Stumbling and Mumbling

People choose to listen to charlatans even when it is against their interest to do so. That’s the message of some recent experiments.

Aristotelis Boukouras and colleagues got subjects to take a multiple choice exam during which they could choose to take help from one of two computerized advisors. One of these was an expert, who gave the answers that a panel of economists would. The other gave the answers that had been most popular with other people who had taken the test. They found that most people chose to take advice from the latter – even after they had been told that it was only giving the popular answers and even when they were paid for getting answers right. What’s more, even when people had the option of switching to the expert when they could see that the populist advisor was wrong, only around half did so. They concluded:

A charlatan espousing popular beliefs can lead laypeople to choose to follow her advice rather than the advice of a genuine expert. This is true even in the face of increasing negative evidence regarding the accuracy of the charlatan.

What’s going on here is a variation on the confirmation bias. “People have a strong tendency to follow the adviser who suggests similar answers to the people’s own priors” the authors say. And it is the charlatan, who gives the most popular answer, who is the more likely to do this.

This has been corroborated by some different recent experiments by Basit Zafar and colleagues. They asked people which articles about the pandemic they wanted to read, having shown them just the headlines. They found that pessimists tended to choose articles with pessimistic headlines and optimists articles with optimistic ones. What’s more, having chosen articles in line with their priors they then revised their beliefs more if the article confirmed their priors – so pessimists who chose to read a pessimistic article became even more pessimistic about the outlook for deaths and jobs whilst optimists who chose optimistic stories became more optimistic. In this way, beliefs became more polarized; this finding of course confirms earlier evidence (pdf).

Of course, these experiments have external validity. People believe Covid denialists and those who claimed economic benefits from Brexit. And they even believe charlatans when their own money is at stake – for example by investing in high-charging under-performing funds.

The thing about these experiments, though, is that people choose the charlatan even under ideal conditions. In the real world there are many other ways for charlatans to build support as well even ignoring the biased and ignorant media. These include:

 - Ideological homophily. Boukouras and colleagues asked questions that weren’t hot ideological issues. Many issues on which we seek expertise, however, are. This causes right-wingers to regard Econ101ers as experts and MMTers as cranks whereas leftists do the opposite.

 - Herding effects. As Robert Shiller shows in Narrative Economics, stories can spread exactly like viruses. This is one reason why asset price bubbles occur and why friends and colleagues have shareholdings and asset allocations (pdf) that are more similar than they should be.

 - Ignorance of selection bias. David Hirshleifer gives an example of this. People talk more about their investment successes than their failures. This causes listeners to over-estimate the probable success of active stock-picking relative to sticking money in tracker funds, and to over-invest in speculative stocks.

 - Lack of incentives. Even when people have big money at stake, they sometimes make bad decisions, for example by buying high-charging, low-performance actively managed funds. How much more likely are they then to make mistakes when incentives to be right are absent? As Jason Brennan has said, ““when it comes to politics, smart doesn’t pay, and dumb doesn’t hurt.”

 - Snake oil sales tricks. In a brilliant paper (pdf), the late Werner Troesken showed how sellers of patent medicines stayed in business for decades by tricks such as: giving people a short-term pick-up with alcohol or opium that they mistook (pdf) for a genuine cure; appealing to people’s desperation (they knew, decades before prospect theory, that desperate people take risks); hyping their products and distinguishing them from others; and denigrating experts.

One implication of all this is that a public service broadcaster as the BBC purports to be cannot be impartial. If you offer people two sides of a story or two talking heads, many will choose the charlatan or false story over the true one. And we’ll get increased polarization – which might make for good TV but not necessarily for good politics or a good society.

But I think the implication is more devastating. All this undermines the conventional liberal faith in the marketplace of ideas. John Stuart Mill thought that “wrong opinions and practices gradually yield to fact and argument.” Experiments, however, confirm our real world experience that in fact the opposite can happen. And this isn’t simply because of our biased and dysfunctional media.

But let’s push the “marketplace of ideas” metaphor a step further. Markets must be embedded within social norms, rules and mechanisms if they are to work effectively, as Jesse Norman argues. In the marketplace of ideas these norms, rules and mechanisms are obviously inadequate. Which poses the question: what would effective ones look like? Too few people are asking this question – which might be because existing ones actually serve the interests of extractive capitalism rather well.

