The wisdom of the crowdsource

As a politics student I never much liked the term ‘political science’.  It seemed to imply that those of us doing the studying could somehow put our own prejudices aside, achieve a pure state of dispassionate reason, and study other people as if they were rats in a laboratory, rather than people just like us.  In the same way, the problem with ‘evidence-based policymaking’, which is one of the buzzwords of the day, is that the certainty of the sciences can never be fully applied to the social sciences, because it’s never possible to run fully controlled experiments on people’s lives.  Correlation, in trying to analyse the effect of one influence among millions on how people act, can rarely prove causation: at best it can give us an educated guess, which falls some way short of pure science.

Economics is a good example: the mountains of data it has accumulated still refuse to point to a clear conclusion.  The more the discipline progresses, the more disagreement there is between the Keynesians and the Austrians, both of whom can torture the statistics as they see fit and produce apparently convincing arguments.  The more I read from either, the less clear I am about which side is right: in theory the Keynesian position is appealing, but in practice the amount of responsibility it places in relatively few hands is a problem too.  Neither Ed Balls nor George Osborne really has a clue what will happen if we fiscally retrench, stimulate demand, put up interest rates, print more money, or whatever.  Each can quote roughly appropriate and superficially attractive examples from history to support his case, but neither can possibly quote examples that cover all of the variables that are in play in what is today an enormous, unique and uncontrollable experiment.  Beyond the very short term, our economic outlook is simply unknowable: unfortunately, politicians and commentators are respected for making confident predictions (even if those turn out to be completely wrong) so you won’t catch many of them admitting it.  Science and social science are, as it were, overlapping magisteria: the bigger and more complicated the political question, the weaker our ability to deal with it by scientific method.

The phrase ‘evidence-based’, then, when applied to politics, where there is rarely a definitively correct answer, is one we ought to be wary of.  Indeed, since governments so often debase evidence-based policymaking into policy-based evidencemaking, we have to be even more sceptical than usual when dealing with any politician, journalist or public figure who purports to be operating on the basis of ‘the evidence’.  Politics is about how we run society, what we do with our and other people’s money, how we share our time on earth with other people, how we order the fundamentals of our lives.  Unlike crunching data from radio telescopes or splicing plant genomes, these are emotive issues, and it is impossible to be fully dispassionate and to disregard our own experiences of our lives and of society.  Anyone who claims to be able to do so should warrant our suspicion.  Anyone who can genuinely do so is a sociopath.

If we are being honest, we all — scientists and academics included — at some point or other fall into one of the following:

1. anchoring trap — giving disproportionate weight to the first item of information received
2. status quo trap — bias towards maintaining the current situation
3. sunk cost trap — making decisions which justify previous decisions, even if these are no longer sound
4. confirming-evidence trap — concentrating on finding evidence to support a favoured option
5. framing trap — posing the question for the decision in a particular way
6. overconfidence trap — overestimating the accuracy of estimates and forecasts
7. prudence trap — being over-cautious
8. recallability trap — giving more weight to recent and dramatic events

(Hammond, J S, Keeney, R L and Raiffa, H (1998), ‘The Hidden Traps in Decision Making’, Harvard Business Review, September-October)

As ever, Orwell is ahead of me:

Implied in the demand for more scientific education is the claim that if one has been scientifically trained one’s approach to all subjects will be more intelligent than if one had had no such training.  A scientist’s political opinions, it is assumed, his opinions on sociological questions, on morals, on philosophy, perhaps even on the arts, will be more valuable than those of a layman.  The world, in other words, would be a better place if the scientists were in control of it. … The fact is that a mere training in one or more of the exact sciences, even combined with very high gifts, is no guarantee of a humane or sceptical outlook.  The physicists of half a dozen great nations, all feverishly and secretly working away at the atomic bomb, are a demonstration of this.

Go and read his short piece in full, then come back to this one.

