Covid19, governments, lies and science

Confession time – for years I have referred to ex-UK PM Tony Blair as T Bliar because of the role he played in leading us into the Iraq war on the basis of the lies he spread about Hussein’s possession of “Weapons of Mass Destruction”.

But Blair is an innocent compared to current British Prime Minister Boris Johnston – renowned throughout the world for the apparently temperamental inability his entire career has demonstrated of being unable to distinguish truth from reality.

This is nowhere more obvious than in the constant refrain Johnson has offered, throughout the Covid pandemic, of simply “following the science”. The 3Quarks Daily site offers today the best putdown of this defence 

Since Covid became an epidemic it is no longer a merely scientific problem. Dealing with it requires balancing conflicting values and the interests of multitudes of people and organisations. This is an essentially political challenge that scientists lack the conceptual apparatus or legitimacy to address.

Epidemiologists can inform the political process but not replace it. In particular, they can advise governments on the sources of risk and the projected levels of risk associated with different Covid policies.

However, as we have seen in the various approaches to lockdown and rollback around the world, how governments address Covid does not follow directly from their different epidemiological circumstances. Governments make two specific political choices well or badly:

-       how much Covid risk to tolerate and

-       how that risk ‘budget’ should be allocated between competing social needs and interest groups.

 

First governments must decide how much Covid matters to them, i.e. how far to prioritise controlling the epidemic relative to their other priorities, such as economic prosperity, other aspects of public health, and their own political survival.

The health of the general population will never be the only concern, and this is entirely reasonable and moral in a world of trade-offs (or we would all demand a speed limit of 10 mph on our roads). This does not mean that we cannot criticise the specific trade-offs a government chooses to make ‘on our behalf’, for example if it seems to value its own political survival far above the lives of citizens.

Closely connected to how much to care is the question of how rosy a view of the risks to take, i.e. whether to plan for the best or worst case scenarios posited by epidemiologists. Together this exercise generates what may be called a ‘risk budget’.

 

Second, governments must decide how to allocate their risk budget among a society’s competing needs and interests. Whatever precautions individuals follow, all physical interactions carry some risk of transmission and hence of raising R nought. Which interactions are worth that risk?

For example, should the airline industry, the hospitality sector, or schools get to resume something like normal services, and thereby resume serving those who depend on them (such as children and working parents), while imposing risks on those who work in them (such as teachers)?

Because there is a limited amount of normality to go around, who gets to enjoy its benefits or suffer its consequences is a matter of intense political competition. One would hope that the political system would prioritise those whose interests have the greatest moral claims and/or generate the greatest net beneficial impact. For example, in person schooling is of great direct and indirect value to children, and also frees up working parents to do all the things we would like them to do, like run ICUs. In contrast, in person university teaching is entirely dispensable except for a handful of vocational subjects like nursing.

 

However we all know that even in the best of times and the best democracies, risks are distributed rather more according to a political than a moral logic, i.e. those groups least able to resist end up holding the shortest straw. Hence the fact that noxious and dangerous facilities like highways, refineries, incinerators and so on are much more likely to be sited in poor and minority neighbourhoods. So it is not surprising that even democratic governments who can legitimately appeal to the public interest are vulnerable to political resentment from those who lose out from Covid risk rationing, especially as time passes and their costs mount.

 

Governments pass from being seen as saviours into callous and arbitrary gatekeepers controlling who gets access to the suddenly precious domain of business as usual. People lose their jobs and fear losing their homes; business owners lose their shirts; families lose the chance to say goodbye to dying relatives; and so on just because of the rules set by the government. Set us free! they cry. 

Covid can’t be worse than this! Ironically, this challenge is only possible because of the success that Covid risk rationing achieved in preventing far more infections and deaths. It thus invokes the paradox of expertise in which the absence of catastrophe counts as evidence that there was no real catastrophe to evade, rather than as evidence that it has successfully been evaded by following the experts’ advice (elsewhere).

