The power of knowing what you don’t know

 The power of knowing what you don’t know

By MARINA MAHATHIR

MUSINGS

Sunday, 25 Jul 2021

AS we wander through the dark Covid tunnel wondering when the next train is going to hit us, our minds also turn to the people who are supposed to stop those trains. Thus far the barriers they have put up – lockdowns, fining innocent people, hunting down migrant workers and refugees – have been knocked into splinters like so many chopsticks. And still they insist that their policies work and indeed have been successful.

But then they’re in the nice, air-conditioned tunnel riding on the gravy trains. Not likely to be run over any time soon.

There’s a quote often misattributed to Albert Einstein that says that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. Whoever originally said it, we now know that it’s true, with the rise in our Covid-19 cases and deaths as proof.

It’s obvious that our leaders and policymakers don’t read. They don’t read the science which is why they do unscientific things like disinfect roads. Nor do they read the signs that come in the form of white and black flags. Or they do, but instead of feeling ashamed, they feel insulted and claim that the appropriate flags should be blue. But they also haven’t noticed how we’ve become blue in the face trying to make them see sense.

It’s also clear that they’ve been blocking out bad news. How else to explain anyone who believes it when hospitals clean up their disaster areas or when they are told that people’s kitchens are full of food? I didn’t know it was possible to be blind and tone deaf at the same time.

For those of our leaders who did go to school, I recommend a book called Think Again by Adam Grant. It’s about “the power of knowing what you don’t know”. Grant wants us to accept that we don’t always know everything, that we can only grow and come up with better solutions when we decide that we need to rethink everything that we know. He starts the book by giving the example of the inventor of the Blackberry who was so sure he had invented the best phone and that he knew everything about human wants that he failed to see the iPhone coming.

To be able to rethink your ideas and beliefs, you need to be, most of all, humble. But most people, especially the higher up the totem pole they are, tend to cling to what Grant calls the arrogance of ignorance. They believe that they got up their perch because they are special and therefore everything they say must be true and smart. Even though people lower down the pole don’t think their bosses are as clever as they are supposed to be, they don’t want to say anything because of the danger of being gaslighted. In other words, trying to correct those on top of them might elicit the comeback, “If you’re so smart, how come you’re down there and I’m up here?”. In our feudal society, this effectively shuts minions up.

Grant goes on to talk about how most people over-estimate their abilities on any subject they claim to know. He gives examples of experiments where the more confident people are in their own abilities, the more mistakes they are likely to make. They are so sure of themselves, they never think they can be wrong. But he also says there’s an underlying force that can also cloud our vision of our abilities, our inability to think about our thinking. “Lacking competence,” he says, “can make us blind to our incompetence.” In Malay, we call it bodoh sombong. Can you think of anyone who might fit the bill?

What’s most needed is confident humility, the willingness to be open and to learn from others. But unfortunately, as we have seen time and again, that’s exactly what’s missing. There are people who blunder on, causing economic and social damage, without caring in the least bit about the human cost. By the time this column comes out, there’ll be probably 8000 people dead from Covid and countless others from suicide. Do the blunderers care? In Indonesia, the public gets apologies from Ministers when they make mistakes. Here? Not a peep.

Instead, we get a show of eye-watering arrogance when people, who need to be labelled VIPs in case we forget, pray in an enclosed place with 300 others and get away with it, despite their own warnings to the rest of us. Elsewhere 200 not very important folks pray on the road outdoors and immediately get investigated, resulting in only 49 of them, all foreigners except one, being arrested. Does it smell to you like it does to me?

Nothing is going to change unless people feel safe enough to give new ideas. In one experiment that Grant cited, people who have psychological safety – they feel they won’t suffer if they provide different ideas – reported more errors than people who felt less safe. But on closer examination, it turns out that while they reported more errors, they made less of them. “By freely admitting their mistakes, they were then able to learn what caused them and eliminated them....in psychologically unsafe teams, people hid their mishaps to avoid penalties, which made it difficult to diagnose the root causes and prevent future problems.” Sounds like that Klang hospital visit, no?

