Tuesday, July 24, 2018

Pitfalls of history - I

A politician needs the ability to foretell what is going to happen tomorrow, next week, next month, and next year. And to have the ability afterwards to explain why it didn't happen. - Winston Churchill

In the controversy over the film 'Padmavat', there were comments that 'history is being distorted' or that 'historical facts are being twisted'. I don't have much idea about either the film or the historical character so that is not what this post is about. These comments seem to give the impression that history about an event or a personality is fixed for all time to come. But this is not true. First of all, there is nothing called ‘correct’ history. There can only be views of the past, some of which approximate more clearly to what actually may have happened because of the evidence they draw upon and the quality of their logic and analysis.

Our perception of the past changes as and when the evidence increases and when the methods for interpreting the evidence improves. Some archaeological expeditions require scientific expertise like DNA analysis and radio-carbon dating so people with knowledge about these scientific fields must be part of the group.  New methods of data analysis and new sources throw fresh light on old incidents. Quite often the new views are slow to trickle down to the general public, who  tend to think that what they leaned in high school history books is unchangeable. In The Black Swan, Nassim Nicholas Taleb tells of three problems in the human mind, which he calls 'the triplet of opacity', which affect our perception of history:

1. The illusion of understanding: People think the world is more understandable, explainable and predictable than it really is. But there are many unexpected factors which impact events.These factors seem predictable in retrospect giving rise to this illusion.

2. History seems more organised and structured in textbooks than it really was. When I was reading about the 70's and beyond in Ramachandra Guha's book India after Gandhi (which is a good book), I seemed to have been living in the midst of chaos. I remember most of the dark headlines but they occurred far away from where I lived. Historians have to write about many incidents spread over vast expanses of space and time in a limited number of pages which results in distortion of the reality.

3. Over-reliance on experts: Philip Tetlock, a psychologist at the University of California, Berkeley selected 284 people who made their living "commenting or offering advice on political and economic trends," including journalists, foreign policy specialists, economists and intelligence analysts, and began asking them to make predictions. Over a couple of decades, he asked them to rate the probability of outcomes of several questions: Would George Bush be re-elected? Would apartheid in South Africa end peacefully? Would Quebec secede from Canada? Would the dot-com bubble burst? Overall he had over 80,000 predictions.

How did the experts do? When it came to predicting the likelihood of an outcome, the vast majority performed worse than random chance i.e, they would have done better picking their answers blindly out of a hat. Liberals, moderates and conservatives were all equally ineffective. Most of the subjects had post-graduate degrees but they were mostly useless when it came to forecasting. Even in the region they had most knowledge of, the experts were not much better than non-specialists.

The main reason for the inaccuracy has to do with overconfidence. Because the experts were convinced that they were right, they tended to ignore all the evidence suggesting that they were wrong - they had an enhanced illusion of their skill. Those with the most knowledge were the least reliable. This is because these experts were cocooned in their area of specialization and tended to view the world through a narrow lens, what Nassim Nicholas Taleb calls 'the philistinism of the over-specialized scholar'. It is like the blind who touch different parts of an elephant and conclude that it is like a rope, a pillar, etc.

Tetlock also found that the experts were resistant to admitting error when it was pointed out to them, offering a number of excuses for their mistakes. The problem is that the over-specialized expert who can come up with the catchy one-liner is more likely to be invited to TV studios since  he is more interesting to listen to than the expert who uses a lot of 'ifs' and 'buts' even though the latter may be closer to the truth. The preferred expert will be the one who gives short, snappy answers to a screaming host who demands, 'India wants to know.'

A safe rule of thumb to follow is to ignore the views of the experts who sound very confident about their forecasts. As Kahneman says in his book, Thinking, Fast and slow, 'The first lesson is that errors of prediction are inevitable because the world is unpredictable.  The second is that high subjective confidence is not to be trusted as an indicator of accuracy (low confidence could be more informative).