How Myths take root and are difficult to shift

The beauty of a book with large print is that it’s easy to go back and read – and that’s what I’ve been doing today with Bregman’s “Humankind – a hopeful history”. I also wanted to check out some references and landed up with some good material, including an interview and a discussion between Bregman and Steve Pinker.

But the main focus has been one of my famous tables which I’ve used to build a map of the various “research myths” about human nature which Bregman identified during the course of his writing – I’ve identified more than 20

I draw two conclusions from my rereading -

- first that, once a myth takes root, it’s very difficult to shift. The media don’t like revisionism and never give equal space or time to something that challenges the conventional wisdom – particularly if it seems to contain a positive message.

- second that most people are fairly decent – but power corrupts ie the evil is in those with power and the battalions of police, soldiers, spies and bureaucrats they control

Here’s Bregman with a couple of comments on two of the experiments -

     The Stanford experiement

RB: Then many of these students said that they didn’t want to do it. They didn’t want to do it because they said: No, that’s not who I am. Then Zimbardo said: You got to do this because I need these results, then we can go to the press and say look, prisons are horrible environments. We need to reform the whole thing. That was actually a movement in the 60s where people said, you know, we got to abolish prisons totally.

And the terrible irony of this movement, which, and Zimbardo was part of that as well, is that it was  then later used by conservatives to say, oh, well, if prisons you know don’t work at all, if rehabilitation is not an option, then, you know, let’s just throw people in prison and throw away the key, right? Let’s just lock people up for life, because then that’s the only option. It’s a history full of dark ironies.

But yeah, the Stanford Prison Experiment is — I think it can only be described as a hoax and it’s very sad that this has been taught to students for 50 years.

 

The Milgram shocks

RB; It’s a problematic experiment as well. The archives have opened up, again, and we now know that many of the subjects didn’t believe the situation was real. And we also know that the people who went all the way, to give 450 volt shocks, yeah, the chance that they would do that was higher if they didn’t believe the whole thing was real. Maybe it was not 65 percent, as Milgram initially reported, maybe it was 50 percent, or 40, or 30, but it’s still way too high. It’s still a very dark and sinister experiment that shows that, indeed, friendly people can do this.

But I do think the experiment needs to be reinterpreted. So Milgram made the argument that people became sort of rigid robots, that they just blindly followed orders, just as many Germans said after the war, you know, “I was just following orders.”

But I think what really happened in that experiment was something different. It was about joining; it was about followership. It was about people wanting to help the scientist, and yes, sort of feeling part of his group — which is not a comfortable message, right? It’s not a comfortable message at all. We talked earlier about, you know, how so often we do the most horrible things in the name of loyalty and friendship. And I think that’s also how we should interpret this experiment.