Unfortunately this implies that democracy can't work. (or won't work very well). That democracy will be outperformed by a well run tyranny, like Singapore or China. (Heinlein alleged said "The best government is a dictatorship I agree with")

I don't know what the answer is.

The reason why people didn't listen to what "a panel of economists" thought best may be that economists have not, as a rule, been right in the past. They sponsored neo-liberal politics at least up to 2008, they didn't believe a financial crash could be possible, etc etc. So why should people listen to them?

At risk of a going off on a tangent

I enjoyed Heinlein's "Double Star" (1956) book.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_Star

The plot is relevant!

Available on the Internet Archive (See above)

Neither Singapore nor China is a "tyranny." Please avoid being prejudiced and so offensive.

Our blogger has a touching wykehamist faith in "experts", who are supposed to be well-informed and unbiased "philsopher-kings". Most people know well that most "experts" overrate their competence, and are biased by vested interests, their own or those of their "sponsors".

Consider the type of expert most people interact with: a medical professional. Most wise people ask for second opinions, and they know that the opinions they get are biased by various prejudices, if not vested interests (for example carefully cultivated by pharma companies). It is not well known but in Japan doctors prescribe a lot more medicines than in many other places, and that "may be related" to doctors in Japan also being pharmacists.

«a public service broadcaster as the BBC purports to be cannot be impartial. If you offer people two sides of a story or two talking heads, many will choose the charlatan or false story over the true one.»

But the BBC is a government service broadcaster, and regardless cannot be impartial. Even offering two sides of a story means excluding many other sides, and selecting which sides are offered creates bias.

«the conventional liberal faith in the marketplace of ideas. John Stuart Mill thought that “wrong opinions and practices gradually yield to fact and argument.”»

And that is very true, in a statistical, darwinian way as in "science advances funeral by funeral": people and countries who consistently make bad choices are ruined, so those who make better choices take their place, more than the same people who make bad choices learning to make better choices. That is a very important message from NN Taleb, who is far from being a wykehamist.

Consider for example the question of whether to buy property or shared in 1999: most experts would have thought that assets were hugely overvalued ("irrational exhuberance"), and reversion to the mean was likely, but people who bought into overvalued markets, trusting political momentum, won yuuugely, and people who trusted the experts lost yuuugely, despite two reversions to the mean in 2001 and 2008. And what matters is ergodic/path dependent outcomes.

As ever, the Left say 'Listen to Experts!', forgetting the caveat 'As long as they're ones we agree with'.

In fields where there are sensible answers to be found I would expect sensible answers to prevail - success stands out and charlatan answers look bad by comparison.

But where there are no obviously sensible answers the charlatans might look to do just as well as experts - neither has an obvious advantage. Neither experts nor charlatans will show better than chance results. For Covid this situation lasted 10 minutes.

The difficult area is where the sensible answers are not so obvious - finance or politics say - where there is noise and time lags in the data. There the charlatan can make an apparently good case and the expert view only emerges over time - and then not with 100% certainty. I used to look at an adviser's office location - certain areas of London were well known for charlatans. Not so easy in these WEB days.

We never fully understand a thing until it no longer matters.

«The difficult area is where the sensible answers are not so obvious - finance or politics say - where there is noise and time lags in the data.»

Ah another wykehamist who seems to divide experts into "philosopher kings" and "charlatans", without even considering the possibility of biases because of vested interests.

I may be reading too much into that word "sensible answers", because "sensible" or "common-sense" are usually words used by right-wingers to describe their rather biased "expertise".

People who are "sensible" and have "common-senses" instead don't trust experts to be wykehamist "philosopher kings", but attempt to compare and contrast the opinions of several variants, especially as to the biases arising from vested interests.

«Neither experts nor charlatans will show better than chance results.»

Such amazing optimism! There is a small problem here, that essentially all information that "civilians" have (and much if not most of what the "experts have) is hearsay, and it is nearly always unverifiable by "civilians" (or even most experts).

Is the moon really made of cheese? Did Julius Caesar really exist? Is the speed of light a universal constant? Did Putin really get Trump elected?

