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Kindle Notes & Highlights
There is a natural tendency for those heading up panels to recruit those who think like them. Checks and balances are needed to make sure that panels include different academic disciplines, industry backgrounds, and political beliefs, and that group participation is structured to permit and encourage challenge and debate. Lucy Easthope recommends that panels ‘should also be made to operate adversarially so somebody could argue against their science.’
Some of the people I interviewed about fear were able to reach a happier place simply by turning off the news.
They were able to put their fears into perspective just by meeting up with others socially.
Taking action can also be helpful.
The other way out of this is to start disregarding the ‘rituals of fear’ as soon as possible.
Once you know how nudge works, it is much easier to spot it happening. You should be more psychologically resistant to behavioural psychology techniques, including the weaponisation of fear. Think of this book as an anti-nudge handbook. Patrick Fagan has kindly shared an excerpt from an essay which continues this ‘Fight back against the nudge’ in Appendix 3.
‘Clearly, using fear as a means of control is not ethical. What you do as a psychologist is co-construction. Using fear smacks of totalitarianism. It’s not an ethical stance for any modern government.’
Finally, I was curious what Morgan had learnt during the epidemic and his role on SPI-B: ‘By nature I am an optimistic person, but all this has given me a more pessimistic view of people. People are passive and biddable. A lot of people don’t question, their thinking is shaped by other people, especially the media and social media and that is a dangerous thing. As a society we are set up to encourage a passive and biddable population.’
We mustn’t let the calls for consultation about the ethics and acceptability of the use of behavioural science, especially about something as profound as fear, drift into a pre-pandemic past. Good ethics must never be behind us
I think once this debacle is over, people will want to forget the worst and romanticise the best, to storify the saga into a bearable memory. But that would be dangerous. We must use the emotional distance and space to critically assess which rubicons were crossed.
I think the handling of the epidemic should teach us to be wary, if not frightened, of Bernays’ ‘invisible government’ which nudges and forces behaviour change through manipulating our emotions. It is the duty of us all to think about what type of society we want to live in, which values we treasure, the styles of governance we approve of and reject, and what constitutional protections we may wish to introduce.
Without the strongest objections from all of us, an inquiry and resistance against these tools, I think their future and repeated use inevitable.
A German professor recounted the process, movingly, in They Thought They Were Free, by Milton Mayer: ‘To live in this process is absolutely not to be able to notice it – please try to believe me – unless one has a much greater degree of political awareness, acuity, than most of us had ever had occasion to develop. Each step was so small, so inconsequential, so well explained or, on occasion, “regretted”, that, unless one were detached from the whole process from the beginning, unless one understood what the whole thing was in principle, what all these ‘little measures’ that no ‘patriotic
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In the blind global panic of an epidemic we have forgotten how to analyse risk. If you don’t accept that you will die one day, that you can never be safe, then you are a sitting duck for authoritarian policies which purport to be for your safety.
Locations with many nursing home deaths may have high estimates of the infection fatality rate, but the infection fatality rate would still be low among non-elderly, non-debilitated people… The median infection fatality rate across all 51 locations was 0.27% (corrected 0.23%)… For people younger than 70 years old, the infection fatality rate of COVID-19 across 40 locations with available data ranged from 0.00% to 0.31% (median 0.05%); the corrected values were similar.’
Sadly, I would also argue that belief in the success or failure of lockdown is also ideological to some degree, because belief in the effectiveness of lockdowns does not seem to be based in firm, unequivocal empirical evidence, as I will demonstrate here.
Isolation of ‘sick individuals’ is ‘recommended’ although the evidence is ‘very low’. Note that these are ‘sick’ individuals. But ‘quarantine of exposed individuals’ is ‘not recommended in any circumstances’. Mass quarantine measures – lockdowns – are ‘not recommended’ due to lack of evidence for their effectiveness. Similarly, evidence for closing schools, contact tracing, avoiding crowding, internal travel restrictions, border exit and entry screening is ‘very low’.
It cannot be stressed enough that the WHO and the UK have never included mass quarantining of healthy people – lockdowns – in epidemic or pandemic preparedness planning. There was no evidence that lockdowns would work, and the harms were acknowledged to outweigh the potential and unproven effects.
The modelling also did not take take into account the spread of the virus in hospitals, care homes and prisons. When 40%6 of deaths are care home residents and up to two thirds of infections leading to serious illness are contracted in hospital,7 it cannot be over-stated what a major omission this was.
Viruses cannot be turned on and off like a tap by governments. This is difficult for the politicians – the enactors of lockdowns – to admit. This is partly due to the sunk cost fallacy, whereby a decision with destructive consequences traps the decision-maker in a cognitive cul-de-sac – they can’t admit the mistake and they keep going. The same is true for governments around the world. Lockdowns don’t work, so they impose more. It is difficult for the opposition to admit as they called for harder, earlier and longer lockdowns. It is hard for the lockdown-cheerleading media to admit. If
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Being aware, for example, that the government is using fear to manipulate you is the first step towards spotting and resisting that manipulation.
Conformity is reduced, for example, when decisions are made in private; and so we can make an effort to make important decisions away from prying eyes to ensure a degree of rationality.
Gustav Le Bon noted in his classic, The Crowd, persuasion occurs not through rational thought but through affirmation, repetition, and contagion.
Avoid highly-emotional or sensationalist sources of information; in particular, avoid video content as much as possible.
In short, unlike reading, video doesn’t give you the breathing room required to think critically. What’s more, reading improves cognitive function – that is, books make you smarter.
Ultimately, the goal is to give your brain room to think by reducing chaos in your life. To paraphrase William H. McRaven and Jordan B. Peterson – make your bed and clean your room.
