

When Kids Start Doing Root Cause Analysis - mkswp
http://blog.marksweep.com/post/22692428919/when-kids-start-doing-root-cause-analysis

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randlet
It is pretty amazing how far down the rabbit hole you can go in "5 why's".

Louis C.K. does a very funny bit on the topic of the OP (NSFW I
think)[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BJlV49RDlLE&feature=playe...](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BJlV49RDlLE&feature=player_detailpage#t=77s)

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malandrew
That video is the first thing I thought of while reading the article. I wasn't
sure if it would get up voted or not, but I'm glad it did, since it does
highlight how far you can go when determining the root cause of something.

"... but Why?" "Because some things are and some things are not!"

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luke_s
I have two kids, and the youngest is just starting on the 'why?' phase. Its
great fun! I treat it as a game to try and see how long I can keep on
answering. As soon as I don't know the answer, I explain that I don't know (or
perhaps that nobody yet knows) and discuss how we could find out.

One interesting thing I discovered - a surprisingly large number of things
will either lead to physics or human psychology if you keep asking 'why?'.
However I don't know if that reflects some deeper truth about the world, or
just my bias in how I answer the questions.

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Michiel
> However I don't know if that reflects some deeper truth about the world, or
> just my bias in how I answer the questions.

It's the same reason why you always end up on "Philosophy" if you're browsing
Wikipedia and consistently follow the first link in each article. Here's the
path for "Airplane":

    
    
      Airplane
      Fixed wing aircraft
      Aircraft
      Vehicle
      Motion (physics)
      Natural science
      Science
      Knowledge /* we know where this going... */
      Fact
      Proof (truth)
      Argument
      Philosophy
    

Try it yourself: <http://www.xefer.com/wikipedia>

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Kronopath
I think that website cheats a little bit. The first link in "Science" is not
"Knowledge" but "Latin", where it's describing the root of the word "Science".
If you follow it properly, you'll find that even the article for "5 Whys"
_doesn't_ go to Philosophy:

    
    
      5 Whys
      Technique
      Technology
      Tool
      Goal
      Animal
      Eukaryote
      Organism
      Biology
      Natural Science
      Science
      Latin
      Italic Languages
      Indo-European Languages
      Language Family
      Language
      Human
      Taxonomy
      Ancient Greek
      Greek Language
      Indo-European Languages // Infinite loop!

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Michiel
That path seems to go in the same direction, but then it diverges in Science,
mostly due to the first sentence on that page, where [Latin] and [knowledge]
are links:

> Science (from [Latin] scientia, meaning "knowledge") is a systematic
> enterprise that builds and organizes [knowledge]...

It happens again in Taxonomy, which otherwise would surely lead to Philosophy
from the [classification] link:

> Taxonomy (from [Greek]: τάξις taxis "arrangement" and Greek: νομία nomia
> "method"[1]) is the science of identifying and naming species, and arranging
> them into a [classification].

On our way to Philosophy we are constantly confronted with Latin and Greek
concepts, because Rome and Greece are where many of the concepts in Philosophy
originated.

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K2h
His experience of having trouble answering more than '5 why's' is a nice
revelation. This is an exercise that nearly every engineer learns about (that
started at Toyota[1]) and has become one of the basic tools used in continuous
improvement. I often complete the exercise and it is trouble enough to make it
to the 5'th why, the thought actually never occurred to me to go farther.

As a side note - when you are improving things, that 4'th and 5'th 'why' are
often things that are very hard (and costly) to change.

[1] <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5_Whys>

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mseebach
If it doesn't hurt, you're doing it wrong.

If something is hard and costly to change, _yet it's the root cause of
problems_ , it's so much more important to change.

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randomdrake
One of my favorite quotes regarding this is from Michael Crichton in one of
his more obscure, autobiographical books called Travels:

"Although knowledge of how things work is sufficient to allow manipulation of
nature, what humans really want to know is why things work. Children don't ask
how the sky is blue. They ask why the sky is blue."

I recommend the book to anyone and everyone looking to explore their own
understanding of the world and their place within it.

~~~
fennecfoxen
The real 'why' can be a dangerous question to answer, though. :)

"Daddy, why do the owls want to make the Sun go away forever?"

"Well, Billy, it's because the film is an expression of the cultural tension
generated by the threat of nuclear warfare which faced American society in the
1980s when it was made. When they're singing about how the good guys are
'running out of batteries' it's giving you a context to interpret your
experiences in a possible future in which you might have to hide out in a
fallout shelter in the dark for days at a time."

"Huh?"

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bane
"Why" is an interesting hack. Before this children learn how things work
through observation of events. "Why" is a force multiplier where the child no
longer even has to wait for events to happen but can explore things that
haven't happened or that are hard to observe. It's a short hop from there to
deep abstraction and philosophy.

Cultivating this may be one of the most important things that parents can do
in terms of ensuring children keep their curiosity long into adult hood (with
appropriate training to develop the endless string of "whys" into a more
socially acceptable question answering model).

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gdubs
Perhaps children intuitively have 'chain of events' thought patterns. It's
something many adults seem to lack, which makes proposing solutions to big
problems difficult; because one has to be able to see far beyond simple cause
& effect to both understand the problem and the proposed solution.

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rhizome
The technical term for this is "empiricism," and you're right that some adults
lose this after a time, or at least mental models start resembling Kowloon
Walled City.

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gdubs
I think the problem is that empiricism is often taught, in primary school, in
a very 2-dimensional, black & white fashion – enforcing a rigid view of cause
& effect. (Edit: often the case, but not always. There are great teachers out
there.)

Maybe it's test-driven curriculum that's largely to blame: question -> answer.

I think in addition to basic empirical reasoning, kids should be exposed to
determinism in the vein of chaos theory; where one is forced to accept that
while connections exist, they may not be immediately obvious. (Edit 2: I guess
this is "Art/Music Class", sadly non-existent in more and more schools)

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lss456
I'm trying it myself and love it. You can get real far in 5 whys. Speaking or
writing it in a stream-of-consciousness fashion (first thing that comes to
your mind) is quite insightful.

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gosub
Why is almost always the wrong question, since it involves an intention. The
right question to ask is How. "Why did you do that?" vs "How did that
phenomenon happen?".

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ken
I've read somewhere that kids keep asking "why?" because they figure out that
it's an easy way to get people to talk a lot, and listening to people talk is
how they learn language.

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keeptrying
Dont kids already do this and most annoyed parents eventually answer "because
the sky is so high" ....

