Expertise is about knowledge. There are two kinds of knowledge: knowing-how and knowing-that. Some knowing-hows require knowing a lot of knowing-that, but nearly all of us know-how to do things without knowing all the thats behind what we do. Do you know how fuel injection works? Doesn't stop you driving a car.
Expertise requires something that someone can be an expert at. There must be a stable body of effective practice, successfully-tested theory and facts. There can be differences of opinion, controversies and changes in this corpus. Too few and we should suspect a professionally-imposed conformity; too many and the subject stops being stable enough for expertise in it to be meaningful. What counts as too many or too few is itself a matter of judgement.
The subject must be manageable. It must be small enough for one person to get their arms round. If an expert is someone who know all the facts, or at least, knows where the facts may be found and absorbed quickly, then there can't be too many facts. Some subjects, like public health policy, or the dynamics of the climate, are just too large to be expert-friendly.
There are no expert witches, because there are no effective spells, and hence the theories have failed all the tests.
There are no experts on (the whole of) the Law of England and Wales. There are simply too many volumes of Halsbury's Laws of England. No one person can get their arms around it. That's why lawyers specialise.
There are experts at medical diagnosis, usually within a specialist field: the facts are few in number, the theories are simple (compared to Quantum Field Theory), while the techniques may be subtle.
What about computer modelling? Three things go into a computer model: the model of whatever it is; the program that embodies that model; and the values of the various coefficients and initial conditions of the model. Those are three different subjects. To model the spread of a virus, one needs to know some immunology, some epidemiology, and perhaps all sorts of things about how close people sit in offices, how many people come within a given distance of others in the course of a day, and so on. Then someone has to take all that and put it in equations and computer code. Then one needs to measure the value of the key parameters for that virus. If those are not known, the whole thing is pointless. The result has to be calibrated against previous epidemics as a test. Journalists never seem to ask modellers about that part of the process.
This needs team-work. Teams cannot be experts. A team might consist of experts at parts of the process, but there is no guarantee that the team members will work well together. The result may well still be a camel. (A phrase that is unfair to camels.)
How do you and I tell if someone is an expert?
First, the subject must sound like a proper specialism. Immunology is a specialism, 'the climate' is not. Epidemiology is, but only when it is being modest.
Second, if they are quoting computer models, not empirical studies, they are not experts. Experts deal in facts and successfully tested theories.
Third, if asked, experts give practical, useable advice that helps the client achieve their goals - or admit that there is nothing they can offer. Pseudo-experts jump to publish research that a) seems to lead directly to policy advice, that b) is in line with their ideology, and c) politicians or managers cannot or will not follow because of economic / social / legal / market / political realities. That last is essential. If what the politicians or managers do works, everyone's happy. If it fails, the experts can say that they advised something different. So they weren't wrong. They weren't right either, because their ideas are never actually put to the test.
Fourth, they do not use whatever it is to advance their social and political beliefs. Experts are not activists. Experts do not see our crisis as their opportunity.
Activists follow an ideology. Ideologies tell their followers what is right and what is wrong. There is no need to worry about facts or the quality of the theories and models: if it helps the cause, it's good, and if it doesn't, it goes in the bin. If the facts are different, that proves the world is corrupt and must be changed or burned down, not that the ideology is wrong. There is no debate, only persuasion; no information, only propaganda.
Activists are attracted to large subjects where there is plenty of ambiguity, complicated statistics, simplified computer modelling of complex systems, few if any opportunities to test any of the theories, and the appearance of relevance for social and political policy.
Once inside these subjects, activists aim to establish their ideology as the purpose of the subject: for example, if you don't buy Climate Change, you're not going to get a job in the UK Met Office. The central tenet of the ideology is binary: you are a believer or not. But in a twist known to everyone, one can't just pronounce the Shahada and go back to one's life: one has to take on all the cultural baggage.
