Beware of experts

Well, not so much "beware of experts" as "beware of definitions of experts".

It's fairly obvious that the way one recognises an "expert" in one field is not going to be the same that one recognises an "expert" in another field.

Obviously expertise and specialisation is a good thing. The problem is that identifying expertise in a field that you have little knowledge of is itself a tricky problem. So there are conventions as to what experts "look like" - some of those conventions are themselves directly rooted in privilege: they look like middle-aged middle-class white men - others are only indirectly so: academic experts tend to be found in research institutions because that's a major way that they become experts, but not everyone can get the chance to work at a research institution even if they have a strong aptitude in and interest for that particular field.

There are lots of problems with recognising expertise from the outside - a lot of my former posts on bad science reporting are caused by precisely that - and even on the inside experts will disagree with each other - but I think there's a particular issue in the way that academic expertise is identified and defined that matters.

This is: all science is basically statistical.

An expert in metallurgy is not an expert on every individual atom within a metal block (you need a different expert for the next block...) but on their statistical behaviour. An expert in economics is not tracking every penny separately but looking at the statistical movements of much larger sums of money over time. We recognise this.

An expert on psychology or health or other fields that consider the general behaviour of living creatures in particular conditions also only has statistical knowledge. We do not recognise this as much.

An atom of metal, or a penny, individually, may well not react in the overall way that a metallurgist or economist predicts that it will. This doesn't usually matter - the overall effect will still be what they predict. (And the individual variation between atoms or pennies is small)

When discussing people, however, a person not behaving in the way that the expert predicts is important. The expert's knowledge of the situation is statistical. They can tell that of 100 people, 90 will do a certain thing. The other 10 will not.

When attempts to predict are taken to the individual level they will regularly fail. The expert is an expert in general behaviour and situations. The individual is an expert in their own personal situation. So an individual's perception of their own situation - and what they should therefore do - should in general be treated as more reliable than the expert's¹.

What actually happens is that the median behaviour the expert has identified - and their identification of such can be quite incorrect through their own privilege issues, of course, but even if all of that is somehow avoided - tends to become regarded as correct and deviation as incorrect. (And, further, stay regarded as correct even if the median behaviour later changes)

It also gets to a point about the difference between a claim that "X is a problem" and "X is an [adjective] problem" - which often gets intentionally ignored.

To make a claim that a particular thing affects a particular proportion of people, or that its prevalence has been changing over time or space, or that a particular counter-measure is in/effective one needs to do a very carefully designed study, probably more than once. This is really difficult to do well.

To make a claim that a particular thing occurs at all, seriously affects those it occurs to, and therefore should be countered ... you need to listen to a few people. This is also really difficult to do well, especially for people with the "anecdote is not evidence" attitude that works well in particular scientific fields and for statistical research and works very badly when exported from there.

Unfortunately, that sort of person is likely to fit right in to an academic environment where they can become a socially-recognised expert, because our expert recognition is insufficient.

We need a separation in the way that society recognises experts between "experts in statistical behaviour of people" and "experts in individual behaviour of people".

Footnote

¹ The obvious exception is when the expert - who may in this context not be a socially-recognisable expert - has knowledge highly material to the individual's situation which they know the individual does not have. Of course, in most cases, not giving this information to the individual is intentionally forcing a mistake on their part.

Occupy Ambivalence

I have very ambivalent thoughts about the Occupy Placename movements. On the one hand, they're highlighting that there are many areas in which the cosy political consensus does not have the support of the population, in a way that governments don't quite know how to respond to and can't entirely ignore. On the other hand, while the movements aren't likely to fall to party-political co-option, there's a definite problem with default-person co-option, Tyranny of Structurelessness, and so on. While some Occupy groups are trying to explicitly deal with these problems, some are very definitely not - and it makes their claim to be for "the 99%" rather dubious.

Part of the reason for the ambivalence, of course, is that there's no one Occupy movement - other than vague solidarity and similarity in some aims, and a global slogan and broad methodology, there's nothing to connect Occupy City A to Occupy City B. The actions and decisions of one don't directly affect the actions and decisions of another.

So the actions of one group can make me hopeful that this attempt at a revolution might really be a revolution - while the actions of another make me sure that it's just another attempt to reshuffle the people at the top (or as Melissa McEwan puts it, "[...] you're not staging a revolution: You're staging a change in management.")

Differences between the US and the UK

One of the questions regarding the UK protests has to be "why now?". The practical answer - that the US protests, themselves having at least some similarities in form to the Egyptian and Tunisian revolutions - have been successful and encouraged people elsewhere, isn't sufficient.

