18:20

I set up a new bank account. And all that was just using my mobile phone, it was looking at my face and me saying, this is who I am, and it more pretty much accepting it. Yeah. Yeah. And I would

Speaker B: 00:18:29

personally, if somebody presented themselves to me and said, this is who I am, I would be more, more likely to trust them authenticating with their Google account or their Facebook account or some other identity provider than them presenting a passport, because you can buy a passport, it's really hard to prove, to falsify an identity on the internet.

Speaker A: 00:18:49

Quite high proportion of passports are false as well. Yeah. I don't know about British ones,

Speaker B: 00:18:55

but anyway, yeah. Anyway, that was just a moan. But, but part of the research, because the phenomenon that I was particularly interested, I was interested in was, why did I fail to see the thing that was not, it wasn't immediately in front of me, but why did I fail to consider lifting this thing up and looking underneath? And I found a study on an appropriately named the seeker.com about why, why we're bad at looking for things within our field of view. It's a study, or we'll link to it, but it's a study from Aberdeen, University of Aberdeen, that suggests that the way that humans track and scan around the scene when they're looking for objects, they, they, we, we, we spend too long on uncluttered areas of the scene compared to cluttered areas. So if you, this, this seems a good example. So Nick's coffee table is covered in stuff. And then there's the carpet around, which is relatively clear. If you were looking for something, your eyes would spend much more time on the clear space than they should do in the space it's more likely to be, which is the cluttered area, which I thought was,

Speaker C: 00:20:01

was interesting. Sounds, feel very intuitively right to me as well. I think that that's absolutely right. You do, you go, you go and you look on the floor and it's silly. It's a bit like that joke about the, you know, the person looking for his keys under the lamplight, because that's where the light is sort of thing. Yeah. Apparently you're meant to repeat the

Speaker A: 00:20:19

name of the thing you're looking for. I've heard that, QI, I think. Yeah, I think it was QI,

Speaker C: 00:20:24

but yeah, I think it definitely, I mean, I, I I've always sort of, the way that I try and look for things is by forming a really clear mental image of what it is, you know, what colour it is, what shape it is. And then, and then I feel like that, that's, that then gives you a leg up. Otherwise you can actually get distracted looking for things, you know, and I feel like it's, that's when it goes wrong. It's like, you think you're looking for it, but you're really just staring at a pile of pile of stuff. There's that phrase, isn't there? Can't see for looking, which I think expresses something true, you know, because you're making an effort to look for something somehow or other, it becomes harder. Yeah. You've got one more thing you want to say? Yeah, just about the, there is some evidence that, that losing things is, is correlated with a number of other sort of cognitive failing issues. Brilliant. Let's hear this. So cognitive acts, like failing, including things like not being able to, well, it's basically losing focus, moving rooms and forgetting why you moved rooms, not noticing changes to things, not noticing things like road signs that you should have paid attention to. There are, so there's a whole bunch of things to do with like the ability to focus cognitively and to retain that focus. And, and there's some evidence, I can't tell you how reliable it is. And it's based partly on self-reporting, but there is some evidence it's genetic. So you can't run in the family and you can perhaps blame your genes. Yeah, I do for most stuff. Yeah. But I, I think the, the, that to me, the really, the big menace for losing things, the, the real, the, when it, when it all goes wrong is I always think of this sort of on grid and off grid, right? On grid means it's in one of the places you'd expect to find it, right? So Peter's passport was on grid. You know, it's, if it's in my in tray, you know, I'm going to find it if it's, if it's in my, one of my boxes of things, I know I'll find it. But when it's off grid, that's when it's not in one of those places and you're, and then there's that sense of yawning abyss of like, well, it could be anywhere. And I, I find that that happens most often when I'm, when I'm holding it, I'm holding it and I go into the next room and I'm not holding it anymore. And, and I think, where the hell has it gone? And, and, and you look in your pockets and it's not there. And then, you know, eventually out of the corner of your eye, you realise you put it on some really high up shelf and you don't know why. In a moment of absent-minded madness. Yeah, you've had a moment of absent-minded because you were picking up something else or you just, and your, and your brain just thought, well, I'll remember where that is, but it doesn't. That's, that's, that's when it is those moments of cognitive failure. And I, I suspect, though I cannot in any way prove it, I suspect most things that get lost, get lost in those moments. They get lost because someone puts something down and intends to pick it up, but forgets to do so.

