Tag: Risk

Incentives for Overestimating Risk

Incentives for Overestimating Risk

Posted on by jabittan
In the United States, and really across the globe, things are becoming more expensive. The price of food, gasoline, cars, and other goods have gone up quite a bit in the last year as the global economy adjusts to the new realities of the post-COVID world, as economies continue to respond to economic stimulus events, and as uncertainty around whether the pandemic truly is in our rear-view mirror continue to hang over our global consciousnesses. During this time of high inflation, many tv pundits, politicians, and experts are forecasting doom and gloom for national and global economies. Forecasting bad news seems to be the norm right now.
 
 
Steven Pinker explored the incentives for overestimating risk and forecasting bad news in his 2011 book The Better Angels of Our Nature. Pinker specifically looked at violence and war in his book and found that there are incentives for people to predict something negative, but not necessarily incentives for people to predict something positive. Pinker writes:
 
 
“Like television weather forecasters, the pundits, politicians, and terrorism specialists have every incentive to emphasize the worst-case scenario. It is undoubtedly wise to scare governments into taking extra measures to lock down weapons and fissile material and to monitor and infiltrate groups that might be tempted to acquire them. Overestimating the risk, then, is safer than underestimating it – though only up to a point.“ (emphasis mine)
 
 
We might be safer if everyone predicts a worst case scenario. If the people with the largest platforms focus on the dangerous potential for a terrorist attack, the public will demand action to reduce the risk. If there is a great focus on the need for improved safety equipment in hospitals responding to a new strain of COVID, then public officials are more likely to act. If there is overwhelming concern about inflation and economic collapse, the government will hopefully take better actions to balance the economy. Predicting that everything will work out and hum along on its own could be more dangerous than predicting the worst outcomes. Predicting doom and gloom not only gets attention, it can drive early and decisive decision making.
 
 
But as Pinker notes, it is safer to overestimate risk only to a point. Pinker cites the costs of the war in Iraq in search of weapons of mass destruction that did not exist as an example of dangerous worst case forecasting. Overreacting to COVID in China through excessive lockdowns and insufficient vaccination efforts may be contributing to higher global prices for goods at the moment. And predicting an economic collapse could spook markets and scare consumers, leading to worse economic outcomes than might otherwise occur. There are incentives to predicting the worst, but also costs if our predictions go too far.
 
 
I think our jobs as individuals is to be aware of the worst case scenarios, but not to become too trapped by such predictions. We need to remember that making worst case scenario predictions will provide feedback into what is already a noisy system. It is likely that forecasting the worst and spurring action by individuals will avert the worst. This doesn’t mean we can sit back and let others handle everything, but it should encourage us to think deeply about worse cases, our actions, and how panicked we should be.
Autocracy, Democracy, Risk, & Benefit

Autocracy, Democracy, Risk, & Benefit

Posted on by jabittan
How often do you pick up trash along the street when you are out for a walk? If you are like most people, you probably see trash, think that someone should do something about it, and keep on walking. If you were to pick up the trash you and everyone else would benefit, but you alone pay the price of removing the trash. It may be unpleasant to pick up someone else’s water bottle. It may be expensive to pick up a TV along the side of the road and recycle it. Even though these costs are small, they are real and when a single individual pays the costs, the fact that the benefit extends not just to the individual but to other people doesn’t make up for those individual costs. The fact that others will benefit in some ways makes the individual costs harder to go through with.
 
 
The little example of the cost and benefit of picking up trash extends to larger contexts, like disposing of an autocrat. To explain how democracies have helped people become more peaceful in his book The Better Angels of Our Nature, Steven Pinker shows how democracies can overcome the individual cost problem that I demonstrated. Pinker writes, “in a dictatorship, the autocrat and his henchmen have a strong incentive to stay in power, but no individual citizen has an incentive to depose him, because the rebel would assume all the risks of the dictator’s reprisals while the benefits of democracy would flow diffusely to everyone in the country.”
 
 
A transition to democracy, away from an autocracy, can be difficult and violent, but once you get there, society can be much more peaceful. Opposing an autocrat, as Pinker notes is dangerous. Everyone may despise the ruler and believe that things would be better without them, but taking action on their own is difficult. The costs of overthrowing the ruler are potentially life or death, making it hard for any single individual to oppose the autocrat.
 