Even what is an expert is hearsay, and even reports on the performance of experts vs. charlatans are hearsay, never mind the "reproducibility crisis".

I agree with those saying experts are just as charlatan as anyone.

What's wrong with asset price bubbles? Financial markets are more and more disconnected from real output. Why not accelerate that trend? People play in unregulated, untaxed financial markets; the Fed insures a monetary floor on access to real resources. Income comes from finance and production comes from self-directed innovation and ad hoc cooperation between individuals.

All the people games currently throttling real supply are moved to finance, which becomes a sandboxed virtual reality that nonetheless produces income. But you want to spend your income on more financial goods, not more real things ...

@blissex: "Even what is an expert is hearsay,"
But there's a difference between e.g. mask-opponents saying "experts said don't wear a mask" and the scientists who actually said "we don't think the transmissibility will be affected by masks that much... oh, wait, the evidence is in and yes, it clearly makes a huge difference so wear a mask".

I mean, yes, I take your point that, in essence, everything is hearsay (even gravity up to a point) but if you are going to take the argument that far, then I'm not sure that it is an argument any more.

(In passing, and for once, I completely agree with you about something else. I have lost count of the times I have had to remind people that the BBC is inherently on the 'side' of the government whatever government that happens to be - I remember when it was called the Blair Broadcasting Corporation. It's a problem for it, yes, but it's far less of a problem than the opinion-only channels that masquerade as news.)

"Scientists who actually said "we don't think the transmissibility will be affected by masks that much... oh, wait, the evidence is in and yes, it clearly makes a huge difference so wear a mask"."

Apart from the scientists who have concluded the opposite, but they can be safely ignored, because you disagree with them..........

Coronavirus deaths are declining importantly in the UK. I am very, very relieved. Vaccine administration has been well handled.

This is wonderful. I am so grateful.

As for masks, all that was necessary was to look to China and Korea and Japan and Thailand and Malaysia, among Asian countries, to know how effective masks were.

The problem I have with the marketplace of ideas is the Holocaust.

When Jews were being pushed onto trains at gunpoint, headed towards oven and gas chambers, did they think to themselves: "Well fair enough. Our argument wasn't good enough and we lost in the marketplace of ideas. Nazism won, they played a blinder really. They deserved to win because their ideas were simply stronger. Maybe we deserve to be eradicated?"

I don't think so.

The marketplace of ideas suggests that popular ideas are best, indeed popular ideas are right.

That this is so clearly and demonstrably not the case should tell us all the the marketplace of ideas is itself a bad idea. Despite being a very successful idea.

The marketplace of ideas is nothing more than the strong telling the weak to shut up.

«everything is hearsay (even gravity up to a point) but if you are going to take the argument that far, then I'm not sure that it is an argument any more»

That is not an argument, it is a statement of the "obvious", which however is not that obvious in practice :-).

The argument is that given as a premise that "obvious" statement, most practical decisions are bets on the credibility of the "experts" or the plausibility of the "evidence". The same as in every trial where the court hears authoritative "experts" presenting quite different "evidence" and reaching opposite conclusions.

But that argument is not that there is no difference between "experts" and "charlatans", but it leads to the argument to be highly skeptical of the "conventional wisdom" wykehamism of our blogger, which seems to make a clear division between "experts" (who are fair and just "philosopher kings") and "charlatans" (which do exist).

In particular I wish to argue that the *sincerity* of "experts" is not very relevant: there have been plenty of "experts" who entirely sincerely believed themselves to be fair and just philosopher-kings and were actually rather biased by their background.
Wise JM Keynes relatedly wrote:

“Practical men who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back”

«there's a difference between e.g. mask-opponents saying "experts said don't wear a mask" and the scientists who actually said "we don't think the transmissibility will be affected by masks that much... oh, wait, the evidence is in and yes, it clearly makes a huge difference so wear a mask"»

As to this there are two aspect, and thus I shall make two replies, and the first is about that "mask-opponents" and "the scientists", which I guess is between those who oppose masks because of "maitvated reasoning" (prejudice, ulterior motives, ...), and fair and just "philosopher-king" scientists who may at first guess wrong but then recant given the evidence "we don't think [...] the evidence is in"):

* "Scientists" can have "motivated reasoning" too, for example because of their careers or personal biases, and that can influence their interpretation and acceptance of evidence. Some "scientists" have acknowledge this with the saying that "science progresses one funeral at a time".

