Since the start of the year I've been taking a dive into exactly this subject (modeling). While I was initially interested in applications for contemporary social and environmental problems, I later learned about the deep cultural significance of models as well as surprising insights emerging from neuroscience. This put the topic on a still deeper philosophical footing. Now with the pandemic exploding around us, the relevance of all this is still more apparent. Pandemics prompt existential questions for how we relate to and make sense of the world. Our response must address the models that have allowed us to anticipate the future and dramatically change the world around us (in ways that, in some cases, inadvertently lead to these very problems).
There's some very exciting work being done by many people on how we know what we know, and a lot of it centers around Karl Friston's prolific research in "active inference". As noted, few people seem to change their behaviors based on modeling. I'd suggest that this is because it feels irrelevant to them. There is a disconnect there. And that disconnect is between the "scientific models" being produced by professional researchers and the "folk models" that most of us grew up with and rely upon for our day to day activities. What most people fail to realize however is that both types of models have a lot in common. If we take epidemiological models for example, the goal is to predict how disease might spread so we can prevent the worst of possible outcomes from occurring. The goal, in short, is to protect ourselves from harm and improve healthy outcomes. This is also the goal of folk models, to "protect and preserve". And when a crisis occurs, as is happening now, we have a learning opportunity. We might see how some of our folk models produce "prediction errors" with real, fatal consequences.
We all share a universal instinct to protect, and we all share "model-based" thought processes, the question that remains is whether we use better models to make accurate predictions, and thereby survive, or whether we use poorer models and make inaccurate predictions, and thereby suffer. Of course, people are very attached to their folk models, and won't easily give them up. Our folk models are a part of our cultural (and evolutionary) heritage after all, they are tradition, and whatever else may be said about them, they did bring us this far in life. Most of our folk models work very well and should be retained as long as they do. But at the same time, and by necessity, all models must be able to adapt to changing conditions. The question is, can our models adapt fast enough before reality catches up and we can no longer stay one step ahead? This is the challenge. It's a challenge to both research science and popular culture.
The coronavirus crisis could have been prevented because there was enough information available to the world, according to Noam Chomsky, who has warned that once the pandemic is over, two critical challenges will remain - the threats of nuclear war and global warming. “In October 2019, just before the outbreak, there was a large-scale simulation in the United States of a possible pandemic of this kind," he said, referring to an exercise - titled Event 201 - hosted by the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security in partnership with the World Economic Forum and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. "But nothing was done, instead the crisis was made worse by the treachery of the political systems that didn't pay attention to the information that they were aware of.” Additional warning was given in a research paper published in the journal Clinical Microbiology Reviews in October of 2007: "The presence of a large reservoir of SARS-CoV-like viruses in horseshoe bats, together with the culture of eating exotic mammals in southern China, is a time bomb."
We can't change the mind of someone in a cult (be it religious or political). But we can provide everyone else with the tools they will need to identify a cult. It's very simple: We have to begin with how accurate models of our world are formed and operate. The number one function of these models is to make a prediction. And we use that prediction as the basis for selecting actions that will best preserve and protect our lives. So when Trump and others say "Nobody could have predicted something like this" that should be a huge red flag. We know this is false, and a further sign that he has abdicated his responsibility to protect and preserve the nation. ...A friend of mine told me how he thinks America overcomes the challenges it faces: a responsible nation heeds the call of Paul Revere. But when we heard the call of today's "Paul Revere", those who cried out "The pandemic is coming! The pandemic is coming!", did we listen?
Essential workforce
The Brookings Institute reports "The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) designated a list of essential infrastructure workers who “protect their communities, while ensuring continuity of functions critical to public health and safety, as well as economic and national security.” The DHS-designated industries employed anywhere from 49 million to 62 million people in 2018, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), representing about 34% to 43% of the total U.S. workforce. This confirms the sheer scale necessary to keep us safe during a pandemic. While some of these workers earn competitive wages, many are employed in industries that pay below the national median ($18.58 per hour), ranging from food and beverage stores to nursing care facilities."