But the situation in the US and the UK is rather different. The recent news that the US median weekly wage for 2010 was $507, for instance. On hearing that, I needed context. So, I converted it to pounds, adjusted for the (small) purchasing power parity difference between the two nations, and then started comparing it with the ASHE results for the UK in the same year.

I live in the North East of England. It's a region that's been largely abandoned by successive governments, has high unemployment, high social deprivation, very little incoming investment, and wasn't in good shape even in the boom years. On a regional basis, it has the lowest median wage in the UK.

It also has a median wage - after currency conversions - around 10-15% higher than the US equivalent. Furthermore, the social safety net is more generous, and health care is both free and available.

The US as a whole is noticeably worse off than the worst bits of the UK. It's not surprising that the US is rising up in protest; nor is it surprising that it didn't before.

10% or 30% or 99%

The UK, meanwhile... there are some seriously deprived parts of the UK. But most of these have been hated by governments for years. The protests in the UK - their appearance at this time - aren't about those bits. They aren't about the consistent demonisation of disabled people that has been ongoing for decades. They aren't about the consistent racism and classism that set off riots in the 80s and riots this summer. They're - in many ways - about the worry on the part of the middle classes that they'll end up poor too.

The UK economy is heading into a severe mess, inflicted by the "expansionary austerity" beliefs of the government - and this is making the middle classes less secure. Not unreasonably, they're worried. But the people at the bottom of the classism pile, and the people seriously affected by other marginalisations, have been there for a long time, and failed by our governmental and economic power structures for a long time. People could have come out on the streets to criticise those structures any time in the last decade.

And part of it - part of it - is that just as you can't have a riot by yourself, you can't have much of a protest - the late Brian Haw excepted - by yourself. The success of the US protests gives some of the discontent in the UK the knowledge that they could do this and not be alone. That might be why the Occupy camps in the UK appeared, and stayed. But there have been protests before.

Who are the protests for? Are they for those who were never at the top of society but thought that if they followed the rules they could lead a comfortable mostly-privileged life, or for the rest of the 99% as well, who knew that they'd never get that far as things stood? Are the efforts of the very poor, disabled people, women and [trigger warning] rape victims and other generally marginalised groups to be heard when speaking for themselves considered a part of Occupy, or separate? The answer varies from camp to camp, and even within a camp, of course. But the general trend I'm reading about in the UK is not making me optimistic.

We know best, now rise up and revolt

Claiming to be representing the 99% is rather tricky. That's a lot of people, who, collectively, agree on absolutely nothing. While the wealth and power may be concentrated in a very small group - far smaller than "the 1%" - that doesn't mean that the rest are going to agree, even on the necessity of overturning the established order.

But the standard response to anyone disagreeing with the approach is to point out that they are in the 99% too. It reminds me a bit of the contempt for people who make the "wrong" voting decision that s.e. smith talks about in the context of the US urban/rural divide.

Why assume that everyone below a certain extremely high wealth level should agree on:

• The current system being unjust (when many of those protesting now didn't think so until it started obviously hurting them)
• The proposed solution being better

It can't be better for all of the 99%, even afterwards.

If the revolution makes a fair effort to dismantle all privilege, then many mostly-default people are going to take some steps down in relative social position. If they really dismantle capitalism, globally, and end inequality, then almost everyone in the UK and USA is going to take several steps downwards relatively, and probably a few in absolute terms too, at least in the short term.

But if it doesn't make that effort and succeed, why should people other than the mostly-default take part in risky, dangerous, and untested revolution to choose who rules them with contempt¹. We already have elections for that.

The assumption is the old socialist-lefty one that classism is so much bigger than every other form of oppression that if you end classism and capitalism the rest will just disappear. It might be necessary to end it, in practice - but it's nowhere near sufficient.

Ambivalence

So, yes, ambivalence. The Occupy movements are well-intentioned and in some cases well-implemented. The power structures they are fighting against are deadly and oppressive, and need to go. But there's a tension there between destroying the power structures and commandeering them - and I don't have confidence that those wishing to destroy them will be able to shape the movements.

They're not going away, for now, and the escalation of violent responses from some governments suggest a panic about where they could go next. But where do they go next? Their very existence is achieving something - but not yet enough. Where they go - and what they do - depends on why they want to do it. Which aspects of privilege do they want to defeat and which do they want to accept? Hopefully the answers will become obvious soon.

Footnote

¹ If the rulers are bad enough, the people can become desperate enough to believe that bringing in a new set of bad rulers on a tide of blood can't possibly make things worse. And often, they're right, especially in the short term. But it can hardly be said to be congruent with the original noble goals of the revolution.

