Thursday, September 23, 2010

What to believe

The internet and other modern media certainly give us a lot of information. Google and Wikipedia are wonderful. We now have a massively enhanced choice of outlet for our news and knowledge churning out material at phenomenal speed.

When all this started we could be forgiven for thinking that confusion could be a thing of the past. But the reality has been the opposite. More hasn’t just meant better, it has also meant ambiguity, bias, misinformation, contradiction.

What can we do?

First, look for bias, and understand that it comes in all shapes and sizes. Don’t believe a word you read in the Daily Mail (though why you would want to read a word in the Daily Mail anyway rather escapes me). Even a quality newspaper usually has an axe to grind, even if it as small as wanting a story to be interesting. The same goes for TV news, though every time I visit the USA I see how blessed relatively we are with the BBC. An interview will always express what the interviewee wants us to conclude. A history book is written by an author, with a viewpoint. Companies always have a point of view. A good starting point is always to ask yourself a sceptical question: what bias might this source bring?

Less obvious, remember that bias begins at home, with ourselves. We tend to believe what we want to believe and to disregard what doesn’t fit our world view. We trust some sources implicitly. We always have assumptions in our heads, and we look for data to support those assumptions and tend to miss data which would challenge them. Challenge those assumptions, again and again. Actively look out for surprises, for data which does not fit or comes from a new angle.

Next, wherever you have interest, see for yourself, dig more deeply, ask some others. Maybe the Dom Joly approach of visiting North Korea is a bit extreme, but one clear advantage of the age of communication is that finding out more has never been easier. Google comes into its own here. How wonderful to be able to read up to date reviews of restaurants or films, for example, each one biased but made more reliable by their quantity. I gave up trusting book or movie reviews in newspapers long ago. In digging, it is important to seek out contrary views, otherwise there is a risk of simply multiplying your own bias. As with so many things in life, diversity is a wonderful thing.

Next, value numbers and charts over sound bites and value trends over individual data points. In this regard, The Economist has no peer, at least in my (biased?) opinion. The charts in there are generally imaginative, clear and objective. There may still be some bias in there, but the chart itself usually helps. Other strengths of The Economist are its willingness to go back and admit where it was wrong and its tendencies to express pros and cons of an argument. Of course, it has its overriding philosophy and may be a little blind to things which don’t fit that.

Finally, chill. We could go mad with this, and many of us get stridently upset about misinformation. It is a fact of the modern world, and we just need to understand it and take the plusses of the communication age rather than get more and more angry. We don’t need to read the Daily Mail ourselves, and presumably those that choose to read it get something from it. If they care to express arguments from The Daily Mail to me, I can choose to ignore them, at least after giving them some consideration.

An example which illustrates many of these points is the continuing debate about the congestion charge in London. There is bias everywhere in the debate, with most contributors plugging an agenda. Personally I find the motorist lobby one of the worst persistent sinners in the dark art of misinformation, but others are biased the other way. I accept my own bias in favour of road pricing, based on logic over emotion and some anti-car feelings. I may even like the policy because I like Ken Livingstone (and others may have the opposite bias). That is a common and dangerous bias, to judge the source rather than their argument.

I can dig further by asking people who have lived in London before and after the charge, not just taxi drivers or shop keepers. I can be more imaginative, for example using my own experience as a driver in Oslo some years back, and less happy recent driving experiences in provincial Britain or Rome. But best of all I can look for statistics. Some years back I read the headline “Congestion charge fails to reverse traffic chaos” or similar. Deep in the article you could see that traffic had grown by say 10% per year in the years before the charge, then had been stable or declining slightly for a couple of years before resuming growth. It is entirely reasonable to conclude that congestion would be worse without the charge, even if the headline was factually correct. That is another common bias – a correct but incomplete or misleading conclusion.

We are blessed to live in the age of communication. It comes at a cost that we can be confused, overwhelmed or bamboozled, deliberately or otherwise. If we are smart and keep our brains active, we can take the plus and minimise the minus.

Thursday, September 16, 2010

What can we believe?

One of the best lessons I received from my English private school in the 1970’s was one they never meant to teach me.

They organised occasional lectures for us. I can’t remember many of them at all. But one sticks in the memory even now, from a posh, arrogant bloke in a military uniform.

