It’s the Brexit campaign all over again. Nigel Farage’s Reform company are leading in the polls after Farage made unproven claims about immigrants, and former Brexit Party MEP Nathan Gill has recently admitted taking bribes to make statements in favour of Russia.

I’m getting flashbacks to the ‘Save Brexit Rally’ in Harrogate on 20 October 2018. Sky News interviewed a leave voter who explained his support for Brexit by saying it would help Britain to “get back to being a British Empire again”, and that the British “stood alone for years” – and therefore did not need the EU.

Us humans really love simple solutions to complicated problems. In 2025, Reform are repeating Brexit-style soundbites, and many of us are lapping them up. It’s like we have amnesia.

David Andress, a Professor of Modern History, wrote a book about why we are so vulnerable to simple political stories.

In a 2018 interview with Dan Snow, Andress explained:

“My book is called Cultural Dementia and it argues that a proper historical understanding that a society should have, is coherent in the way that a person’s individual proper memories are coherent. They do actually remember how their personal past and their present fits together.

“But dementia in an individual breaks all that down in terrible and tragic ways. I think currently, societies like Britain, like France, like the USA… are in danger of falling into a state which is metaphorically dementia. They lose sight that their past isn’t of uniform glory and success.”

The pasts that are being lauded by populist politicians are “completely ficticious, imagined, demented. A vision of the the past where nothing ever went wrong. It’s a course of action that can only be catastrophic. It’s an attempt to recreate a fantasy of a historical past in a world where other powers will never let that happen.”

“It’s often people remembering certain highlights – the benefits of being powerful in the past without understanding the costs of achieving that.”

“A lot of the social democratic wealth that kept the [UK] going was a product of its previous imperial position, and that imperial position was disintegrating violently all over the world through that same period of the 1950s and 60s which now looks like a golden age of prosperity and happiness.”

“It’s a question of only understanding half the history, only understanding the bit of it that lets you feel good about yourself and missing out of understanding what was really happening alongside that.”

Artificial nationalism

Andress on the artificiality of nationalism as a set of ideas: “These ideas of hermetically sealed nation states… and at the same time be expansionist and dominant – these are fantasies of 19th century politicians looking to build their own power bases. It’s a political ideology, not a description of reality. But it’s so embedded within our understanding of what makes a society because of the success of it as an ideology in the last two centuries, that people really struggle to see past it. And it becomes a fall-back position, the default, to assume that if you did seal up the borders and stop all this troubling flow of people and things back and forth then everything will be ok.

“But it’s absurd. All the major powers of Europe and the world are built on continuous flows of immigration and emigration. People moving around in their millions through the 19th and early 20th centuries. They’re built on change and flexibility and flow and interplay.”

What causes cultural dementia?

In the interview, Andress lists four causes of the West’s amnesia:

“Because we’re old [as societies] – a sense of long-term historical continuity that can be taught and emphasised but which no longer reflects our real position in the world. So much is said about Britain being an extremely wealthy country but we are in that position because of what happened in the past, more than what happens now.”

Denial – because we don’t want to consider the costs of our wealth – the pollution etc.

History education – exams and fact-cramming strip out complexity. “There’s a terrible lack of understanding in the world.”

Technological change and complexity, “life and the world around us has become almost literally incomprehensible”.

“But the problem is that we’ve accepted over simplified stories instead of making more of an effort to understand that the national story, the conspiracy theory, the yearning for a strong man leader – all of those things, at an emotional level, are an understandable response to everything being so strange and problematic and traumatic. But we ought to be trying harder to understand it all.”

Demolishing the nationalist myths

Andress: “The history of Britain and its relationship with the rest of the world is extraordinary. The small damp island becoming a global power. But it’s vital to understand that it can’t happen again. The things that came together to make [British dominance] possible – from the discovery of the Americas, the depopulation of the Caribbean by disease, the openness of west Africans to slave trading because of the long history of slave trading in the Islamic world – all of these things are really complex, contingent foundations for the British empire, the industrial revolution, the massive scientific achievements of Britain in the 18th and 19th centuries.