If the pandemic has taught me anything, it is that anyone going into the workforce today should consider the possibility that they will need to justify whether their job is "essential" or not at some point in the future. And as I consider this, it strikes me that this is the diametric opposite of what anthropologist David Graeber famously called "bullshit jobs". So now we have two categories: essential jobs and bullshit jobs. In his book "Bullshit Jobs: A Theory", Graeber argues that the existence of meaningless jobs is psychologically destructive and causes societal harm. Rutger Bregman, who promotes a universal basic income and a shorter workweek, says we’ve got a huge amount of bullshit jobs right now. He pointed to a paper by two Dutch economists on socially useless jobs which suggests that around a quarter of the workforce is not sure whether they contribute anything."
Naomi Klein made some important observations: Shouldn't technology be subject to the disciplines of democracy and public oversight? More to the point, if public funds are paying for so much of it, shouldn't the public also own and control the internet as a nonprofit public utility? We cannot abdicate oversight and control, and we must ensure responsible use. She also points out that some newer technologies have the effect of replacing good jobs with bad jobs. How do we address that? In a separate article David Roberts interviewed Pavlina Tcherneva about a federal job guarantee. "The shock of the virus has opened the conversation to [these] bigger ideas." It might be possible for the public to control our technological infrastructure in such a way as to ensure that everyone can benefit from access to it. Tcherneva: "If you have a care project — environmental care, community care — you could add a lot more hands, a lot more people to shadow teachers or nurses to do on-the-job training. These [work] programs can be a buffer that absorbs unemployed people, and then, as they are ready to move on to better jobs, they leave." We need policy packages that are designed to provide essential services, help people, and address power relationships.
Universal Basic Services
David Roberts wrote an article that describes an idea very similar to Peter Corning's notion of a "basic needs guarantee", only here it is called "universal basic services". He writes: "The notion of “universal basic services” (UBS) is a relatively new entrant in the debate over social democratic policy that focuses on the social infrastructure that enables individuals to reach their potential. Building on universal, publicly funded services like education and (at least in most countries) health care, it proposes to expand the range of such services to include other building blocks of life in a modern society: food and shelter, housing, access to digital information, and more."
Andrew Percy: "We defined seven basic categories of essential services that meet three criteria. For someone to meet their full potential, they need safety, opportunity, and participation. So that is individual safety, opportunity to use their skills and abilities to improve their own lives, and ability to participate in the democracy. What does that take, in a modern sense? They need somewhere safe to live, access to food, health care access, education, access to digital information and communication systems, and access to a transport system. Our seventh category we call legal, by which we mean access to the institutional mechanisms of democracy and society... We modeled our proposal. For the vast majority of the population, everybody earning median incomes and below, there’s a net positive. People right at the bottom are having something like 60 to 80 percent of their normal costs replaced by public services. That leaves them money in their pocket." I think "universal basic services" together with "universal basic jobs" is a winning combination. We can stimulate the local job market by providing the services we need most.
Andrew Percy: "We defined seven basic categories of essential services that meet three criteria. For someone to meet their full potential, they need safety, opportunity, and participation. So that is individual safety, opportunity to use their skills and abilities to improve their own lives, and ability to participate in the democracy. What does that take, in a modern sense? They need somewhere safe to live, access to food, health care access, education, access to digital information and communication systems, and access to a transport system. Our seventh category we call legal, by which we mean access to the institutional mechanisms of democracy and society... We modeled our proposal. For the vast majority of the population, everybody earning median incomes and below, there’s a net positive. People right at the bottom are having something like 60 to 80 percent of their normal costs replaced by public services. That leaves them money in their pocket." I think "universal basic services" together with "universal basic jobs" is a winning combination. We can stimulate the local job market by providing the services we need most.