* Conversely "motivated reasoning" and even obsession (from which "scientists" are far from free) can lead to better insight than detached analysis.

* Regardless, how can a "civilian" decide between two conflicting "experts", or between an "expert" and a "mask-opponent", which one is more credible or which one has the most reliable evidence, without becoming themselves "experts"?

In practice many people decide by "authority", which largely means "alignment with the conventional wisdom", whichever the person regards as "conventional". That is by using a "rule of thumb", some kind of "heuristic", and that is largely what gives rise to the "cognitive biases" that our blogger greatly oversells.

Any 'expert' whose area of expertise is one where his(or her) pronouncements cannot be easily tested in the real world is not an scientist at all but a pseudo-politician, indeed some might say a charlatan in fact. Anyone taking their word for anything is doing so entirely on trust not science.

«there's a difference between e.g. mask-opponents saying "experts said don't wear a mask" [...] oh, wait, the evidence is in and yes, it clearly makes a huge difference so wear a mask"»

The second aspect here is about the merit of the specific example, because like many others (e.g. our blogger's favourite, effects of immigration) it is not that trivial because:

* Wearing or not wearing masks has several different consequences, and there can be many different claims.

* Masks can either help prevent being infected or prevent infecting others.

* In either case their effectiveness can be a matter of degree.

* Regardless of the effectiveness, we should look at the consequences of getting it wrong.

* Regardless of the consequences of getting it wrong, we should look at the costs of mandatory wearing/not wearing them.

The same "experts" can then offer their expert opinions about some of those points but not others, ingenuously or disingenuously, and it is not easy to find an "expert" that is truly "expert" about all of those points at the same time… It takes *judgement* to figure it out.

The last point above is also "political": even if it were granted that masks are somewhat effective at reducing infection of other people, that getting it wrong one way would be much worse than wrong the other way, and that wearing them has a very low practical cost, some people will argue that not being forced to wear a face mask is their indefeasible right against oppression, whatever the consequences ("fiat libertas, ruat caelum").

To which I reply: then argue against wearing a "mask" on your crotch, and go around not just with your face but your crotch uncovered to demonstrate your determination to support liberty!

«The same "experts" can then offer their expert opinions about some of those points but not others, ingenuously or disingenuously»

And this related to a general point, hinted at by another commenter writing "where there are no obviously sensible answers the charlatans might look to do just as well as experts", which is BTW the far more prevalent case.

The general point is that in "barbarian" countries of northern Europe in particular there is the common misperception that arguments are true or false, just as someone is either an (wykehamist, philosopher-king) "expert" or a "charlatan".

But arguments can have a degree of context-dependent applicability, can be bullshit (made for effect with no regard to truth or applicability), and can be (and often are) dissembling, as in "technically" true ("a partial truth can be a great lie").

In particular many "experts" are not just well versed in dissembling, in part because that is important for career advancement in the sciences too, but also can *inadvertently* dissemble, because their audiences cannot understand the nuances and limits of the statements by the "expert".

And all this without mentioning again the "reproducibility crisis"...

«pronouncements cannot be easily tested in the real world is not an scientist at all but a pseudo-politician, indeed some might say a charlatan in fact. Anyone taking their word for anything is doing so entirely on trust not science.»

Please let's not go from one extreme to another: while I reject the myth of a sharp distinction between (philosopher-king) "experts", the statement above is very objectionable because of some distinct arguments:

* It is exceptionally difficult in many cases to agree or even to figure out what "tested in the real world" means, that something can be just "tested in the real world" is a simplistic myth as that of the sharp distinction between "experts" and "charlatans".

* Because of practical limits, even if we agreed what "tested in the real world" means, most people would have to accept the hearsay that something has been "tested in the real world" on the basis of trust alone.

* Regardless, there is something in between "tested in the real world" and "entirely on trust", and it is *judgement*, where the quality of judgement and of insights can be rated as a to a degree of persuasiveness. We can say of someone that even if not "tested in the real world" and not always true/applicable their arguments are usually well judged.

