Would you shake hands with Dominic Cummings? Credit: Daniel Leal-Olivas via Getty
Back in February 2020, a blogger named Jacob wrote a post on his blog, Put A Number On It, called “Seeing the Smoke”. The title comes from a famous 1968 psychology experiment in which groups of three students were put in a room to fill out a questionnaire. Then the experimenters started pumping smoke under the door and watched how the students reacted.
Two of the “students” in each group were paid actors, told to ignore the smoke. The remaining, real students, presumably not wanting to look stupid or panicky in front of the others, ignored the smoke in 90% of cases. If students were on their own, however, they went to investigate the smoke 75% of the time.1
The point is that we don’t just care about whether there’s a real chance of danger – even apparently real, apparently obvious signs of very imminent danger, like smoke under a door. We also care, very much, about looking silly.
Seeing the Smoke drew an analogy with the coronavirus, which was then still mainly in Wuhan. “Human intuition is … very good at one thing: not looking weird in front of your peers,” wrote Jacob. “It’s so good at this, in fact, that the desire to not look weird will override most incentives.” The point of his blog was to give permission to worry. If you were the sort of person who would sit in a smoke-filled room until someone else stood up, he said, “I’m here to be that someone for you.” The point was to give you social permission to start making preparations, whatever those preparations were.
I read Seeing the Smoke, and shared it on Twitter, in an attempt to spread the permission. Dominic Cummings, at the time still the chief advisor to Boris Johnson, did as well, and said so in March this year. It, along with a Slate Star Codex blog post a few days later, “helped me and some others in no10 realise we were going terribly wrong”, Cummings tweeted. Put A Number On It is a key part of the rationalist blogosphere, and Cummings, like me, is a fan.
Cummings is going in front of a Commons select committee on Wednesday, to talk about the decisions the Government made as the pandemic spread to the UK. There will probably be mud-slinging and a lot of claims and counter-claims about who said what and when.
Certainly, the arguments over whether or not the Government was “pursuing a herd immunity strategy” seem extremely vulnerable to definitional problems – does that mean they planned to let the virus rip unchecked, or to slow and control its spread? But it’s definitely the case that in early March, the UK was talking about slowing, rather than stopping, the virus: its pandemic flu plan said “It will not be possible to halt the spread of a new pandemic influenza virus, and it would be a waste of public health resources and capacity to attempt to do so.” Instead, they wanted to let the virus work its way through the population slowly, protecting the most vulnerable, while preventing it from ever overwhelming the NHS. You can call that a “herd immunity strategy” if you like, or not, but that was the goal.
And it does sound as though by 18 March, Cummings was pushing for faster lockdown. That was a few days after the publication of Seeing the Smoke, and around the same time as Tomas Pueyo published his influential post The Hammer and the Dance, calling for draconian, immediate lockdowns to crush the curve, which – if you acted early enough – could be reasonably brief, weeks rather than months.
Whatever one’s view of Cummings, an ability to see the smoke, despite the other people in the room apparently not seeing it, is an extremely useful skill. At the beginning of the year, the media didn’t want to look panicky, it didn’t want to look weird, so too many of us said things like “don’t worry about coronavirus, worry about the flu” or made fun of Silicon Valley types for refusing to shake hands.
There’s a phrase that is used a lot on social media, “read the room”. When people are angry about something, and someone else comes in and says “actually it’s a bit more complicated than that”, they are told to “read the room”. A classic example: when the political analyst David Shor tweeted, during last year’s Black Lives Matter protests, that violent race riots in 1968 reduced the Democratic vote enough to tip the election to Nixon, he was told to “read the room” and that he was “tone deaf”. A few days later he was fired from his job.
“Reading the room”, understanding what the social consensus around some issue is and not straying too far from that consensus, is an important thing. I’m not belittling it: we live in a social world, and we need to understand the mores and demands of that social world in order to prosper in it – and to make that social world bearable for everyone.
If we all ignored the strictures of society, it would be chaos. That includes rules of not saying things that are true but offensive: parents will know the exquisite agony of having their too-young-to-read-the-room child saying things like “Look daddy, that man’s really fat”. I’m not calling for a total free-for-all where you can say anything you like as long as it’s true. But reading the room isn’t always useful, and it won’t tell you if the room is filling up with smoke or not.
Back in March 2020, there was an elite consensus on certain things. Masks don’t work. We shouldn’t panic (37 days before lockdown, UK newspapers were mocking people who were scared of Covid and telling you you were more likely to be killed by a cow). Travel bans don’t work. (I got that one wrong.) If you locked down early, the population would get “behavioural fatigue” after a few weeks.