He had very fancy slides and maps, at least for the time. And his subject was the threat of the then Soviet Union. Seemingly, things were bad. His maps and charts all had menacing looking Russian tanks and missiles all over them, pointing mainly at Eastbourne (where I happened to be). And the defence force seemed to have deteriorated markedly from the halcyon days of Dad’s Army.

By the end of the talk, I was half expecting the Russians to just march in through the back door of the building and take over. Nothing seemed to be stopping them.

One of the themes of the talk was that Russians were evil. I didn’t really understand what sort of evil, that involved long words. But they were certainly evil. All of them. Every single Russian was sitting at that moment in their kitchen or living room, or on their tank more likely, filled with thoughts of hate for us, well for me actually.

But I was a child with a subversive streak even then, and I was smart enough to think a bit more deeply. Of course Russians weren’t all evil. They were people. According to the BBC, they had enough trouble putting foods in their mouths. And no doubt they were more concerned with who was chatting up their daughters, or where to get a lottery ticket or how to avoid the boss. Thoughts of invading Eastbourne probably didn’t get much of a look in, despite what this posh bloke would have us believe. His talk merely made me suspicious. Later in life I met some real Russians, and my suspicions were confirmed and my sceptic nature became more engrained.

Another key moment of truth for me came in my twenties. I’d started working for Shell and each day walked twice past the Festival Hall on the South Bank in London. Ken Livingstone was in charge at the old GLC at the time and had cheekily installed a statue of a black man along the walkway. I had never heard of him, but read that he was something to do with the anti apartheid struggle in South Africa.

The media and establishment gave little attention to the statue nor indeed to the wider South African issues. The official line seemed to be that the regime there might not be all that savoury but it was a hard place to govern, the locals weren’t really up to it, the black leaders were aggressive terrorist types and anyway we had some interests there via companies and expats. All too difficult, and the best we could do would be make occasional diplomatic noises to try to change the regime slowly.

I didn’t give this much thought, until I later walked past the same statue in the 1990’s and read that his name was Nelson Mandela, by then a hero even in the UK. While Ken Livingstone is hardly everyone’s cup of tea, especially later on his career, he had been ahead of the curve on that one. By the way, he also drove through lower tube and bus fares and later the congestion charge, visionary, courageous and correct policies, so he can argue that he has created a pretty strong legacy.
Anyway, I was able by luck to connect back to my own apathy from the 1980’s and reflect on different versions of truth and also the potential untrustworthiness of establishment sources we tend to take on trust without challenge.

It is a struggle all the time to know what to believe. Truth is elusive and usually nuanced. Just think of your own family or even your recent relationship history, and consider how even nearby things can be distorted or subject to different viewpoints. Multiply in the dimensions of complexity, scale and time, and especially context and bias, and we should all become very sceptical indeed.

Venezuela is a current case in point. In the last month I have read articles about Venezuela and Chavez in both The Economist and The Guardian Weekly. The former was utterly damning, the latter lauding. Each quoted statistics, the former of inflation and growth, the latter of poverty reduction. It is clear that there is some establishment bias at work – the failed CIA supported coup in the early days of Chavez was the clearest example of media censorship I can ever recall – yet The Economist is generally pretty sound. No doubt, as usual, the truth, such as it is, lies somewhere in the middle.

I like the approach of British comedian Dom Joly, who has just published a book, The Dark Tourist, describing his journeys to unlikely destinations such as North Korea or Iran’s ski slopes. Maybe he can go to Venezuela for us. Even then, of course he has his own bias and what he will see can only ever be a tiny fraction of what is going on.

As an example of how complexity, time and bias can overtake a story, take Christ’s Passion. I was lucky enough to be in Oberammergau last weekend for the famous ten-yearly play there. The play had some modern takes, for example on the role of Mary Magdalene and the Jews. It also did a good job of leaving room for doubt in interpretation. The roles and attitudes of Caiaphas, Pilate or Judas can all be interpreted in many ways. I usually go with a messy reading that most people are just trying to do a job but are often misinformed and fairly incompetent. History has seen far more cock up than conspiracy. Then there is interpreting Jesus himself. Wow.

After creating a case to make us all paralysed by scepticism, next week I’ll try to find a way forward. In the information age, this problem is only getting worse. Sure, Wiki and the internet give us so much information, but that only adds to the potential for mistakes. How can we live sane, informed lives in this environment?

Tuesday, September 7, 2010

Starting a Day

A combination of two circumstances led me to some learning points in recent days.