 
But once you get past an autocrat, once enough people have joined together and once a country has democratized, peace can be more achievable. In a democracy, ousting bad leaders is easier and doesn’t have as many individual costs. The benefits are still there for everyone, but the individual costs have been reduced or eliminated, making peaceful transitions more likely. Violence within democracies comes at a cost to the individual, shifting dramatically from the arrangement in an autocracy. Ultimately, the risk and reward imbalance that individuals face is part of what helps keep autocrats in power, just as it keeps trash along the side of the road.
Capital Flows

Capital Flows

Posted on by jabittan
There is a lot of fear in the United States that China will upend US economic systems and that we will find ourselves in a global order defined by the Chinese Communist State. A portion of this fear has to do with the fact that the Chinese government doesn’t protect the same rights that our Constitution upholds, and Americans have a very sensitive view toward their constitutional rights and freedoms. While I often do think the rhetoric is overblown and xenophobic, I think it is fair to be concerned about the Chinese surveillance state, whether China adheres to Western ideas of human rights, and whether China is willing to uphold the rule of law.
 
 
But Yuval Noah Harari might argue that we don’t have to be too worried about the Chinese state. Harari may look back in history and suggest that we really don’t need to fear states like Russia and China that don’t uphold the rule of law or protect private property in a fair and equitable way. In his book Sapiens, Harari presents historical examples of global capital flows to argue that dictatorial states are less trustworthy in global economic systems and ultimately lose economic respect and credibility, hurting the governments and making them weaker. Harari writes, “capital trickles away from dictatorial states that fail to defend private individuals and their property. Instead, it flows into states upholding the rule of law and private property.”
 
 
Capital flows are important because they can shape a country’s political influence, living standards, political stability, and population wide prosperity. A country that fails to uphold the rule of law, fails to protect private property, and is a threat to the lives and liberties of its people is a country that will not attract investment, Harari’s argument would suggest.
 
 
China is a big and scary country, but if China cannot demonstrate to companies and corporations that it will protect intellectual property, that it will protect individual liberties, and that it will uphold international rules of law, then capital flows will ultimately be reduced and directed elsewhere. This was seen recently when the Women’s Tennis Association severed tied with China after a female tennis player accused a high ranking male member of the Chines Communist Party with sexual assault and then disappeared. Capital flows away from demagoguery and dictatorships to more safe and secure locations, where risk is reduced and where there is a greater guarantee of liberty and freedom of person and property. Personally, I hope that Harari’s theory holds true, and that any countries on the rise adopt better governance systems to improve rule of law, personal liberties for their people, and and to adhere to human rights.
Mary Roach on Reincarnation in India

Mary Roach on Reincarnation in India

Posted on by jabittan
In the book Spook, Mary Roach writes, “People don’t seem to approach life with the same terrified, risk-aversive tenacity that we do. I’m beginning to understand why, religious doctrine aside, the concept of reincarnation might be so popular here. Rural India seems like a place where life is taken away too easily – accidents, childhood diseases, poverty, murder. If you’ll be back for another go, why get too worked up about the leaving?” Roach is joking of course, but this quote comes at the end of a lengthy description of dangers and risks that she experienced in India that we would find appalling in the United States. Her travels to India brought her face to face with cyclists moving through heavy traffic and breathing diesel smog. She was afraid of large trucks overflowing with potatoes and cauliflower that threatened to spill over onto the vehicle she was riding in. And she was also afraid for the lives of more than one woman riding precariously on the back of a fast moving Vespa.
While the quote is funny, it does get at some interesting ways of thinking about life, death, and how we go about our days. I’m not sure how much of our differences in risk tolerance in the United States versus India comes down to beliefs in reincarnation, but I can see how ideas of reincarnation would be comforting in a dangerous society. I don’t know if reincarnation would be enough to create a moral hazard scenario where people were intentionally negligent about safety because they expected to come back in another life, but I’m sure there is some impact that could be studied.
The quote from Roach also seems to suggest that Americans value our lives differently than individuals in India. She highlights how risk averse Americans tend to be, referring to how much we go out of our way to ensure everything we interact with is safe, and how we try to limit risk in everything from roller coasters to strollers. I think that what is likely going on is a difference in culture that stretches back years and is fraught with technological limitations and differences in population density. I am currently listening to an audiobook with an author who interviewed friends from her childhood in rural Ohio in the 1960’s and 70’s. Her dad was a doctor, and she notes how many individuals, including children, died in accidents involving farming equipment. Today we have adopted technology within everything we do, allowing us to make the world safer. Risk stands out more than in the 1960’s and 70’s when we didn’t have the technology to make everything as safe as we can now. Perhaps the difference that Roach noted, that she jokingly attributed to belief in reincarnation, is simply due to limitations in technology and a need to earn money.
Rent

