What Can we Learn?

This is a copy of a submittal I made to the Thunder Bay Chronicle Journal, and which they published May 9, 2020.

 

Fear. An emotion shared by many living creatures, including ourselves. One that has evolved through evolution as a means of protecting oneself from danger, or perceived danger. When groups of creatures are together, as there is strength in numbers, it does not take much to overcome that rational action by the irrational actions fear often instills. Take as an example a herd of bison, truly very formidable creatures that should have little fear of anything else. Yet aboriginals of the plains could easily get a few to start running which quickly would expand to the whole herd and then they were easily led to run over cliffs to their deaths.

Humans, while still prone to irrational actions instigated by fear, have developed means of controlling that fear. Take for example your house; a structure built to withstand most actions the local environment can produce. Different areas have different types of structure depending on local conditions. But all share some basic features. Close the doors and windows and little, if anything, from outside can penetrate. As you become more assured that the outside elements are not posing the dangers you first identified you can start by easing open these controls. Even within the bounds of your home you can have even greater control of the local environment, by closing doors to individual rooms then changing the heat or other characteristics of that room as needed.

The nation state is merely an extension of the home as a controlled environment as a means of protecting the residents from external dangers. There are exceptionally good reasons we have secure borders; to protect us from unpredictable dangers from abroad.

Ironically, the herd instinct still prevails to our detriment. Take for example our “pandemic”. A rational approach would have been, once we were made aware of the potential danger of what is now called Covid-19, to shut down our borders and isolate recent arrivals from China from the general population until we were certain of a few things: that the new arrivals did not have the virus by giving their immune systems enough time to deal with any new disease, and to do enough research to determine what the true risks were.

I will not get into the details as we all know both actions were not taken until far too late. 

The latter though is more complicated. Computer models were used to “predict” how dangerous the new threat was. Unfortunately, far too many people forgot, or never accept, a basic caution of any data based process; garbage in, garbage out. To translate, a computer model relies on input data. If that input data is uncertain, or even wrong, the output will be no better. Yet we have had so many restrictions placed upon us based on computer models that have proven to be, how can I say it, far from accurate?

Every disaster provides opportunities to learn to prevent those actions that proved most useless. Two I am going to recommend are as follows: no computer model should ever be used to control policy, especially if the input data has any uncertainty; and we have to accept that there are very valid reasons why countries have borders and act accordingly, enough with this “post-national” nonsense.