The (non-)paradox of agency and oppression

This isn't really a paradox, but it's very easy to get drawn into lines of reasoning where it looks like one if you're not careful. Stated simply:

If it's okay for any individual to do X, why is it a problem if most individuals do X?

Or in inverse:

If it's a problem that most people do X, why shouldn't individuals who do X be criticised?

So, the apparent paradox is that it's okay for any individual to do X, but when most people do X, it's considered a problem. For a topical example, there have been a few reports recently about the domination of the press by men¹. One of the common responses to the suggestion that this might be a problem is the suggestion that "maybe women just don't choose to be journalists".

That probably is a significant factor. So - if it's a problem that women don't become journalists, especially senior journalists (and it is, because of the effect on what gets considered news and how it gets reported) - isn't that a criticism of women who didn't choose journalism as a career? Aren't you just wanting to force society to conform to some gender-equal state regardless of the wishes of its members?

Or, for an example that works from the other direction, that I've criticised before, "if the female beauty standard is a problem, isn't it wrong for women to wear makeup?"

Two apparently-opposed statements

In a bit more detail: one of the major principles of social justice activism is that less-privileged people have as much agency as more-privileged people, and so should be assumed (as with a default person) to have the capability to make autonomous decisions about their own life. Criticising those decisions is almost always a really bad idea because you don't know why they made them, and the idea that you could guess better than them what the correct decision was is extremely arrogant and completely erases their capacity to make their own decisions. Just the way that pro-default society likes it.

Another principle is that there are real widely-held stereotypes of behaviour, differences in treatment, and so on, that lead to some people being privileged over others, and that this privilege is a bad thing and should be dismantled. Such dismantling is likely to be resisted, of course, by the people who benefit from that privilege.

The conflict then comes in a flawed chain of reasoning something like the following:

• Upholding privilege is bad
• Actions which accept the path of privilege tend to uphold it
• Therefore actions which privilege wants you to take are bad

Or perhaps from the other side

• All of this is a consequence of the sum of individual decisions
• Individual decisions shouldn't be criticised
• Therefore the sum effect shouldn't be criticised

This gets used either as an excuse to uphold the status quo, or an excuse to attack non-privileged people who are not seen to be doing enough to dismantle it.

Neither is a good situation.

The really obvious flaw in the logic

I'm not claiming this is the only flaw or even the most major one. But it's the stand-out neon letters one, for me.

People's choices are constrained

No-one ever gets a completely free choice about what they do. For instance, when I was last job-hunting, I had two broad options:

1. Restrict my search roughly to County Durham. This reduced the chances of finding a suitable job, but meant that I could stay in a part of the country where I knew several good friends.
2. Search nationally, increasing the chances of finding a job, but also increasing the chances of having to move to a place where I knew no-one.

I'm not going to say which I chose, but for me, both were viable options.

For someone with a partner who already had a job in County Durham, the first option becomes much more preferable, if at all possible.

For someone who was shorter on cash at the start of their search than I was, the second option might have to be taken.

For someone who was more widely-travelled than me, and had plenty of spare cash, they might have plenty of friends in London already, and have the third option of moving there and then looking for work. That option wasn't even on my list.

The options that any individual has in a particular situation depend on their more general circumstances, their privilege, and many other externally-imposed factors.

Those factors, of course, include other people's decisions. In the case of employment, for instance, if you have a Muslim-sounding name, you might choose to apply for a job at an airport, but that doesn't mean anyone will treat the application fairly.

Resolution

That, of course, makes the resolution of the apparent paradox entirely straightforward. It's absolutely legitimate to look at what factors are influencing whether people apply for careers in journalism, and why those factors are different for different genders.

It's also legitimate to see if there's anything that can be done to change those factors if the overall effect appears to be harmful.

It's possible that, after changing those factors, some people will make a choice that they otherwise wouldn't have made. This isn't interfering with people's choices, or restricting them - it's giving them extra options² in addition to those they already had.

Similarly, one can criticise and try to dismantle the beauty standards while not criticising any individual for their own choices over their appearance³. (The people who are ready to criticise women for wearing make-up rarely seem willing to equally criticise men for not doing so, as eastsidekate points out, though surely both "reinforce" the same gendered beauty standards)

The distinction between external factors affecting people's choices, and those choices themselves, should be very obvious. In general, it only serves the interests of the hierarchical status quo to hide that distinction.

