New City Media

SiteLogic Founder Matt Bailey uses the power of analytics — that is, statistical analysis — to determine how Star Trek’s famous Red Shirts can live long, happy lives instead of being messily killed on one of Captain Kirk’s adventures. A noble project. But Bailey’s analysis ignores both context and behavior, and this is the result:

We can reliably improve the survivability of the red-shirted crewmen by only exploring peaceful, female-only planets (android and alien females included).

Are you sure? Even if we implement this solution, don’t we do that at the cost of the larger goal? The Enterprise has a mission statement, and that mission statement is:

To explore strange new worlds; seek out new life and new civilizations; to boldly go where no man has gone before.

Restricting exploration to planets populated by peaceful females significantly reduces exploration options. Not that it would be exploring, anyway — the Enterprise would clearly be limited to exploring planets plenty of people have gone before. Otherwise, how would you know the planets were safely female?When you’re seeking to solve a problem, it’s not sufficient to gather a bunch of numbers together and start looking for patterns. Look at numbers long enough and strange correlations start to reveal themselves like faces in wallpaper. But those correlations are just tricks of data. As my high school science teachers used to say, “correlation is not necessarily causation.” We need to do more than look at numbers. That’s where context and behavior comes in.First of all, it’s important to note that Red Shirts are security personnel. The much higher mortality rate of Red Shirts is more a result of job function than color choice. That’s your context, and with that we can ask why being security on the Enterprise is such a dangerous mission.By watching the behavior of the crew — particularly Kirk — we might get a better impression of what they could do differently.

So, how might their own behavior contribute directly to their death?

1. Kirk frequently places security in charge of omnipotent or near-omnipotent beings who have already demonstrated resistance to Federation weaponry, squandering their lives in the inevitable escape attempts. In the first season episode Charlie X, for example, Kirk responds to Charlie “disappearing” a crewman by ordering two security guards to escort Charlie to his quarters. In this case, Charlie just makes their weapons disappear.When Kirk pulls the same stunt with Nomad in The Changeling, however, the red shirts aren’t so lucky. Even though the robot Nomad has already demonstrated it can out-gun the Enterprise itself, Kirk sends it away with two security guards armed merely with hand-phasers. They might as well be armed with elbow macaroni.So we should either enroll Kirk in remedial critical thinking classes or place Spock in charge of landing party operations.

2. Security officers don’t exhibit much in the way of military training. They often fully enter a room or clearing before looking around to see if anyone is lurking in the shadows, rarely take cover before opening fire, or rush headlong into danger. Either the Federation has forgotten basic military and police techniques or there’s a royal screwup at Starfleet Academy in charge of teaching these guys.Regardless, we need to get Enterprise security in a SWAT class stat. By taking the time to look at actual behavior and understand the context in which it occurs, we’ve identified two problems much closer to the problem at hand than the gender-makup of explored planets. Not only that, but we have a number of solutions to choose from — and none of those solutions conflict with the Enterprise’s mission.

Don’t get me wrong: analytics is a powerful tool. But it should not be your only tool. Before you start crunching numbers, take a good long look at what your problem really is. If you’re a web developer, watch people use your site. Unless you understand how and why people do what they do, the numbers in your server log are of very limited value indeed.