 And then the table

Issue	Initial thesis	Revised analysis
Bombing of German cities	It would lower civilian morale	It boosted morale
Hurricane Katrina	Social breakdown	Social support strong
“mean world syndrome”	The world is getting worse	Stephen Pinker’s “The Better Angels of our Nature” tells us that past 70 years have been much less violent. It’s the media that stirs our pessimism and cynicism
Homo economicus	People are selfish	They are altruistic and cooperative
Veneer theory of civilisation	ditto	“Only recently have scientists concluded that the grim view of humanity needs revision” p19
“The Selfish Gene”	Richard Dawkins original book	Which he later disowned
Lord of the Flies	Even kids are aggressive	The original boys in Golding’s story actually rewarded cooperation
Friendly foxes	Darwinian selection rewards aggression	Russian geneticist demonstrating selection breeds friendly foxes
Cannibalistic apes	Aggression is inbuilt	Pinker wrong about  violence of hunter-gatherers
“Soldiers who don’t shoot”	Fighting is natural	Only about 15% of soldiers fire their rifles
“The curse of civilisation”	When ice retreated, farming became possible and progress started	Settled life was labour-intensive; possessions and leadership developed – sickness and violence started
“The Mystery of Easter Island”	Large statues were rolled into place with logs – requiring chopping down of forests – people then turned on one another (Mulloy 1974)	Duly repeated in J Diamond’s “Collapse” (2005).  Reality was that rats destroyed the forests and western ships brought slavery and plague
Stanford University	1971 experiment - Students separated into prisoners and jailors and role-played – with sadism and violence resulting	When students protested they were told that results needed to prove that prisons didn’t work. Zimbardo published that research in 1973. Martinsen then pushed that thesis – with strong media support – although his subsequent retraction got no publicity
Stanley Milgram’s shock machine	1961 experiment which had psychology students apply ever-stronger voltage to control subjects	Follow-up research indicated that many students understood it was a mock study
38 New York Bystanders	1964 incident when a young woman loudly stabbed to death – with no one going to her rescue. A few days later, the  killer was apprehended by 2 bystanders	Experiment confirmed there was a “bystander effect” when people thought that others would deal with sit. No media reported fact that it was 2 bystanders who caught the killer Meta analysis pub in 2011. In 90% of cases people help!
The “Broken Windows” theory	James Q Wilson started this with a 1982 article in The Atlantic which was taken up by Mayor Giuliana and police Commissioner Bratton	A 2015 meta-analysis disproved a theory which had cops arresting anyone for minor felons. Demographic trends were the basic cause of the decline in crime. Arguably the strategy has led to racial profiling and increased police aggression
German fighting zeal in 2nd WW	Janowitz and Shils discover that German soldiers fight for camaraderie	But outsiders don’t count 95% of soldier deaths in 2nd WW were from “distance” weapons
The Pygmalion effect	Humans can and should be classified into positive and negative categories	Expectations are self-reinforcing - it’s the basis of theory X and theory Y schools of management. If you assume people are lazy, they will prove you  right – and vv
Monetary rewards can demotivate	People need financial rewards to achieve	Edward Deci has demonstrated that bonuses are generally perverse
The tragedy of the commons	G Harin wrote an article with this title in 1968 which argued that people abused common land eg overgrazing	Elinor Ostrom won a Nobel prize in 2009 for proving him wrong – starting with a famous Workshop in 1973 to study the “commons” and her 1990 book “Governing the Commons”
Norway’s prisons	The US incarcerates about 10 times more people in prisons than the average country	Norway’s low recidivism rates demonstrate a better way
Drinking tea with terrorists	Heavy prion sentences are the normal recourse	Dutch and Danish treatment show there is a more effective way

 Further Reading

One of the most serious and systematic reviews of any book I have ever encountered - https://www.academia.edu/43631182/On_Rutger_Bregmans_Humankind_Minor_revisions_22_September_2020_

https://nomadron.blogspot.com/2019/07/human-nature_11.html

Bregman and Pinker discussion https://thepanpsycast.com/panpsycast2/episode80-1

The Power Paradox -

http://www.ippanetwork.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/Power-Paradox-Leakey.pdf

https://leakeyfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/Origin-Stories-Episode-20-The-Power-Paradox-LIVE.pdf

Humankind

Rutger Bregman is one of the 18 writers who feature in the table I drafted earlier this year to illustrate my theory that those who straddle different worlds (whether of nationality, profession or discipline) are both more creative and clearer writers than more insular types. Bregman wrote the little book Utopia for Realists (2016) which thrust him into the global league.

He graduated as an historian but has, since 2013, been a journalist at a fascinating Netherlands journal De Correspondent whose funding was crowdsourced; operates on a membership basis; and sets its face against “news” as such. This has given him the 

“privilege to pursue my own fascinations and be powered by that magical stuff known as intrinsic motivation”

That’s a quote from the Acknowledgements in his most recent (and larger) work – Humankind – an optimistic history (2020). He clearly has a great English translator but his material is written so clearly and in such highly readable short chapter chunks - each of which introduces us to some well-known but generally false research such as the “broken windows” criminological “explanation”. 

His style has some similarities with that of Malcolm Gladwell – so I finished its 400 pages in a couple of days.