Genuine public interest
Pankaj Mishra, in Flailing States, writes: "Anglo-America’s dingy realities – low-wage work, underemployment, hyper-incarceration and enfeebled or exclusionary health systems – have long been evident. In a widely circulated essay in the Atlantic, George Packer claimed that ‘every morning in the endless month of March, Americans woke up to find themselves citizens of a failed state.’ In fact, the state has been AWOL for decades, and the market has been entrusted with the tasks most societies reserve almost exclusively for government: healthcare, pensions, low-income housing, education, social services and incarceration. East Asian states have displayed far superior decision-making and policy implementation. They share the assumption that genuine public interest is different from the mere aggregation of private interests, and is best realised through long-term government planning and policy.
"The pandemic has shown that the Reagan-Thatcher model, which privatised risk and shifted the state’s responsibility onto the individual, condemns an unconscionable number of people to premature death or to a desperate struggle for existence. Now Boris Johnson claims that ‘there is such a thing as society’ and promises a ‘New Deal’ for Britain. Biden, abandoning his Obama-lite centrism, has rushed to plagiarise Bernie Sanders’s manifesto. In anticipation of his victory in November, the Democratic Party belatedly plans to forge a minimal social state in the US through robust worker-protection laws, expanded government-backed health insurance, if not single-payer healthcare, and colossal investment in public-health jobs and childcare programmes. The ideal of democracy, according to which all adults are equal and possess equal power to choose and control political and economic outcomes, cannot be realised when it is undermined by economic inequality."
Pankaj Mishra, in Flailing States, writes: "Anglo-America’s dingy realities – low-wage work, underemployment, hyper-incarceration and enfeebled or exclusionary health systems – have long been evident. In a widely circulated essay in the Atlantic, George Packer claimed that ‘every morning in the endless month of March, Americans woke up to find themselves citizens of a failed state.’ In fact, the state has been AWOL for decades, and the market has been entrusted with the tasks most societies reserve almost exclusively for government: healthcare, pensions, low-income housing, education, social services and incarceration. East Asian states have displayed far superior decision-making and policy implementation. They share the assumption that genuine public interest is different from the mere aggregation of private interests, and is best realised through long-term government planning and policy.
"The pandemic has shown that the Reagan-Thatcher model, which privatised risk and shifted the state’s responsibility onto the individual, condemns an unconscionable number of people to premature death or to a desperate struggle for existence. Now Boris Johnson claims that ‘there is such a thing as society’ and promises a ‘New Deal’ for Britain. Biden, abandoning his Obama-lite centrism, has rushed to plagiarise Bernie Sanders’s manifesto. In anticipation of his victory in November, the Democratic Party belatedly plans to forge a minimal social state in the US through robust worker-protection laws, expanded government-backed health insurance, if not single-payer healthcare, and colossal investment in public-health jobs and childcare programmes. The ideal of democracy, according to which all adults are equal and possess equal power to choose and control political and economic outcomes, cannot be realised when it is undermined by economic inequality."
Ezra Klein, in "Why We're Polarized", wrote: "The story of American politics is typically told through the stories of individual political actors. We focus on their genius, their hubris, their decency, their deceit. We take you inside their feuds, their thoughts, the bon mots they deliver in private meetings and the agonies they quietly confide to friends. We locate the hinge moments of history in the decisions they make. And, in doing so, we suggest they could have made other decisions, or that other people, in their place, would have made different decisions. This assumption has the grace of truth, but not as much truth as we think, not as much truth as the breathless insider accounts of White House meetings and campaign machinations would have us believe. ...I have lost faith in these stories. We collapse systemic problems into personalized narratives, and when we do, we cloud our understanding of American politics and confuse our theories of repair. My intention is to zoom out from the individuals to better see the interlocking systems that surround them. I will use specific politicians as examples, but only insofar as they are marionettes of broader forces. What I seek isn't a story but a blueprint, a map." So are we using a blueprint, a map of broader forces, to make our political decisions? Or are we relying on personalized narratives and stories that hinge on individual actors? How do we handle the complex threats we face this century, and protect and preserve the integrity of the nation and it's citizens? Will the nation operate according to responsible models of systemic processes?