If we ever get rid of this lot, I think we should make it mandatory for anyone aspiring to rule us to read this book so that they won’t cling to their self-assumed smartness as if it came down from above. I might even sponsor all 222 copies of it.

 

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Talking straight

Talking straight

By MARINA MAHATHIR

MUSINGS

Sunday, 27 Jun 2021

We seem to have a ‘new dictionary’ where the words have one meaning for some and another for others.

IN the alternate universe that some of our leaders inhabit, a new dictionary is being invented. It takes words that are normally understood by most people to mean something and gives them new meanings indeed. The most famous – some might say “infamous” – is of course the word ‘soon’.

In most cases, for example, when mothers demand their children pick up their mess, “soon” usually means “now!” For most adults however, time expands a little and “soon” might include maybe within the next week or so, as in “I’ll call you for coffee soon”. However, when the word is sandwiched between “as” and “as possible” and spoken by someone with as much authority as a mother, it is usually taken as meaning “right this minute”.

Of course, you could fudge the “as possible” bit by saying that the possibilities are endless. Yes, tomorrow is a possibility but so is next year. But as any child knows, negotiating terminology with a clearly irritated mother is inviting trouble, the sort of trouble that causes a grudge to be carried for years on end, even possibly a lifetime. The question that the child has to juggle in his or her mind is simple: is it worth it?

Then there’s the definition of “lockdown”. Normal people think of this term to mean “stay home”, don’t anybody move at all. In the 16th century when people realised that the reason the plague decimated so much of Europe was because people kept moving from place to place, they basically locked down whole cities until it was safe to open up again. Even earlier, in the 6th century, the Prophet Muhamad had said “When you hear that [a plague] is in a land, do not go to it and if it occurs in a land that you are already in, then do not leave it, fleeing from it.” The Prophet knew instinctively about quarantines and lockdowns not because he was a public health specialist but because he was a wise man with plenty of common sense.

If only we followed his example. Instead we have played with the definition of lockdown by allowing loopholes the size of the SMART tunnel. Worse we allowed some people to blithely walk through those loopholes because they are supposedly famous, important and kosher.

In the old dictionary, public health measures applied to all. That’s why it’s not called for-some-of-the-public health measures. But since we’re now using the new backdoor lexicon, the meaning of public is now elastic. Everyone is “the public” except for some. There’s the very few who because of fame, and not necessarily any utility, are excluded from any of the rules that apply to the hoi polloi. Then on the other end of the spectrum, there’s the groups that are very utilitarian but have to abide by even more rules than the “public”: the migrant workers and refugees who clean our toilets and streets, plough our fields, make our gloves and build our buildings. These we cramp into centres where the social distance is perhaps 10cm rather than 100cm, not much different from the many prisoners in our jails. The virus is however not showing any respect for these distinctions.

Of course the other phrases that have now gotten different meanings are the ones like “we’re doing really badly”, which now means “we’re doing really well”. We are “the worst in the world” translates as “we’re not”. Where once people panicked at news that there were 200 cases reported in a day, now we think that 2000 per day means we’re on the road to recovery. The word “cluster” used to send chills of fear through our hearts but now we learn that actually most cases aren’t related to clusters at all, they’re just sporadically all over the place. Nothing to fear because we’re really doing well.

Even that well-used phrase “herd immunity” which used to mean that about 80% of us would have been vaccinated is now made of rubber. We’re well on target (another rubbery word) apparently because we’ve vaccinated 10% of our people. Or at least the 10% who have registered to be vaccinated. In Kelantan, only a quarter of the people who should be vaccinated have registered and out of that, only a quarter of those have had a needle poked in their arms. What was that target again?

