The Mismanagement of Covid-19 Part I: Senseless Errors
In his best-selling book Moneyball, Michael Lewis tells the true story of how the Oakland A’s general manager Billy Beane built a competitive team on a very limited budget by defying the conventional wisdom of baseball experts. Instead, Beane relied upon an unconventional sophisticated data analytics approach to scout and evaluate players. Despite perennial meager budgets, in the twenty years Beane has used data analytics to build teams, the A’s have made the playoffs an impressive nine times. Beane’s innovative approach has literally become a game changer as many of baseball’s most talented clubs today are employing the key principle that serves as the foundation for building successful teams: Trust the evidence of data over the opinions of experts.
The story of Moneyball is intriguing because it calls into question the judgments of experts. After all, if the knowledge of experts in a relatively simple industry such as baseball could be significantly improved by an unconventional data analytical approach, could the same be true for more complex human activities? It was a question that many, if not most, of us had not considered before Lewis popularized this story.
After publication, Lewis was surprised to learn that the ideas in his book weren’t as original as he thought. A chiding review in the New Republic pointed out that Lewis did not seem to be aware of the deeper reason for the inherent flaws in expert judgments: the dynamics of thinking in the human mind. The discovery of the workings of human thinking and how they can enable inefficient and sometimes irrational expert judgments had been described, years prior, by a pair of psychologists, Daniel Kahneman—whose groundbreaking work resulted in a Nobel prize—and his longtime collaborator Amos Tversky. This review would inspire Lewis to delve into the story of the work of these two psychologists, which would become the subject of his subsequent book, The Undoing Project.
Dual Thinking Modes
Kahneman and Tversky discovered that the human brain is a paradox. While it is capable of producing highly developed analytical and creative intelligence, it is also prone to make apparently senseless errors. Why is this so? The answer according to the psychologists is that people are nowhere near as rational as they think and are incredibly susceptible to unconscious biases that influence human decision-making to a far greater extent than we realize.
Kahneman and Tversky discovered that people engage in two different thinking modes in their day-to-day lives. They refer to these ways of thinking by the nondescript names System 1 and System 2. System 1 is fast thinking, which operates automatically with little or no effort. It is highly proficient at identifying causal connections between events, sometimes even when there is no empirical basis for the connection. System 2, on the other hand, is slow thinking and involves deliberate attention to understanding details and the complex web of relationships among various components. Whereas System 1 is inherently intuitive, deterministic, and undoubting, System 2 is rational, probabilistic and highly aware of uncertainty and doubt. Needless to say, these two ways of thinking are contextually very different.
Both System 1 and System 2 thinking are distinctly human capabilities that have provided humanity with an immense evolutionary advantage. We are capable of developing complex intellectual structures such a mathematics, physics, and music via applications of System 2, and, thanks to System 1, humans have the unique capability to make judgments and decisions quickly from limited available information. In employing these two capabilities, Kahneman and Tversky found that, while we may perceive ourselves as predominately rational System 2 thinkers, the reality is most human judgments and decisions are based upon the more intuitive System 1 for the simple reason that we don’t have the time to do System 2 thinking.
For example, if you suddenly find yourself in an unfamiliar place late at night in the presence of a complete stranger with no one else in sight, you will need to make some practical decisions rather quickly. Doing a detailed background check on the stranger is not possible, so you will have to make a fast judgment about whether this unknown person is likely friendly, hostile, or indifferent. You will rely upon your experience and intuition to quickly examine the clues in front of you to decide whether to ignore the person, engage in a conversation, or flee as fast as you can.
However, while fast thinking is more useful in making immediate choices, it is also more likely to result in judgment errors, even though when engaged in System 1, we tend to feel more confident than when we employ System 2. That’s because the mental narratives that are a natural byproduct of System 1 are likely to result in biases that often cause us to make confident decisions that are completely wrong.
These mental narratives are likely what guided the conventional thinking of traditional baseball scouts. Similarly, System 1 narratives may be informing the thinking of the public health experts who continue to influence the shaping of public policy in handing the Covid-19 pandemic. And if this is so, it raises the question of whether or not the mass application of social distancing, mask-wearing, and vaccine mandates might be another case of humans making confident judgments and decisions from limited available information.
A Simplistic Solution
When the coronavirus first erupted into our lives, it was immediately framed as a public health crisis, which is why the guiding expertise for handling the pandemic came from the public health community. As a result, the strategic focus in combatting the virus, especially in the early days of the pandemic, was organized around making sure the health care system was not overwhelmed by an influx of Covid-19 patients. Mass social distancing and stay-at-home policies were quickly put in place to support this organizing principle.
This guidance propagated a narrative that has become a form of conventional wisdom. According to this narrative, social distancing, mask-wearing, and vaccine mandates are necessary because anyone of us could be a potential carrier. Despite the insistence of governmental leaders that they are following the science, many policy decisions seem to be more informed by the opinions of experts than the evidence of data. And these opinions are often grounded in a questionable moral position that coerces people to accept whatever inconveniences or hardships we need to endure—even if that means tens of millions lose their jobs and face the prospect of financial ruin—because there is nothing more sacred than saving lives. However, one of the strange consequences of this ad hoc morality is that the only deaths that seem to matter are Covid deaths. Somehow the collateral death and destruction resulting from Covid policies have become acceptable losses.
While these losses may be acceptable to the public health experts who are myopically focused on this one disease, these consequences are very real to the millions of people who may have to live for decades with the collateral damage from short-sighted policies. Stress and anxiety from social isolation and financial uncertainty have likely resulted in increases in alcoholism, drug addiction, domestic violence, suicides, and ironically, weakened immune systems. The latter is most significant because more people with weakened immune systems translates into more people in the Covid-19 high risk group. Some have argued that the cure may turn out to be more harmful than the disease.
While well-intentioned, it appears that our public health experts are nevertheless being misguided by System 1 thinking as they remain riveted on a simplistic strategy that is myopically focused on vaccination as the sole solution for stopping the pandemic. Only System 1 thinking would insist that 100 percent vaccination of the population is essential when there is clear evidence that the vaccines do not prevent people from catching and spreading the disease. Only System 1 thinking could lead private and public entities to insist that vaccination is required to engage in commercial discourse, with no exceptions even if the jab puts some people at risk of serious injury or even death. Only System 1 thinking would require the vaccination of those who have the longer-lasting superior immunity that comes from recovering from the disease.
System 1 thinking has prevented our public health experts and policy makers from taking a holistic approach to public health. Public health is not limited to the minimization of infectious diseases. It’s larger responsibility is to cultivate a holistically healthy society, which, in addition to managing infectious diseases, includes minimizing the number of deaths resulting from efforts to curb a pandemic, optimizing the functioning of society to the fullest possible extent during a pandemic, and propagating a multi-faceted strategy of preventive activities, early treatments, and immunization mechanisms. There are no simplistic solutions to complex problems. And, as we are witnessing, those who coercively endorse one-size-fits-all approaches run the risk of propagating the senseless errors that often come from the unconscious biases inherent in System 1 thinking.