I am always grateful for your writing, not because I believe that you are right (or wrong!), but because what you say challenges me to think in new dimensions and in new directions. It feels like an invitation to explore, with the assurance that you will not abandon us in a hostile or dangerous country. Thank you. By the way, 1953 and 1968 are my personal ‘anni mirabiles’. I may be mistaken!
Thanks, Roger. By the way, I would love to say 1968 was a marvellous year, as it was graced by my entry to the world, but between assassinations and wars and riots and revolutions it surely ranks near the top of the list of "post-Second World War years when an awful lot of people felt like the world was falling apart."
I was in Paris in 1968 and was swept up in the exhilaration of the May events. It was a big inspiration for what I consider my life of human rights activism. Maybe my birth year could be thought of in the same way … or not!
Your observation that people forgot the dangers of these diseases is true, and likely has an effect, but assumes that people are largely rational. It ignores the long history of the anti-vax movement which existed as early as the first smallpox vaccine, smallpox! It's flared up in small pockets over the years, but was mostly contained.
Our current issue is that the anti-vax opinion has infected an entire political wing, which turns it from a fringe view to a mainstream one. Like most view espoused by that particular wing these days, it's very dangerous.
I agree with your first point, which I had hoped came across in the story about smallpox in Montreal. Again: The point about "we have forgotten how bad the diseases can be" is only one of many factors!
The reasons you give are important and compelling. I see another that is implied by your rationale but also needs to be made explicit! We are creatures who constantly make assumptions, many of which are opaque, not only to our audience, but to ourselves. Challenging ourselves to uncover and then articulate those assumptions out loud is one of the most useful disciplines I can think of. In my practice, I find some of the great questions to ask about what seems to be a convincing strategy might be: “what are the assumptions on which its success likely depends? How can you stress-test those assumptions to know whether to hang on to them? If you abandoned those assumptions, what alternatives would you consider replacing them with and to what effect?”
Absolutely. There are always assumptions (it's impossible to avoid them) and the more we explicitly state them the more we can subject them to scrutiny and improve our thinking. This is a central reason why Fermi-style analysis (breaking a problem into smaller components, see Superforecasting) improves judgement.
Mr. G, I recently upped my subscription to paid and this column demonstrates why that was a good decision. [Please understand that the rest of this is typed with a broken arm.]
Your "modest proposal" [apologies to J. Swift] to be explicit and your examples therein are wonderful and, when I consider them more fully, a tremendous exposition on how our society is speaking at each other and ever higher volume but, more importantly, truly we speak past each other.
Unfortunately, I am convinced that even when we get explicit there is so much that is implicit in speech that we will continue in our "mis-speaking."
As well, the effectiveness of being explicit often requires good faith on the part of the listener or reader. All too often statements which are rightly qualified or tempered because it would be wrong to claim absolute certainty, are stripped of nuance and argued against as if a definitive assertion had been made.
Our beliefs and generalizations by necessity reflect only what we know. But lurking beyond our knowledge is what we don't know, which if known could change our beliefs and generalizations. For example, if we have the data points 1,0, 3,6 and 5,12 we could construct a line with a formula y = 3x-3. If further investigation reveals new data - 2,6 -- our equation will differ significantly: y = x^3 - 9x^2 + 26x - 18 and our graph will be non-linear instead of linear. Unfortunately, once we get settled into beliefs and generalizations we often stop searching for data that might upset our beliefs. Instead we search for and accept only data that confirm them -- "confirmation bias." It's the path of least effort. We should expect that experts would recognize the problem of the unknown and welcome alternative data and interpretations. Many do. However, money and politics have so corrupted our institutions that we hear 'experts' speak of "settled science," a pair of words that ought to be viewed as an oxymoron.
There is a lot of wisdom in this article. A lot of wisdom that is lost on many of us, probably all of us at times. Thanks.
I am always grateful for your writing, not because I believe that you are right (or wrong!), but because what you say challenges me to think in new dimensions and in new directions. It feels like an invitation to explore, with the assurance that you will not abandon us in a hostile or dangerous country. Thank you. By the way, 1953 and 1968 are my personal ‘anni mirabiles’. I may be mistaken!
Thanks, Roger. By the way, I would love to say 1968 was a marvellous year, as it was graced by my entry to the world, but between assassinations and wars and riots and revolutions it surely ranks near the top of the list of "post-Second World War years when an awful lot of people felt like the world was falling apart."
One person’s meat ….!
I was in Paris in 1968 and was swept up in the exhilaration of the May events. It was a big inspiration for what I consider my life of human rights activism. Maybe my birth year could be thought of in the same way … or not!
Forgot to say that my birth year was 1939!
Your observation that people forgot the dangers of these diseases is true, and likely has an effect, but assumes that people are largely rational. It ignores the long history of the anti-vax movement which existed as early as the first smallpox vaccine, smallpox! It's flared up in small pockets over the years, but was mostly contained.
Our current issue is that the anti-vax opinion has infected an entire political wing, which turns it from a fringe view to a mainstream one. Like most view espoused by that particular wing these days, it's very dangerous.
I agree with your first point, which I had hoped came across in the story about smallpox in Montreal. Again: The point about "we have forgotten how bad the diseases can be" is only one of many factors!
The reasons you give are important and compelling. I see another that is implied by your rationale but also needs to be made explicit! We are creatures who constantly make assumptions, many of which are opaque, not only to our audience, but to ourselves. Challenging ourselves to uncover and then articulate those assumptions out loud is one of the most useful disciplines I can think of. In my practice, I find some of the great questions to ask about what seems to be a convincing strategy might be: “what are the assumptions on which its success likely depends? How can you stress-test those assumptions to know whether to hang on to them? If you abandoned those assumptions, what alternatives would you consider replacing them with and to what effect?”
Absolutely. There are always assumptions (it's impossible to avoid them) and the more we explicitly state them the more we can subject them to scrutiny and improve our thinking. This is a central reason why Fermi-style analysis (breaking a problem into smaller components, see Superforecasting) improves judgement.
Mr. G, I recently upped my subscription to paid and this column demonstrates why that was a good decision. [Please understand that the rest of this is typed with a broken arm.]
Your "modest proposal" [apologies to J. Swift] to be explicit and your examples therein are wonderful and, when I consider them more fully, a tremendous exposition on how our society is speaking at each other and ever higher volume but, more importantly, truly we speak past each other.
Unfortunately, I am convinced that even when we get explicit there is so much that is implicit in speech that we will continue in our "mis-speaking."
As well, the effectiveness of being explicit often requires good faith on the part of the listener or reader. All too often statements which are rightly qualified or tempered because it would be wrong to claim absolute certainty, are stripped of nuance and argued against as if a definitive assertion had been made.
Our beliefs and generalizations by necessity reflect only what we know. But lurking beyond our knowledge is what we don't know, which if known could change our beliefs and generalizations. For example, if we have the data points 1,0, 3,6 and 5,12 we could construct a line with a formula y = 3x-3. If further investigation reveals new data - 2,6 -- our equation will differ significantly: y = x^3 - 9x^2 + 26x - 18 and our graph will be non-linear instead of linear. Unfortunately, once we get settled into beliefs and generalizations we often stop searching for data that might upset our beliefs. Instead we search for and accept only data that confirm them -- "confirmation bias." It's the path of least effort. We should expect that experts would recognize the problem of the unknown and welcome alternative data and interpretations. Many do. However, money and politics have so corrupted our institutions that we hear 'experts' speak of "settled science," a pair of words that ought to be viewed as an oxymoron.