Or perhaps, one should not pronounce the Shahada unless one is prepared to take on the cultural baggage. People who are not prepared to take on the baggage will avoid the institutions which demand adherence to the Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion, or their modern equivalents, and this is the intention. So much as naming the ideology on the website will deter the non-believers. Internal criticism is not so much actively silenced as recruited away. The old guard either stay quiet or leave.
Fifth, experts do not work in ideological institutions. Why not? Because of the risk they run should their research turn out to be contrary to the aims of the organisation. And because of credibility: once we know a man is being paid to follow a party line, we do not know if he is telling us to follow the party line because it is the best thing to do, or because his paycheque depends on it. Experts need their credibility. Activists just need to fill the air with noise.
So the next time you read an article quoting a piece of research about something in the news, that seems to have immediate policy relevance and fits in with a prevailing ideology, the authors are not experts, but a bunch of academics seeking their fifteen minutes of fame.
Because, sixth and most important, experts stopped talking to the media about the same time that journalists stopped reporting the news and started pushing ideology. Nobody who talks to The Guardian, or the BBC, is an expert. They are a propagandist for a dogma the media want to push.
Thursday, 21 May 2020
Monday, 18 May 2020
Thursday, 14 May 2020
Big NHS Hospitals Are The Problem: Start Thinking About Solutions
Any disease from any vector depends for its lethality on the state of the patient's immune system. There's always someone who recovered from a disease that laid waste to the rest of the town. And someone who was unaffected. What made HIV so shocking was that it was the first virus that attacked the immune system: patients did not die from HIV, but from what they caught because HIV had weakened their immune system. At the moment the way SARS-Cov-2 works is not known. Like all diseases it hurts people with compromised immune systems, and it seems to do more damage to people with existing conditions that would have killed them in the next couple of years. Perhaps those conditions rob the body of its ability to fight the virus. Perhaps it weakens the body and the existing condition then finishes the patient.
Whatever the mechanism, the effect is the same. Hospitals are full of people with compromised immune systems and in poor shape. (Also expectant mothers and people who broke something in an accident - both those groups generally have sound immune systems.) So once SARS-Cov-2, or any other virus with similar characteristics, gets stuck into a hospital building, and in the staff, it kills people. Just like MRSA. Or a bad flu. Nothing new, but a lot more effective.
Many of the people with compromised immune systems and multiple conditions are old. There are a lot of old people in Western populations: a far greater proportion than at any time before. That makes SARS-Cov-2, and the ones that follow it, much more visible. When I was born, most men died before 70, and their wives survived not many years more. Now they live to eighty and beyond.
Western economies can afford to build large central multi-disciplinary hospitals. Such super-hospitals make qualified doctors, consultants, surgeons and other specialists highly productive. Because they make a small number of professionals highly productive, all the professionals are in the hospitals. Anyone needing more than simple care has to go to a hospital because that's where the productive professionals are. So all the vulnerable people wind up in hospital.
So a SARS-Cov-2 or similar virus turns a super-hospital into a killing house. Not because the virus is so awful, but because super-hospitals are where the NHS put its potential victims.
We have learned from the SARS-Cov-2 experience that the viability of the NHS depends on the parameters of the next virus. If the asymptomatic incubation time is too long, if the proportion of the population who are asymptomatic is too high, if the lethality (the ratio of death to infection) is too high, if it persists too long on the surfaces of hospitals and workplaces, then the hospitals become killing houses and have to be shut down.
Or the hospitals can be left open, and the rest of us shut down. Which is the choice Governments all over the world made in 2020.
Those governments thought super-hospitals were the solution. And so had to be "saved". Thus creating the insanity whereby to protect the resource that cures people, people have to be denied access to the resource that cures them.
In fact, super-hospitals are the problem.
People should not be turned away from A&E because of a virus that harms the patients two floors up in another annexe.
Put the children, child birth and maternity activity in a separate building. A&E can have its own building as well. Not annexes of a super-hospital, but in separate buildings, preferably in different postcodes. Under different organisations. I don't know enough about medicine to know what else could be hived off to stand on its own. Inevitably there will be a building for the care of people with compromised immune systems and complications: that will be the big one.
