Tim Harford's Blog, page 33

Cautionary Tales – When the autopilot switched off

An airline captain thought he was giving his children a harmless thrill by letting them “fly” his packed airplane – the young cockpit visitors weren’t really in control… the autopilot was doing the real flying. Until it wasn’t. Do safety features actually lull us into a false sense of security – tempting us to take greater risks than we otherwise would?

Cautionary Tales is written by me, Tim Harford, with Andrew Wright. It is produced by Ryan Dilley, with support from Courtney Guarino and Emily Vaughn.

The sound design and original music is the work of Pascal Wyse. Julia Barton edited the scripts.

Thanks to the team at Pushkin Industries, including Mia Lobel, Jacob Weisberg, Heather Fain, Jon Schnaars, Carly Migliori, Eric Sandler, Emily Rostek, Royston Beserve, Maggie Taylor, Nicole Morana, Daniella Lakhan and Maya Koenig.

[Apple] [Spotify] [Stitcher]

Further reading and listening

ESPN covered the accident that killed Dale Earnhardt.

The official report into the crash of Flight 593 is available on Aviation Safety (pdf). Also see the article on Tailstrike.

The Effects of Automobile Safety Regulation Author(s): Sam Peltzman Source: Journal of Political Economy, Vol. 83, No. 4 (Aug., 1975), pp. 677-726. Sam Peltzman criticises the quality of his own analysis here.

“Rubbin’ is racin”’: evidence of the Peltzman effect from NASCAR Adam T. Pope · Robert D. Tollison. Public Choice (2010) 142: 507–513 DOI 10.1007/s11127-009-9548-2

Southern Economic Journal 2007, 74(1), 71–84. Automobile Safety Regulation and the Incentive to Drive Recklessly: Evidence from NASCAR Russell S. Sobel and Todd M. Nesbit

Academic articles weighing up risk compensation in a variety of contexts are published in the Journal of the International AIDS Society, the British Medical Journal, OSF Preprints, Annals of Behavioural Medicine, and Scientific Reports.

The lesson humble sea urchins teach us about resilience

On the surface, April 2020 was apocalyptic. You could walk the sunny streets of Oxford and barely see a soul: shops closed, roads empty, just the occasional pedestrian nervously crossing to the other side of the street. Of course, it wasn’t just Oxford. The International Labour Organization estimated that, globally, more than 80 per cent of all workers were under some pandemic-related restriction that April.

Behind closed doors, however, the economy was surprisingly resilient. Looking at data from five leading European economies plus the US and Japan, the economists Janice Eberly, Jonathan Haskel and Paul Mizen calculate the extent of that surprise. They find that output from conventional workplaces fell by 23 per cent between the first and second quarters of 2020. Yet actual output fell by just 13 per cent — severe, but less than half of what one might have expected.

This was economic resilience in action.

The shocks, however, have kept on coming. So, should we be reassured by the resilience shown in early lockdowns? And is there a way to strengthen it in future?

With hindsight, the relatively small fall of two years ago is easily explained: many people found ways to do their jobs from home. Home internet connections originally purchased to allow gaming and streaming, kitchen tables typically unused during working hours, portable computers and phones, posh sheds . . . these and other assets were pressed into double duty as business equipment. Eberly and her colleagues call this “an unprecedented and spontaneous deployment of ‘potential capital’”.

“Potential capital” has been unlocked before. Over a decade ago, people started describing “the sharing economy” or “the peer-to-peer economy”, in which technology was making it easy to arrange carpooling or to link tourists with people in travel hotspots who had spare rooms. The attraction was obvious enough: underutilised assets were matched with people who wanted to use them. The case for peer-to-peer matches was particularly strong in instances where demand fluctuates, from Friday-night rides to rooms near a popular sporting event.

Few people would describe Airbnb or Uber as paragons of “sharing”, and in the intervening years these business models have been thoroughly professionalised. But the point remains: technology seems to make it easier to unlock or repurpose assets.

Does the ability to unlock potential capital increase resilience? Undoubtedly, in the short term. If the same pandemic had struck in the 1990s, it is hard to imagine working from home would have been feasible for so many people. Internet connections were too sparse, software too inflexible, computers too clunky.