We need a system where political actors place the national welfare over their own narrow self interest, where the big picture takes priority. But in too many cases the opposite arrangement exists. Why? The popular model of personal identity (and personal agency) is too narrow and we have an impoverished understanding of the complex interactions that exist within any functioning system. This is really a single corrupted model. This flawed conception is further amplified by corrupt political actors who would actually have us believe that systemic processes, particularly within society, are either (A) nonexistent or (B) to be avoided whenever possible. And so, without a decent model to use, most debate remains focused on the marionettes and not the broader forces. Consequently we remain disorganized, ineffectual, and have no real agency in determining our fate. ...But I think the corrupting influences can be successfully addressed if we spent more time trying to improve our models (and the conditions necessary for that to occur) and less time being distracted by marionettes. The pandemic has forced us to pay a lot closer attention to models that can accurately predict and thereby help us protect ourselves. The greater the threat, or the perception thereof, the more we need effective models to move to center stage and become a part of the national conversation. I hope we never forget how the pandemic changed the way we see things and we continue to model our response to existential threats.
Karl Friston on "Immunological dark matter"
On Sunday Karl Friston gave a short interview regarding his work modeling the epidemiology of the Covid-19 pandemic. Then today he wrote his own blogpost to clarify some of the things he talked about. One short paragraph in particular illuminates the importance of model comparison, model evidence, and the exploration of model space: "Bayesian model comparison is at the heart of dynamic causal modelling. It brings certain perspectives that can sometimes seem counterintuitive. First, there is no notion of falsification. In other words, claims like “this model can be falsified because of this and that” have no meaning. All models are evaluated in relation to each other, in terms of their relative evidence. Crucially, models change as they assimilate new data (via a process of Bayesian belief updating). In short, having the ability to compare different models means that one has the ability to explore a model space, as prior beliefs become more precise and more data becomes available. The best model has the highest evidence and provides an accurate account of the data in the simplest way possible."
On Sunday Karl Friston gave a short interview regarding his work modeling the epidemiology of the Covid-19 pandemic. Then today he wrote his own blogpost to clarify some of the things he talked about. One short paragraph in particular illuminates the importance of model comparison, model evidence, and the exploration of model space: "Bayesian model comparison is at the heart of dynamic causal modelling. It brings certain perspectives that can sometimes seem counterintuitive. First, there is no notion of falsification. In other words, claims like “this model can be falsified because of this and that” have no meaning. All models are evaluated in relation to each other, in terms of their relative evidence. Crucially, models change as they assimilate new data (via a process of Bayesian belief updating). In short, having the ability to compare different models means that one has the ability to explore a model space, as prior beliefs become more precise and more data becomes available. The best model has the highest evidence and provides an accurate account of the data in the simplest way possible."
Protests
Yesterday Trevor Noah shared a video "George Floyd and the Dominoes of Racial Injustice" in which he said: "We need people at the top to be the most accountable because they are the ones who are basically setting the tone and the tenor for everything that we do in society. It's the same way we tell parents to set an example for their kids, the same way we tell captains or coaches to set an example for their players, the same way you tell teachers to set an example for their students. The reason we do that is because we understand in society that if you lead by example, there is a good chance that people will follow that example that you have set. And so, if the example law enforcement is setting is that they do not adhere to the laws, then why should the citizens of that society adhere to the laws when, in fact, the law enforcers themselves don't?"