Thursday, July 5, 2018

Fahrenheit 451

Fahrenheit 451 is a dystopian novel by American writer Ray Bradbury, published in 1953. It presents a future society where books are outlawed and "firemen" burn any books that are found. Its key theme is of an authoritarian society distracted by broadcast media. Fahrenheit 451 refers to the temperature at which paper burns. The lead character is a fireman named Montag who initially burns books with gusto but begins to get disillusioned with his job.

Captain Beatty, Montag's fire chief, senses Montag's concerns and recounts how books lost their value. His speech to Montag about the history of the firemen is a commentary on how mass media reduces interest in reading literature. Bradbury wrote this at a time when TV was beginning to become popular in the US and he was getting concerned about the effect of simplistic messages being pushed by the mass media. Since India is desperate to copy the US, the speech is illuminating. (I have omitted some conversations and description that occur in-between and retained a substantial portion of Beatty’s speech.)
"Picture it. Nineteenth-century man with his horses, dogs, carts, slow motion. Then, in the twentieth century, speed up your camera.  Books cut shorter. Condensations, Digests. Tabloids. Everything boils down to the gag, the snap ending."
"Classics cut to fit fifteen-minute radio shows, then cut again to fill a two-minute book column, winding up at last as a ten- or twelve-line dictionary resume. I exaggerate, of course. The dictionaries were for reference. But many were those whose sole knowledge of Hamlet ...was a one-page digest in a book that claimed: 'now at least you can read all the classics; keep up with your neighbours.' Do you see? Out of the nursery into the college and back to the nursery; there's your intellectual pattern for the past five centuries or more."
"Speed up the film, Montag, quick. Click? Pic? Look, Eye, Now, Flick, Here, There, Swift, Pace, Up, Down, In, Out, Why, How, Who, What, Where, Eh? Uh! Bang! Smack! Wallop, Bing, Bong, Boom! Digest-digests, digest-digest-digests. Politics? One column, two sentences, a headline! Then, in mid-air, all vanishes! Whirl man's mind around about so fast under the pumping hands of publishers, exploiters, broadcasters, that the centrifuge flings off all unnecessary, time-wasting thought!"
"School is shortened, discipline relaxed, philosophies, histories, languages dropped, English and spelling gradually neglected, finally almost completely ignored. Life is immediate, the job counts, pleasure lies all about after work. Why learn anything save pressing buttons, pulling switches, fitting nuts and bolts?"
"More sports for everyone, group spirit, fun, and you don't have to think, eh? Organize and organize and superorganize super-super sports. More cartoons in books. More pictures. The mind drinks less and less. Impatience. Highways full of crowds going somewhere, somewhere, somewhere, nowhere. The gasoline refugee. Towns turn into motels, people in nomadic surges from place to place,  following the moon tides, living tonight in the room where you slept this noon and I the night before."
Don't step on the toes of the dog-lovers, the cat-lovers, doctors, lawyers, merchants, chiefs, Mormons, Baptists, Unitarians, second-generation Chinese, Swedes, Italians, Germans, Texans, Brooklynites, Irishmen, people from Oregon or Mexico. The people in this book, this play, this TV serial are not meant to represent any actual painters, cartographers, mechanics anywhere. The bigger your market, Montag, the less you handle controversy, remember that! ...Authors, full of evil thoughts, lock up your typewriters. They did.
Magazines became a nice blend of vanilla tapioca. Books, so the damned snobbish critics said, were dishwater. No wonder books stopped selling, the critics said. ...There you have it, Montag. It didn't come from the Government down. There was no dictum, no declaration, no censorship, to start with, no! Technology, mass exploitation, and minority pressure carried the trick, thank God. Today, thanks to them, you can stay happy all the time, you are allowed to read comics, the good old confessions, or trade-journals."
With school turning out more runners, jumpers, racers, tinkerers, grabbers, snatchers, fliers, and swimmers instead of examiners, critics, knowers, and imaginative creators, the word `intellectual,' of course, became the swear word it deserved to be. You always dread the unfamiliar. ...We must all be alike. Not everyone born free and equal, as the Constitution says, but everyone made equal. Each man the image of every other; then all are happy, for there are no mountains to make them cower, to judge themselves against.