“Without other things that other people did in other places none of that could have happened here. Britain could never have developed that sense of itself as extraordinary and unique and special – we need to turn the perception on its head – to understand how much we are indebted to everyone else for the fact that we were top nation for such a long time and to start thinking about how we have a relationship with the rest of the world, when they’re soon going to figure out that we’re nowhere near being top nation any more.

“Everyone needs to understand that no country stands alone.”

See also

Buy the book - Cultural Dementia

HistoryHit interview

Thought-terminating cliché

Neoliberal deceit

It can be very easy to think that tomorrow will be the same as today.

Predictive Processing theory suggests that the brain defaults to what it already knows, that generating predictions about its surroundings is more energy efficient than working from actual sensory data all of the time… but that is a useful idea for another day.

Taking photos on a city street can jolt me out of this normalcy bias / change blindness. Take the photos a few minutes apart. So much will have changed. I wonder if that’s part of the appeal of photography? That our auto pilot has to be switched off to reach the level of heightened awareness needed to see what’s in front of us?

Approximately 2,400 years ago, in the dialogue Cratylus, Plato gets Socrates to paraphrase Heraclitus:

”Heracleitus says, you know, that all things move and nothing remains still, and he likens the universe to the current of a river, saying that you cannot step twice into the same stream.”

You will never experience this precise sequence of events ever again in your lifetime.

Everything is in flux. Act accordingly.

Elsewhere

One minute fifty seconds into the Anna Erhard - Cut it Out video, when the right people are in place, and they have the energy and enthusiasm to be on the streets of Berlin late on New Years Eve 2019 and the camera is on and charged and pointing in the right direction and fireworks explode all around.

“Of course we can electrify everything… we already use electrolysers to make ammonia. We can electrify steelmaking. There are multiple groups doing electro-chemical pathways to steel… We can electrify all the vehicles. Even the big trucks are going electric… There are synthetic biology pathways to turn electricity into proteins. It’s not inconceivable that we will electrify a hell of a lot of food. Electrifying a combine harvester might be hard, but we might just have many small combine harvesters instead of one huge one.

”If you take a tiny bit of creativity you can electrify everything.”

Saul Griffith,
founder of Rewiring America, and Rewiring Australia, talking to Robert Llewellyn on the Fully Charged Show Podcast.

Also: The big fossil fuel companies tend to fund the political parties that are more willing to employ disinformation and misinformation, so another benefit of reducing our dependence on oil could be healthier politics. At least for a while.

Elsewhere

Reform Is the Political Arm of the Fossil Fuel Industry

There are a thousand reasons why people vote for demagogues and populists. In the recent US election, the economy was identified as one of those reasons, with inflation and consumer price increases being mentioned. Many voters also talked about the need for “authenticity”, that they prefer politicians that “tell it like it is”.

Today’s useful idea is not economic neoliberalism (the notion that market fundamentalism can fix everything), but an associated idea; neoliberal deceit.

Broadly, the promise of neoliberal free-market driven societies was that privatisation, deregulated efficiency and endless competition would make lives better. Neoliberalism was presented as a natural law, that There Is No Alternative.

Forty-plus years into this free market experiment, the social contract has been broken, the world is on fire, water is poisoned and it’s common for CEOs to make nearly 200 times their typical worker. Unleashing the market and being “competitive” was held up as vital and energetic, instead it looks like the “free market” is a sclerotic scam, being used to distract and exhaust voters, protect vested interests and maintain oligarchy. Socialism for the rich, capitalism for the poor.

