General Discussion

Trump’s Make America Great Again movement might feel liberated by a judiciary that holds no sway over the executive, said Aziz Huq, professor at the University of Chicago Law School.

“But what it also does is it liberates everybody else. Why should a governor, why should a state court judge . . . why should anybody listen to the legal opinion of either the Supreme Court or the president?

“It’s not that you open the door to unilateral claims of power by the president, it’s that you open the door to a cacophony of voices rather than a single voice settling what the law says,” he added.

“I don’t think anyone knows what that looks like. But I don’t think it’s what the people on the Maga right think it looks like”.

Data about the flow of choices is used to update and enhance a system’s global view of its own state

What is happening here is more than an abstract flow of information. It is more than a means of surveillance. It is more than a price mechanism. Rather, it’s as if the air traffic control and insurance commission functions of the IBM 650 have been fused, shrunk, and wholly generalised. This is the real computing revolution. Much of what we do is immediately authenticated as we do it, stored as data, classified or scored on some sort of scale, and deployed in real time to modulate some outcome of interest – usually, the behaviour of a person, or a machine, or an organisation.

Peter Sandman, a risk communication researcher, has made some fascinating observations about how we handle information in times of crisis. The traditional calculation of risk is to multiply the magnitude — how bad something will be when it happens by the probability of it happening (risk = probability x impact).

It’s the type of formula that an environmental assessor uses to determine acceptable outcomes from a proposed industrial project or a simplified way that an insurance company uses to calculate rates.

But Sandman says that this classic equation needs another key factor: outrage.

Outrage is a strong emotion. The actual magnitude or probability of risk is overcome by the cultural assessment of risk. Emotions and beliefs outweigh data. For most of the public, the risk formula can be better expressed as:

risk = 😳 x 💥

So if forcing data is a bad strategy, what is a good strategy? Your best path to get someone to listen to you is to have frank, open discussions, and for you to listen to their concerns about an issue. In this case, the COVID-19 pandemic.

Instead of giving someone an info dump (or some such), talk about the worry of being alarmist. Talk about the disruption in your life. Talk about the dilemmas. You normally help your grandma with meals, but now you can’t visit. You’re worried that the project you’ve been working on for months might get cancelled if you don’t go in to work. You’re sad because you can’t celebrate a milestone with friends and family.