The super-hospital is now a liability, not an asset. It needs de-centralising.
Or it won't be there when we next need it. It will be closed.
Or we will be.
Whatever the mechanism, the effect is the same. Hospitals are full of people with compromised immune systems and in poor shape. (Also expectant mothers and people who broke something in an accident - both those groups generally have sound immune systems.) So once SARS-Cov-2, or any other virus with similar characteristics, gets stuck into a hospital building, and in the staff, it kills people. Just like MRSA. Or a bad flu. Nothing new, but a lot more effective.
Many of the people with compromised immune systems and multiple conditions are old. There are a lot of old people in Western populations: a far greater proportion than at any time before. That makes SARS-Cov-2, and the ones that follow it, much more visible. When I was born, most men died before 70, and their wives survived not many years more. Now they live to eighty and beyond.
Western economies can afford to build large central multi-disciplinary hospitals. Such super-hospitals make qualified doctors, consultants, surgeons and other specialists highly productive. Because they make a small number of professionals highly productive, all the professionals are in the hospitals. Anyone needing more than simple care has to go to a hospital because that's where the productive professionals are. So all the vulnerable people wind up in hospital.
So a SARS-Cov-2 or similar virus turns a super-hospital into a killing house. Not because the virus is so awful, but because super-hospitals are where the NHS put its potential victims.
We have learned from the SARS-Cov-2 experience that the viability of the NHS depends on the parameters of the next virus. If the asymptomatic incubation time is too long, if the proportion of the population who are asymptomatic is too high, if the lethality (the ratio of death to infection) is too high, if it persists too long on the surfaces of hospitals and workplaces, then the hospitals become killing houses and have to be shut down.
Or the hospitals can be left open, and the rest of us shut down. Which is the choice Governments all over the world made in 2020.
Those governments thought super-hospitals were the solution. And so had to be "saved". Thus creating the insanity whereby to protect the resource that cures people, people have to be denied access to the resource that cures them.
In fact, super-hospitals are the problem.
People should not be turned away from A&E because of a virus that harms the patients two floors up in another annexe.
Put the children, child birth and maternity activity in a separate building. A&E can have its own building as well. Not annexes of a super-hospital, but in separate buildings, preferably in different postcodes. Under different organisations. I don't know enough about medicine to know what else could be hived off to stand on its own. Inevitably there will be a building for the care of people with compromised immune systems and complications: that will be the big one.
The super-hospital is now a liability, not an asset. It needs de-centralising.
Or it won't be there when we next need it. It will be closed.
Or we will be.
Monday, 11 May 2020
Photographs I'm Printing (5)
Wandsworth Town, 20/1/2013 - Apple iPhone 4S
Grey. White. Small patches of strong colour. Snow makes shapes out of everything. And when did Wandsworth Town ever look picturesque?
Thursday, 7 May 2020
The Raven Paradox
I cannot believe that anyone is still discussing this, but Sabine Hossenfelder did recently, as did UpAndAtom in mid-2019. Both present it as a serious issue for the idea of evidence and hence the scientific method.
The paradox is due to Carl Hempel, one of the many philosophers who circled round Rudolph Carnap and the Vienna School. They loved them some logic, and this really is.
Consider the hypothesis "All ravens are black". Evidence for this would be a black raven. A counter-example would be a white raven. So far so obvious. But "All ravens are black" is logically equivalent to "All non-black things are non-ravens". The evidence for that is a white tennis shoe and a red tomato. So on the principle that two logically equivalent statements should have the same evidence base, white tennis shoes are evidence for "All ravens are black". Which of course they aren't.
Which is supposed to be a paradox.
Which it is only if we stop to admire it for too long.
It isn't a paradox. It's a sign that our idea of what counts as evidence is nuanced enough to distinguish between statements that are equivalent in the predicate calculus. Nothing says that logical equivalence trumps all other forms of equivalence or lays waste to all other distinctions. Unless you're the kind of person who hung out with the guys at Carnap's Bar and Grill.
