Tag Archives: Public Information

Asymptoting towards zero…

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Nearly ten years ago Hal Varian wrote a paper called Mar­kets for Inform­a­tion Goods. It’s none too eleg­antly expressed, but it has what you might call “pro­found” implic­a­tions:

I would like to coin a “Malthus’s law” of inform­a­tion. Recall that Malthus noted that num­ber of stom­aches grew geo­met­ric­ally but the amount of food grew lin­early. Pool (1984)* noted that the sup­ply of inform­a­tion (in vir­tu­ally every medium) grows expo­nen­tion­ally whereas the amount that is con­sumed grows at best lin­early. This is ulti­mately due to the fact that our men­tal powers and time avail­able to pro­cess inform­a­tion is con­strained. This has the uncom­fort­able con­sequence that the frac­tion of the inform­a­tion pro­duced that is actu­ally con­sumed is asymp­tot­ing towards zero.

*Ith­iel De Sola Pool, Hiroshi Inose, Nozomu Taka­saki, Roger Hur­witz. Com­mu­nic­a­tions flows: a census in the United States and Japan. Elsevier Sci­ence, New York, 1984.

Public information — it’s not rocket science

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Oné of my favour­ite pub-bore top­ics is the import­ance of pub­lic inform­a­tion. And I like col­lect­ing examples. Here is one from Richard Feyn­man’s con­clu­sion to the report on the dis­aster which des­troyed the space shuttle Chal­lenger in 1986:

If a reas­on­able launch sched­ule is to be main­tained, engin­eer­ing often can­not be done fast enough to keep up with the expect­a­tions of ori­gin­ally con­ser­vat­ive cer­ti­fic­a­tion cri­teria designed to guar­an­tee a very safe vehicle. In these situ­ations, subtly, and often with appar­ently logical argu­ments, the cri­teria are altered so that flights may still be cer­ti­fied in time. They there­fore fly in a rel­at­ively unsafe con­di­tion, with a chance of fail­ure of the order of a per­cent (it is dif­fi­cult to be more accurate).

Offi­cial man­age­ment, on the other hand, claims to believe the prob­ab­il­ity of fail­ure is a thou­sand times less. One reason for this may be an attempt to assure the gov­ern­ment of NASA per­fec­tion and suc­cess in order to ensure the sup­ply of funds. The other may be that they sin­cerely believed it to be true, demon­strat­ing an almost incred­ible lack of com­mu­nic­a­tion between them­selves and their work­ing engineers.

In any event this has had very unfor­tu­nate con­sequences, the most ser­i­ous of which is to encour­age ordin­ary cit­izens to fly in such a dan­ger­ous machine, as if it had attained the safety of an ordin­ary air­liner. The astro­nauts, like test pilots, should know their risks, and we honor them for their cour­age. Who can doubt that McAul­iffe was equally a per­son of great cour­age, who was closer to an aware­ness of the true risk than NASA man­age­ment would have us believe?

[F5] Let us make recom­mend­a­tions to ensure that NASA offi­cials deal in a world of real­ity in under­stand­ing tech­no­lo­gical weak­nesses and imper­fec­tions well enough to be act­ively try­ing to elim­in­ate them. They must live in real­ity in com­par­ing the costs and util­ity of the Shuttle to other meth­ods of enter­ing space. And they must be real­istic in mak­ing con­tracts, in estim­at­ing costs, and the dif­fi­culty of the pro­jects. Only real­istic flight sched­ules should be pro­posed, sched­ules that have a reas­on­able chance of being met. If in this way the gov­ern­ment would not sup­port them, then so be it. NASA owes it to the cit­izens from whom it asks sup­port to be frank, hon­est, and inform­at­ive, so that these cit­izens can make the wisest decisions for the use of their lim­ited resources.

For a suc­cess­ful tech­no­logy, real­ity must take pre­ced­ence over pub­lic rela­tions, for nature can­not be fooled.

