Let's Get Explicit

Stating what's implicit helps identify hidden traps

In my books and other writing, I often illustrate biases and errors of judgment with stories drawn from the mistakes of other. Readers may infer from this that I am holier than thou. So let me state emphatically that I have committed — once, twice, a dozen times — absolutely every mistake I have ever written about. The stories I tell are chosen solely because I believe they illustrate what I need to illustrate, not to criticize lesser mortals, and certainly not to suggest I am above it all.

Now let me illustrate with a story about a big mistake I made. And how it stemmed from a failure to be sufficiently explicit.

I published Risk: The Science and Politics of Fear in 2008. Although I didn’t write about the irrational fear of vaccines in Risk, I was aware the issues substantial and growing. I talked about it many times in subsequent lectures and conversations. And I always made the same point:

Vaccines are victims of their own success, I said.

In the developed world, who knows anything about diphtheria? It’s a word we hear when we take a toddler into the doctor’s office for shots, and that’s that. The fact that it was once the stuff of parents’ nightmares, that diphtheria suffocated countless children to death while their helpless parents could only watch in anguish, has vanished from collective memory. Thanks to vaccines. And there are many other stories like that. The danger of communicable disease was front and centre of humanity’s collective mind thought all of history, but since the mid-20th century, thanks to vaccination, it has been pushed off-stage.

So when someone comes along and uses dodgy bits and pieces of evidence to spin a story about a vaccine putting people at risk of this or that terrible harm, people are liable to focus solely on the possible threat of the vaccine and give not a moment’s notice to the threat of the thing the vaccine protects us from. With the good done by vaccines dropped from the equation, the conclusion is inevitable: Why take even a small chance of suffering a terrible harm from a vaccine? Why take even a risk of harm that is little more than speculation? That’s a rational conclusion — but only if we ignore the good the vaccine does. And thanks to the privileged lives we lead in the developed world, we can and do.

So I said there is a way to put a stop to irrational fears about vaccines: Suffer a new, deadly pandemic, then develop and distribute a vaccine that saves the day. We will be as grateful as people were when Jonas Salk revealed the polio vaccine in 1955. It will be the end of all the but the hardest core of the anti-vax movement.

Right. I did not exactly nail it.

Along comes the Covid pandemic in 2020, science develops and delivers a vaccine at a speed previously unimaginable, vast numbers of lives are saved, suffering is reduced, and … the irrational fear of vaccines explodes.

Now, if I wanted to defend myself, I could argue that I wasn’t really wrong. I was only referring to one relevant factor. Of course I knew there were other factors, and if the circumstances were right, those factors could tip the outcome in other directions.

In fact, it would have been easy, prior to Covid, to imagine all sorts of scenarios in which one or more of those other factors became predominant and the successful introduction of a vaccine in the midst of a pandemic would be followed by a much less happy outcome. I’m reasonably confident that if someone had pushed back on my thinking I would have said so. And if they had asked me to lay out one or more of those scenarios, I would have come up with something like, say, “in an atmosphere of political polarization and rapidly worsening mistrust, when personal identities are increasingly entwined with political identities, political leaders could, for selfish reasons, make suspicion of vaccines a core part of a political identity. If that were to happen, things could take a nasty turn.” To make that case, I could have drawn from plenty of history: For example, in one of the last major smallpox outbreaks in North America, death rates among English-speaking Montrealers were much lower than among French Montrealers. The reason? The English were the dominant community, they trusted public health authorities, and they got vaccinated at high rates. The French were poorer and more marginalized, they didn’t trust authorities, they were suspicious of vaccines and got vaccinated at lower rates. French Montrealers didn’t fear the vaccine because they were privileged people who were clueless about the danger of smallpox. Quite the opposite. French and English alike knew smallpox was a terrible threat but they responded very differently because they held very different positions in society.

That’s what I could have said. But I didn’t.

So was I really wrong? Yes, I was really wrong. Period.

But I could have avoided that if I had been more explicit.

That doesn’t mean that in those lectures and conversations I should have rolled out a seventy-five page paper of the many factors likely to be at work and how they could manifest in different ways and produce different outcomes. No one has time for that.

What I should have said instead is, “if there is a deadly pandemic, and a vaccine is developed, irrational fear of vaccines will fall. All else being equal.”