Footnotes

¹ While it's not mentioned in the preview of this survey, one could find much the same result for white people, rich people, non-disabled people, and most other axes of privilege. It also suggests that of the 3,700ish people surveyed, only two genders were represented at all (which is either evidence of a far more significant bias in journalism, or evidence of bad data gathering at some stage - the full report isn't out yet, so I don't know which)

² Which works both ways, of course - if people who aren't men are more likely to choose journalism as a career, that would be one way to adjust the balance. But likewise, if men are made less likely to choose journalism as a career, by making it a more viable choice for some of them to enter other (currently mostly female) careers, that would also have the same effect.

³ Some choices like blackface need criticism, of course, but that sort of choice is obviously not what I'm talking about here. I'm discussing choices for which there is no problem with any individual making that choice, but there may be a problem when most individuals feel they have to make that choice.

Mathematical Morality

It seems that some people think that morality works on a numeric points basis - plus fifty points for donating to charity, minus ten points for queue-jumping, etc. - and then assess people or actions based on the perceived total score.

So, mathematical morality. There's three related applications of it that I've seen just in the last week, and they're all enraging and favourable to society's default people.

Heroes

There seems to be this need to elevate heroes, and to stand by them right or wrong, and to use mathematical morality to justify this.

And they either think "Oh, X has got a score of plus one million, there's no way they'd ever do anything significantly negative" or they think "Oh, X has got a score of plus one million, and they may have done this bad thing, but that's only minus a few thousand, so they're still plenty in credit."

And of course, having convinced themselves that their hero is incapable of wrongdoing, they'll dismiss out of hand, with the most convoluted contortions, the possibility that they might have, or that it matters if they did.

So the people who don't get to be official heroes - and of course being a default person makes it much easier to become one in the eyes of the default-centric world - end up discarded to defend the hero.

I'm/they're not an X-ist

This sort of mathematical morality is also, of course, the source for a lot of the common "not an X-ist" arguments that get passed around. It's slightly more sophisticated than heroic maths - only heroes get to have their total scores aggregated - in that it gives points in various sections.

So, for a white person, "has black friends and is polite to them" gets plus 100 points on the "racist/not a racist" scale (it should just be part of the "meets minimum standards of decent behaviour" score, anyway, but...). Using a racist slur, well, that's only minus 20 points on that scale. They're still at plus 80, so they're not a racist. Incidentally, these scales also have low standards - for white people, anti-racist activist starts at plus one, racist starts at minus ten thousand, everything in between is "not a racist".

Of course, it doesn't work like that. Even the most committed activist is going to slip up sometimes, if they're working in an area where they have at least some privilege. Their high positive score might mean that the initial reaction to them is different - a friendly notice, a starting belief that it was accidental, etc. - than it would be to someone with a history of dragging their privilege around everywhere.

What it doesn't mean is that they can cancel things out. Their previous good work doesn't mean that they don't need to make amends for this one time they slipped up. (They may also need to tell other privileged people who are trying to be helpful by claiming this on their behalf to shut up, while they're at it)

Nor can they cancel out the perception of their mistake by doing other good work later but leaving the mistake unamended for.

Ends justify the means

This mathematical morality also infects actions, by letting the end justify the means. So the goal - winning a victory for their political team and keeping the other side out - is worth plus ten thousand points to them. That means, to some people, that they can do nine thousand or so points worth of negative stuff, that they'd disapprove of if it were someone else (like their opponents) doing it, as means of achieving that end.

Their opponents, of course, aren't allowed to use any. Them winning is minus ten thousand on its own. Any negative things they do on their campaign just put them even more into moral debt.

So we see just about every form of discrimination being used as a tool, from people who are allegedly against it, and who'll try to justify or minimise the collateral harm they're causing, while criticising the other side for doing exactly the same thing for the same reasons.

The "best" "person" for the job

The news that Harriet Harman has called for half of Labour's shadow cabinet to be women has stirred up the usual controversy, with calls for "the best man person for the job to be chosen". The same arguments come up with discussions of quotas or all-women/all-BAME shortlists.

It always sounds initially reasonable because who wouldn't want the best people, but there are several big problems with this.

Problem 1: Who says what best means?

If you have a bunch of mostly privileged people in charge at the moment, they will probably assess "best" as "like us". It may well be subconscious, and it may well be justified based on "experience" or "political views" but the effect is the important thing, and the effect will be to perpetuate privilege.

Some requirement to improve the diversity of the representative body¹ over time is needed to break out of this pattern.