Related to the last point I also reject any simplistic binary distinction between "science" and "not science", my usual argument (derived from arguments from philosopher Chaim Perelman) is that there is something in between, what I call "disciplines".

Examples with different degrees are history, medicine, political economy, where there are few if any reproducible experiments, where most statements have some counterexamples, but where conclusions need not be arbitrary, they can be based on systematic approaches to insight and result in judgement qualified and supported by persuasive arguments.

«lost count of the times I have had to remind people that the BBC is inherently on the 'side' of the government whatever government that happens to be - I remember when it was called the Blair Broadcasting Corporation.»

Let's be more precise here, my impression is that:

* The BBC is the mouthpiece of "the establishment" (the "conventional wisdom") more than the government of the day.

* Still the government of the day has ways to bend the BBC to its specific view.

* The BBC is still largely the "Blair Broadcasting Corporation" as Blair and Mandelson worked hard and very successfully to infiltrate it with their people, just as Cameron and Johnson etc. are working in the same sense but less successfully.

* The BBC however has *always* been in some sense the "Blair Broadcasting Corporation", from J Reid onwards, as "the establishment", or "conventional wisdom", has been for a long time "blairite", that is "liberal tory". T Balogh reported that H Wilson once remarked "Whoever is in office, the Whigs are in power", and that largely applies to the BBC too.
And that's largely why the "conservative right" have always that the BBC is too left-wing, and the "progressive left" complains that the BBC is too "right-wing", because its culture is largely "radical right"/"whig".

«The problem I have with the marketplace of ideas is the Holocaust»

We cannot properly discuss anything involving that, so let's say that the problem is *popists* instead:

"Well fair enough. Our argument wasn't good enough and we lost in the marketplace of ideas. Calvinists won, they played a blinder really. They deserved to win because their theologies were simply stronger. Maybe us heretics who plot for the domination of this country by the Rome based advocate of Satan deserve to be beheaded?"

Now assume that "experts" have established in the "marketplace of ideas" that popists do plot to have the country dominated by the roman puppet of Satan, and this will lead to the people of the country being corrupted into suffering the torments of Hell for eternity, there are some possible positions:

* The theological "experts" are charlatans, so the popists are not guilty.

* We should trusts the "experts", and do whatever we can to behead all those who plot to damn us to an eternity of torments in Hell.

* We cannot be sure that the theological "experts" are right, so what is the correct application of the "precautionary principle" in this case?

* Even if the theological "experts" are right, it is an eternal principle of "natural justice" thatthe popists are people too, so we should not behead all of them, but merely neutralize their influence.

Personally I am concerned with Cancel Culture
and 'Woke'

https://www.spiked-online.com/2021/02/15/free-speech-is-the-first-casualty-of-wokeness/

https://www.spiked-online.com/2021/02/15/cancel-culture-is-a-threat-to-ordinary-people/

"half of Britons believe they are less free to say what they think than five years ago."

But what is the alternative to free speech the norms imposed by cancel culture?

There is no alternative "Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,Or to take up arms against sea of troubles and by opposing them end them."
Hamlet.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/To_be,_or_not_to_be

Only free speech permits the option of opposition to speech. Other solutions subject people to coercion.

"half of Britons believe they are less free to say what they think than five years ago."
How many Britons? I don't think I know anyone personally who seriously thinks that of themselves but of course the relentless media assault on 'woke' might encourage that view of people generally being less able to express views. Other people though.

Yes, it's the 'woke' who are been persecuted.

https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-lincolnshire-51501202

"Mr Justice Julian Knowles said the effect of police turning up at Mr Miller's place of work "because of his political opinions must not be underestimated".

He added: "To do so would be to undervalue a cardinal democratic freedom.

"In this country we have never had a Cheka, a Gestapo or a Stasi. We have never lived in an Orwellian society.""

When the Police take it upon themselves to 'check your thinking' and record non-crime hate incidents.

We have crossed a significant, line not to mention the sackings for private tweets etc.

And with the News-speak and distortion of history; Orwellian is correct.