But over time, as potential capital is more routinely deployed, slack is squeezed out of the system. Resilience may fall rather than rise. John Doyle, a mathematician at Caltech, has coined the phrase “robust-yet-fragile” to describe systems that deal well with certain shocks and badly with others. The distributed, information-rich, working-from-home economy that coped so well with lockdowns might be extremely vulnerable to certain cyber attacks, or to problems with the electricity grid. If we could all head back to the office in a crisis, then nothing would have been lost. But if offices themselves become an endangered ecosystem, we would be selling flexibility to buy efficiency, and new vulnerabilities would appear as a result.

Such new vulnerabilities are hard to anticipate. Andrew Zolli and Ann Marie Healy give some vivid examples in their book Resilience. Jamaica’s coral reefs were stressed during the 1960s and 1970s by overfishing, but seemed to cope well. Although fish were scarcer and less diverse, long-spined sea urchins thrived in a similar evolutionary niche, feeding on algae. The coral reefs themselves were fine. Even the ferocious Hurricane Allen, in 1980, was survivable. It devastated the shallower reefs but soon the coral appeared to be recovering.

Then, in 1983, some pathogen killed almost every long-spined urchin. Within months the reef was overwhelmed by algae. The urchins were no longer around to keep it in check, and the back-up — fish — were also depleted. The corals were destroyed. The moral of the story is that because the sea urchins were so good at eating algae, their success masked the fact that they were the last line of defence and that the coral system was in a precarious situation.

Is the internet the long-spined sea urchin of the modern economy? Or is the electricity grid? These things are usually clear only with hindsight. At this point I should thump the table and demand that our leaders think more about resilience. And they should. But I wouldn’t pretend that the solution is straightforward.

Some sources of resilience, such as redundant capacity, are expensive and turn out to be useless. (In March 2020, I declared that we needed to scramble to build more ventilators. Did we?)

Some sources, such as flexible computing assets, or globally optimised supply chains, can hide vulnerabilities, or create new points of failure.

And others, such as thriving, empathetic communities, are things we would want at any time, but don’t necessarily know how to create.

We can’t simply buy resilience by the yard. But if we value it highly enough, we may be able to cultivate it.

Written for and first published in the Financial Times on 8 April 2022.

The paperback of The Data Detective was published on 1 February in the US and Canada. Title elsewhere: How To Make The World Add Up.

I’ve set up a storefront on Bookshop in the United States and the United Kingdom. Links to Bookshop and Amazon may generate referral fees.

Cautionary Tales Short – Voting in a Monkey as Mayor

Cautionary Tales episodes are released every other Friday, and so there will be one appearing again next week. Meanwhile, for  Pushkin+ subscribers, I proudly present another Cautionary Tales “Short”.

Shownotes

The main sources on the Hartlepool elections were contemporary reports from The Times, The Guardian and the BBC.

On random promotions, see In Praise of Random Promotions and Alessandro Pluchino, Andrea Rapisarda, Cesare Garofalo The Peter principle revisited: A computational study Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications,
Volume 389, Issue 3, 2010.

What an abusive chatbot teaches us about the art of conversation

In 1989, several years before the world watched the chess-playing supercomputer Deep Blue vanquish the world champion Garry Kasparov, a computer notched up a different milestone in artificial intelligence that was all but unnoticed. This was largely because the evidence was too crude to be publishable.

Just after lunchtime on May 2, someone at Drake University in Iowa — presumably a male student — started an online text chat with a user at University College Dublin. The UCD user’s handle was “MGonz”.

MGonz was not a gentle conversation partner. Their opening gambit was “cut this cryptic shit speak in full sentences”, followed by “OK thats it im not talking to you any more” and “ah type something interesting or shut up”. MGonz hurled abuse and grilled the Drake student about his sex life.

Over the next hour and 20 minutes, the two exchanged juvenile insults and prurient questions, with MGonz goading the student into boasting about the size of his manhood. Finally, the student called MGonz a “stupid homosexual”, MGonz called the student “obviously an asshole” and the student logged off, presumably writing off MGonz as an abusive troll.