And if you had read the room, you would have agreed with all of it. I know I often did. That’s what the experts are telling us! It’s only Silicon Valley tech bros who want us to stop shaking hands, and Donald Trump who wants us to close our borders. The trouble is, the room was wrong, and reading it correctly didn’t help.
The rationalists, as Matt Yglesias wrote after the Slate Star Codex kerfuffle earlier this year, are really bad at reading the room, and much better at seeing the smoke. They talk about numbers and facts a lot, and come to conclusions like “actually, if you want to do good in the world, you should contribute to antimalarial charities rather than getting angry about the hot-button issues of the day”. That is the opposite of reading the room.
Cummings, for better or worse, is also terrible at reading the room. And he admires people who are similarly bad at it – the abovementioned David Shor, for instance. He promotes rationalist and rationalist-adjacent people like the podcaster Julia Galef and the superforecaster (and occasional UnHerd contributor) Michael Story. He wanted to hire “weirdos” as government advisers. (As an aside, I suspect that one’s ability to read the room is related to one’s tendency to “decouple”.)
These days, it’s wrong not to like masks, and we’re criticising the Government for not shutting borders quickly enough to counter the Indian variant. Behavioural fatigue turned out not to be a thing. I haven’t shaken hands in 14 months. But we’re still reading the room when we agree with those things. It’s just that the room’s opinion has changed.
An interesting game is trying to work out what the room’s opinions will shift on next. At the moment, it seems to be starting to change on the question: did the coronavirus escape from a lab?
It’s funny, because the hypothesis “Covid escaped from a Chinese lab” sounds like a wacky conspiracy theory, but all its constituent parts, “there are labs working on gain-of-function research in viruses, including in Wuhan”, “major disease outbreaks have been started by viruses leaking from high-security labs”, and “the Chinese aren’t always super open and transparent about things”, are pretty uncontroversial. Whether it turns out to be true or not, the theory has gone from crackpot speculation to plausible hypothesis, but very few of the facts have changed; only the opinion of the room.
And interestingly, Put A Number On It borrowed the “smoke” metaphor from an earlier blog post by a different rationalist, Eliezer Yudkowsky, who was talking about the dangers of human extinction caused by AI. Perhaps we ought to take that a bit more seriously too. (Although I should declare an interest, since my first book was on that topic.)
Seeing the smoke, not reading the room: these are difficult things to do. They involve putting yourself outside the consensus, outside the cosy circle where we all agree: they risk making you look ridiculous, or worse. In the Covid era, though, reading the room rather than seeing the smoke probably cost hundreds of thousands of lives. Dominic Cummings has many faults, but I suspect he is better at seeing smoke than he is at reading rooms.
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Subscribe“Britain voted Brexit because of austerity”. I take it you didn’t vote for Brexit James, or you’d know that wasn’t true.
To be fair to James, he is quoting the views of others.
Thank you, Howard.
An excellent essay, in which the last three words of the first paragraph neatly encapsulate Vince Cable’s life in the political arena : “almost entirely pointless”.
VC is not pointless. He recently tweeted this;
“You don’t need to be a Communist or even a Socialist to recognise the positives as well as the evils in Lenin’s rule. Not least, his New Economic Policy established pragmatic market socialism which eventually succeeded in Deng’s”
He and his ilk are dangerous.
Sadly I have to agree. Far, far too many of his generation held similar deluded opinions, in fact in many ways they are the progenitors of today’s ‘woke’ sub-culture.
At the time (the 60’s) it was so fashionable to espouse liberal/socialist views, that even the so called Conservative Party was infected with the poison. Just at look at Ted Heaths and a plethora of other feeble Tory cretins.
For me, the seminal moment was the suspension of capital punishment in August 1964, and the subsequent atrocity perpetrated almost exactly two years later in Shepherds Bush. The State had abrogated its power to chastise with utterly predictable and foretold results.
To compare Lenin’s NEP to China’s economic policy is absurd, just absurd. The NEP was very small scale and did little more than enable a few entrepreneurs to make various goods avaialble for a couple of years. China’s capitalism is on a vast scale.
oi tosspot we did not vote brexit cause of austerity..we voted cause we have witnessed yrs of repression from the EU that differed from the economic union we voted into in the 70s and watched successive gvmts take from us over the yrs..do not put ur bile to our lips
beautifully put, Steve, Thank You.
An interesting article containing a lot of truth. I am slightly surprised that Cable seems unable to see that there might be more important things than economics. He always struck me as having a little more depth than that, although I believe he was an economist for an oil company.
