Smoking-Bun

I’m still hung up on this expenses scandal here in the UK. Members of the public are still sounding off ad nauseum about their disgust with politics and politicians, and it’s all quite nauseating. Of course this sort of anger in the UK can only stir up angry letters to The Times. “I was so angry I changed my status on Facebook”. We are such a docile breed now as the public.

The trouble with this debate is that a significant percentage of the public seem to be casually suggesting the idea of just tearing up our democracy with the vague notion that we would be better off ’starting again’. Whereas in reality there is no hope for that sort of process.

It’s an idle threat. “You’re never getting chocolate again” is what we say to our kids, both with the full knowledge that it’s a course of action we would never actually have the stomach to carry through.

Imagine we tore it all up or went communist or anarchist, or started some new and independent and highly successful system of self-governance. I guarantee that within five years the US would invade on some humanitarian pretext, if our closer neighbours in Europe hadn’t got there first. Start fucking about with our current system of government and we’d simply be swallowed up by those whom it threatens.

All we really want to do is vent our anger – we want our indignance noted. It’s not very healthy is it. It’s the equivalent of shouting down the phone at some poor dogsbody in India because you’ve been charged extra on your overdraft.

It makes me wonder if I’m just out-of-step with the general public. I have always assumed that politicians are power-hungry and money-hungry wankers – the expenses scandal tells me nothing that I didn’t feel I already knew. Is the public shock faked? I have to wonder. Are the public only shocked because the Telegraph tells them they should be?

Tom Dalyell is an interesting example. He claimed 18,000 pounds expenses to build a bookcase and was eventually given £7800 for the project. String him up? But he was one of the handful of MPs who actually vocally opposed our aggression in the middle-east, and thus one of the handful who blessed British politics with some sort of reasonable alternative in a crucial debate. His agitation may have saved lives. What do his bookcases matter in the face of a genuine political debate?

The biggest irony of the last week comes from some of the suggestions that the Queen exercise her right to dissolve parliament – I’d take a wild guess that the idea that anyone should live like royalty at the expense of the public probably doesn’t disgust the Queen too much.

Are most conspiracy theorists loonies?

It seems normal to think so. That’s why we don’t have newspapers full of the heartfelt opinions of holocaust deniers and people who think the World elite are alien lizards. Instead we choose to read more rational opinions about MMR, weapons of mass destruction and revolutionary underpants embedded with bio-crystals that make cellulite vanish!

I don’t think journalists in the media have this quite right – they may think that conspiracy theories are irrational and plain wrong, but somehow they shrink from their duty to publicly reflect this. If you hold a heartfelt belief, and you find that the rest of the world seems to ignore it, you wonder why it is being ignored. On internet sites conspiracy theories are flourishing, and the ‘conspiracy of silence’ in the mainstream media only encourages them that they are right.

Do not make the mistake of thinking that conspiracy theories are unconvincing. If you watch the right video on the internet, or read the right article, you can be convinced of virtually anything. Read the heartfelt testimony of those who say they felt explosions in the twin towers before the planes ever hit, or the woman who swears she was sexually abused as a child by world leaders. You have to deny these people’s very essence to dispute them. Read the testimonies of Jesus’s disciples and tell me that you deny their essential belief – it’s not always easy.

It has happened with climate change. As the consensus has grown that climate change is man-made, the minority who disagree have found themselves given less and less of a platform in the media, and rather than just accept that more scientists believe one explanation over another, the idea that there is a conspiracy at work has grown. It’s a siege mentality. Whatever you believe in, you would like to see it given more column inches. It is this factor, over and above any of the scientific evidence, that has created this political divide.

As the 9/11 conspiracies grew virally on the internet, they found themselves left virtually unchallenged in the media. Soon a small army of internet investigators were uncovering thousands of anomalies in the 9/11 events that the media never bothered to address on their behalf. Left to their own devices, and with no legitimate form of redress, they have flourished. The force of the campaign promoting the ‘inside job’ theories of 9/11 has simply been left unchecked for far too long, creating a mountain of mistaken beliefs that it will take decades or even centuries to undo.

The Kennedy assassination conspiracies are a long-term example of this – the controversy around this event will never ever die. Millions of enthusiastic man-hours have been sunk into this conspiracy theory. Oliver Stone made a movie about it. It is so embedded in popular culture that you can be almost guaranteed that one of your friends will believe that Lee Harvey Oswald could never have killed Kennedy. And I think now that the Princess Diana theories will exist as long as time itself.

How did it come to this?

I think part of this comes down to the mistaken belief that conspiracy theorists are loonies. That they are slightly loopy eccentrics who, while fairly harmless, are not really to be engaged – leave them to their imaginary worlds. The idea that if you talk about them, it only encourages them and gives them unwelcome publicity.