As David Graeber put it: “politically, there is no better way to ensure people are not politically active or aware than to have them working, commuting to work, or preparing for work every moment of the day. Sacrificing so many of one’s waking hours to the gods of productivity ensures no one has access to outside perspectives that would enable them to notice – for instance – that organizing life this way ultimately decreases productivity. As a result of this neoliberal obsession with stamping out alternative perspectives, since the financial collapse of 2008, we have been left in the bizarre situation where its plain to everyone that capitalism doesn’t work, but it’s almost impossible for anyone to imagine anything else. The war against the imagination is the only one the capitalists have actually managed to win”.

Despite books that may help with critical thinking being banned, many voters know something’s wrong. They may not be able to articulate exactly what is rotten, but they can see that billionaires are shooting rockets into space rather than paying their employees enough to cover the rent.

Falling living standards cause immense stress, living inside an ongoing unspoken con, that your elected officials won’t talk about, or even identify, exacerbates that stress.

The neoliberal deceit is the unwillingness of mainstream technocratic, “sensible” politicians to address market fundamentalism.

Until they do, the demagogues and dangerous populists’ simplistic solutions to complicated problems will remain attractive.

“It is so easy to overestimate the importance of one defining moment and underestimate the value of making small improvements on a daily basis…

“… improving by 1 percent isn’t particularly notable—sometimes it isn’t even noticeable—but it can be far more meaningful, especially in the long run. The difference a tiny improvement can make over time is astounding.

“Here’s how the math works out: if you can get 1 percent better each day for one year, you’ll end up thirty-seven times better by the time you’re done. Conversely, if you get 1 percent worse each day for one year, you’ll decline nearly down to zero.

“What starts as a small win or a minor setback accumulates into something much more.”

James Clear writing about the performance improvements made by Dave Brailsford to the British Cycling team.

Just don’t overlook more significant causes of improvement, and watch out for diminishing returns.

We all use inductive reasoning. We reach conclusions based on our own specific experiences. Our reasoning is based on what is known, not on the entirety of reality.

This means that our rationality is bounded; our decision-making is limited by our incomplete information.

Many of us won’t consider large-scale political lobbying. And if we do it’s so outside our sphere of experience that it sounds outlandish, and is dismissed.

After all, what “normal” person would set up an entire TV network to promote right-wing propaganda? Or finance a multimillion dollar, multi-year budget to encourage “uncertainty” about climate change? Or build a network of more than 500 “think tanks” in nearly 100 countries to push for lower taxes for the rich?

No “normal” person would - it would involve a huge amount of effort - therefore, many of us conclude, these organisations are unlikely to exist.

Bounded rationality is also exploited by stage magicians. As Teller, from magician duo Penn & Teller, puts it:

”Make the secret a lot more trouble than the trick seems worth. You will be fooled by a trick if it involves more time, money and practice than you (or any other sane onlooker) would be willing to invest. “

In summary: One of the reasons why there’s not more outrage about the corruption of our political systems is that, to many of us, effective lobbying requires an unlikely amount of effort.

See also

TV network setup to promote right-wing propaganda - Roger Ailes’ “A Plan For Putting the GOP on TV News”.

A multimillion dollar, multi-year budget to encourage “uncertainty” about climate change - the Global Climate Science Communications Plan.

A network of more than 500 “think tanks” in nearly 100 countries - Atlas network.

In recent years, populist politicians have been encouraging us to believe in simplistic solutions to complicated problems, to trust in our intuition, to confirm our biases, to scorn expertise and avoid thinking too deeply.

Don’t challenge your prejudices, wallow in them, they say.

The double-slit physics experiment is an extraordinary thing for many scientific reasons - but I like it because it forces me to reconsider my preconceptions, and reminds me not to get too comfortable in my reality.

My (overly) simple description of the experiment:

Place two pellet guns two metres away from a wall, with a one metre gap between the two guns. Then place a board in front of the two guns. The board has two vertical slits in it that exactly align with the spacing of the nozzles of the guns.

Then, fire pellets from the two guns.

The pellets fly through the air, pass through the two slits and hit the wall behind, forming two vertical lines on the wall, that align with the two slits.

