I was trying to be clever but guys never are
There's something really troubling about the UK government's new plans to monitor at-risk children, by which they mainly mean those "at risk of future offending early in their life". Having noticed that children whose parents are very poor, or drug addicts, or criminals are likely to do less well in their lives, they're planning to identify such children and surround them with social workers, police officers, youth workers, guidance teachers, etc. Note however, that having identified a family where poverty is going to lead to trouble, they're not going to give the family more money (recent reports show an increase in child poverty in the UK). They're just going to put a big flag "suspected criminal" on the kid's file.
Some side-effects are obvious - researchers claim that parents are less likely to discuss problems with doctors, social workers, health visitors, teachers, etc.
Other consequences will take longer to emerge. There's a lot of evidence that stigmatising people as potential criminals means they're likely to be treated as criminals and to behave as criminals, regardless of whether the initial assessment was valid. When resources are concentrated on monitoring and policing the poor, it's likely to intensify social divisions (already growing under the Labour government), and while there are statistical correlations between e.g. domestic violence and poverty, the causal relationship is a bit more complex than that. Will schools use the information for admissions? Will it affect sentencing policy for juvenile delinquents if they're judged as naturally criminal?
And of course the predictions are not accurate; it's only a statistical association. You can't predict who will or won't be a criminal, even if your observations and mathematical model and calculations are all correct.
It might not be as bad if the combined information-gathering forces were aimed purely at child welfare and benefiting the child, but that doesn't seem to be the principal goal. Many parents are going to be reluctant enough to be included on a list of parents needing help (even if the reasons for inclusions aren't their fault), but if it's a list of future criminals, you're moving from an interventionist social policy to an instrument of state control.
Not directly relatedly, I got around to watching Part 2 of Adam Curtis's The Trap the other night, where various distinguished psychiatrists were pointing out the basic methodological flaw with the DSM method of assessing mental illness, that it deliberately uses statistical analysis to reduce all human behaviour and emotions to a series of numerical values which are then used to calculate an average or "normal" value, which is the numerical ideal of health, and then psychiatrists seek to maintain all human beings within these narrow definitions of normality, without taking any account of causes or individual circumstances of the individual being judged (grief, anxiety, poverty, etc).
Curtis's argument across all the areas he covers seems to be about the limits of mathematical and statistical models of human behaviour, and the necessity for personal judgment by committed professionals in fields from psychiatry to government. Perhaps we have some irrational fear of being reduced to numbers and denied our individuality, which we should be willing to accept if it is genuinely beneficial, but it's clear that in many cases numerical values are an insufficient method of characterising complex social systems; indeed I've read about a general rule which claims that any parameter you select as a performance measure or target will rapidly cease to have any value for understanding the behaviour of a system.
The model of the DSM doesn't correspond exactly to what our government is planning to do; they're establishing a model of the ideal family, recording everybody who differentiates from that, but rather than attempt to restore them to normality (e.g. via money, proper care of drug addicts, social measures to avoid splitting up families) they're going to police the abnormal in a virtual prison. Will we soon have a potential-criminality score like our existing credit rating? And who will have access to it?
From elsewhere, my thoughts on part one of the Trap, to keep linked up.Ah the happiness and joy of Adam Curtis's new series The Trap: What Happened To Our Dreams Of Freedom on BBC2. The first episode attempted to show how ideas of games theory created in the 1950s were used by Robert McNamara to administer the Vietnam war and later by Margaret Thatcher to organise the health service. The belief that people were rational, selfish, and manipulative, seeking to maximise their rewards by predicting how others would act originated with John Nash and the RAND Corporation analysing nuclear war; Nash proved that the most stable society was one where nobody ever trusted anyone else (defying earlier theories that pure self-interest would lead to anarchy).
This became a general theory of human motivation for those on the new right (Hayek, James Buchanan, etc), which would overthrow traditional elites that were based on the principle of working for the public good or national interest and replace them with people working according to systems of incentives for their own self-interest. Even though the RAND Corp experiments had shown that in practice people don't pursue the self-interested strategies which Nash had found optional.
Meanwhile those on the left were seeking to overthrow rigid bureaucratic or authoritarian structures, and in psychiatry the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual replaced the power and judgment of (often seriously ignorant) psychiatrists with an apparently scientific and objective system that judged 50% of Americans were mentally ill and included a detailed description of normal behaviour (this is less directly connected to rest of the argument, but Laing and others were heavily influenced by game theory, and I'm sure later episodes will return to American psychiatry).
The program also included Sir Antony Jay explaining how popular sitcom Yes Minister was propaganda for the followers of Hayek. James Buchanan explained how corrupt politicians are better than idealists because the former were more amenable to persuasion. However, setting soldiers in Vietnam performance targets of how many people to kill led to massacres of civilians, and the consequences in other areas of public management will prove little better.