Having said that, the triumph of money and the economy has been with us for some decades now and has swept up almost everyone in, say, the top 50% of the population. I include myself to some extent, before I started to wake up over the last 15 years or so.
My first fegree was economics. The classical definition of which is the study of how a society allocates scarce natural resources to one of a number of possible uses.
Towards tye end of my studies, I came to the notion that economics is really about providing an intellectual justification for a political objective. Usuallywhere the political objective was the advancement of those who ere supporting the economic idea.
Afam Smiths invisible habd was no more than a justification to shift power from the landed aristocracy towards commercial enterprise. Likewise, Marx argued to take power from those who had it by dint of owning factories etc in order to replace power with those without such ownership.
Call me a cynic if you will.
Cynic then !The very clear difference between positive and normative economics was drummed into me at A level and then at the LSE..I focused on the former and very much took the view that it was a source of research for political science-not the other way round.Having said that,most economic debate currently appears to be characterised by sloppy thinking and an absence of any scientific method.
So the author is quite convinced that property assets – he means houses – should be taxed. He makes no attempt to explain why this wealth tax – which is what it would be – should apply to just one asset. A person with a million pound house is taxed on their wealth. A person with a million pound share portfolio is not. This is sensible? How does this economics expert propose that his tax will work with legal partners, for example husband and wife, each owning half the asset? It makes no sense and has never worked anywhere. And in any event, we already have a wealth tax called IHT. To raise more revenue, the Government, any Government, is going to have to look at the big number taxes: income tax, National Insurance, and VAT.
The Author obviously hasn’t heard of Council Tax,or death duties on Income /inheritance of £240,000 or above
I’d favour internet sales. And a tax on FATGA.
I used to be one of the naive souls that thought a strong economy (which meant a good chunk of free market economic policy) could only be grounded in a reasonably free and open political system. I am older now, and I know that for a fiction – not because of China (or somewhere smaller, like Singapore) proving me wrong, but because I now understand the power of the modern state to dictate how people think, quite frankly to manipulate it, through and with a media which is for its own reasons allied to it. The current propoganda on Covid is just the latest example – but based on opinion polls there doesn’t seem any doubt that it is highly effective in exerting control.
So, no, to the extent that a strong economy gives rise to a strong state, a state which is capable of dominating any communication medium it chooses to, I am quite certain that the example of China is not an aberration, it is quite capable of being the future for all of us.
‘China is not an aberration, it is quite capable of being the future for all of us.’
And that future is approaching fast. The US and the EU are clearly heading in the direction of a China-style society, while literally handing over their assets and markets to China. The same is true of Canada. Whether or not countries such as the UK and Australia can somehow hold out as islands of democracy and some sort of freedom will be one of the great questions of the years to come. As you say, our mainstream media is now in lockstep with the state, so the omens are not good.
Sadly I believe You are mostly Correct! ”Bladerunner” Style of Woke Capitalism and Chinese communism Societies , awaits the next Debt ridden generation?….”There is hope.”.thought Winston as he entered ‘Victory mansions’…
Did project fear fail because people thought other things were more important than personal wealth and wealth of the nation or was it because many saw it for the utter bullshit it was.
Where is the economic logic of staying tied to 7% of the worlds population – a 7% that sees its share of global GDP decline year on year, compared to sacrificing some of the benefits of being part of the 7% in order to seek new and better opportunities with the other 93%? Those who argue for staying with the 7% are defeatists that have no pride in or ambition for their country.
Taxing housing assets? Do you mean taxing people out of their houses? Where are they to go? We aren’t exactly flush with spare flats.
Mr. Kirkup is broadly right about China, but:-
“(And I still do: the sooner we start taxing housing assets to fund social care the better.)”
As if Britain does not tax “housing assets” already! And that a particular “new” tax can be reserved for a particular purpose.
Not only does HMG already tax houses, but VAT is levied on building repairs. That is a huge tax on essential annual maintenance which should be encouraged, not discouraged.
One supposes stamp duty doesn’t count as a tax either.
“Effective economic policy is trumping politics.” Except that no-one to my knowledge says that there is no politics in China. In fact I am sure that the CCP itself would say that ‘the leading role of the party’ guarantees that ‘politics is in command’. Deng’s turn toward ‘capitalism with Chinese characteristics’ was prompted by politics; the prospect that the party would lose power if it did not improve the people’s standard of living in an East Asia which was on the march, developmentally. South Korea and Taiwan show that China’s particular brand of party-state is not the only political route to prosperity, even in Asia. What should stimulate our concern is not China’s success, but our own current failures, both economic and political.