As expected, two lines are created by the pellets on the wall.

Now, repeat the process but use tiny electrons instead of visible pellets.

The electrons fly through the two slits, but more than two vertical lines form on the wall behind the board. Let’s say five lines appear on the wall behind.

Unexpected - multiple vertical lines appear on the wall - even though the electrons only passed through the two slits in the board.

The firing of the electrons produces a counter-intuitive result. It’s quantum physics, apparently. Electrons can be particles and probability waves at the same time. When they are waves, and pass through the two slits, the waves interact and diffract, causing multiple lines to appear on the wall.

The even weirder part of this experiment is: When the waves are observed, their behaviour changes - they go back to acting like visible pellets - and the pattern on the back wall would reduce to two vertical lines.

The implications are pretty huge, and are still being figured out.

The exact reason why observation causes this change is one of the central questions in quantum mechanics.

One explanation, known as the Copenhagen interpretation, suggests that the act of measurement forces the particle to 'choose' a position.

Apparently, the scientific consensus is that this doesn't mean our consciousness creates reality. Instead, they think it's more about how these tiny particles interact with other particles when we measure them.

Anyway… I may never really understand what the double-slit experiment reveals about quantum mechanics. I like how its results are so counter-intuitive (to me), that they expose the limits of the simplistic stories I use to make sense of the world.

This experiment reminds me of the need to challenge my pre-existing beliefs, as they are often inaccurate and insufficient. Life is much weirder than many of us imagine.

Elsewhere

Theoretical physicist Brian Greene explains the double slit experiment

Guillaume Chaslot was a software engineer at Google. He improved the YouTube recommendation engine, according to his LinkedIn page.

Years after leaving Google he set up AlgoTransparency - their “mission is to expose the impact of the most influential algorithms”.

In 2018, soon after starting AlgoTransparency, Chaslot tweeted about the YouTube algorithm - the wording of the tweet has stayed with me.

Chaslot:

“The YouTube algorithm I worked on heavily promoted Brexit, because divisiveness is efficient for watch time, and watch time leads to ads.

“Brits deserve deserve to know what @YouTube's AI promoted by the millions during the referendum.

“Without transparency there is no democracy”

I’ve also seen Twitter and Facebook encourage conflict, all because:

“divisiveness is efficient for watch time, and watch time leads to ads.”

In other words, social media algorithms manipulate us because the owners of the algorithms, and some of their minions, are happy to profit from conflict and pollution.

Elsewhere

Reminds me of:

Les Moonves, former chief executive of the CBS TV network, celebrating Donald Trump’s presidential campaign in February 2016 at the Morgan Stanley Technology, Media, and Telecom Conference in San Francisco. Stating, that it “may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS, that’s all I got to say.”… “So what can I say? The money’s rolling in, this is fun,”.

Samoa Joe, wrestler, on social media: “In case you don’t know the formula Hot takes = engagement= Algorithm placement= views= $$ . Some of you are playing yourselves trying to win these arguments . Remember you’re not the consumer here, You’re the product.”

Related: Whenever former large tech employees grow a conscience and want to make amends for their actions, I often think of this skewering tweet by @calebsaysthings:

“hello, my name is Chip Brockman. I was the SVP of Innovating New Brain Diseases at Facebook for three years. before that, I was the Director of Monetizing Depression at Pinterest.

“now that I’ve gotten rich from that, I’m here to talk about the dangers of technol”

The tragedy of the commons is a concept that gets mentioned in debates on social media. It gives an argument some heft, it sounds authoritative when people are arguing for personal responsibility, the privatisation of resources and scaremongering about immigration.

Ecologist Garrett Hardin popularised The Tragedy of the Commons label.