But while MGonz was abusive, it was not a troll — it was a simple chatbot programmed by UCD undergrad Mark Humphrys that was left to lurk online while Humphrys went to the pub. The next day, Humphrys reviewed the chat logs in astonishment. His MGonz chatbot had passed the Turing test.

The Turing test was invented by the mathematician, codebreaker and computing pioneer Alan Turing in 1950. The test is simply for a computer to successfully pretend to be a human in a text-based conversation with another human. Alan Turing predicted that by 2000 computers would be able to pass as human 30 per cent of the time in a five-minute conversation. I like to believe he had something more uplifting in mind than MGonz’s exchange with the student.

Turing’s test is a benchmark for artificial intelligence, and a controversial one — but I am less interested in the test itself than in the moral of the story of MGonz’s success. Faced with the difficult task of convincing a human that a chatbot is human, the obvious tactic is to increase the sophistication of the chatbot. Humphrys stumbled upon an alternative: reduce the sophistication of the human. MGonz had passed the Turing test, but is it not also fair to say that the student had failed it?

A good conversation involves give and take, builds over time and exists in a context rather than a vacuum. These are all things that any chatbot finds hard. But MGonz generates plausible dialogue because insults need neither context nor memory. And it is impossible to read the MGonz transcript without thinking of ugly parallels, including the chaotic first presidential debate between Donald Trump and Joe Biden, or any Twitter spat you care to name.

Cathy O’Neil’s book The Shame Machine describes Twitter pile-ons as reflecting “a host of reactions: pain, fury, denial and often a frantic search for acceptance”. It is an environment in which MGonz would thrive.

From political discourse to a chat over a beer, we are at our best when our conversation explores complex issues, is sensitive to context and allows for shades of grey. But complexity, context and ambiguity do not play well on social media. The qualities that distinguish us from MGonz are the qualities that get squeezed out by a fast-moving, sound bite-driven world.

An alternative to insults and bullying is for a politician to repeat scripted lines, from “education, education, education” to “get Brexit done”. That is an understandable response to the constraints of modern communication, but it is hardly an exhibit of the best and deepest political thought.

The philosopher Gilbert Ryle once wrote, “To a partly novel situation the response is necessarily partly novel, else it is not a response.” Ryle is right and clearly these scripted soundbites are not intended to be a response to anything — they are designed to be clipped, shared and retweeted in splendid isolation.

I am not sure I can suggest much to make social media less angry and shallow, or political discourse less pre-cooked and polarised. But each of us can take responsibility for our own conversations. A useful rule of thumb is that if we are having dialogues that MGonz could emulate, we should probably be rethinking our approach.

Brian Christian’s delightful book The Most Human Human explores the history of chatbots, while meditating on the nature of good conversation. Christian argues that chatbots tend to pass for human because we humans set the benchmark so low. So many of our interactions are predictable or perfunctory or downright rude. No wonder the chatbots find us easy to imitate.

Conversation is not easy and, after two years of social distancing, we are all a little out of practice. But the best conversations are delightful, even transformative experiences. So let’s start by vowing to do better than MGonz and see what we can build from there.

Written for and first published in the Financial Times on 18 March 2022.

The paperback of The Data Detective was published on 1 February in the US and Canada. Title elsewhere: How To Make The World Add Up.

I’ve set up a storefront on Bookshop in the United States and the United Kingdom. Links to Bookshop and Amazon may generate referral fees.

Cautionary Tales – Photographing Fairies

Sherlock Holmes is known for approaching all mysteries with cool logic – and yet when his creator Sir Arthur Conan Doyle saw photographs taken by two young girls purporting to show real life fairies at play… he unwisely declared them genuine.

Elsie Wright – Self portrait with fairy

How did Elsie and Frances fool so many people with their photography… and why did they keep the hoax going for decades?

Cautionary Tales is written by me, Tim Harford, with Andrew Wright. It is produced by Ryan Dilley, with support from Courtney Guarino and Emily Vaughn.

The sound design and original music is the work of Pascal Wyse. Julia Barton edited the scripts.