Rent

Posted on by jabittan
When I was in high school I took a class my senior year that followed the secular personal financial management course from Dave Ramsey. Ramsey provides many practical lessons about money management and financial well-being. One area that he focuses on is how much of your income you should spend on different areas, such as on housing, groceries, and other necessities. Ramsey follows the standard recommendation that you don’t spend more than 30% of your income on housing, a great goal, but one that really isn’t a possibility for many Americans.
Kathryn Edin and H. Luke Shaefer examine the high cost of rent and how it impacts the lives of those living in poverty in their book $2.00 A Day, originally published in 2015. “Between 1990 and 2013, rents rose faster than inflation in virtually every region of the country,” the authors write. This has serious impacts for the lives of those living in poverty. One impact discussed by the authors, that I had not considered, was child custody. In some cities and states there are limitations on how many children can share a single room. At a certain point, too many children, especially of mixed gender, are not allowed to share a room and doing so could constitute neglect and lead to parents losing custody of their children.
Edin and Shaefer continue, “between 200 and 2012 alone, rents rose by 6 percent. During that same period, the real income of the middling renter in the United States fell by 13 percent.” While wages had stagnated and real incomes had fallen for lower class workers, rents across the country were rising. The increase in rent was particularly high in large cities where most of the economic output and job creation in the country has taken place. Renters faced a choice, live where rents are cheap, but where there are no jobs, or live where rents are high, and where jobs can be found. Living in a cheap place may mean an unreasonably long and expensive commute, but living where the jobs are might mean sharing a place with non-familial renters and crowding into living conditions that put renters at risk.
I haven’t studied affordable housing, and I don’t know the solution to rising rents for low income individuals and families. But I think it is important to know the statistics shared by Edin and Shaefer. I live in a city where rents and home prices have skyrocketed (Reno, NV). One consequence of the rising rents is an increase in homelessness, particularly in short term homelessness. We all see people on the streets and notice when there are more people on the street, but we don’t always notice the short term homeless. The chronic homeless overshadow what is sometimes a larger, yet less visible form of homelessness. Understanding the rise in rents, the stagnation of income (which we might hopefully be getting out of as we recover from COVID) and the impact on short-term homelessness helps us think more clearly and accurately about the challenges that renters face, and about ways to help those who are unable to keep up with rising rents. It is important that we think about the obvious consequences of increased rents, like homelessness, and also the less obvious consequences, such as families potentially losing custody of their children. As rents have risen, Dave Ramsey’s advice to keep your housing costs below 30% of your income just isn’t possible for many Americans, and the consequences have been dire for many individuals and communities.
Data Driven Methods

Data Driven Methods

Posted on by jabittan
In the world of big data scientists today have a real opportunity to push the limits scientific inquiry in ways that were never before possible. We have the collection methods and computing power available to analyze huge datasets and make observations in minutes that would have taken decades just a few years ago. However, many areas of science are not being strategic with this new power. Instead, many areas of science simply seem to be plugging variables into huge data sets and haphazardly looking for correlations and associations. Judea Pearl is critical of this approach to science in The Book of Why and uses the Genome-wide association study (GWAS) to demonstrate the shortcomings of this approach.
 
 
Pearl writes, “It is important to notice the word association in the term GWAS. This method does not prove causality; it only identifies genes associated with a certain disease in the given sample. It is a data-driven rather than hypothesis-driven method, and this presents problems for causal inference.”
 
 
In the 1950s and 1960s, Pearl explains, R. A. Fisher was skeptical that smoking caused cancer and argued that the correlation between smoking and cancer could have simply been the result of a hidden variable. He suggested it was possible for a gene to exist that both predisposed people to smoke and predisposed people to develop lung cancer. Pearl writes that such a smoking gene was indeed discovered in 2008 through the GWAS, but Pearl also notes that the existence of such a gene doesn’t actually provide us with any causal mechanism between people’s genes and smoking behavior or cancer development.  The smoking gene was not discovered by a hypothesis driven method but rather by data driven methods. Researchers simply looked at massive genomic datasets to see if any genes correlated between people who smoke and people who develop lung cancer. The smoking gene stood out in that study.
 