In my dealings with conspiracy theorists, I have found some people I would describe as loonies. But by far the majority are people who simply have got the issues muddled in their heads, and have been left to their own devices to interpret them. Most are honest and some spend a lot of time on their campaigning activities, man-hours that could have been spent on something more progressive and less… wrong!

I blame the media as an entity. Or the establishment in general. For always peddling the middle line, and ignoring the polarised ends of every issue. For dismissing certain researchers as crackpots but refusing to tackle the actual content of their debate. For thinking that if you ignore something it will just go away – that doesn’t work.

There will always be a level of organised madness in life – I see it as much in the establishment as I do in the outliers who believe in lizards, or so-called religious cults who believe in the second coming of Elvis, or those who peddle what is essentially water as a progressive alternative medicine. Instead the establishment tell us that Jade Goody is some sort of saint, that the values of capitalist society are so superior to the alternatives, that the soap opera of political skullduggery is more important than the issues they are employed to address.

Please point out to me who the loonies are, because I could never work it out.

Have you ever laid awake at night worrying about the expenses claims of politicians?

Apparently everyone in England has, because there is such a feeding frenzy about the fact that some politicians have been fiddling theirs. If you’re a journalist this sort of thing is gold-dust – politicians on the fiddle, an opportunity to whip up a sense of corruption at the heart of British politics, and the opportunity to feign disgust on behalf of the electorate.

The latest casualty is the speaker of the commons Michael Martin (pictured above) – the bloke who basically chides MPs when they speak out of turn in the chamber, and is the ultimate icon for political pomposity. They’ll hire a new one, and nothing will actually change. If a politician goes to prison for fraud over this, a new one will come up in their place.

If you’ve been laying awake at night worrying about the expenses claims of the speaker of the house of commons there can only be three reasons. You are Michael Martin. Or you are his wife. Or you are clinically insane.

I agree with Stephen Fry, who has courted controversy by going against the journalistic line…

“Let’s not confuse what politicians get really wrong – things like wars, things where people die – with the rather tedious bourgeois obsession with whether or not they’ve charged for their wisteria. It’s not that important. It really isn’t. It isn’t what we’re fighting for. It isn’t what voting is about. And the idea that ‘oh we’ve all lost faith in politics, because’… it’s nonsense. It’s a journalistic made-up frenzy.”

There’ll be a lot of journos mumbling about ‘Fry getting his’ and plotting the demise of the greatest living Englishman after that. How dare he piss on their scoop!

But he’s right. Whatever politicians do with their expenses, the issues actually don’t change at all. The story has as much relevance to actual political issues as the plotline on the feeblest daytime soap opera.

What will happen is a general reshuffle as some politicians are picked off and destroyed, while others seize the chance to make political capital from the fallout. A tightening of the rules on expenses may be a good thing, and perhaps a debate about the general level of pay of MPs. It’s a subject about as close to my heart as Pluto.

Does that really help you sleep at night?

I’ve started reading The Wisdom Of Crowds, James Surowiecki’s critically acclaimed tome from 2004. It’s subtitled “Why the many are smarter than the few” and the basic thesis of the book is that when a crowd’s opinions are taken as a whole, they are often more accurate than the opinion of one learned person who may just be wrong.

Renowned playwright Tom Stoppard calls it ‘brilliant and fascinating’ on the back cover. But he’s not a crowd, he’s one person. And many people are smarter than the few. It seems odd to see his individual quote on the back of the book – surely a group of playwrights would be a better judge.

The first case study in the book is from British scientist Francis Galton (one person), who studied the group results of the ‘Guess the weight of the Ox’ competition at a regional country fair…

Galton undoubtedly thought that the average guess of the group would be way off the mark. After all, mix a few very smart people with a some mediocre people and a lot of dumb people, and it seems likely you’ll end up with a dumb answer. But Galton was wrong. The crowd had guessed that the ox, after it had been slaughtered and dressed, would weigh 1,197 pounds. After it had been slaughtered and dressed, the ox weighed 1,198 pounds. In other words, the crowd’s judgement was essentially perfect.

Next case study. The US submarine Scorpion sinks somewhere in the North Atlantic, with no technology available to accurately pinpoint its position. A naval officer John Craven (one person) comes up with a way of assessing a group of experts’ varying predictions on where the submarine may lay…

The location that Craven came up with was not a spot that any individual member of the group had picked. In other words, not one of the members of a group had a picture in his head that matched the one Craven had constructed using the information gathered from all of them… Five months after the Scorpion disappeared, a navy ship found it. It was 220 yards from where Craven’s group had said it would be. What’s astonishing about this story is that the evidence that the group was relying on in this case amounted to almost nothing. It was really just tiny scraps of data.