Thanks to the team at Pushkin Industries, including Mia Lobel, Jacob Weisberg, Heather Fain, Jon Schnaars, Carly Migliori, Eric Sandler, Emily Rostek, Royston Beserve, Maggie Taylor, Nicole Morana, Daniella Lakhan and Maya Koenig.

[Apple] [Spotify] [Stitcher]

Further reading and listening

The definitive source is Geoffrey Crawley’s 10-part series “That Astonishing Affair of the Cottingley Fairies”, published in the British Journal of Photography 1981-82

Other sources include Russell Miller, The Adventures of Arthur Conan Doyle; Frances Griffiths, Reflections on the Cottingley Fairies; and Peter Lamont and Richard Wiseman Magic In Theory.

Harvey Sacks “Everyone Has To Lie,” was published in in B. Blount and M. Sanches (eds.) Sociocultural Dimensions of Language Use, Academic Press, New York, NY, pp. 57–80 and usefully summarised in Shankar Vedantam and Bill Mesler Useful Delusions.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s own account is in The Coming of the Fairies.

Why I won’t be launching my fantasy novels on Kickstarter

It seems unlikely that anyone will ever read my epic fantasy trilogy about the adventures of Angor Ironfist. There are four reasons for that. First, it is unreadable. Second, it is unfinished. Third, it was written on a now-obsolete BBC Microcomputer, in a now-obsolete word processor called Wordwise Plus and saved on a now-obsolete 5¼in floppy disk. Finally, I threw that floppy disk away years ago. If it exists at all, it is buried deep in an unknown landfill.

And yet, what if that unfinished novel is worth tens of millions of dollars? News from Kickstarter has prompted me to consider renting an excavator and digging for buried treasure — like that poor guy in Wales who threw away a hard drive with the code needed to access what’s now several hundred million dollars of bitcoin and who is promising to split any proceeds with Newport City Council if it will only let him try to dig it out of the municipal dump.

What is this news from Kickstarter? Why, Brandon Sanderson news, of course. Sanderson, a popular and prolific author of fantasy and science fiction, usually with conventional publishers, turned to the fundraising website with four new novels and the apparently ambitious goal of raising $1mn in just 30 days. The million dollars rolled in in just over 30 minutes, and more than $15mn in the first 24 hours. Sanderson’s Kickstarter campaign is comfortably the most popular in the website’s history, beating out a fancy watch, a fancy picnic cooler and a board game.

Sanderson’s takings are a thousand times more than many authors might expect as an advance. However, Sanderson cannot simply pocket that money. He has to pay for the books to be edited, designed, typeset, printed and distributed. Since he reportedly employs 30 people, he effectively owns a small publishing company, albeit one whose sole purpose is to publish books by Brandon Sanderson.

Still, it’s an impressive feat, and several author friends of mine have been muttering about turning to Kickstarter to launch their next title. I am not tempted yet, partly because I am all too aware of the existence of Kickstarter’s whispering memento mori, “Kickended”.

I’ve written about Kickended before, a project in which the artist Silvio Lorusso scraped Kickstarter for examples of projects that raised precisely zero dollars. The project is worthwhile not as mockery but as context. For every success on Kickstarter, there is an ignominious failure. (To be precise, for every successful project on Kickstarter, there is a project that raises no more than 20 per cent of its funding goals.)

Sometimes the reasons for the failure are evident, at least with hindsight. But Kickstarter can be fickle. It might have seemed obvious that when someone tried to raise CA$10,000 to make an antipasto salad on the site, they would get no takers at all. But a gentleman allegedly named Zack Danger Brown had just raised $55,492 to make a potato salad, so why not?

That’s life, you might think. Sometimes a silly project takes off, and usually it doesn’t. But that’s not the way our understanding of the world is formed. I am confident that this is the first article anyone has ever written about the zero-dollar antipasto salad campaign, but I can find a thousand articles about the $55,492 potato salad, including in The New Yorker, the BBC, The Guardian, The Washington Post and even the Financial Times.