The Raven Paradox is a useful edge case: a theory of evidence should not fall foul of it.
Notice that to a falsificationist, there is no problem here. Confirmations don't count, only falsifications. White shoes do not refute the raven hypothesis, but falsificationists do not count the number of refutations, as inductivists do count confirmations. One refutation is too many, and a hundred confirmations are too few. (Ahem.) Notice also that the only things that falsify "All non-black things are non-ravens" are also ravens of any non-black colour. So the positive and its contra-positive have the same counter-examples. Just another logical superiority of falsificationism. But I digress.
Another approach is to notice that white shoes also confirm the claim that "All ravens are green", or indeed any other colour. We might say that if a piece of evidence confirms an hypothesis H(black) and also H(green), H(purple), H(puce) and so on, it is in some sense trivial with respect to that set of hypotheses. It's not what we are really looking for, which is that every time we see a raven, it is reassuringly black. This is an attempt to capture the necessary quality of relevance that evidence must have. It is not perfect, but it's a start. I'll leave the lads at Carnap's Bar and Grill to debate the details.
Instead of trying to resolve the paradox, we should ask: how did we get here? What are we assuming that creates the paradox? Is it true? What are the other assumptions we might have in their place? Who says that "equivalent with respect to the predicate calculus" is the relevant equivalence? Why not "equivalent with respect to the legal concept of material relevance"?
Which would send the ravens flying.
The paradox is due to Carl Hempel, one of the many philosophers who circled round Rudolph Carnap and the Vienna School. They loved them some logic, and this really is.
Consider the hypothesis "All ravens are black". Evidence for this would be a black raven. A counter-example would be a white raven. So far so obvious. But "All ravens are black" is logically equivalent to "All non-black things are non-ravens". The evidence for that is a white tennis shoe and a red tomato. So on the principle that two logically equivalent statements should have the same evidence base, white tennis shoes are evidence for "All ravens are black". Which of course they aren't.
Which is supposed to be a paradox.
Which it is only if we stop to admire it for too long.
It isn't a paradox. It's a sign that our idea of what counts as evidence is nuanced enough to distinguish between statements that are equivalent in the predicate calculus. Nothing says that logical equivalence trumps all other forms of equivalence or lays waste to all other distinctions. Unless you're the kind of person who hung out with the guys at Carnap's Bar and Grill.
The Raven Paradox is a useful edge case: a theory of evidence should not fall foul of it.
Notice that to a falsificationist, there is no problem here. Confirmations don't count, only falsifications. White shoes do not refute the raven hypothesis, but falsificationists do not count the number of refutations, as inductivists do count confirmations. One refutation is too many, and a hundred confirmations are too few. (Ahem.) Notice also that the only things that falsify "All non-black things are non-ravens" are also ravens of any non-black colour. So the positive and its contra-positive have the same counter-examples. Just another logical superiority of falsificationism. But I digress.
Another approach is to notice that white shoes also confirm the claim that "All ravens are green", or indeed any other colour. We might say that if a piece of evidence confirms an hypothesis H(black) and also H(green), H(purple), H(puce) and so on, it is in some sense trivial with respect to that set of hypotheses. It's not what we are really looking for, which is that every time we see a raven, it is reassuringly black. This is an attempt to capture the necessary quality of relevance that evidence must have. It is not perfect, but it's a start. I'll leave the lads at Carnap's Bar and Grill to debate the details.
Instead of trying to resolve the paradox, we should ask: how did we get here? What are we assuming that creates the paradox? Is it true? What are the other assumptions we might have in their place? Who says that "equivalent with respect to the predicate calculus" is the relevant equivalence? Why not "equivalent with respect to the legal concept of material relevance"?
Which would send the ravens flying.
Monday, 4 May 2020
Photographs I'm Printing (4)
River Seine, Paris 27/9/2011 - Canon PowerShot A590 IS
Because the rippling water, the shades of the stone walls, the autumn trees, young folk hanging out, and a warm summer evening. There was a heatwave that week.