In his 1968 essay, The Tragedy of the Commons, Hardin writes:

”the rational herdsman concludes that the only sensible course for him to pursue is to add another animal to his herd. And another; and another.... But this is the conclusion reached by each and every rational herdsman sharing a commons. Therein is the tragedy. Each man is locked into a system that compels him to increase his herd without limit-in a world that is limited. Ruin is the destination toward which all men rush, each pursuing his own best interest in a society that believes in the freedom of the commons. Freedom in a commons brings ruin to all.”

In other words, Hardin is saying that individuals will often use natural resources to their advantage without considering the long-term impact on the community and the resource itself.

But: in the ‘60s political scientist Elinor Ostrom (and others) saw the flaws in Hardin’s argument.

Tim Harford has written about Ostrom’s research:

“The problem with Hardin’s logic was the very first step: the assumption that communally owned land was a free-for-all. It wasn’t. The commons were owned by a community. They were managed by a community. These people were neighbours. They lived next door to each other. In many cases, they set their own rules and policed those rules.”

Local communities can successfully manage resources sustainably without privatisation. Local communities can work together. People are not always purely self-interested.

Altruism, trust, reputation, and a sense of fairness can play significant roles in how individuals use shared resources.

The tragedy of the commons is not inevitable.

See also

The popularity of the tragedy of the commons idea is in part due to it being a memorable story, that can feel intuitively true, even though it’s not true. In this sense, it’s an example of “thought terminating cliche” / style over substance.

Elsewhere

The miracle of the commons

"The Tragedy of the Commons": how ecofascism was smuggled into mainstream thought

“We receive, I think, over a billion signals every minute from the environment.

“If we try to be conscious of all the signals, we couldn't do it, so we throw out all the information that seems unimportant, which means we also throw out all the information that seems threatening to our belief system or to our dogma. And our brain constructs a model out of all the information coming up from the rest of the nervous system and we project the model outward and consider it reality.

“It's not reality, it's our reality tunnel.”

Robert Anton Wilson,
author and “agnostic mystic”

“[Reality tunnel] is the phrase that I learned from Robert Anton Wilson, and it was in the simplest terms, the call for us to make a distinction between reality, the actual thing and our experience of it as individual human beings.

“And so he called the experience we have of reality, our reality tunnel. 

“And… implored a lot through his writing that none of us should forget that we have a reality tunnel which is comprised of everything that we have personally experienced. The messages that have been passed on to us through parenting, through the society that we grow up in… the traumas we may have experienced, the stories that we tell ourselves essentially go to create a fully curated experience of reality, which is in fact not reality at all.” 

Daisy Campbell,
writer, actress and theatre director

Both quotes are from the Adventures in Nutopia podcast,
Episode 2 - The Map is Not the Territory.

=====

Wilson’s books had a resurgence in popularity in the UK in the 1990s. I’m fairly sure in one of them he recommends that political candidates should not be allowed to take office if they’ve not expanded their minds to the point that they have an awareness of their own reality tunnels (biases).

====

See also

Metacognition

“Courage calls to courage everywhere, and its voice cannot be denied.”

Millicent Garrett Fawcett, suffragist and campaigner.
From her book - The Women's Victory - and After: Personal Reminiscences, 1911-1918.

I like a popular modern interpretation of this famous quote - that some truths are so important, so self evident, that they cannot be silenced.

=====

There is another interpretation of the quote. The authors of the book Millicent Garrett Fawcett: Selected writings argue that “Fawcett was merely trying to explain why Davison’s death – which she described as a deliberately “sensational” act of self-sacrifice – made headlines around the world”.

The book states:

“Although making a comparison between Davison’s death and the sacrifice made since then by others in the service of their country, and the attention given to both suffragist and suffragette activities, the quote is not quite so clearly congratulatory regarding militant action as the modern meaning now projected onto it.”

The quote in its original context:

“In the early summer of 1913, an incident occurred which deeply touched the popular imagination and placed the principle of self-sacrifice as illustrated by the militants on a hill-top from which it was seen not only all over our own country, but throughout the world. Courage calls to courage everywhere, and its voice cannot be denied.