It’s a tiny change. But it explicitly says — in the phrase “all else” — that there are other factors at work. Those factors matter. They could produce a different outcome.

There are other ways I could have phrased it, of course. “If there is a pandemic and a vaccine is developed, irrational fear of vaccines will fall. Assuming other factors don’t push the outcome in a different direction.” Or whatever. The point is to say, up front, “but please note it’s a complicated world and there is more to this than I am saying in my brief comment.”

Granted, caveats like this are often used like fine print. Or to put that more bluntly, they’re ass-covering. That’s unfortunate. But let’s not miss the fact that, ass-covering aside, they can have real value.

Being explicit in this way stops the other person from hearing my clear, emphatic statement (“if X, then Y”) and then inferring something I did not intend (“X is the sole relevant factor so Y is the only possible outcome”).

Even better, saying “all else being equal” could lead someone to ask, “what else is there? How could those things change the outcome?” If that happens, you’re having a truly illuminating conversation.

The value of being more explicit was endorsed long ago by no less an authority than Benjamin Franklin.

In his autobiography, Franklin wrote that over time he learned…

…the habit of expressing myself in terms of modest diffidence; never using, when I advanced anything that may possibly be disputed, the words certainly, undoubtedly, or any others that give the air of positiveness to an opinion; but rather say, I conceive or apprehend a thing to be so and so; it appears to me, or I should think it so and so, for such reasons; or I imagine it to be so; or it is so, if I am not mistaken.

What Franklin is describing is not false humility. It is making explicit something he implicitly and sincerely believes — that while he is making an assertion he thinks is true, he knows he may be wrong.

Franklin sees two reasons for doing this for speaking this way.

The first is that if he speaks with certainty, his listener may understandably infer that Franklin believes no one can reasonably disagree with him. That’s obnoxious. It “seldom fails to disgust,” he writes, and may “provoke contradiction and prevent a candid attention.” This is how conversation turns into verbal arm-wrestling. And verbal arm-wrestling is a lousy way to learn and improve your thinking.

The second reason:

If you wish information and improvement from the knowledge of others, and yet at the same time express yourself as firmly fix’d in your present opinions, modest, sensible men, who do not love disputation, will probably leave you undisturbed in the possession of your error.

By making explicit the possibility that you are in error, you implicitly invite those “who do not love disputation” to disagree. It says, “I welcome disagreement. You do me a favour if you spot a problem with my thinking. I would be grateful.” That’s a good way to ensure that if there is a problem, and the other person spots it, Franklin will discover what it is. And improve his thinking.

If the case for being explicit like this is so clear, why don’t we do it more? I suspect at least one reason is what psychologists call “the curse of knowledge”: When we know something, it is a struggle to grasp the perspective of those who don’t.

I see the curse of knowledge all the time in my work, which often involves speaking with specialists and translating for a general audience. The specialists share a large body of knowledge. To them, it’s commonplace. Everyone they know knows it! As a result, when specialists speak to a general audience, they often communicate poorly because they badly overestimate how much that audience knows. It’s my job, as a go-between, to say, “no, they don’t know this or that. You need to walk them through it.”

Now think about me talking about anti-vaccine feeling a decade ago. I state one factor that matters. Then I say, “a pandemic would change that factor and make anti-vaccine feeling go away.” And I say no more. Specifically, I don’t say “but there are other relevant factors and other outcomes are possible.” Why not? Because that’s obvious! Everybody knows that!

So I end up saying something that, in the end, proves to be badly wrong.

Same goes for Ben Franklin’s wise admonition about speaking humbly.

It pains me to say this but for most of my life I have routinely violated Franklin’s directions. (I‘m working on it …) I make assertions strongly. I offer no explicit acknowledgement that these assertions may be wrong. Why not? Because it’s obvious they are only my opinions! It’s even more obvious that I am a flawed human being, like everyone else, so my views may be wrong. And what’s most obvious of all is that if someone disagrees and shows why I am wrong, he or she does me a big favour. I will be grateful.

Except none of this is perfectly clear and obvious to other people. Because I didn’t say it.

There’s lots more to be said about the value of being more explicit, but I’ll leave that for another day.

In the meantime, please leave your views in the comments. And remember you are most welcome, here and always, to correct me on any matter. I will thank you. And Ben Franklin.