 
Pearl continues to say that causal investigations have shown that the gene in question is important for nicotine receptors  in lung cells, positing a causal pathway to smoking predispositions and the gene. However, causal studies also indicate that the gene increases your chance of developing lung cancer by less than doubling the chance of cancer. “This is serious business, no doubt, but it does not compare to the danger you face if you are a regular smoker,” writes Pearl. Smoking is associated with a 10 times increase in the risk of developing lung cancer, while the smoking gene only accounts for a less than double risk increase. The GWAS tells us that the gene is involved in cancer, but we can’t make any causal conclusions from just an association. We have to go deeper to understand its causality and to relate that to other factors that we can study. This helps us contextualize the information from the GWAS.
 
 
Much of science is still like the GWAS, looking for associations and hoping to be able to identify a causal pathway as was done with the smoking gene. In some cases these data driven methods can pay off by pointing the way for researchers to start looking for hypothesis driven methods, but we should recognize that data driven methods themselves don’t answer our questions and only represent correlations, not underlying causal structures. This is important because studies and findings based on just associations can be misleading. Discovering a smoking gene and not explaining the actual causal relationship or impact could harm people’s health, especially if they decided that they would surely develop cancer because they had the gene. Association studies ultimately can be misleading, misused, misunderstood, and dangerous, and that is part of why Pearl suggests a need to move beyond simple association studies. 

Risk Savvy Citizens

Risk Savvy Citizens

Posted on by jabittan
In Risk Savvy Gerd Gigerenzer argues for changes to the way that financial systems, healthcare systems, and discourse around public projects operate. He argues that we are too afraid of risk, allow large organizations to profit from misunderstandings of risk, and that our goals are often thwarted by poor conceptions of risk. Becoming risk savvy citizens, he argues, can help us improve our institutions and make real change to move forward in an uncertain world.

“The potential lies in courageous and risk savvy citizens,” writes Gigerenzer.

I think that Gigerenzer is correct to identify the importance of risk savvy citizens. We are more interconnected than we ever have been, and to develop new innovations will require new risks. Many of the institutions we have built today exist to minimize both risk and uncertainty, unintentionally limiting innovation. Moving forward, we will have to develop better relationships toward risk to accept and navigate uncertainty.

A population of risk savvy citizens can help reshape existing institutions, and will have to lean into risk to develop new institutions for the future. This idea was touched on in Bruce Katz and Jeremy Nowak’s book The New Localism where they argue that we need new forms of public private partnerships to manage investment, development, and public asset management. Public agencies, institutions we have relied upon, have trouble managing and accepting risk, even if they are comprised of risk savvy citizens. The solution, Katz and Nowak might suggest, is to reshape institutions so that risk savvy citizens can truly act and respond in ways that successfully manage reasonable risks. Institutions matter, and they need to be reshaped and reformed if our courageous and risk savvy citizens are going to help change the world and solve some of the ills that Gigerenzer highlights.