“The race for the Derby was held on the last Wednesday of May. The King’s horse was the favourite. Crowds even more enormous than usual gathered to witness it; among them, a young woman, a militant suffragist, Emily Davidson, of Morpeth in Northumberland, had managed to place herself close to the winning-post against the rope barrier which kept the crowd off the actual track. As the King’s horse swept by at a tremendous speed, Emily Davidson threw herself in front of it. Down came the horse with fearful violence; the jockey was, of course, thrown and seriously injured; and there lay Emily Davidson, mortally injured.

“She had deliberately sacrificed her life in order, in this sensational way, to draw the attention of the whole world to the determination of women to share in the heritage of freedom which was the boast of every man in the country. The King enquired for the jockey; the Queen enquired for the injured woman. In a day or two it was announced that she was dead. She never recovered consciousness. She had died for her cause.”

“Person 1 makes claim Y.

Claim Y sounds catchy.

Therefore, claim Y is true.”

Bo Bennett - Logically Fallacious

Thought-terminating clichés can be used to prevent arguments from proceeding by providing a speaker with a largely meaningless phrase they can recite as a false conclusion.

UK example of a thought terminating cliche:

Much of the British public are familiar with thought-terminating clichés due to the political campaigning for the UK to leave the EU. “Brexit means Brexit”, “red, white and blue Brexit”, “no deal is better than a bad deal”, “let’s take back control” etc.

US example of a thought terminating cliche:

“DEI” is an acronym that stands for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. It was used in corporate, educational, and non-profit settings to refer to initiatives or policies aimed at fostering diverse perspectives, equitable treatment, and an inclusive environment. More recently it’s being used as a “magic word” to close down debate.

As Luke Wesley Pearson points out:

”If you oppose “DEIA” you should have to use the full phrase instead of the letters. Be brave and say, “I oppose diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility.”

“Bonus points if you admit which part of that you don’t like. Making it an acronym transforms it into a thought-terminating cliche.

“From now on, be proud of your opinions, but be specific. Let everyone know if it’s diversity you don’t like, or if it’s equity, or if it’s being inclusive, or if it’s the accessibility, you patriots!!”

Why thought terminating cliches are effective:

According to memory scientist Lisa Fazio, from an article by Amanda Montell:

“Unfortunately, mere awareness of such tricks is not always enough to help us resist their influence. For this, we can blame the “illusory truth effect” – a cognitive bias defined by the unconscious yet pervasive tendency to trust a statement simply because we have heard it multiple times.

“… we are so primed to confuse a statement’s familiarity with veracity that the bias persists even when listeners are warned to look out for it, even when they are explicitly told the source was untrustworthy.

““Some of these cliches catch on not necessarily because we believe them to be true but because they feel comfortable and are easy to understand””

Elsewhere

Thought-terminating cliché - Wikipedia

Politicians saying Brexit means Brexit

The Brexit tackle

Rory Sutherland is a purveyor of popular useful ideas - which is why I’m mentioning him here.

He’s an ad-man, Vice Chairman at Ogilvy UK and self-proclaimed conservative. He’s also an entertaining anecdotalist and conversationalist. Within the marketing industry he has a useful function. For many years, he’s encouraged that sector to be more mischievous, to be more thoughtful. His talks are peppered with counter-intuitive stories about how the world really works.

His themes, broadly, are: humans are weird, irrationality is important and traditional economics is insufficient. Eye-opening stuff for the boardroom. Ruffles some feathers, but doesn’t scare the horses (in the field next to the duck pond).

In a recent interview with the influential music producer Rick Rubin, Sutherland is reaching a wider audience.

In the interview, Sutherland is more expansive than I’ve heard him before. He makes his points about reductionist mainstream economics then touches on his concerns about free market capitalism.