But I must say, of all the alternative characterisations of words that are currently in use now, the one that I take the most offense to is the one that says that discrimination is not discrimination. Specifically, if a law says that a Malaysian woman cannot enjoy the same rights as a Malaysian man, then she is not being discriminated against because that’s what the law says. And everyone knows that laws, despite being made by men with certain neanderthal tendencies, are always “neutral”.

It would be nice to think that “neutral” means “impartial” but when we look at the impact of some laws, we know that they’re not. If women cannot confer their citizenship to their children born abroad, we’re basically exiling them. Men on the other hand can marry who they want, have children wherever they want and all those progeny can claim Malaysian citizenship. If I were to be unkind, I would think that the law was made to punish women who had the gall to marry foreigners instead of our own males, privileged solely by their gender. Some Malaysian woman should marry Bill Gates to test this theory out. Might we change the law because he might bring his billions here?

Maybe a side-effect of this pandemic is the inability to think straight anymore. Or it has made people who never had the ability become even worse. As a simple example, witness the deafening silence from the Education Minister on the multiple complaints of sexual harassment in schools. Presumably he’s a parent too, yet has nothing to say about making our schools safe for our children. Nor has the Multimedia and Communications Minister had anything to say about online cyberbullying. Does silence mean they agree with what is happening, do not believe it or simply have no idea what to say?

In this new normal dictionary, when nobody in government takes a stand on anything, who knows what to make of all this wordlessness?

Marina Mahathir longs for the time when people talked straight, when up was not down and good was not bad.

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Strange but logical

Strange but logical

By MARINA MAHATHIR

MUSINGS

Sunday, 30 May 2021

Actions that do not make sense at first can still work if they are based on logic, not politics.

WHEN I was still a young student, I once had the opportunity to learn how to ski. Not being an athletic person, it was not easy for me to deal with the cold, the equipment and, most of all, the strange things I had to get the hang of to go down a slope safely. One of the most difficult was to accept that if I wanted to turn in one direction, I had to shift my body weight to the opposite direction. To turn left, I had to lean right and somehow the physics of that action gets my skis to move where I want them to. To me, it was totally counterintuitive and didn’t make sense. But it worked.

Counterintuitive actions often work because although they seem strange to the bystander, there is a logical basis underlying them. That logic may not be obvious at first but repeated actions make them clearer and more understandable. But if they don’t work, then their justification becomes questionable.

As an example, in January, our government rolled out what seemed like a counterintuitive move in a democracy. They declared an emergency and closed down Parliament because, they said, this would help them manage the Covid-19 pandemic without all sorts of distracting political noise. This so-called logic was quickly dismantled. Politicians kept blabbering away, some because they realised that their power to make laws had been taken away from them, accompanied by the even louder cacophony on social media. In other words, the noise got worse rather than ceasing.

At the same time, the Covid-19 pandemic, for which the counterintuitive move was initiated, only got worse, rather than better. Nearly 420,000 people have been infected this year alone, about four times more than all of last year. And sadly, we lost more than 2,000 people due to Covid-19 in the first five months of 2021 compared with last year’s 471 fatalities.

It seems that the logical scaffolding for the emergency declaration and the suspension of Parliament is not holding up. This may be because the action is operating under a completely different intuition, that of self-preservation.

In many ways public health and epidemiology works both intuitively and counterintuitively. When you have a pandemic, epidemiologists instinctively know that they should confine and contain. They won’t allow people to move about, not until they’re sure that everyone within a hotspot has been tested and declared free of the disease. Amateurs, however, act in a way that is intuitive to them – send everyone to the safety of their own homes, but that is counterintuitive to epidemiological common sense. That would allow people from areas of high infection to move about freely, suffering amnesia about the fact that the virus needs human bodies and the air they breathe out to get it places.

How happy would the virus be when politicians who have been exposed are not required to isolate themselves at home? It must have been delirious when untested students were allowed to go home to their families all over the country, and then return to their universities after the Hari Raya celebrations. “All homegoing students are required to adhere to the SOP” they said without saying how this was going to be guaranteed. “Once they return to campus, they will be screened and those without symptoms will be allowed to return to their hostels and classes” was the self-satisfied justification. Obviously someone has not read the articles about asymptomatic people being able to spread the virus far easier than the symptomatic ones for the precise reason that they are allowed to roam free. Counterintuitive thinking at work: if you can’t see it, they don’t have it.