NASA owes it to the cit­izens from whom it asks sup­port to be frank, hon­est, and inform­at­ive, so that these cit­izens can make the wisest decisions for the use of their lim­ited resources. So do they all.

Why informing the public doesn’t always work…

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In case you missed this little gem from the Wash­ing­ton Post:

Long-term memor­ies mat­ter most in pub­lic health cam­paigns or polit­ical ones, and they are the most sus­cept­ible to the bias of think­ing that well-recalled false inform­a­tion is true.

The exper­i­ments do not show that deni­als are com­pletely use­less; if that were true, every­one would believe the myths. But the mind’s bias does affect many people, espe­cially those who want to believe the myth for their own reas­ons, or those who are only peri­pher­ally inter­ested and are less likely to invest the time and effort needed to firmly grasp the facts.

The research also high­lights the dis­turb­ing real­ity that once an idea has been implanted in people’s minds, it can be dif­fi­cult to dis­lodge. Deni­als inher­ently require repeat­ing the bad inform­a­tion, which may be one reason they can para­dox­ic­ally rein­force it.

Indeed, repe­ti­tion seems to be a key cul­prit. Things that are repeated often become more access­ible in memory, and one of the brain’s sub­con­scious rules of thumb is that eas­ily recalled things are true.

Many eas­ily remembered things, in fact, such as one’s birth­day or a pet’s name, are indeed true. But someone try­ing to manip­u­late pub­lic opin­ion can take advant­age of this aspect of brain func­tion­ing. In polit­ics and else­where, this means that who­ever makes the first asser­tion about some­thing has a large advant­age over every­one who denies it later.

Fur­ther­more, a new exper­i­ment by Kim­ber­lee Weaver at Vir­ginia Poly­tech­nic Insti­tute and oth­ers shows that hear­ing the same thing over and over again from one source can have the same effect as hear­ing that thing from many dif­fer­ent people — the brain gets tricked into think­ing it has heard a piece of inform­a­tion from mul­tiple, inde­pend­ent sources, even when it has not. Weaver’s study was pub­lished this year in the Journal of Per­son­al­ity and Social Psychology.

The exper­i­ments by Weaver, Schwarz and oth­ers illus­trate another basic prop­erty of the mind — it is not good at remem­ber­ing when and where a per­son first learned some­thing. People are not good at keep­ing track of which inform­a­tion came from cred­ible sources and which came from less trust­worthy ones, or even remem­ber­ing that some inform­a­tion came from the same untrust­worthy source over and over again. Even if a per­son recog­nizes which sources are cred­ible and which are not, repeated asser­tions and deni­als can have the effect of mak­ing the inform­a­tion more access­ible in memory and thereby mak­ing it feel true, said Schwarz.

Stockwell 2: Policing public information

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The IPCC’s Stock­well 2 report is undoubtedly the best account of the man­age­ment con­fu­sion sur­round­ing the killing of Jean Charles de Menezes. Well, it’s the only one.

There is a key prob­lem. The cent­ral claim in all police com­mu­nic­a­tions was that de Menezes was chal­lenged, refused to com­ply and was then shot. This, Stock­well 2 tells us, is a mat­ter for the unpub­lished Stock­well 1 report. In fact we still don’t know who shot de Menezes — police officers, sol­diers, whoever.

The risk to the gen­eral pub­lic remains infin­ites­imal, but the les­son is simple — don’t walk out of a build­ing under haphaz­ard sur­veil­lance and use pub­lic trans­port, or you are liable to be executed.

The con­clu­sions paint a grim pic­ture of inform­a­tion man­age­ment within the Met and the degree of trust that can be attrib­uted to police state­ments in a crisis. In future, per­haps all such inform­a­tion should come with a “health warn­ing.“
Here’s a key excerpt, my ital­ics:

Fol­low­ing the shoot­ing of Mr de Menezes, inac­cur­ate inform­a­tion was released by the MPS [Met­ro­pol­itan Police Ser­vice] on the 22 and 23 July dur­ing a press con­fer­ence given by the Com­mis­sioner and in a num­ber of media releases.