Thursday, 30 April 2020
It's time for a while that I thought about things in which I do participate
There is one thing I have begun to realise.
How much of my comments and thoughts are about events in which I do not participate.
For some reason, commenting on things happening elsewhere to other people did not feel strange before. Everyone talks about the news.
Then The Quarantine happened. Governments did things that they have never done before, not even in wars, and some of them assumed powers that no-one should be allowed to keep. For a day. What is happening in America now is unbearable to watch. A once-great nation is breaking up before our eyes.
What is happening in the rest of the world is also incomprehensible, if you try to understand it as the rational reaction of governments to a virus. Understand it as the desperate reaction of exhausted politicians to one more pseudo-crisis being exploited by special interest groups, and hyped up by a media driven by sensation and producing anti-government propaganda, and it makes perfect sense. Now they have to back out of it while maintaining the pretence that it really was serious, without panicking a noisy chunk of the population who believe the hype and without alienating all the voters. That's quite an act.
And here I am, participating in the whole farce and I don't want to comment or think about it. Of course I have, because understanding what happened to cause the Quarantine is the single biggest test of an analyst's abilities. Now I have done it(*), while carrying on with the day job, standing in lines to collect my prescriptions, and trying to run a life, and now I'm done with it.
But right now, I have nowhere to go, and even if I did, I'm a little short on motivation.
We can fix that. There are at least another six weeks before my gym is allowed to open, and large companies will continue to be asked to keep their staff at home for at least another five months. So I have plenty of time to experiment with how I live and work at home.
Which is what I am going to think about now. It's time for a while that I thought about things in which I do participate.
(*) When Boris announced the Quarantine, all the academics and public health advisors said to themselves:
Experts. Huh. Look what happened the last time we listened to the experts! We got locked in to our homes for four months for no reason at all. **** the experts.
How much of my comments and thoughts are about events in which I do not participate.
For some reason, commenting on things happening elsewhere to other people did not feel strange before. Everyone talks about the news.
Then The Quarantine happened. Governments did things that they have never done before, not even in wars, and some of them assumed powers that no-one should be allowed to keep. For a day. What is happening in America now is unbearable to watch. A once-great nation is breaking up before our eyes.
What is happening in the rest of the world is also incomprehensible, if you try to understand it as the rational reaction of governments to a virus. Understand it as the desperate reaction of exhausted politicians to one more pseudo-crisis being exploited by special interest groups, and hyped up by a media driven by sensation and producing anti-government propaganda, and it makes perfect sense. Now they have to back out of it while maintaining the pretence that it really was serious, without panicking a noisy chunk of the population who believe the hype and without alienating all the voters. That's quite an act.
And here I am, participating in the whole farce and I don't want to comment or think about it. Of course I have, because understanding what happened to cause the Quarantine is the single biggest test of an analyst's abilities. Now I have done it(*), while carrying on with the day job, standing in lines to collect my prescriptions, and trying to run a life, and now I'm done with it.
But right now, I have nowhere to go, and even if I did, I'm a little short on motivation.
We can fix that. There are at least another six weeks before my gym is allowed to open, and large companies will continue to be asked to keep their staff at home for at least another five months. So I have plenty of time to experiment with how I live and work at home.
Which is what I am going to think about now. It's time for a while that I thought about things in which I do participate.
(*) When Boris announced the Quarantine, all the academics and public health advisors said to themselves:
****, he's actually going to do it. He wasn't supposed to do it. Quarantining healthy people is so dumb even the WHO knows it's dumb. He was supposed not to do it, so that if things went bad, we could all say we advised him to do it, but he wouldn't listen, and look what happened, and how superior are we? Just like we always do. Of course he shouldn't have listened to us.That's what happened. The experts overlooked how hyped-up the media were, and how tired the politicians were after Brexit, and years of appeasing the unappeasable activists. The disaster that has come on our country will not, however, make the media or the experts or the activists one whit more responsible. Repeat after me...
Experts. Huh. Look what happened the last time we listened to the experts! We got locked in to our homes for four months for no reason at all. **** the experts.
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