He outlines a “useful idea”. He says:

”What worries me about free market capitalism is that economists and management consultants like it for entirely the wrong reason… I would argue that most of the appreciation of capitalism is driven by the idea of its efficiency, not its inventiveness… What we should have been doing is optimising capitalism for inventiveness.”

and:

“It's exactly that point about I make about capitalism, which is that we've been encouraged to view it as an efficiency mechanism where it's really an exploration mechanism.”

But. Rubin doesn’t ask: “Rory, why is capitalism being driven by the idea of its efficiency, not its inventiveness?”

Maybe I’ve missed it, but nobody ever seems to ask Sutherland why capitalist efficiency is being prized over inventiveness. Sutherland’s statements are just accepted. And it slightly irritates me.

What would happen if conservative Rory did join the dots?

Would he conclude that the idea of capitalist efficiency is politically expedient for the rich and powerful (when expressed as austerity, for example), as it helps to maintain inequality, social hierarchy, social control and elite status quo?

That a capitalist system that emphasised inventiveness is not broadly encouraged as it might lead to more social mobility?

Perhaps we’ll never know.

Update: 24 February 2025… we do (partly) know!

Sutherland is now addressing inequality and its impact in many of his public talks. He doesn’t answer my question directly, but he does recognise that the current system is flawed.

In the example below, he makes the inequality issue palatable to his audience by approaching it from the perspective of a hard working manager being undermined by a rich junior.

Talking to Chris Williamson (53 minutes in), he says:

”I think a lot of people know that there is fundamental intergenerational inequity, which is because salaries are taxed very highly, while wealth—particularly capital gains from your main property—is barely taxed at all. That leads to, I think, a kind of absurdity. One piece written about this argues that it's not actually intergenerational inequality that's the problem; it's going to be intragenerational inequality when people start inheriting houses or not inheriting houses.

“You can literally have a situation where someone works incredibly hard for 30 years and reaches a position of eminence in a business or institution, yet, because their parents lived in an area with low house prices or didn’t own a house at all, they are still living somewhere subpar. Meanwhile, their underlings, whose parents lived in Surbiton or Kensington or wherever, are essentially swanning around in palaces and going on cruises all the time. That strikes me as a fundamental flaw. We’ve created a system where unearned income, which is neither particularly meritocratic nor earned, is treated incredibly generously, whereas earned income is taxed heavily…

”One idea I found extraordinarily interesting comes from Gary Stevenson, who makes a very valid point—whatever else you may think of him. Nearly all economic models use single representative agents, meaning they assume that the person they are optimising for is an average of everybody. As a consequence, inequality doesn’t feature in those models because they only deal with averages. If Bill Gates walks into a football stadium, then on average, everyone in the stadium is a millionaire. Obviously, that’s not a reliable way to model reality.”

See also

Rick Rubin and Rory Sutherland - Tetragrammaton podcast

UK social mobility at its worst in over 50 years, report finds

Paul Collier: UK is not a meritocracy, social mobility is a lie (12 mins in)

This website has a page on Rory Sutherland, it says: “Sutherland is one of the founding members of the The Common Sense Alliance, a lobby group for the tobacco industry.” The Common Sense Alliance was funded by British American Tobacco.

“Geographical curves are so involved in their detail that their lengths are often infinite or more accurately, undefinable.”

Benoit Mandelbrot, How long is the coast of Britain?, 1967

”An example of the coastline paradox. If the coastline of Great Britain is measured using units 100 km long, then the length of the coastline is approximately 2,800 km. With 50 km units, the total length is approximately 3,400 km, approximately 600 km longer.”

Coastline paradox, Wikipedia

“Mandelbrot’s paper made clear that it’s all but impossible to answer the how-long question without first agreeing on a unit of measurement. Precision takes time which is why a trade-off needs to be made regarding the level of confidence needed and the time and resources required for the measurement.”