Speaker A: 00:23:16

Yeah, yeah. I'm terrible at that sort of thing. Let's wind up. But before we do, again, an obvious question I want to ask, if you think it's an interesting one, which is worst thing, I have to confess a lot of the time when I ask these questions, because I think I've got something, you know, that I want to say. Worst thing you've ever lost or biggest thing you've ever lost or your most painful ever lost. How does that sound?

Speaker C: 00:23:35

Apart from my dignity.

Speaker A: 00:23:38

Too many times. Yeah. So Nick, your most disastrous loss or one that's most painful.

Speaker C: 00:23:44

It's interesting. One of the things I read during the research for this was that losing objects can induce genuine grief. You know, indistinguishable from the grief of losing a loved one in some cases, depending on the object. The object that I had a huge amount of affection for was my first pair of cufflinks I bought at the age of 22 when I just started my new job. And I bought some smart shirts and I knew I needed some cufflinks. So I bought a couple of pairs of cufflinks. And there was one that I really loved, which was they were kind of blue, blue and sort of a nice blue shiny color with a little green square of shiny color inside it. And I loved those cufflinks. And, you know, they went everywhere with me. But, you know, I kind of every time I put them on, I think, oh, I'm wearing my first pair of cufflinks. And then I left them in a hotel room. Oh, yeah. I know I did. I know. I know exactly where I left them. It was after a wedding that I'd been to. And it still bothers me. Yeah. Still nags at me. Weirdly, we got burgled about sort of six, seven years ago and the burglar stole half my cufflinks. Half. They were in a tray and somehow he took half of them. And of course, of the ones that were remaining, only about half of them were actually still pairs. Yeah. So that doesn't annoy me anything like as much as losing that pair of cufflinks. But I also I mean, if there was one thing I could restore to the earth, it would be my daughter's Hello Kitty, which she loved and she took it everywhere with her. And then when she was she must have been about three or four, I think she was going to the park with Hello Kitty and she put Hello Kitty in the back of her little, little kind of trike. And when they when she got to the park, it had gone, it had gone and it wasn't anywhere to be seen on the road on the way back. And obviously, Hello Kitty's disappeared forever. And it still bothers it bothers her. And as a result, it bothers me. Yeah. Scarred for life. But I think I mean, I like to think Hello Kitty was found by another little girl who's given her a good. Yes, there

Speaker B: 00:25:44

we go. Yeah, that's where we can we can we can hope for that. Peter, my story is very similar to the Hello Kitty. I had I had a little Ted. Yeah, I think it must have been six or seven or eight. We took a trip to Disneyland in Florida. Is it Disney World? One of them. Florida. I think it's right. And little Ted disappeared one day. Just out of the blue. I was utterly distraught, as you can imagine. And so as a result, my parents were and little Ted's never been replaced. That

Speaker C: 00:26:21

was the last. Come on, Disney Corporation, find little Ted. Yes. So little Ted's never been

Speaker B: 00:26:26

replaced. He was the last sort of primary little, you know, primary sort of thing that went with me everywhere. Yeah. And I've engineered my life to not have stuff around that one incident. Yeah. Because I don't don't form affect, don't form any kind of affection attachment to physical items because of that one. Yeah, but wait, so what year was this? I think I must have been six

Speaker C: 00:26:50

or seven. Right. If anyone who works at Disney is listening, go and look in your lost property

Speaker B: 00:26:56

box and find little Ted. He wouldn't have been lost actually at Disney. He'd have been lost in the hotel. That's okay. The hotel in Disneyland. No, it wasn't an official Disneyland hotel. So

Speaker A: 00:27:06

send me around the world with: 1000