There is no evid­ence that the Com­mis­sioner or any other mem­ber of the MPS know­ingly released the incor­rect inform­a­tion to the media and pub­lic that Mr de Menezes had been chal­lenged and that his cloth­ing had added to their sus­pi­cions. Whilst they did release this inform­a­tion it was believed by them to have been cor­rect at the time. [On what basis? See below…]

Those within the MPS respons­ible for pre­par­ing the media releases and state­ments, sanc­tion­ing them and actu­ally releas­ing the mater­ial should have ensured that the proven­ance and vera­city of the inform­a­tion they con­tained had been estab­lished. [What else are they there for?] Whilst they could be con­sidered to have been neg­li­gent in not doing so [Yes…] account must be taken of the extraordin­ary pres­sures under which the MPS were oper­at­ing at the time [Don’t trust inform­a­tion in a crisis].

Inform­a­tion that Mr de Menezes was wear­ing unseason­able cloth­ing ori­gin­ated from officers engaged on the anti ter­ror­ist oper­a­tion at Stock­well and mem­bers of the pub­lic. That inform­a­tion is not cor­rect, but it was passed on and became part of the MPS media releases. The inform­a­tion that Mr de Menezes had been chal­lenged was also released by the MPS. Whether or not that was actu­ally fac­tual is a mat­ter for the Stock­well 1 invest­ig­a­tion. Mr de Menezes was not given an instruc­tion by police officers that he could have chosen whether to obey or refuse.

Ms de Vries in the MPS DPA made a genu­ine error when she included in the 11:41hrs 22 July 2005 press release that Mr de Menezes had been chal­lenged. She wrongly based it on her assump­tion that a chal­lenge would always be made. Her text was not changed when it was checked prior to release.

Pub­lic wit­nesses who gave early tele­vised state­ments con­trib­uted to the release of incor­rect inform­a­tion when they stated that Mr de Menezes had been wear­ing sus­pi­cious cloth­ing and had jumped a ticket barrier.

Their actions were based upon what they had per­ceived occurred in a very stress­ful situ­ation and they were genu­inely mis­taken. The inform­a­tion they provided to the media was out­side the con­trol of the MPS.

MPS staff and wit­nesses from other agen­cies were mon­it­or­ing 24 hour tele­vi­sion news cov­er­age fol­low­ing the shoot­ing. It is believed that some of them may have been influ­enced by the inac­cur­ate accounts that were being reported.

More cor­por­ate cock-ups and half-baked assump­tions than con­spir­acies, then. But the police are no nearer telling us who killed Mr de Menezes. It’s ironic really, an anonym­ous death squad seems so…South American.

Con­trast the Met’s enthu­si­astic invest­ig­a­tion of ITV News journ­al­ist Neil Gar­rett (dis­clos­ure: he once worked for me) who was passed leaked IPCC doc­u­ments from Stock­well 1:

I opened the front door to dis­cover that my flat had been raided and searched. Laptops, mobile phones, cam­eras, CD-Roms, even press cut­tings from around the time of the De Menezes reports had been taken.

The flat was a com­plete mess, and only the most curs­ory effort had been made to put things back. Oddly, a chair from the bed­room had been left in the bath­room. A car­bon copy of a war­rant was cas­u­ally left on the fridge…

Inter­views made it clear the police had delved into our bank accounts and credit records. Text mes­sages retrieved from our phones were read out to us. Silly every­day emails about money, or the lack of it, were twis­ted and inter­preted as a fin­an­cial motive for the alleged crime.

The police were thor­ough, I’ll give them that — but they just could not seem to coun­ten­ance the idea that the only motiv­a­tion was a desire on the part of our IPCC source to get the truth out. The only solace was that we hadn’t been arres­ted under the Ter­ror­ism Act. One day in a police cell is bad enough, 28 days must be a nightmare.

Indeed.