The problem is at its most acute when, as with the Keynes/Hayek question, an issue presents us with binary choices.  The drugs debate is a good example, and one where the liberal side (including the BBC’s Mark Easton, who no longer makes any pretence of impartial journalism) claims to have monopolised the evidence, citing Britain before prohibition, contemporary Portugal, and elsewhere as examples of successful legalisation and harm reduction.  Many of these arguments are convincing, but then so is the argument that giving visitors boarding passes that read WARNING: MANDATORY DEATH SENTENCE FOR DRUG TRAFFICKERS UNDER SINGAPORE LAW, and carrying out the threat, has resulted in a low drugs problem there.  Though they are clearly incompatible, essentially I agree with both sides: either extreme would be an improvement on the status quo.  But there is evidence on both sides, and neither side can conclusively demonstrate that their position, when applied to all of the other circumstances that are unique to our socio-economic situation, will work as they intend it to (for example, on the one hand the relaxation of late-night licensing laws failed to turn us into a continental-style cafe culture and merely extended the existing problems later into the night in the areas that adopted it, but on the other we had the legality and availability of ‘legal highs’ like mephedrone to thank for a drop in the use of other, nastier drugs like cocaine — at least until we made them illegal highs).  Both sides are advocating a leap in the dark, to a greater or lesser extent: but both are on firm ground to say that it is impossible to call the compromise that is our present policy a success.  What we ideally need is a global referendum in which the status quo is not on the ballot.  Much the same applies to the debate on crime and penal policy, where again the government seem to be advocating a mixed policy of community-based rehabilitation rather than short-term imprisonment, but without the vast amounts of money that such a policy would clearly need to have any chance of working — this seems to be the same sort of compromise as we have in drugs policy, and seems to me to have about as much chance of working.

The best way forward for politics and political science is to try to apply the methods of the information revolution: by acknowledging the limitations of social science as a discipline and the limitations on how much any individual or small group of people can know, by admitting the role of individual and social experiences in shaping people’s opinions, and by aggregating as much information as possible when formulating policy.  Policy should operate in the free market of ideas as price does in the free market of exchange: in the modern parlance, we should crowdsource it.  This is the opposite approach to fascism and communism (both of which, Orwell tells us, were supported by plenty of scientists and academics in their time), which both ultimately failed because too many decisions were being made by too few people with too little information.  The representative democracy we currently have — whereby we are ruled by an elite making what it thinks are the best decisions on our behalf, with a degree of our consent — is half way between the two positions.  The ultimate, revolutionary, goal — in synthesis with the revolution in access to information, which inclines me towards the rational optimist camp — is for as many people as possible to have as much of a say in as many decisions that affect them as possible.  Direct democracy may be some way off yet, but it is the direction in which we should be agitating to travel.

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Where to draw the line when squaring the circle of triangulation

Occasionally on this blog I’m a little behind the news agenda: usually that’s just because life gets in the way, but sometimes I like to have a good think about some issue before I write about it.  This is not a problem that burdens 99% of other bloggers.

The point is relevant to today’s post.  I’ve been thinking about Switzerland’s referendum vote to ban miniature cigarettes minarets.  I suspect I’d've sheepishly voted in favour of the ban, not for any particularly good reason but from a visceral fear of the country turning into relativistic Britain or the ghettoised Netherlands.  Perhaps that shows that the ‘no’ campaign were right to call the whole thing dangerous populism; but the vote should stand, and Swiss democracy will be weakened if, as now seems possible, the vote is overturned by the Swiss supreme court or even the European Court of Human Rights.

Our own representative democracy has failed in many ways: turnout is collapsing, the professional elite who conduct politics seem an ever more remote and self-serving class, and voters are losing patience with mainstream centre-left and centre-right parties and looking at more radical options.  Direct democracy, Swiss-style, therefore seems very appealing.  On the right, Dan Hannan and chums suggest a set of US-style reforms (elected sheriffs, recall elections, open primaries) that would make our democracy more direct, and so re-engage individual and community participation.  On the other side, many liberals and leftists think a more proportional voting system is the answer.  All very nice ideas, though in the former case our love of good public services and hatred of paying for them might well lead to a fiscal collapse of Californian and not merely British proportions, and in the latter case party lists would surely produce even more robotic, docile MPs.  (And the House of Lords, for all its logical incoherence, has stood up to the executive on freedoms of speech, detention without trial and ID cards in a way the Commons hasn’t: so liberals and social democrats should be careful what they wish for.)  Also, look at the direct relationship in the US between local control over electoral boundaries and partisanship and corruption: gerrymandered constituencies become unloseably safe seats, candidates are forced into extreme positions to win primaries, and – like Labour in Glasgow – have no incentive to govern well after their inevitable victory.