So! A book is a loaded gun in the house next door. Burn it. Take the shot from the weapon. Breach man's mind. Who knows who might be the target of the well-read man? Me? I won't stomach them for a minute. And so when houses were finally fireproofed completely, all over the world ...there was no longer need of firemen for the old purposes. They were given the new job, as custodians of our peace of mind, the focus of our understandable and rightful dread of being inferior; official censors, judges, and executors. That's you, Montag, and that's me."
"You must understand that our civilization is so vast that we can't have our minorities upset and stirred. Ask yourself, What do we want in this country, above all? People want to be happy, isn't that right? Haven't you heard it all your life? I want to be happy, people say. Well, aren't they? Don't we keep them moving, don't we give them fun? That's all we live for, isn't it? For pleasure, for titillation? And you must admit our culture provides plenty of these."
"Coloured people don't like Little Black Sambo. Burn it. White people don't feel good about Uncle Tom's Cabin. Burn it. Someone's written a book on tobacco and cancer of the lungs? The cigarette people are weeping? Bum the book. Serenity, Montag. Peace, Montag. Take your fight outside. Better yet, into the incinerator. Funerals are unhappy and pagan? Eliminate them, too. Five minutes after a person is dead he's on his way to the Big Flue, the Incinerators serviced by helicopters all over the country. Ten minutes after death a man's a speck of black dust. Let's not quibble over individuals with memoriams. Forget them. Burn them all, burn everything. Fire is bright and fire is clean."
Montag's change of heart happens after he meets a seventeen-year-old girl named Clarisse McClellan, who opens his eyes to the emptiness of his life with her penetrating questions and her unusual love of people and nature. Montag finds her unusual perspectives about life intriguing. She makes Montag think of things that he has never thought of before, and she forces him to consider ideas that he has never contemplated. For eg., she informs Montag that once upon a time, a fireman's job was to put out fires, now they start them. A few days later, he hears that Clarisse has been killed by a speeding car. When he asks Beatty about Clarisse, this was the reply:
Clarisse McClellan? We've a record on her family. We've watched them carefully. Heredity and environment are funny things. You can't rid yourselves of all the odd ducks in just a few years. The home environment can undo a lot you try to do at school. That's why we've lowered the kindergarten age year after year until now we're almost snatching them from the cradle. We had some false alarms on the McClellans, when they lived in Chicago. Never found a book. Uncle had a mixed record; anti-social. The girl? She was a time bomb. The family had been feeding her subconscious, I'm sure, from what I saw of her school record. She didn't want to know how a thing was done, but why. That can be embarrassing. You ask Why to a lot of things and you wind up very unhappy indeed, if you keep at it. The poor girl's better off dead." 
"Luckily, queer ones like her don't happen, often. We know how to nip most of them in the bud, early. You can't build a house without nails and wood. If you don't want a house built, hide the nails and wood. If you don't want a man unhappy politically, don't give him two sides to a question to worry him; give him one. Better yet, give him none. Let him forget there is such a thing as war. If the Government is inefficient, top-heavy, and tax-mad, better it be all those than that people worry over it.  
Peace, Montag. Give the people contests they win by remembering the words to more popular songs or the names of state capitals or how much corn Iowa grew last year. Cram them full of non-combustible data, chock them so damned full of 'facts' they feel stuffed, but absolutely `brilliant' with information. Then they'll feel they're thinking, they'll get a sense of motion without moving. And they'll be happy, because facts of that sort don't change. Don't give them any slippery stuff like philosophy or sociology to tie things up with. That way lies melancholy. 

PS: An article in The New Yorker about Amazon and books