This widespread coverage makes a difference to our intuitions about the world. Numerous studies have shown that exposure to an idea makes that idea seem more plausible. One, by Pennycook, Cannon and Rand, showed people various news headlines — some true, some false, but all spotted in the wild. If people had seen a fake news headline once, they were more likely to believe it when shown it again a week later.

This “illusory truth” effect appears to emerge because people find it easier to process information they’ve seen once before, and then subconsciously take that fluency as a sign of truth. Another recent study has a title that speaks for itself: “Success stories cause false beliefs about success.”

Even though we know deep down that neither Sanderson’s multimillion dollar novels nor Brown’s $55,492 potato salad are examples of how things typically go on Kickstarter, these stories loom large.

Nor is this fact peculiar to Kickstarter. Think of a tennis player or a footballer. Who did you think of? Serena Williams? Cristiano Ronaldo? Most sportspeople you can summon to mind are brilliant, successful and very well paid for their skills. But the vast majority of sportspeople are none of those things. You just cannot name many of them.

The same is true for authors, actors, and entrepreneurs. We are surrounded by struggles, half-failures, reverses and modest accomplishments. Yet we are also surrounded by unrepresentative tales of spectacular triumphs. I wish Sanderson well, but I don’t plan to go mining for floppy disks any time soon.

Written for and first published in the Financial Times on 25 March 2022.

The paperback of The Data Detective was published on 1 February in the US and Canada. Title elsewhere: How To Make The World Add Up.

I’ve set up a storefront on Bookshop in the United States and the United Kingdom. Links to Bookshop and Amazon may generate referral fees.

We must pay the cost of carbon if we are to cut it

Shouldn’t we be doing more to respond to the climate emergency? It’s a natural question to ask. But, perhaps, we should turn the question around, and ask: why haven’t we solved the climate change problem already?

Economics suggests a ready answer: externalities. Unfortunately, the concept of externalities is a century old, and it shows. So why do economists persist in using this dusty old term, and is it still useful? An externality is a cost — or sometimes, a benefit — that is not borne by either the buyer or the seller of a product. And, if neither has to bear the cost, neither has much reason to care.

This is not the way a market usually works. Normally, when companies make the products that surround us, they have plenty of incentive to cut every possible source of waste. Consider a familiar product: a can of lemonade. The first such cans, produced in the middle of the 20th century, weighed about 80g when empty. Now they weigh just 13g. The saving in weight means the can manufacturers have to pay less for materials and transportation. It costs less to put a can of lemonade in front of you in a shop, and that means either the manufacturer and retailer make more profit, or that you pay less for your lemonade — or, often, both. The cans are also easier to open and less likely to give the drink a metallic tang.

A better product, for less money — that is the way the free market tends to work. But not necessarily. What incentive does the drinks maker have to reduce the carbon dioxide emissions from the manufacture of the drink — for example, by using renewable energy in refining the aluminium? Not much. The main incentive would be if renewable energy were cheaper. The carbon dioxide emissions are hardly a consideration for a profit-seeking firm. And, as the consumer, you have a keen interest in the price and the quality of the drink. But the carbon emissions? Any worries you might have are rather vague. How would you even know which soft drinks produce low emissions? Even if you did care, other customers might not.

That, then, is the externality problem: a seller makes a product, a consumer buys the product, but the greenhouse gas emissions associated with that product are of no real concern to either of them. An army of designers, engineers and technologists may be deployed to shave a fraction of a penny off the cost of producing each product — but reducing carbon dioxide emissions is an afterthought.

So what can be done? There is some room for consumer pressure: we all want to feel that we are doing something to help. But consumer pressure only goes so far: we may have only a faint idea of products are doing the most harm to the environment, or where the easiest improvements can be made. Some products attract a lot of attention, while others fly under the radar.

Policymakers could directly regulate the market. That can work for some large and obvious sectors of the economy — for example, we know that coal is a source of energy that produces a huge amount of carbon dioxide, so policymakers could ban the use of coal-fired power stations. Another straightforward regulation is to require more energy-efficient cars or washing machines.