One more quick one, just to finally put the issue to bed…

A classic demonstration of group intelligence is the jelly-beans-in-the-jar experiment, in which invariably the group’s estimate is superior to the vast majority of the individual guesses. When finance professor Jack Treynor ran the experiment in his class with a jar that held 850 beans, the group estimate was 871. Only one of the fifty-six people in the class made a better guess.

You convinced now? Do you now understand ‘why the many are smarter than the few’? It’s a glorious confirmation of democratic principles, of society, of human being’s one-ness. Or it’s a crock of shit.

What if I were to say that these these examples were simply an illustration of ‘good luck’. Or rather a realistic expectation of a small number of cherry-picked examples to support a certain conclusion. Obviously I am not a crowd, so my judgement isn’t to be trusted. Is any one of these examples a proper experiment, that is even capable of proving this point about the accuracy of group judgement? Of course not.

Let’s imagine a hundred Francis Galton’s going to a hundred country fairs with a hundred Oxes and examing a hundred sets of ‘guess-the-weight’ results. Now if in all of those results the crowd judgement was ‘essentially perfect’ then you have a bit of a phenomena – indeed it might be the most amazing phenomena ever observed in sociological history. But let’s pretend that only one out of a hundred times was the group accurate – that would be the only one we’d hear about in this book. The other 99 Francis Galton’s wouldn’t consider their results to be worthy of any further analysis. My guess is that’s what happened – we’ve heard about the only time the results fit this claim about crowds. Yes it’s just a guess, but it is just as likely as the guess inspired by Galton’s presented experience here.

There are other problems here. It is assumed, for example, that those guessing the weight of the ox were a perfect cross-section of society, rather than a specialised group with a professional interest in the matter, ie the sort of people who might be wandering around a country fair looking at livestock. The writer notes that a number of the guesses were discarded as unintelligible, so it’s only a judge of the wisdom of crowds that have mastered basic writing skills. Imagine how the results might be altered according to the way in which the guesses were made – in small groups perhaps,  influencing each others guesses and colouring the experiment in different ways. Could the guessers see the guesses already made? – this is absolutely crucial to the test!!!

A submarine sank and a ‘group judgement’ was within 220 yards of the actual position of the vessel. Was this a control experiment? No it was a one-off – submarines don’t sink every day. Presumably if one expert had been proven to be bang-on with their educated guess of where the sub was, we’d be reading about their phenomenal performance in a book called ‘The Wisdom of One Individual’. What is hilarious about this example is that it is admitted that there is almost literally no information to work on – unless we believe in some sort of extra-sensory-perception being employed, the result is quite clearly blind luck.

This submarine example isn’t a crowd at all, it is a presumably hand-picked group of experts of unspecified number – if there were only 3 of them for example it totally changes the implications of the results. As noted, these experts were asked to guess on all sorts of things about the sub, the possible problems it encounters, its speed and angle of descent – presumably the group was accurate on all of these things as well, and the writer has just forgotten to tell us. If the group average of the guesses of the angle of descent was way off for example, how smart are the many then?

I included the last ‘experiment’ because of the hilarious line “invariably the group’s estimate is superior to the vast majority of the individual guesses”. Because if you think about it, whatever the spread of the guesses, presuming that there is a reasonable difference between them, the average is likely to be more likely to be reasonable, and also different (or ’superior’) to the majority. That’s the whole bloody point of taking an average.

Funny in this case that the writer claims that ‘invariably’ this jelly-bean experiment works, but strangely this is one claim that they don’t have accurate data for – what a shame, as it’s the only claim which might genuinely have proven their point!

This is not even a measure of the general wisdom of crowds – it is the (supposed) specific wisdom of crowds in certain situations, ie ones where there is a large scale on which to guess, where the actual answer isn’t an unusual ‘outlier’, and where a spread of wrong guesses can be easily averaged into a ‘group guess’. Ask a crowd what temperature magnesium melts at, and see if your average is more accurate than the guesses. Some will know and the rest will guess – it’s as simple as that. If only all judgements were over jelly-beans in a jar, rather than those in the real-world.

Ask a crowd which hand I am holding a coin in – their wisdom might be split 50/50 in that case – no doubt this book would claim that they were only half a hand away with their group guess, which is better than 50% of the crowd’s guesses.

Maybe this book will dispel my initial fears with thorough and convincing analysis based on genuine reason. The reputation of renowned playwright Tom Stoppard depends on it.