First, I had a cold. Most of us get them, and I’m lucky that for me it only comes once or twice per year. It is not so horrible, but while it lasts it is not much fun either. This one followed my normal pattern. Just a sore throat on Wednesday preceded system meltdown on Thursday and Friday. No more headache or nausea after that, but several more days of coughing and sneezing.

Then, I had a singing weekend, in Dordrecht. What a wonderful great Church, with a superb organ and outstanding acoustic. I do this sort of course quite often, where over two days or a week a group pay for a top conductor to guide us to prepare and perform some music. In this case thirty five of us performed choral evensong in Dordrecht on Sunday night, and a splendidly English affair it was too. Well, not thirty five of us, but thirty four and a half, with me as the half. For of course colds and singing do not mix.

So, this combination led to me working hard on Saturday while not fit to do so, and then having to get up early on Sunday morning. At that waking is what led to the insights.

The first sensations on Sunday morning were all positive. I awoke to a warm satisfaction of having slept deeply, a serene feeling after a few days of seriously disrupted sleep on account of my screwed up respiration. This warm feeling became sweeter still from the sensation of Faure on the alarm system and the realisation that I had once again woken up beside the woman I love.

But that is the end of the good news, as my body then followed the brain in regaining consciousness. My big toes reminded me that my shoes are a little too small. Both my calves informed me that the slightest movement of either leg would be punished by cramp. The feather cruelly tickling my nether regions was still there, yet it would take a whole army of feathers to arouse anything in the genitals. Last night’s rushed supper reminded me that it was still sitting in my intestine and would rather not be. Shoulders and neck screamed for unforthcoming massages. My head throbbed in retribution for the alcohol poured generously into last night’s hot lemon cocktail. And someone seemed to have been applying superglue to my eyes overnight.

Then the cylinders and pistons of the damaged breathing system had their say. They demanded I cough, and cough again, yet it would be another day before coughing produced any result other than a counter productive one. Little singing pains persisted in both ears and dryness in the mouth demanding immediate application of several packets of Strepsils. A nose fit for a war zone. And pure pain in the throat, making we wonder if I might ever sing again.

Somehow, with eternal thanks to chemists everywhere and the precious but threatened resource of honeybees, I made it to the Dordrecht train. Forty minutes sitting in a seat facing a bright sun worked further on everything, eventually even the superglue. By the time the singing started, I was fit for anything…except singing.

So what is the point of all this self pity? I’m not looking for sympathy – I am blessed indeed. I’m also not trying to gloat, for example by pointing out that I was able to sleep until eleven this morning to complete a recovery. Not gloating, I promise.

No, my insight is that this is how I used to wake up most of the days of my life. The disaster of the breathing system was admittedly not usually so bad. But the symptoms of excessive tiredness and wear were, day after day. It took a special set of circumstances to recreate once what used to be normal. And when it was normal, it was not remarkable, so I didn’t focus on it or consider it or do anything about it.

How many of us start most days with such an extended groan from under our bonnet? My hypothesis is that it is most of us, to some degree or other. Younger people less of course and congratulations to all you diet and fitness fanatics, take your bow now. But then I suspect many people work longer hours than I ever used to, and also have further disadvantages, for example young kids, chronic illnesses or some dependency on drugs, nicotine or alcohol.

What are we feeding by subjecting ourselves to this, what are we achieving in the plus column to counteract this glaring minus? I can only think of three answers. Our bank accounts, our egos and the denial of our fears.

Bank accounts need to be fed, I acknowledge. That is how the world works, at least for now. But do they need to be fed quite so greedily, or quite so relentlessly?

Egos only need to be fed if we make it that way. Feeding an ego is just like feeding an addiction. It starts with a somewhat pleasurable kick, but it has a cost, and over time the benefits only diminish while the costs escalate.

Feeding denial is ultimately destructive, yet we all do it, all the time. But staying on the same treadmills, we manage to avoid really considering what the alternatives might be, thereby avoiding facing up to what would need to be done in order to reach those alternatives. Thinking about our own needs and beliefs and choices can be the scariest thing we ever face, so most of us will do all we can to defer and avoid such thoughts. What strange creatures we are indeed.

So we feed one necessary but overrated thing and two positively destructive ones, at the cost of allowing ourselves physical discomfort and deterioration, day after day after day. I did this for years. It is only by escaping it and then having the good fortune to experience it again for a day that I can start to appreciate the folly involved. I have never been so grateful for a cold.

Do you want to escape? I suggest starting with challenging denial and ego.