Today horror writer Steven Craig Hickman wrote: "I understand the rage, the pain, the suffering. I even understand the violence directed at corporate America. What I don't understand is why out of all this need for Justice there are no leaders of the people? Where is the voice that will pull this energy out of its ass and into a political movement of action to change the rules of the game. All this street violence is leading to one thing: the State will soon decide to react against it, and things will get dark indeed. It happened in my generation in the sixties, too. Repression when it comes will come swiftly if people don't form a movement in which their rage, pain, and suffering can unite them to put someone in the Whitehouse worthy of the people. The rage against the police is a symptom of the larger problem in our country, which is lack of true leadership and a sense of real justice, law, and change. We keep pretending with ourselves every four years that things will change, and what do we get: more of the fucking same from both parties - jack shit. Promises and more promises, while the fat cats get richer, and poor get poorer..."
There's a very clear theme here. We have had a vaccuum of leadership for too long. The people at the top are the wrong role models. On this point there is wide agreement. But because we live in a polarized nation where chaos and disruption is viewed as an opportunity by all sides in a conflict to promote their own agenda, we must also be aware that some of the worst elements in society are coming out with the protesters. Neo-Nazi accelerationists try to stoke social division and create conflict. They "hold that the liberal-democratic order is a failure, that we should move beyond it toward a better future, but for them this means the total collapse of a degenerate and corrupt Western society, and the rebirth, out of its ashes, of a new political order more hospitable to white domination." This is not the answer. We don't replace the wrong people at the top with terrorists and unapologetic fascists. So where do we go from here? We absolutely must carefully examine our social models, understand how these operate within contemporary culture, and use this opportunity for deep reflection. Otherwise we may continue to collectively sleepwalk into a future that even a horror writer struggles to imagine.
Today horror writer Steven Craig Hickman wrote: "I understand the rage, the pain, the suffering. I even understand the violence directed at corporate America. What I don't understand is why out of all this need for Justice there are no leaders of the people? Where is the voice that will pull this energy out of its ass and into a political movement of action to change the rules of the game. All this street violence is leading to one thing: the State will soon decide to react against it, and things will get dark indeed. It happened in my generation in the sixties, too. Repression when it comes will come swiftly if people don't form a movement in which their rage, pain, and suffering can unite them to put someone in the Whitehouse worthy of the people. The rage against the police is a symptom of the larger problem in our country, which is lack of true leadership and a sense of real justice, law, and change. We keep pretending with ourselves every four years that things will change, and what do we get: more of the fucking same from both parties - jack shit. Promises and more promises, while the fat cats get richer, and poor get poorer..."
There's a very clear theme here. We have had a vaccuum of leadership for too long. The people at the top are the wrong role models. On this point there is wide agreement. But because we live in a polarized nation where chaos and disruption is viewed as an opportunity by all sides in a conflict to promote their own agenda, we must also be aware that some of the worst elements in society are coming out with the protesters. Neo-Nazi accelerationists try to stoke social division and create conflict. They "hold that the liberal-democratic order is a failure, that we should move beyond it toward a better future, but for them this means the total collapse of a degenerate and corrupt Western society, and the rebirth, out of its ashes, of a new political order more hospitable to white domination." This is not the answer. We don't replace the wrong people at the top with terrorists and unapologetic fascists. So where do we go from here? We absolutely must carefully examine our social models, understand how these operate within contemporary culture, and use this opportunity for deep reflection. Otherwise we may continue to collectively sleepwalk into a future that even a horror writer struggles to imagine.
Most everyone understands that weapons are not toys, that people who own and use them should meet a standard of mental health, that people should have the training and knowledge to use them, that such people should not be deprived of their use, that there are many legitimate reasons why a person would want weapons, and that the design of weapons is an art with a long cultural history. Most everyone understands these things. What many people are forgetting is the limitations of weapons. There is a persistent myth that Americans cannot be deprived of their rights so long as they are the fastest draw, the sharpest aim, and have the most ammunition and other tactical gear. If anyone thinks that the only way to deprive us of our rights is through brute force, they are living in a fantasy. Today more than ever, the violence glamorized by military power, militias, terrorists, and police is a spectacle.