Andreas Holmer, Estimating Work: the Coastline Paradox

Update, June 2024. Related quote by Bertrand Russell:

”Everything is vague to a degree you do not realize till you have tried to make it precise, and everything precise is so remote from everything that we normally think, that you cannot for a moment suppose that is what we really mean when we say what we think.”

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“Consider: If you’re a New Guinean living in the forest, and if you adopt the bad habit of sleeping under dead trees whose odds of falling on you that particular night are only 1 in 1,000, you’ll be dead within a few years.” …

“Studies have compared Americans’ perceived ranking of dangers with the rankings of real dangers, measured either by actual accident figures or by estimated numbers of averted accidents. It turns out that we exaggerate the risks of events that are beyond our control, that cause many deaths at once or that kill in spectacular ways — crazy gunmen, terrorists, plane crashes, nuclear radiation, genetically modified crops. At the same time, we underestimate the risks of events that we can control.”

Jared Diamond, author and a professor of geography at the University of California, writing about the biggest single lesson he learnt from 50 years of field work on the island of New Guinea. 28th January 2013.

See also

Metacognition and availability bias.

“It has often and confidently been asserted, that man's origin can never be known: but ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, and not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science.“

Charles Darwin,

introduction to The Descent of Man, 1871.

=====

The relationship between ignorance and confidence is fascinating. It’s a topic I’ll return to later.

“At the outside, babies, you’ve got about a hundred years here. There’s only one rule that I know of, babies — God damn it, you’ve got to be kind.”

Kurt Vonnegut,

in the novel God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, 1965.

Another quote from the book:

“Thus did a handful of rapacious citizens come to control all that was worth controlling in America. Thus was the savage and stupid and entirely inappropriate and unnecessary and humorless American class system created. Honest, industrious, peaceful citizens were classed as bloodsuckers, if they asked to be paid a living wage. And they saw that praise was reserved henceforth for those who devised means of getting paid enormously for committing crimes against which no laws had been passed. Thus the American dream turned belly up, turned green, bobbed to the scummy surface of cupidity unlimited, filled with gas, went bang in the noonday sun.”

“The Gervais Principle is this:

“Sociopaths, in their own best interests, knowingly promote over-performing losers into middle-management, groom under-performing losers into sociopaths, and leave the average bare-minimum-effort losers to fend for themselves.”

Venkatesh Rao

From: The Gervais Principle, Or The Office According to “The Office”, 2009.

More: “A Loser who can be suckered into bad bargains is set to become one of the Clueless. That’s why they are promoted: they are worth even more as Clueless pawns in the middle than as direct producers at the bottom, where the average, rationally-disengaged Loser will do. At the bottom, the overperformers can merely add a predictable amount of value. In the middle they can be used by the Sociopaths to escape the consequences of high-risk machinations like re-orgs.”

Elsewhere

Loyal workers are selectively and ironically targeted for exploitation, Journal of Experimental Social Psychology

To make progress, we have to take risks.
But if we take risks, there will be failures.
To recover from failure, additional resource is required.
But, often, in “market driven” organisations, with short-term goals, additional resource is denied - deemed inefficient and wasteful.
Which stifles the organisation’s ability to take risks.
Which costs them a lot more in the long-run, as they can’t make progress.

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Nassim Taleb’s book ‘Anti-fragile: Things That Gain from Disorder’ “explores how you should act in a world that is becoming increasingly volatile. According to him, we have allowed efficiency thinking to optimize our world to such an extent that we have lost the flexibility and slack that is necessary for dealing with failure. This is why we can no longer handle any form of risk…

“We need failure to be able to learn, we need inefficiency to be able to recover from mistakes, we have to take risks to make progress and so it is imperative to find a way to celebrate imperfection.”

Hans de Zwart,

Director of Bits of Freedom, a Digital Civil Rights Organisation in the Netherlands.

Source.

“The secret to doing good research is always to be a little underemployed. You waste years by not being able to waste hours.”

Attributed to

Amos Tversky,

psychologist.