[Stoves] Fwd: business sickness (Xavier, Crispin)

Crispin Pemberton-Pigott crispinpigott at outlook.com
Thu Jul 21 13:48:46 CDT 2016


Dear Nikhil

 

>Are you suggesting that we have been selling false dreams - to cooks or to our masters? :-) 

What a great question.

Well, on the stove testing front we have been selling false dreams to the producers, the testers, the ‘masters’ as you call programmers, and to the users. 

There are so many conceptual errors in the evaluation methods (including the social methods) that were it any other field, the field itself would have been run out of town. And we wonder why it has taken so long to gain legitimacy…

Selling stoves conceptually used to be about saving fuel which meant producing more fuel-efficient stoves. That went along OK until people started going ‘engineering’ without much of a clue about measurements, metrics and calculations. Until things developed into ‘testing methods’ we were sort of doing ok, and by that I mean in the 70’s. We sold ‘fuel savings’ when saving fuel was conceptually tied to gas guzzling cars.

Now we sell ‘health impacts’ which are based on IER’s and DALY’s and GBD interpretations. Health impacts are notoriously difficult to ascertain with anything like the precision of fuel saved, even if both are calculated incorrectly. At least with fuel you get a reality check by watching the pile of wood disappear, or not.

So, we are still selling false dreams to a similar crowd of customers, but in new, imaginative ways. Look at it this way: If the stove community can’t correct things as basic as the invalid metrics of common tests, how can it correctly predict the impact of health from an exchange of stoves?  That takes real imagination.  We have as a community, little credibility among real scientists at least in part because of the obvious misuse of scientific tools and persistent conceptual errors about how ratings should be produced and how health impacts are estimated (or not). Stripes are not yet earned.

I am by no means giving up, aluta continua, as recent exchanges in the ISO groups have demonstrated. There is no point in producing a standard that will sit and rot. What is most encouraging is that the cook and the kitchen are getting a lot more credit for performance than they have been ‘traditionally’. Testing in a realistic context, whether in a lab or out, is key. If you want to know what a stove does, use it and measure, where ‘measure’ includes interviews.

We are going to fix this.

Crispin

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.bioenergylists.org/pipermail/stoves_lists.bioenergylists.org/attachments/20160721/b73a0a7a/attachment.html>


More information about the Stoves mailing list