It’s been generally well received – although this sniffy, caustic review writes it off for being too simplistic 

Not yet erased from the annals of history, for example, is the 18th-century philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, on whom the author regularly calls for his view that humans are naturally nice, and it is the institutions of civilisation that have corrupted us. Bregman contrasts this with what he calls, following the biologist Frans de Waal, “veneer theory”: the view (attributed to Hobbes among others) that civilisation is a thin skin of decency barely concealing the savage ape underneath.

 

You might suspect that there is something to both these views simultaneously, but Humankind is a polemic in the high Gladwellian style and so aims to be a simple lesson overturning our allegedly preconceived ideas, with the help of carefully selected study citations and pseudo-novelistic scenes from the blitz and other teachable stories. The “veneer” theory, Bregman insists, is totally wrong.

What is his evidence? Infants and toddlers, studies suggest, have an innate bias towards fairness and cooperation. When some Tongan children were shipwrecked on a Pacific island for over a year, they cooperated generously rather than re-enacting Lord of the Flies.

 

Since Bregman is a priori sure that all nasty stories about human nature must be “myths”, he tries to puncture several. The chapter on Philip Zimbardo’s notorious Stanford prison experiment ably collects the recent discoveries that the whole thing was a hoax, with the guards being coached in their cruelty to the prisoners.

On the other hand, a bizarre chapter about Easter Island attempts to disprove, on the basis of some inconclusive fragments of evidence, the accepted story of how deforestation led to civil war, cannibalism and population collapse. This never happened, concludes Bregman blithely, even though the Easter Islanders themselves say it did: a vivid example of his gift for dismissing inconvenient evidence.

 

That approach, however, won’t wash with Stanley Milgram’s “obedience” experiments, in which subjects were instructed by experimenters to give (fake) electric shocks to people in another room, and continued to do so even when the “victims” seemed to be in terrible pain. Disarmingly,

Bregman admits that he originally wanted to bring this story crashing down, but he can’t: the findings have been robustly repeated. Instead he reframes the subjects’ “obedience” as “conformity”, which might sound to you like a distinction without much of a difference. Our social instinct to conform, along with the well-known camaraderie between soldiers, is what Bregman finally offers as an explanation for the Holocaust, in place of some story about fundamental human evil. Which even if plausible, notably fails to explain the actions of the Nazi leaders themselves.

 

Bregman also points at how nice Norwegian prisons are, and visits a hippyish school where there are no set lessons or curriculum. If we believed in human decency, he suggests, this is how things could be everywhere.

But plainly the attempt to replace a story about humans’ essential wickedness with a contrasting story about humans’ essential loveliness has already run aground – as it was bound to, since any claim that complex human beings are essentially one single thing or another is a fairytale. “I’ve argued that humans have evolved to be fundamentally sociable creatures,” Bregman writes – as though this is a brave thing to argue, though absolutely no one in the world disagrees with it

What I really appreciated about the book was how easily it wove theory into the narrative. That’s no easy thing to do and was particularly well done in the chapter on “The Power of Intrinsic Motivation” which gave pride of place to the Buurtzog model of social care which I faulted Goodhart’s “Head Hand Heart” for ignoring. Jos de Blok is its founder and has some very critical things to say about both management and academia! Pity that Bregman didn't elaborate.....

The book finishes with “Ten Rules to Live by” – the most disappointing section.

The business model used by “The Correspondent” has attracted its share of criticism – a positive Guardian article here but a more critical piece from Niemanlab which, in itself, looks an interesting media site.   

Links I liked

Luck, context and talent

The world has seen so many talented artists and writers – but for every success there are many thousands of disappointments. That’s why I’m a fan of the Neglected Books blog which resurrects excellent writing from some decades past which has long been forgotten about. And the current post has a discussion about the part luck plays in the process by which some books become classics. It was Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s The Black Swan which first made me aware of this when he wrote the following - 

More than four centuries ago, the English essayist Francis Bacon had a very simple intuition. ….. Bacon mentioned a man who, upon being shown the pictures of those worshipers who paid their vows then subsequently escaped shipwreck, wondered where were the pictures of those who happened to drown after their vows. The lack of effectiveness of their prayers did not seem to be taken into account by the supporters of the handy rewards of religious practice. “And such is the way of all superstition, whether in astrology, dreams, omens, divine judgments, or the like”, he wrote in his Novum Organum, written in 1620.