Real power, of the sort we must confront today, is the ability to coerce the minds of others, to get them to think and believe in a certain way, without the need to ever resort to physical violence. This is targeted advertising and ideological indoctrination. This is why dictators sew confusion to prevent rebellion, or fan the flames of xenophobia to manufacture consent and consolidate the will of the people. They coerce the minds of others with symbols of fear, security, and personal empowerment. Skillful parasites can mislead the minds of others with false evidence so that they are unwitting accessories to subversive models for domination and control. Today the rhetoric of freedom through violence is simply a manipulative ploy in a culture war to influence people. Those who fall for it end up using their weapons against the people, not in their defense. We're going to continue to see these fetish items trotted out every day. Violence ultimately solves nothing. It's a seductive lie that subverts substantive deliberation, distracts from real solutions, and keeps people firmly in the grip of unscrupulous politicians. We must recognize the dynamics of power without being caught in its web. To paraphrase the great journalist and peace advocate Norman Cousins, our security will ultimately be found only through the mutual control of force, not the use of force.
What is a man?
In his article "What is it like to be a man?" Phil Christman wrote that 'protection' is central to the concept of masculinity, but this basic value has become twisted and deformed in a contemporary culture where the answer to the question "How does one actually protect?" is no longer as straightforward as the collective mythology we've inherited might suggest it should be. He writes: "The proponents of traditional masculinity lament our failure to embrace a protective role. Political theorist and pundit Harvey Mansfield (in "Manliness", p66) gives us a summation that is, by the low standards of our cultural conversation on masculinity, relatively straightforward: “A man protects those whom he has taken in his care against dangers they cannot face or handle without him. He makes an issue of some matter, engages his honor, and takes charge of the situation either as a routine or in an emergency. The willingness to take on risk is the primary protection enveloping all other ways of providing for someone.” The merit of taking on risk seems self-evident, of course—it sounds, again, like mere adulthood, or mere goodness. Yet culture whispers to us that a too-narrow concern with securing a future for one’s family or one’s lover can go badly wrong. You can’t even talk about this urge, as I’ve discovered in writing this paragraph, without coming uncomfortably close to the “Fourteen Words” that define the neo-Nazi creed."
The willingness to, indeed the merit of taking on risk is central to the popular concept of masculinity. What makes that insightful? View this value against the backdrop of the contemporary Reagan-Thatcher model, where, as Pankaj Mishra recently pointed out, "privatised risk shifted the state's responsibility onto the individual". It's almost like these ideas were meant to be together: those who are consumed by a masculine fantasy of locating and performatively enacting their roles as risk-bearing individuals, and a social model that provides them with the pretense for doing just that. The sad reality is that, by and large, the gravest forms of risk men face today are not the sort of threats that can be diffused with muscle strength. This, perhaps, explains why women global leaders have displayed a more competent response to the pandemic. Risk management in the modern world takes brains, not brawn. ...Wake up fellow men! I applaud your willingness to take on risk, but there's a disconcertingly large number us who are still sleepwalking in a world that has moved on.
The willingness to, indeed the merit of taking on risk is central to the popular concept of masculinity. What makes that insightful? View this value against the backdrop of the contemporary Reagan-Thatcher model, where, as Pankaj Mishra recently pointed out, "privatised risk shifted the state's responsibility onto the individual". It's almost like these ideas were meant to be together: those who are consumed by a masculine fantasy of locating and performatively enacting their roles as risk-bearing individuals, and a social model that provides them with the pretense for doing just that. The sad reality is that, by and large, the gravest forms of risk men face today are not the sort of threats that can be diffused with muscle strength. This, perhaps, explains why women global leaders have displayed a more competent response to the pandemic. Risk management in the modern world takes brains, not brawn. ...Wake up fellow men! I applaud your willingness to take on risk, but there's a disconcertingly large number us who are still sleepwalking in a world that has moved on.
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