So: the Athenian ideal is of an informed citizenry consulted on as many matters of governance as often as possible.  Perhaps the Swiss are nearest this ideal: the US certainly isn’t.  At the moment Britain does worse on the second criterion: but I worry that a US-style relaxation of our broadcasting rules (as seems to be universally supported on the right, if the most popular blogs are anything to go by) would permanently destroy the possibility of the first.  The problem is that most people choose to expose themselves only to the ideas they already agree with, and consume media accordingly: be that Fox News or the Morning Star.  The man on the Clapham omnibus – damn him – prefers to have his opinions massaged than challenged.

What, then, would stop us ending up like the US, where the media has led society to a partisanship of 1860s proportions?  And how uninformed must a society be to elevate buffoons like Glenn Beck and Michael Moore to the status of revered commentators?  The BBC, for all its haters – and it’s to their credit that their news output manages to upset Israeli and Palestinian supporters in equal measure – seems to be one of the few sources of social cohesion left in Britain: and every time it chases ITV (or the increasingly degraded Channel 4) in the ratings race to the bottom, and every time we read that presenters are paid seven-figure salaries, and that hundreds of dispensable middle managers are paid six-figure salaries, its moral and cultural authority weakens a little more.  OK, Sky News is just as capable as News 24 of putting a competent reporter in Westminster to deliver the gossip.  But, as Peter Hitchens repeatedly points out, the BBC is still the only media outlet that bothers to produce challenging, high-quality broadcasting (another strand to his thesis, which perfectly sums up my own political philosophy, that selfish libertarianism is “profoundly unconservative”).  The wonderful serendipity of shows like The Forum on the World Service would, I suspect, never materialise in a purely commercial system.  The most recent episode of that show flits between forest fire management, the efficiencies of global food production, and the relevance of Dadaism.  In an increasingly niche market there might be money to be made in equally deep broadcasting, but not in equally broad.

A little cultural elitism, then, is necessary to stop democracy – which in our case could already become more direct with a referendum on whether to leave the undemocratic European Union – collapsing into mob rule and atomisation.  Would anyone, even fans of capital punishment, be happy with the idea of Simon Cowell deciding such matters in his bearpit?  It’s no surprise that his proposal is to physically divide the audience into two opposing factions, like the Greens and the Blues in the Colloseum, with no possible room for nuance or consensus.  Why not just go the whole hog and literally show bear baiting live on Sky One: that would be a logical consequence of Randy libertarianism too.  Restrained broadcasting, like independently set constituency boundaries, is therefore another example of the necessity of political vaccination: in the same way that a tougher line on debt a few years ago could have prevented our economic collapse, a mild state religion is the best defence against creepy evangelism, and a tougher line on immigration would have prevented the election of fascist representatives today.  Sorry if this doesn’t fit easily into predictable left / right pigeonholes – but you’re welcome to read that on 99% of other blogs.

P.S.  Peter Hitchens is worth quoting in full -

Those who call for the abolition of the BBC show a strange faith in the ability or willingness of commercial broadcasters to attempt serious reporting of news, high culture or religious broadcasting. Without the BBC such things will vanish from the airwaves. They also seem to assume – for reasons I don’t grasp – that privately owned monopoly or oligopoly broadcasters will be inclined to support conservative positions. There is no evidence of this. The three main (commercial) networks in the USA are relentlessly liberal, and Fox is neo-conservative, that is to say uninterested in the great moral and cultural issues. Of course if you want broadcasting to be a howling wilderness, then abolishing the BBC will certainly produce that result. But the BBC will in any case defeat such a campaign, precisely because it is true that commercial broadcasters can’t and won’t produce broadcasting of the quality of Radios Three and Four, or even that of the old (not current) BBC2 or the better bits of (publicly subsidised) Channel Four. Reform, such as I propose, is both more credible and more likely to succeed in the long run. Of course, you may say that it is unlikely (it is) or impossible (it may be) but these are counsels of despair, and if you really believe there is no hope then why bother to enter the debate? Better to cultivate your garden and seek shelter from the coming storm.