It's generally accepted, for instance, that there is a critical point in Parliaments where the proportion of women exceeds 30%. Above that point, women are "expected" to be in Parliament, and the process of increasing representation becomes self-sustaining (though measures still need to be taken to ensure that there isn't a bias retained for the more senior posts). Those countries that have reached that threshold have all made explicit efforts to do so (usually using some sort of quotas, either in election or selection processes)

Problem 2: "Best" is not a constant over time

Someone who has overcome a lack of privilege to get to the stage of being a plausible contender for the Shadow Cabinet has necessarily had to put more effort in and work harder to get to that stage than an ultra-privileged default person who - while they still had to work hard for it - did not have additional barriers put in their way.

They might be, on paper, not quite as good at the moment as Mr. Default, but after a year they might well be better than Mr. Default would be.

Problem 3: The implication that our current default representatives are the best

No-one ever claims this explicitly because it's so obviously and laughably false, but it's a fairly clear implicit assumption.

When the effects of privilege on people's decisions and opinions are considered, this is clearly even further from the truth.

Problem 4: The definition of "best" is fluid

If you're only appointing one person, then you can probably come up with some criteria for who the best person is, apply them to the candidates, accept a certain margin for error as inevitable but go with the result anyway.

If you're appointing several people - or for Parliament as a whole, hundreds of people - then it's very tempting to just do the same thing again.

Let's say that we're looking for people to sit on a committee. There are three spaces, and numerous candidates. To simplify, we've got free choice over the appointment, and after consideration, we decide that there are four separate equally important skills that these committee members should have. We assess our candidates against these skills (let's assume a perfectly accurate assessment method, because we've already covered potential inaccuracies in Problem 1) and get the following:

Candidate	A	B	C	D	E	F	G
Skill W	9	8	7	10	1	3	4
Skill X	7	8	5	6	9	2	5
Skill Y	3	2	4	3	8	4	5
Skill Z	5	4	5	1	2	10	4
Total	24	22	21	20	20	19	18

If we go for appointing the three best candidates in the naive "best people for the job" way, we appoint A, B and C, who have the highest totals. This leaves our team, however, very weak in skill Y (between them, they're as good at this as candidate A alone is at skill W, and it's unlikely to be purely additive) and not much better in skill Z.

By appointing D, E and F instead, despite these three being weaker as individuals, the maximum skills of the team are much better - 10+9+8+10 rather than 9+8+4+5 - and after a little bit of practice and in-team training, we should have a much better committee.

I've intentionally made this an extreme example, for clarity, but even in a more ambiguous case - C having their 7 in Skill Y, for example - I think it would be difficult to justify appointing both A and B.

And so it is with not appointing default people all or most of the time - by increasing the diversity of the representative body, you increase the range of problems it can identify and usefully deal with. I don't doubt the good intent of some of the current default MPs in Parliament, but with the levels of privilege they have, even knowing what the right questions to ask are is going to be unlikely (and that's just the ones that are aware of their privilege and trying to fight it, never mind the ones that are unaware of it and/or quite enjoy having it).

The recent anonymity proposals that I've written about have provided a very clear example of why female MPs are extremely necessary at all levels of government. The proposal was added by an all-white-male negotiating team for the coalition, and largely opposed by women in the opposition parties. A more gender-balanced Parliament or negotiating team probably wouldn't even have suggested the idea.

It's not necessary to be the best in general (even temporarily accepting the quite possibly false assumption that the current best person is a default person) . You just need to be better than all or most of the others at something and not dangerously incompetent at the rest. With the current gender and race balances in Parliament, a mediocre female or BAME MP will almost certainly still benefit the country and Parliament more than all but the most exceptionally talented white male MPs, and - see Problem 3 - the vast majority of our current white male MPs are not "exceptionally talented".

¹ The Shadow Cabinet is not a representative body as such, but it in the aspects relevant to this discussion it has many similarities.

Possible versus desirable

In "Just because you can do something doesn't mean you should", there's this BBC article. I'm not going to comment on the article itself, though it has problems, but on the headline.

Not the article headline, "Sudan's date-gin brewers thrive despite Sharia" but the even shorter summary headline that is used in links to it from elsewhere. "Getting lashed".

You can see why it's there, and since headline writers are often paid for the skill at fitting puns into extremely small places, it's not surprising. On the other hand, it is disappointing that a quite serious article on brewing of araqi against the local laws is felt an appropriate place to put a silly headline based on "lashed" being both UK slang for "intoxicated" and the penalty for distilling alcohol being a beating.

From a context-free point of view, it's a very good headline, combining the two major themes of the article into just two words. Not considering the context, and not realising that just because something can be done doesn't mean it should be done is a pretty common expression of privilege, though.