February 16, 2021

COVID-19, experts and the media

On February 4th, the British Medical Journal (BMJ) published an editorial * which suggested that the actions of most government’s in mishandling the COVD-19 pandemic could be described as ‘social murder’. They write:

“The 'social murder' of populations is more than a relic of a bygone age. It is very real today, exposed and magnified by covid-19. It cannot be ignored or spun away. Politicians must be held to account by legal and electoral means, indeed by any national and international constitutional means necessary. State failures that led us to two million deaths are 'actions' and 'inactions' that should shame us all.”

The biggest state failure of them all is the UK Chancellor persuading the UK Prime Minister to ignore his expert scientific advisers last autumn.

This damning verdict should come as no surprise, as in most countries most medics have despaired at the failure of politicians to be able to lockdown hard and early. Time and time again leaders want to delay what is inevitable, which just means that more people die, and the lockdowns when they come last longer than if they had been put in place earlier. Equally academic economists with some expertise in pandemics have despaired when governments have used the economy as an excuse for not saving lives, because these economists know there is no trade-off between health and the economy beyond a few weeks.

The interesting thing about this editorial was not that it was written, but that it received virtually no coverage in the mainstream media....

* https://www.bmj.com/content/372/bmj.n314

-- Simon Wren-Lewis

https://www.bmj.com/content/372/bmj.n314

February 4, 2021

Covid-19: Social murder, they wrote—elected, unaccountable, and unrepentant

After two million deaths, we must have redress for mishandling the pandemic

Murder is an emotive word. In law, it requires premeditation. Death must be deemed to be unlawful. How could “murder” apply to failures of a pandemic response? Perhaps it can’t, and never will, but it is worth considering. When politicians and experts say that they are willing to allow tens of thousands of premature deaths for the sake of population immunity or in the hope of propping up the economy, is that not premeditated and reckless indifference to human life? If policy failures lead to recurrent and mistimed lockdowns, who is responsible for the resulting non-covid excess deaths? When politicians wilfully neglect scientific advice, international and historical experience, and their own alarming statistics and modelling because to act goes against their political strategy or ideology, is that lawful? Is inaction, action? How big an omission is not acting immediately after the World Health Organization declared a public health emergency of international concern on 30 January 2020?

At the very least, covid-19 might be classified as “social murder,” as recently explained by two professors of criminology. The philosopher Friedrich Engels coined the phrase when describing the political and social power held by the ruling elite over the working classes in 19th century England. His argument was that the conditions created by privileged classes inevitably led to premature and “unnatural” death among the poorest classes. In The Road to Wigan Pier, George Orwell echoed these themes in describing the life and living conditions of working class people in England’s industrial north. Today, “social murder” may describe the lack of political attention to social determinants and inequities that exacerbate the pandemic. Michael Marmot argues that as we emerge from covid-19 we must build back fairer....

«in most countries most medics have despaired at the failure of politicians to be able to lockdown hard and early. Time and time again leaders want to delay what is inevitable, which just means that more people die, and the lockdowns when they come last longer than if they had been put in place earlier.»

Professor Wren-Lewis uses here the usual revolting thatcherite framing of hard vs. soft lock-down, as if epidemic containment depended solely on individualistic willingness to quarantine themselves.

The better but un-thatcherite argument that people like Wren-Lewis or Johnson cannot accept is that containment by a state funded and organized test-trace-isolate system requires no rolling lock-downs, resulting in areas like China-Taiwan having accumulated so far 9 deaths per year, over a population of 24 millions. Experts like the Chief Scientific Officer and the Chief Medial Officer of the UK recommended that and were ignored:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/14/england-coronavirus-testing-has-not-risen-fast-enough-science-chief

Or those of China-Taiwan:

https://edition.cnn.com/2020/10/29/asia/taiwan-covid-19-intl-hnk/
«The government also invested in mass testing and quick and effective contact tracing. Former Taiwanese Vice President Chen Chien-jen, who is an epidemiologist by training, said lockdowns are not ideal. Chen also said that the type of mass-testing schemes undertaken in mainland China, where millions of people are screened when a handful of cases are detected, are also unnecessary. "Very careful contact tracing, and very stringent quarantines of close contacts are the best way to contain Covid-19," he said.»

BTW "mass-testing schemes" may not be necessary, but they considerably help when the situation is already difficult.