 

This is a potent insight: the drowned worshippers, being dead, do not advertise their experiences. They are invisible and will be missed by the casual observer who will be led to believe in miracles.

Not just in miracles, as Taleb goes onto argue…..it is also the process which decides whether an artist is remembered. For every artist of genius, there have been many more with the same talent but whose profile, somehow, was submerged….

Art, of course, is the subject of high fashion – reputations ebb and flow…..we are vaguely aware of this…but it is money that speaks in the art “market” and it is the din of the cash register to which the ears of most art critics and dealers are attuned

 

Someone else who celebrates unknown or, rather, forgotten artists is Jonathan in Wales who runs a great blog called My Daily Art Display which fleshes out the detail of the lives of long-forgotten but superb artists…..

But it’s not, of course, just a matter of LUCK – the discussion at Neglected Books mentions the fantastic sea artist, Turner, who very much stood on the shoulders of other artists he knew –

 

There is a wing of the local museum devoted to the Norwich school of painters, who were around the time of J. M. W. Turner, who knew him, who inspired him and were inspired by him—but who weren’t Turner. So, it’s full of works that are amazing—but that aren’t the few classics people associate with Turner. Certainly, some of my favorite painters are artists I wouldn’t have known unless I’d seen their work hanging in a gallery or museum.

 2. The “Stepping Stones” report and diagram of 1977

Last month the new English libertarian journal The Critic had an interesting article reminding us of the maverick policy adviser to Margaret Thatcher in the 1970s, John Hoskyns, a systems analyst who owned his own company. 

But in the early 1970s, as the three-day week, double-digit inflation, a declining GDP and crippling industrial action began to accelerate, he turned his mind to politics. Why, he asked himself, was Britain in the state it was? What exactly had gone wrong? Why did it have the longest working hours, lowest rate of pay and lowest production per head of any major country in Northern Europe? Why – a former industrial superpower and winner of two world wars – were we now falling so far behind?

The questions began to obsess him: “It was,” he wrote, “such an absolute Everest of problem-solving that I wouldn’t leave it alone, I couldn’t think about anything else.” He thus set to work on a diagram to map out all the causes and effects.

The diagram took an entire year to complete. It was really a “why?” diagram, Hoskyns explained:

Why did things happen? In other words, you look at a problem – what are the causes? And of course, there are often many causes. But then you look at the causes and you realise that they themselves are the result of other problems and other causes. Almost everything turned out to be a precondition for almost everything else.

 

“What the diagram really said,” Hoskyns later explained “is that if you’re going to change anything, you’ve got to change everything … because actually, in terms of logic, the causal connections are such that you cannot say, ‘Let’s just do that’, because – you can’t! Because actually, there are five other things that are causing that.”

When the Wiring Diagram was completed – a vast flow chart of interconnected ailments, some of the arrows moving in both directions – Hoskyns showed it to Thatcher.  She laughed at its complexity and said it looked like the map of a chemical works, but she was intrigued. 

 The final 1977 Stepping Stones report Hoskyns produced can be viewed here

Head, Hand, Heart

David Goodhart is a British “thinker” whose work arouses mixed feelings in good liberal circles. He was the author of “The Road to Somewhere – the new tribes shaping British politics” (2017) which I called, in an extended post of 2 years ago, “the most insightful analysis of contemporary British society I’ve read”.