There are howlers galore that would be hilarious if they weren’t actually dangerous. There was that domestic tourism policy where you could not travel in your own car across borders but instead – raise eyebrows here – must take a tour bus. Which genius thought it safer to get into a air-conditioned, enclosed bus with some 20 strangers for several hours than to sit in a private car with people you live with? I wonder what the families of those people who got infected on such a bus tour are thinking. Oh wait, they should have known not to get on a bus. It must be their own fault.

Which brings us to LRTs, MRTs and other enclosed people-transporting tubes. The intuitive thing is to shut them down so that people are not kept in close quarters with one another. But people still rely on them to get to work, those who cannot stay home for one reason or another. So you keep them running but with fewer trains.

Unfortunately, if you do that, more people will have to crowd into the coaches rendering it impossible to maintain physical distancing. We know, if we read at all, that the virus is airborne and the safest places are well-ventilated ones. Would this be true of LRTs? Isn’t that why, even if there had not been such a terrible accident, 231 passengers on one train would still have been endangered?

Common sense seems only to be viewed through a political lens. We can’t have picnics in parks, for example, because politicians are so used to spreading food around and inviting strangers to eat with them. Restaurants that have not greeted diners in months now have to close earlier in order to sell less takeaway food. Markets and bazaars can stay open because how else can votes be guaranteed? At this rate, will we have a surge of dead voters still on the rolls in the next elections?

Intuition would tell us that every person is at risk, and every person is a risk. Therefore why treat some differently than others, as if the poor and the powerless, and the less glamorous are riskier than others and need to be punished more harshly?

The only thing that seems to have gone well is the vaccination programme, if you can get an appointment. Once you do, the process is the most orderly that’s ever been organised in this country.

But there are complaints about the large numbers of no-shows. The instinct is to blame those who don’t turn up for wasting everyone’s time. The counter instinct, however, would be to look at why people are supposedly shying away. Perhaps it is just an arduous task to even get to a vaccination centre. So as the old saying goes, if Mohamad won’t come to the mountain, why not take the mountain to wherever it is needed? Besides mobile vaccination clinics, why not set up vaccination centres in shopping malls? You can get jabbed and shop at the same time. Safety and economy done.

Marina Mahathir instinctively wants to get under the covers and stay there until all this is over. But realises that, counterintuitively, it is better to be awake and be a thorn in the side of those currently leading the country.

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Not the superlative we want

Not the superlative we want

By MARINA MAHATHIR

MUSINGS

Sunday, 25 Apr 2021

WHILE our government tries to tell us that we’re on the up and up despite having no money, in one area at least we’ve taken a deep plunge. We’ve managed to dive 18 places in the World Press Freedom Index 2021 to the 199th spot, an “astonishing fall, ” according to Reporters Sans Frontieres who does the ranking every year. We may love superlatives in our country but achieving the biggest fall of any of the 180 countries in the index should probably not go into the Malaysian Book of Records.

Nobody with any common sense will be surprised of course that our nose-dive happens to coincide with the change in government last February. Not two years before that, Malaysians woke up with a new sense of freedom. Reporters suddenly looked excited about delivering the news because they were no longer constrained. People were tuning in to TV news programmes and talk shows again because they finally felt they were getting something worthwhile from them, instead of the barely hidden propaganda previously.

So, we rose in the press freedom ranks, not to astronomical levels, since we still had certain laws hanging over our heads that the government then had promised to repeal. None of that had time to happen before a whole new set of politicians decided to swoop in and take over.