@aragon
Culture wars baloney. Mostly a Tory tactic to differentiate themselves from Labour (or else we might struggle to differentiate the two) before next election. Will be constantly used to support the Tory leaning and hit the left.
It's not dissimilar to the furore over no platforming at Unis. Trivially small issue exagerrated for political ends.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.bbc.co.uk/news/amp/education-43989236

The Tory right got Brexit largely on the back of whipping up hysterical concerns about Johnny foreigner...now they are doing similar with their phoney cry of 'cancel culture'.
So called cancel culture is more about pitting the needs of minorities against those of the working class, when neither have been properly addressed.

February 15, 2021

Coronavirus

Cases   ( 28,317,703)
Deaths   ( 498,203)

India

Cases   ( 10,925,311)
Deaths   ( 155,840)

Cases   ( 4,047,843)
Deaths   ( 117,396)

France

Cases   ( 3,469,539)
Deaths   ( 82,226)

Germany

Cases   ( 2,346,876)
Deaths   ( 65,949)

Mexico

Cases   ( 1,992,794)
Deaths   ( 174,207)

Canada

Cases   ( 826,924)
Deaths   ( 21,311)

China

Cases   ( 89,772)
Deaths   ( 4,636)

February 15, 2021

Coronavirus   (Deaths per million)

UK   ( 1,724)
US   ( 1,500)
Mexico   ( 1,342)
France   ( 1,258)

Germany   ( 786)
Canada   ( 562)
India   ( 112)
China   ( 3)

Labour elite used cancel culture, just like Tories, to demean Jeremy Corbyn. Labour, after all, has become Tory now.

So ———- the best thing to do is listen to nobody?
After all, if experts are not, and non-experts are, politicians cannot be trusted (true) and the BBC is biased (true) .. it kinda gives the impression that investing in gold is the best route (assuming it isn’t gold-wrapped tungsten). I have a headache.

«listen to nobody?»

Rather: listen to several, compare and contrast, and then make your own bets, knowing that they are bets, based on hearsay, so uncertain. The point is that nobody is going to give you, never mind for free, valuable risk-free information.

https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/1233878865325514753
“The entire idea of the INCERTO is that uncertainty makes some decisions muuuuuuch easier. If I am "uncertain" about the skills of the pilot, I take another plane. If I am "uncertain" about an investment, I say no, etc.”

Wren-Lewis uses here the usual revolting thatcherite framing of hard vs. soft lock-down...

[ There was no use of "thatcherite" in the terrific essay by Wren-Lewis. I have no idea what the term actually means, other than that it is supposed to be insulting.

China has been remarkably successful at dealing with the coronavirus and would seem to be a proper source of ideas for other countries. The levels of restrictions such as quarantines in China are importantly varied and we should look at why and how.

America sadly has more than 500,000 coronavirus deaths now, but has shown little interest in knowing how other countries are dealing with the epidemic. ]

Links to the blog of Simon Wren-Lewis - mainlymacro - do not post so I cannot set down the precise reference, but the essay is simple to find:

February 16, 2021

COVID-19, experts and the media

Simon Wren-Lewis

See https://web.archive.org/web/20201126043553/https://www.jhunewsletter.com/article/2020/11/a-closer-look-at-u-s-deaths-due-to-covid-19

> Genevieve Briand, assistant program director of the Applied Economics master’s degree program at Hopkins, critically analyzed the effect of COVID-19 on U.S. deaths using data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in her webinar titled “COVID-19 Deaths: A Look at U.S. Data.”

[...]

> “The reason we have a higher number of reported COVID-19 deaths among older individuals than younger individuals is simply because every day in the U.S. older individuals die in higher numbers than younger individuals,” Briand said.

> Briand also noted that 50,000 to 70,000 deaths are seen both before and after COVID-19, indicating that this number of deaths was normal long before COVID-19 emerged. Therefore, according to Briand, not only has COVID-19 had no effect on the percentage of deaths of older people, but it has also not increased the total number of deaths.

> These data analyses suggest that in contrast to most people’s assumptions, the number of deaths by COVID-19 is not alarming. In fact, it has relatively no effect on deaths in the United States.

I like this expert ...