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White faces, brown shirts, black hearts

Nick Griffin‘s about to appear on Question Time: I can contain myself no longer.  For once I find myself in agreement with New Labour ministers over their Tory and Liberal counterparts.  Alan Johnson argued on the same programme last week that although the BNP’s first appearance might concentrate on their inherent racism, future appearances – and the BBC could hardly say the party were entitled to appear once but never again – would focus on the quotidian: health, education, etc, thus legitimising their input into debates about politics, rather than meta-debates about political parties.  Secondly, Peter Hain – who has some form in fighting racists – has pointed out that the BNP have effectively been ruled an illegal party because of their racially restrictive membership rules.  I think it an error to make them change these (though I can’t imagine many non-whites will be queueing up to join) as it makes it easier for them to disguise their true nature.  The BBC clearly shouldn’t give a platform to an illegal party; but I don’t see why they should be under any obligation to give a platform to every minor legal one either.  If the BBC wants to continue to be seen as setting the tone for political and cultural debates, and as exercising editorial judgements in the best interests of society – a notion already under threat in the new media free market of good and bad ideas – they shouldn’t let the BNP broadcast on any of their frequencies.  If anything they should make Jonathan Ross and Russell Brand leave rude messages on Griffin’s answering machine: mock the devil and he will flee from thee.

We should all hate everything about the BNP: the constitutional racism, the simplistic dilution that sorts complex genetic histories into “indigenous Caucasians” and everyone else, the appropriation of the symbols of patriotism, Griffin’s support for American white supremacists, and their anti-history poison about the Holocaust.  But it goes deeper than that: the BNP frighten me because they force me to think about what I would do if I ever found myself living under a fascist regime.

The dreadful truth is that, had Hitler won the war and all his plans come to fruition, life would have gone on much as it had before for the fortunate mass of white people who kept their heads down: a bit more squalid and a lot more stifling, but there’s no reason to believe there would have been a general terrorising of the majority of the population.  Who hasn’t wondered how he would have behaved in, say, occupied France – or how our grandparents (a useful proxy) would have behaved if Hitler had occupied Britain?  With a few noble and a few ignoble exceptions, most of us would have wrestled nightly with the dilemma of collaborating for a quiet but morally atrocious life, or risking everything to stand up to evil.  We can hope that we would have found some surprising well of courage; but millions of “good” people faced this dilemma, and not all passed the test.  Man is absolutely the same everywhere, whatever the BNP might say: weak, generally not ideological, but easily led astray by charismatic leaders with simple, seductive answers to complex questions.  I was seduced by Blair’s lies about the Iraq war.  Hitler was no Blair: he was an idealist in the German romantic tradition who believed what he preached and was willing to destroy the world to build his utopia.  Beware, then, of idealists.

The most chilling truth exposed by the second world war was that millions of ordinary men – who loved their families, went to church on Sundays and cared about their local communities – knowingly shuffled the papers and ticked the boxes that made the Holocaust possible.  Followers of the group selection school of evolutionary biology might argue that racism is an evolved social mechanism: historic communities who weren’t suspicious enough of outsiders were often replaced by them.  Taking a similar line to its logical conclusion, even genocide needn’t be considered strictly irrational – in the sense of being against the interests of the perpetrators – which perhaps shows the limits of applying relativistic Western secular philosophy to developing societies: witness the accounts of Rwandan Hutu women who bullied their reluctant husbands into murdering their neighbours to get their hands on their petty property before someone else did.  Keeping up with the Tutsis very quickly turned into stringing up the Tutsis.  In hard times, with attractive demagogues on standby to fill the vacuum that government and the rule of law should fill, man’s fallen nature quickly comes to the surface.  Everyone who is alive today is alive because our ancestors used violence against other individuals and other tribes.

I blame the mainstream right and left for failing to control immigration and crime, for failing to challenge the sorry worldview of the underclass, for ceding power to Europe and for allowing the politicisation of multiculturalism to wreck the worthy idea of diversity: that’s why we now have elected fascist representatives, not because we’ve become more racist as a society.  I don’t think we have – but if anything we should be pleasantly surprised that more conservatives, dismayed by the willful decline of Britain under the liberal establishment, haven’t turned to simplistic solutions (thankfully the BNP’s policies on issues other than race are an incoherent mix of economic populism and republicanism).  After 7/7 and the earlier race riots, it briefly became acceptable to say that “Enoch Powell was right”; one heard whispers among previously polite society that perhaps the BNP had a point (of course, the Islamic extremists are the mirror image of the BNP).  Thankfully it still takes quite a leap to go from having occasional reflexive doubts like these to supporting “voluntary” repatriations of people who came here to work and seek a better life, as the BNP propose.  It’s precisely because immigration is the most permanent of all policies – as Powell knew – that it’s such a difficult issue.