And then there was Covid. The greatest public health emergency in a century swept every single country and has now infected an astounding 141 million people and killed more than three million. Our contribution has not been too bad, at 377,000 infections and 1386 dead, if we’re looking at it from the point of view of the United States. For those of us actually living in Malaysia however, it’s been an unmitigated disaster.

There’s no need to reiterate how much suffering the pandemic has caused, not just by those who have been infected and lost their lives or those of their loved ones but also by those whose livelihoods disappeared almost overnight. Alongside the virus pandemic, other pandemics have emerged including the mental health one, the domestic violence one and not to forget, the misinformation one. In the first half of 2020, the Health Ministry recorded 465 cases of attempted suicide. Malaysians are depressed because they are worried after losing their jobs and incomes, but there just aren’t enough counsellors and psychiatrists to help them manage these emotional crises.

Do we get any empathy though? Instead, we get scolded every day for not following the SOPs in speeches, in the media and even via SMS.

Harsh penalties are imposed on those who have violated them, a necessary measure if only they weren’t so selectively imposed. My eyebrows were raised at a headline that said a honeymooning couple were fined for lying about the reason why they crossed state lines despite the ban on interstate travel. They turned out to be some unknown newlyweds, not famous ones who have yet to be charged with anything.

These are the sorts of inequalities that are making ordinary people totally fed-up. You would think after innumerable cases of some people being given special treatment despite obvious and major violations of SOPs, and the tremendous clapping-back that the public has given, the government would be chastened and at least make an attempt at fairness. But no, they continue ignoring the swelling tides of dissatisfaction.

I’m amazed at how people still are able to show their dissent despite the increasingly narrow space for anyone to voice it. After a judge decided that Malaysiakini should be censured because its readers made comment the government doesn’t like, we can almost give up hope on ever having any freedom to speak or express ourselves, despite these being Constitutional rights. How not to get a chill down the spine when the judgment leaves media at risk of gigantic fines or jail if someone decides to deliberately leave a provocative comment on their website? It doesn’t even matter if the comment was immediately taken down. What a great way to get rid of pesky news sites that constantly snipe at the government.

Yet Malaysians don’t give up hope. They continue to say their piece, through cartoons, on social media and even through the courts. The Emergency Ordinance, that shameful act of suspending Parliament under the weakest of excuses, is meeting resistance from all right-minded citizens. With EMCOs, MCOs and clusters being announced every day and numbers of infections rising, who truly believes that the Emergency is meant to manage the pandemic? Perhaps only the tiny cluster that will benefit from it.

Our leaders like to rail against “fake news”, even enacting a law against it under the Emergency ordinance. This is exactly what is making us slide to the bottom of the World Press Freedom Index. But you have to wonder who is delivering the untruthful news when an Emergency is passed ostensibly to manage the pandemic, yet the numbers have been continually rising?

Marina Mahathir is wondering if the endless statistics thrown at us each day is meant to numb us, rather than make us understand numbers. The views expressed here are solely her own.

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Asian hate on the rise

Asian hate on the rise

By MARINA MAHATHIR

MUSINGS

Sunday, 28 Mar 2021

I LIKE to be rational when I read the news. I know what it’s like to read about something horrible happening in a particular country and imagine that the entire country is aflame.

When we read news about civil wars and violence in a country, most of us tend to neglect to look at maps to see where exactly these things are happening. In some cases, the conflict is happening in a particular part of that state and not where you would normally visit. This was true of the conflict in Sri Lanka decades ago that was confined mostly in the north, or in Nigeria where the Boko Haram are running rampage also in the north.

Even when there is no conflict, news about a natural disaster, such as earthquakes or hurricanes, can put people off going to that country. When Fukushima in Japan was struck by an earthquake in 2011, tourists shied away from visiting a country that is normally one of the safest in the world, for fear they would be contaminated by radiation from the damaged nuclear power plant in that city. Most of the former Soviet Union is safe but I still don’t understand why there are tours to the Cher-nobyl nuclear disaster area in the Ukraine.

