| You left out hypothesis C: if you send too many firefighters they get in eachothers way and become difficult to coordinate, making them worse at putting out the blaze. And hypothesis D: fires with the same number of firefighters cause different levels of destruction because some departments are organized to let their 10X firefighters work more efficiently. And hypothesis E: Many arsonists become firefighters thus more firefighters increases the risk that an arsonist will be on the team And hypothesis F: The same as hypothesis A but since some tools require more than one person there's actually a minimum threshold below which destruction skyrockets And hypothesis G: Wealthy areas that can hire more firefighters also suffer more expensive destruction for a given blaze. And hypothesis H: If we invest the resources we're spending on firefighters into fire prevention we can reduce total fire damage And infinitely more hypotheses. There will always be another argument that makes some logical sense. And unfortunately reality is under no obligation to make sense, so it's entirely possible something that sounds stupid and counterintuitive could just happen to be correct anyways. But with data, we can test hypotheses. Vary the number of firefighters and see what happens. |