But appearing, as it did, only a few months after the Brexit referendum, its sympathetic treatment of the “left-behinds” offended privileged Remainers. He may have been a founding member of the centrist monthly “Prospect” but his card had been marked from 2004 when he published a pamphlet entitled “Too Diverse?” - which argued that the country was approaching the limits of acceptable levels of immigration    

He’s just published a worthy successor Head Hand Heart – the struggle for dignity and status in the 21^st Century whose 280 pages I managed to romp through in a couple of days and whose key points I want to share with you. But first an explanation of the title's first three words - 

Britain and America in particular suffer from a condition he describes as “Peak Head”, where cognitive achievement acts as a sorting mechanism in a supposed meritocracy. Along the way, we have devalued both technical, practical abilities (Hand), and social and empathetic skills (Heart), while alienating and demoralising the people who do the jobs that require them.

Deindustrialisation is a big part of the story. In 1976, Goodhart writes, there were 45,000 steelworkers and 4,000 students in Sheffield. In 2017, 20 years after Tony Blair made a mantra of “education, education, education”, there were 5,000 steelworkers and 60,000 students.

One of the results of this profound cultural shift has been a stagnation in pay and a demoralising loss of status for jobs not deemed to be part of the graduate “knowledge economy”. The hourly pay of bus and coach drivers has risen by just 22% since 1975, compared with a 111% rise for advertising and public relations managers. 

The book is a remarkably easy read – with extensive quotations from (and references to) other books (not unlike the style of this blog!) – although I did find my eyes glazing over at the excessive references to statistical trends and percentages.  

Key Points (for this reader)

1. The chapter on the history and significance of the Intelligence Quotient is not as thorough or as useful as it might be – which is strange given that this is the basis of his critique. 

2. The chapter on “Whatever happened to Heart?” is only 30 pages long and devoted mainly to nursing and the social care of the elderly but makes no mention of the Dutch model for neighbourhood care – started by Buurtzorg a few years back which, for the past few years, has been inspiring people everywhere. This is a worker cooperative model… which, quite rightly, figures as one of the inspiring case-studies in Frederic Laloux’s “Reinventing Organisations”. Will Davies’ very useful review of the book notes that it is very weak (if not lame) on prescriptions – tending to rely on moral exhortation, pay adjustments and the dishing out of honours. 

Why on earth does he not recognise that cooperatives offer the strongest way to dignity?

3. The following chapter “The Fall of the Knowledge Worker” is even shorter (20 pages) and records an interesting interview with Andy Haldane, the Bank of England’s Chief Economist, about the possible effects of automation on “the future role of humans” (!!). For Haldane these seem to consists of 3 Cs – Creativity, Craft and Caring. 

- First the cognitive skills requiring creativity and intuition.

- The second are skills of “bespoke design” – the market niches which require craft skills – be it in art, foodstuffs or textiles.

- “tasks requiring emotional intelligence (sympathy and empathy, relationship-building and negotiation skills, resilience and character) rather than cognitive intelligence”

4. The final chapter “Cognitive Diversity and the Future of Everything” is perhaps the most interesting since it relates to some of the posts of this year about how “outsiders” with “peripheral vision” who straddle different worlds produce the most insightful perspectives – except that it uses the concept of “cognitive diversity” and of “collective intelligence”. This takes me back to my consultancy days, when I used Belbin’s team roles and Harrison and Bramson’s The Art of Thinking to help my staff understand that there was no ideal way of operating in a team – there are distinctive roles or ways of thinking and the trick is to use them effectively…. 

5. I am a great believer in the concept of the “golden medium” – ie balance between opposing forces. And this is how the book ends – with the argument that what is needed is a better balance between head, hand and heart.

Further references

https://www.manhattan-institute.org/life-after-meritocracy

http://www.erstestiftung.org/en/the-three-hs-and-the-achievement-society/

https://unherd.com/2020/07/why-universities-had-to-be-challenged/

https://www.chronicle.com/article/the-insufferable-hubris-of-the-well-credentialed?cid2=gen_login_refresh&cid=gen_sign_in

https://thenextrecession.wordpress.com/2020/10/04/work-or-toil-in-the-pandemic/