Governments can also try to fund innovations that might solve the problem, from battery charging to low-energy lighting. But these efforts only go so far. Tempting as it is to think of the transition to a clean economy as a huge leap, it is in fact a trillion tiny steps — the steps that each of us take, many times a day, all around the world, when we decide how to live and what to buy. In each of these trillion steps is an externality: a cost borne not by the buyer or the seller of a product, but by all of humanity now and in the future. And, unless we can eliminate a trillion little externalities, we are unlikely to solve the problem.

In 1920, the economist Arthur Pigou produced a formal definition of an externality, and proposed a way to solve it: a tax in direct proportion to the external cost. In some cases, this “Pigouvian” tax is hard to calculate. But, in the case of carbon emissions, it should be possible to tax coal, oil and natural gas when it is first extracted. It has been encouraging to watch the world finally start to mobilise action on climate change — and even more encouraging to watch the rapidly falling costs of solar and wind energy. A carbon tax would help to push this clean energy revolution forward — and into the decisions each of us makes every day.

Written for and first published in the Financial Times on 19 March 2022.

The paperback of The Data Detective was published on 1 February in the US and Canada. Title elsewhere: How To Make The World Add Up.

I’ve set up a storefront on Bookshop in the United States and the United Kingdom. Links to Bookshop and Amazon may generate referral fees.

Cautionary Tales Short – Blood On The Tracks

As per our new rhythm, Cautionary Tales episodes are released every other Friday, so there will be one appearing again next week. As a bonus for Pushkin+ subscribers, I proudly present another Cautionary Tales “Short”.

Shownotes

A major source was, of course, the inquest report. Another key source was a long piece in the Guardian by Michael Simkins, in which Simkins interviewed the elderly survivor Peter Stoddart. Eric Hollnagel’s research into “work as imagined” and “work as done” is published in, for example, Resilient Health Care, Volume 2, The Resilience of Everyday Clinical Work 2015.

The paperback of The Data Detective was published on 1 February in the US and Canada. Title elsewhere: How To Make The World Add Up.

Five ways to fight the information war

My finger hovered over the mouse as I briefly considered retweeting the “Battle of Snake Island” footage. You may have seen it; you may have retweeted it yourself. It was, apparently, the last moments alive of 13 heroic Ukrainian soldiers, with a Russian ship demanding surrender, and the imperishable Ukrainian response, “Russian warship, go fuck yourself”. The coda: all 13 had immediately been killed by a Russian bombardment.

But while my finger hovered, I did not retweet to my nearly 200,000 followers. Why not? There was something a bit too perfect about the tiny tale of courage and atrocity, and I had no way of knowing whether any of it was true. For all I knew, the photograph was taken in Shetland and the conversation was audio from a Romanian pizza advert.

After a few days it became clear that while the exchange was genuine, the coda was not. The defiant soldiers had been captured alive. The Russians had said so all along; even a stopped clock is right twice a day. For those of us fortunate enough to be a safe distance from the horrors of war, the Russian invasion of Ukraine is providing a crash-course in how to think both about accidental misinformation and deliberate disinformation.

I draw five lessons. First, we should recognise that a lot of disinformation is absurdly simple. For many decades, people have fretted about “damned lies and statistics”, fearing that cleverly manipulated data was the ultimate weapon of disinformation. More recently there has been something of a panic about “deepfake” video technology. But it doesn’t take a master of video effects to fool us. For a receptive or distracted audience, a simple lie will do.

A lot of the disinformation that is circulating is kindergarten-level stuff: clips from computer games or relabelled footage. UkraineFacts.org, a collaboration between fact-checking organisations, has hundreds of examples, including video of paratroopers filmed years ago in North Carolina, a photo of a Soviet-era missile taken in a museum, and footage from the movie Deep Impact. The camera may not be lying, but the caption is.

Such “recontextualised media” are ideally suited to social sharing. TikTok’s main function, for example, is to make it easy to edit then share clips of media, stripped of their original context.

Second, we should slow down and pay attention both to the claim and to our reaction. We don’t fall for misinformation because we’re stupid but because we’re emotionally aroused. We can often spot the lie if we think calmly. But if we are angry, fearful, lustful or laughing out loud, calm thinking is what we don’t do.