Thankfully even a handwringing Cassandra like me can see that this is all absurdly hypothetical: two MEPs and a handful of useless councillors doesn’t constitute much of a political threat; their winning any sort of real power is inconceivable, and even if it somehow became likely it would be easy enough these days to leave the country.  But they’re a disturbing bunch not just because we would hate the sort of society they would bring about if they ever held power – that goes without saying – but because they make us confront the dark ancestral memories that lie dormant in our own apparently healthy hearts.

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It may be that the Gulf will wash us down

I promise not to keep pillaging lines from Ulysses every week, but that one seemed apt for this week’s topic (cities of men and manners, climates, councils, governments…).  Like Stephen Hawking with his F5 key, I was refreshed to read this piece by tree-hugging righty Zac Goldsmith, a rich environmentalist who aims to become a Tory MP.  Unlike many of his fellow parliamentary candidates – and you can read this sentence both ways – I hope he succeeds.  Here’s a Conservative interested in something beyond the usual diet of God, guns and gays, defying the Young Turks who – taking their cue from the American rabid right – think climate change was dreamed up by the BBC and the Guardian.  Cameron will need such allies.  To be a successful prime minister he’ll have to upset both the Mr Creosote-esque public sector and his hard-a-starboard parliamentary party.  From what he says (and here I agree with the rightwing bloggers) he seems more in the one nation Macmillan or Disraeli tradition than the Thatcherite one: but the scale of the challenges of climate change, public debt, shoddy education, the benefits culture and the broken society require more than a bit of benign paternalism.  On the last of these, one of my great gripes with today’s liberal left is the extent to which they downplay people’s legitimate fears about crime and antisocial behaviour, usually from the relative safety of middle class neighbourhoods: even if crime actually was as low as the government claims – and what idiot would believe the crime figures, any more than the unemployment figures? – perception, in building a cohesive society not ruled by fear and atomisation, is everything.  So I find myself nodding in agreement at the noises he makes on these matters; less so on the BBC and the rules surrounding impartial broadcasting: if the BBC has become too Guardian-reading, which is the standard charge, better to nudge it back towards Lord Reith’s founding values.  But I’ll credit Cameron with enough sense to know that if he allowed Sky News to become Fox News it would cause more problems for him than anyone else; so I suspect these nods and winks are a ploy to keep Murdochs junior and senior onside till the election.  Nonetheless, it would be folly on my part to bet against the proposition that six months into a Cameron government I’ll be posting scathing blogs about him, though I can’t conceive of how he could possibly be worse than Brown or Blair.

To return, as thro’ scudding drifts the rainy Hyades vext the dim sea, to climate change: it’s almost impossible to get an accurate picture of the background science in the mainstream media.  As a layman I therefore follow the precautionary principle.  Here are four possible scenarios:

1.  The scientists (or the overwhelming majority of them) are right; we curb carbon emissions; disaster is averted.
2.  The scientists are right; we don’t curb carbon emissions; disaster!
3.  The scientists are wrong; we curb carbon emissions; environmentalists are left with egg on their faces.
4.  The scientists are wrong; we don’t curb carbon emissions; life goes on.

The ideal scenario is the fourth, but the consequences of the second (I refer you to Monbiot and Kunstler) greatly outweigh those of the third (relatively minor short-term economic disruption), so we ought to work on the basis of the first.  But we aren’t.  Distracted by jawdropping vitriol that painted his rather moderate healthcare plans as socialist death panels, Obama allowed Congress to come up with a predictably pisspoor cap and trade bill: the only debate is whether it’s slightly better or slightly worse than useless.  Certainly it repeats the mistakes of the EU’s, troughing out pork aplenty to pig iron and coal.  Meanwhile the BRICs take the view that they oughtn’t be denied the right to pollute which we enjoyed while we were getting rich.  It all bodes ill for the chances of a meaningful deal at the forthcoming ‘Kyoto 2.0′ in Copenhagen in December.  Much of the green left have already scuppered the response to climate change with irrational opposition to nuclear power, the environmental side effects of which are trivial compared to global warming, but are instinctively optimistic about the potential for governments to solve the problem by enforcing emissions cuts elsewhere.  Being illiberal I have little faith in the ability of John Q. Pubic to change his driving, flying, eating, bathing and reproducing habits, or in our governments to remedy this mess on our behalf.  The cornucopias of clean energy and carboniverous technology might therefore be our last, best hope: as Zac says, best not to stifle these by putting false hope in Obama, Lula, Singh and Hu.

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