It is not just V. Cable – the international establishment is generally in love with the Communist Party dictatorship of the People’s Republic of China.
Listening to Klaus Schwab of the World Economic Forum fawning over “President” Xi’s speech to the international elite about “freedom and democracy” would be funny if it was not so tragic. The international establishment assume that a Social Credit system of censorship and control (denying people with the “wrong” cultural and political opinions, employment or the ability to trade) will only be used against people they dislike – never against them themselves.
As for Donald John Trump – yes the election was rigged, but he seems to have had no plan about what to do if it was rigged (even though many people warned him that the election would be rigged), Not planning out what to do if the election was rigged, was a massive failure.
On trade the policy of President Trump was straightforward – free access to the American market IF a trading partner gave free access to its market. President Trump was not interested in one-way-trade (with America importing but not exporting) – he wanted two way trade (open both ways). Hardly rocket science – so I am surprised that V. Cable does not understand that the objective was always to “make a deal” – get access for American exports.
Idiots like Cable have no comprehension of sustainability, resilience and sufficiency whether on economic, political, cultural or ecological levels.
Similarly, very little is understood in terms of the economy being an energy system and how the rising energy cost of accessing and distributing energy is increasing. This is reducing the supply of surplus energy to create meaningful prosperity which is why living standards have laboured since before the Financial Crash.
Consequently, QE and other forms of monetary stimulus are effectively subsidising the increasing energy cost of accessing and distributing energy in order to avoid a prosperity crash.
Essentially, Western economies have reached secular stagnation and monetary stimulus is life supporting a system that has reached peak prosperity in relation to fossil fuels.
https://surplusenergyeconom…
This puts greater emphasis on ecological, cultural and political wellbeing.
Idiots like Cable think they know best but it is always the working class who are experiencing reality on the ground.
Vince cable is a numpty, as is James Kirkup.
..
If we want an economy like Germany or Switzerland then perhaps 70% of the population is going to have to change it’s attitude to trade and technology. One take a horse to water but one cannot make it drink. What proportion of the British population have the same attitude and academic attainment as the Swiss entering their various technical institutes?
An interesting review of both the book and its author.
Politicians (and others) who live by the “economy is all” theory are taking a rather psychopathic view. I think that this applies to many modern politicians and, indeed, it may be a necessary qualification for long term political success. More and more, their ideology (including this particular ideology) seems to trump every other consideration.
One sees plentiful displays of ostentatious humanity, but I think most of us are capable of seeing the difference between the true and the false in this regard – in fact, I think that most of us see that rather more clearly than our politicians do.
Having just watched the brilliant documentary on the BBC about the Delorean affair, anyone who thinks that economics can ever be divorced from politics shouldn’t be seriously involved in either.
I’m not convinced that China is proving much of anything wrong. They have about 4 times the population of the US, yet are still behind it in GDP. It’s always easier to play catch up when you’re well behind than it is to continue making fast progress when you near the target. Assuming there’s no revolt against the regime for losing the Mandate of Heaven, we’ll have to see what they can do in the next few years. I’m not as concerned as the author or some of the commenters here. Of course, I may be wrong.
The role of quantitative easing is to finance budget deficits when the tax base is too low. It funds welfare and while the bond market is dysfunctional it is a free ride off the surplus countries. The last thing that is needed is populists or ignorant members of the public interfering with it with their views reflecting their vested interests. Its adverse distributional consequences are best deal with by using fiscal policy to tax the windfall gains it produces.
It is fascinating to me as growth has slowed over the last 45 years (blame EU loony Tories Brown all deserve credit) in the UK and indeed seems to have got slower by the decade if I could put a chart here I’d demonstrate…. Yet we saw Labour win 2 re-ections and accepted from a coalition Conservatives win 3 re-elections twice.
a 10 years line is better i.e mapping last 10 years but this does it note fewer but deeper recessions and no actual booms lately
I was minded by the Labour leaders debate where I saved time and did not watch and read someone comment on the Trans discussion and I said did anyone ask their economic ideology or discuss economics? Nope. Not a factor.
As Austerity (OK pedants it’s not what you define as austerity but to question terms is a fallacy argument as you know what I mean) showed in 2010-Pandemic really people do not blame slow growth more unevenly spread necessarily even if decent economics would make things better. 1% or 2% growth can be seen on a graph and maybe if you live in side by side countries that differed but clearly does not hit people in the eyes. TBF some of it is timing Clinton was a disaster and led to 2008 but he was long gone and his pointless budget surpluses (seriously they served no purpose in the 90s USA) etc were not obvious to all but economics professors.