Third, we have allies in our fight for the truth. There’s a growing movement of diligent independent fact-checkers, and there are also people out there called “journalists” whose job it is to figure out what is going on. Some of them are pretty good at what they do, and some of them are risking their lives right now to do it.

Fourth, we must remember that indiscriminate disbelief is at least as damaging as indiscriminate belief. It might seem smart to reject every claim as potential disinformation, but it is wiser to try to figure out the difference between truth and lies.

Indeed, disinformation is often designed less to con the ­gullible, and more to force us all into a reflexive crouch, instinctively rejecting the very idea that the truth will ever be known. Few people are fooled by clumsy footage of a fake President Zelensky ordering Ukrainians to surrender, but rather more will go on to reject footage that is perfectly genuine.

The non-profit news organisation ProPublica recently reported the phenomenon of fake fact-checking. Social media posts, amplified by Russian state TV, appear to be fact-checkers debunking Ukrainian disinformation. In reality, they are themselves disinformation, debunking claims that were never made.

It’s a more sophisticated version of the UK’s Conservative party briefly rebranding itself on Twitter in 2019 as a fact-checking organisation. The aim, in both cases, is probably not straightforward deception. It is to breed confusion, cynicism and distraction.

Which brings me to lesson five: we mustn’t lose sight of what matters. I’m writing this column about disinformation because I know more about disinformation than Kremlinology or combined-arms warfare. But it is vital not to let a discussion of disinformation distract us from what is happening — an outrageous war, an economic crisis and a humanitarian catastrophe.

While most of us are far from the tanks and the bombs, we are all participating in an information war. The good news is that every one of us has been in training for it all our lives. We have developed a keen sense for bullshit, and filled our cognitive toolboxes with sharp and sturdy tools for thinking clearly.

Every newspaper article you’ve read, every political debate you’ve watched, every conversation you’ve had and every social media post you’ve ever thought about sharing — all of them have prepared you for the challenging yet essential task of taking responsibility for what you read, share, believe and disbelieve.

For most of us, the scarce resources in this information war aren’t years of study or intellectual brilliance. They are softer assets: curiosity, patience, persistence and judgment. It is not too late to bring them to the battle.

Written for and first published in the Financial Times on 1 April 2022.

The paperback of The Data Detective was published on 1 February in the US and Canada. Title elsewhere: How To Make The World Add Up.

I’ve set up a storefront on Bookshop in the United States and the United Kingdom. Links to Bookshop and Amazon may generate referral fees.

Cautionary Tales – The False Dawn of the Electric Car

Sir Clive Sinclair was a computer whizz and business mogul to rival Steve Jobs or Bill Gates. He was a visionary who could do no wrong… until he tried to launch an electric vehicle.

The C5 “electrically assisted pedal cycle” doesn’t seem so outlandish to us now… but 1985 just wasn’t ready for the “aerodynamic bathtub” on wheels. Sir Clive was ridiculed and his business ruined. How did it all go so wrong?

Cautionary Tales is written by me, Tim Harford, with Andrew Wright. It is produced by Ryan Dilley, with support from Courtney Guarino and Emily Vaughn.

The sound design and original music is the work of Pascal Wyse. Julia Barton edited the scripts.

Thanks to the team at Pushkin Industries, including Mia Lobel, Jacob Weisberg, Heather Fain, Jon Schnaars, Carly Migliori, Eric Sandler, Emily Rostek, Royston Beserve, Maggie Taylor, Nicole Morana, Daniella Lakhan and Maya Koenig.

[Apple] [Spotify] [Stitcher]

Further reading and listening

We relied on contemporary media coverage, plus three books about Sir Clive Sinclair and his inventions: “Sinclair and the Sunrise Technology” by Ian Adamson and Richard Kennedy; “The Sinclair C5 Story” by D.J. Cogan, and in particular “The Sinclair Story” by Rodney Dale.

The idea of innovation and the adjacent possible is explored in Steven Johnson’s “Where Good Ideas Come From“.

An academic exploration of the affair is Andrew P. Marks, (1989),”The Sinclair C5 – An Investigation into its Development, Launch, and Subsequent Failure”, European Journal of Marketing, Vol. 23 Iss 1 pp. 61 – 71