Possibly the first news story you'll ever read to feature Newt Gingrich, Yorkshire indie band The Wedding Present, and an attempt to impress a girl by passing an act of congress celebrating the 1000th anniversary of Christianity in the Ukraine.
Child/exam-related nonsense.
For Lee and/or Herring fans: old Smash Hits interview.
Some side-effects are obvious - researchers claim that parents are less likely to discuss problems with doctors, social workers, health visitors, teachers, etc.
Other consequences will take longer to emerge. There's a lot of evidence that stigmatising people as potential criminals means they're likely to be treated as criminals and to behave as criminals, regardless of whether the initial assessment was valid. When resources are concentrated on monitoring and policing the poor, it's likely to intensify social divisions (already growing under the Labour government), and while there are statistical correlations between e.g. domestic violence and poverty, the causal relationship is a bit more complex than that. Will schools use the information for admissions? Will it affect sentencing policy for juvenile delinquents if they're judged as naturally criminal?
And of course the predictions are not accurate; it's only a statistical association. You can't predict who will or won't be a criminal, even if your observations and mathematical model and calculations are all correct.
It might not be as bad if the combined information-gathering forces were aimed purely at child welfare and benefiting the child, but that doesn't seem to be the principal goal. Many parents are going to be reluctant enough to be included on a list of parents needing help (even if the reasons for inclusions aren't their fault), but if it's a list of future criminals, you're moving from an interventionist social policy to an instrument of state control.
Not directly relatedly, I got around to watching Part 2 of Adam Curtis's The Trap the other night, where various distinguished psychiatrists were pointing out the basic methodological flaw with the DSM method of assessing mental illness, that it deliberately uses statistical analysis to reduce all human behaviour and emotions to a series of numerical values which are then used to calculate an average or "normal" value, which is the numerical ideal of health, and then psychiatrists seek to maintain all human beings within these narrow definitions of normality, without taking any account of causes or individual circumstances of the individual being judged (grief, anxiety, poverty, etc).
Curtis's argument across all the areas he covers seems to be about the limits of mathematical and statistical models of human behaviour, and the necessity for personal judgment by committed professionals in fields from psychiatry to government. Perhaps we have some irrational fear of being reduced to numbers and denied our individuality, which we should be willing to accept if it is genuinely beneficial, but it's clear that in many cases numerical values are an insufficient method of characterising complex social systems; indeed I've read about a general rule which claims that any parameter you select as a performance measure or target will rapidly cease to have any value for understanding the behaviour of a system.
The model of the DSM doesn't correspond exactly to what our government is planning to do; they're establishing a model of the ideal family, recording everybody who differentiates from that, but rather than attempt to restore them to normality (e.g. via money, proper care of drug addicts, social measures to avoid splitting up families) they're going to police the abnormal in a virtual prison. Will we soon have a potential-criminality score like our existing credit rating? And who will have access to it?
From elsewhere, my thoughts on part one of the Trap, to keep linked up.Ah the happiness and joy of Adam Curtis's new series The Trap: What Happened To Our Dreams Of Freedom on BBC2. The first episode attempted to show how ideas of games theory created in the 1950s were used by Robert McNamara to administer the Vietnam war and later by Margaret Thatcher to organise the health service. The belief that people were rational, selfish, and manipulative, seeking to maximise their rewards by predicting how others would act originated with John Nash and the RAND Corporation analysing nuclear war; Nash proved that the most stable society was one where nobody ever trusted anyone else (defying earlier theories that pure self-interest would lead to anarchy).
This became a general theory of human motivation for those on the new right (Hayek, James Buchanan, etc), which would overthrow traditional elites that were based on the principle of working for the public good or national interest and replace them with people working according to systems of incentives for their own self-interest. Even though the RAND Corp experiments had shown that in practice people don't pursue the self-interested strategies which Nash had found optional.
Meanwhile those on the left were seeking to overthrow rigid bureaucratic or authoritarian structures, and in psychiatry the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual replaced the power and judgment of (often seriously ignorant) psychiatrists with an apparently scientific and objective system that judged 50% of Americans were mentally ill and included a detailed description of normal behaviour (this is less directly connected to rest of the argument, but Laing and others were heavily influenced by game theory, and I'm sure later episodes will return to American psychiatry).
The program also included Sir Antony Jay explaining how popular sitcom Yes Minister was propaganda for the followers of Hayek. James Buchanan explained how corrupt politicians are better than idealists because the former were more amenable to persuasion. However, setting soldiers in Vietnam performance targets of how many people to kill led to massacres of civilians, and the consequences in other areas of public management will prove little better.
Possibly the first news story you'll ever read to feature Newt Gingrich, Yorkshire indie band The Wedding Present, and an attempt to impress a girl by passing an act of congress celebrating the 1000th anniversary of Christianity in the Ukraine.
Child/exam-related nonsense.
For Lee and/or Herring fans: old Smash Hits interview.