The point I’m making is that people read the news and do not often get a sense of perspective. News tends to highlight the worst things that happen, and the effect is to scare people by making them assume that disasters engulf an entire country, or that one person represents an entire community.

Of course, the Covid-19 pandemic cannot be minimised in any way – it is literally everywhere and the only way to contain it is to stop people’s mobility. If we don’t move, we won’t spread it.

But it is the randomness of events that most scares us, especially when they’re violent, human-made acts that are seemingly impossible to predict. You happen to be walking on a city street and airplanes crash into a tower above you. Or you’re praying in a mosque and a shooter comes in and fires away at the congregation. Or worse, your children are at a school and someone comes in with an automatic rifle.

Lately we have watched in horror at yet more mass shootings in the United States, an almost weekly event. What has caused a lot of anguished talk is the fact that in the killings in Atlanta, Georgia, six of the seven victims were Asian women. Racism and misogyny seem to have intersected to fatal effect.

The United States is perhaps the one country these days where it is difficult to get a sense of perspective. We don’t feel like going to America these days for many reasons.

Firstly, the insane and easy availability of guns there, especially the sort of weapons that soldiers normally use in wars to kill as many people as possible. The other reason is the surge in violence against people of Asian descent.

Since the beginning of the pandemic in March 2020, various NGOs have counted more that 3,700 cases of abuse and harassment against Asian-Americans, especially people who are less able to defend themselves, like the old and women and children. Before last week, there were two deaths of old men caused by such attacks. Now the number of fatalities has increased substantially, and the worry is that there will be more.

What a lot of commentators have noted is that it is no coincidence that the surge in attacks have followed in the wake of the pandemic. They point to former president Donald Trump calling the coronavirus the “China virus” and “Kung flu” as setting the tone for discriminatory attitudes towards Asian-Americans.

Words matter, especially in a political environment that was particularly nativist, that sought to blame the Other, whether black, Muslim or foreign, for everything that is wrong with society. In their blinkered way, white supremacists, like all supremacists, think that everything will be perfect if only everyone in their country looked like them.

While we are busy sympathising with Asian-Americans for the horrible things that are happening to them, we should perhaps also reflect on our own attitudes towards the Other, whether citizens or not. Recently there was a complaint about Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka’s use of the word “keli**” in their dictionary to describe a tambi, a young man of Indian origin. It is astounding that Dewan Bahasa did not pick up on the sensitivity of the word.

But the word is not uncommon. We talk about other communities in our everyday lives using all types of derogatory words. Do we stereotype people freely and then excuse ourselves by saying we were only joking?

As much as we rightfully bemoan what is happening in the United States, it might help to remember that we are not immune from the same sort of racism and misogyny in Malaysia. Never mind what we say and do to fellow citizens, we also need to be mindful of the foreigners who live among us as workers and refugees.

There has been an uptick of discriminatory language in the media about foreign workers and refugees in Malaysia, people who are the least protected by our law enforcers.

Once we blamed them for a surge in petty crimes. Now we blame them for the pandemic despite the fact that fewer foreigners are infected by the coronavirus than are Malaysians. When they are infected, the fault is often ours because of conditions in factories and detention centres where physical distancing is simply not possible.

So lowly do we think of poor, dark-skinned foreigners, as opposed to wealthy white ones, that when our government sent over 1,000 refugees back to their country of origin that had been taken over by a military coup, there was barely a word of protest from anyone (except for a few NGOs who work with refugees). We really need some self-reflection on our own hypocrisy.

By all means, sympathise with Americans of Asian origin and pray hard that no Malaysian currently in the United States, especially those who could be mistaken for mainland Chinese, would ever have to suffer any of that violence. But while we empathise, we should also be cleansing ourselves of the same impulses to see those different from us as the Other and blame them for all our troubles.

We should call out those of our Trump-like leaders who create the sort of enabling atmosphere that leads to discrimination. We may not have as many guns floating around as they do in the United States, but the bullets of hate remain the same and are just as painful.

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