Risk literacy and Reduced Healthcare Costs - Joe Abittan

Risk Literacy & Reduced Healthcare Costs

Posted on by jabittan
Gerd Gigerenzer argues that risk literacy and reduced healthcare costs go together in his book Risk Savvy. By increasing risk literacy we will help both doctors and patients better understand how behaviors contribute to overall health, how screenings may or may not reveal dangerous medical conditions, and whether medications will or will not make a difference for an individual’s long-term well being. Having both doctors and patients better understand and better discuss the risks and benefits of procedures, drugs, and lifestyle changes can help us use our healthcare resources more wisely, ultimately bringing costs down.
Gigerenzer argues that much of the modern healthcare system, not just the US system but the global healthcare system, has been designed to sell more drugs and more technology. Increasing the number of people using medications, getting more doctors to order more tests with new high-tech diagnostic machines, and driving more procedures became more of a goal than actually helping to improve people’s health. Globally, health and the quality of healthcare has improved, but healthcare is often criticized as a low productivity sector, with relatively low gains in health or efficiency for the investments we make.
I don’t know that I am cynical enough to accept all of Gigerenzer’s argument at face value, but the story of opioids, the fact that we invest much larger sums of money in cancer research versus parasitic disease research, and the ubiquitous use of MRIs in our healthcare landscape do favor Gigerenzer’s argument. There hasn’t been as much focus on improving doctor and patient statistical reasoning, and we haven’t put forward the same effort and funding to remove lead from public parks compared to the funding put forward for cancer treatments. We see medicine as treating diseases after they have popped up with fancy new technologies and drugs. We don’t see medicine as improving risk and health literacy or as helping improve the environment before people get sick.
This poor vision of healthcare that we have lived with for so long, Gigerenzer goes on to argue, has blinded us to the real possibilities within healthcare. Gigerenzer writes, “calls for better health care have been usually countered by claims that this implies one of two alternatives, which nobody wants: raising taxes or rationing care. I argue that there is a third option: by promoting health literacy of doctors and patients, we can get better care for less money.”
Improving risk and health literacy means that doctors can better understand and better communicate which medications, which tests, and which procedures  are most likely to help patients. It will also help patients better understand why certain recommendations have been made and will help them push back against the feeling that they always need the newest drugs, the most cutting edge surgery, and the most expensive diagnostic screenings. Regardless of whether we raise taxes or try to ration care, we have to help people truly understand their options in new ways that incorporate tools to improve risk literacy and reduce healthcare costs. By better understanding the system, our own care, and our systemic health, we can better utilize our healthcare resources, and hopefully bring down costs by moving our spending into higher productivity healthcare spaces.
Believing We Are Well Informed

Believing We Are Well Informed

Posted on by jabittan
In his book Risk Savvy, Gerd Gigerenzer demonstrated that people often overestimate their level of knowledge about the benefits of prostate and cancer screening. “A national telephone survey of U.S. adults,” he writes, “reported that the majority were extremely confident in their decision about prostate, colorectal, and breast screening, believed they were well informed, but could not correctly answer a single knowledge question.” I think this quote reveals something important about the way our minds work. We often believe we are well informed, but that belief and our confidence in our knowledge is often an illusion.
This is something I have been trying to work on. My initial reaction any time I hear any fact or any discussion about any topic is to position myself as a knowledgeable semi-expert in the topic. I have noticed that I do this with ideas and topics that I have really only heard once or twice on a commercial, or that I have seen in a headline, or that I once overheard someone talking about. I immediately feel like an expert even though my knowledge is often less than surface deep.
I think that what is happening in these situations is that I am substituting my feeling of expertise or knowledge with a different question. I am instead answering the question can I recall a time when I thought about this thing and then answering that question. Mental substitution is common, but hard to actually detect. I suspect that the easier a topic comes to mind, even if it is a topic I don’t know anything about but have only heard the name of, then the more likely I am to feel like I am an expert.
Gigerenzer’s quote shows that people will believe themselves to be well informed even if they cannot answer a basic knowledge question about the topic. Rather than substituting the question can I recall a time when I thought about this thing, patients may also be substituting another question. Instead of analyzing their confidence in their own decision regarding cancer screening, people may be substituting the question do I trust my doctor? Trust in a physician, even without any knowledge about the procedure, may be enough for people to feel extremely confident in their decisions. They don’t have to know a lot about their health or how a procedure is going to impact it, they just need to be confident that their physician does.
These types of substitutions are important for us to recognize. We should try to identify when we are falling victim to the availability bias and when we are substituting different questions that are easier for us to answer. In a well functioning and accurate healthcare setting these biases and cognitive errors may not harm us too much, but in a world of uncertainty, we stand to lose a lot when we fail to recognize how little we actually know. Being honest about our knowledge and thinking patterns can help us develop better systems and structures in our lives to improve and guide our decision-making.

Medical Progress

Posted on by jabittan
What does medical progress look like? To many, medical progress looks like new machines, artificial intelligence to read your medical reports and x-rays, or new pharmaceutical medications to solve all your ailments with a simple pill. However, much of medical progress might be improved communication, better management and operating procedures, and better understandings of statistics and risk. In the book Risk Savvy, Gerd Gigerenzer suggests that there is a huge opportunity for improving physician understanding of risk, improved communication around statistics, and better processes related to risk that would help spur real medical progress.

 

He writes, “Medical progress has become associated with better technologies, not with better doctors who understand these technologies.” Gigerenzer argues that there is currently an “unbelievable failure of medical schools to provide efficient training in risk literacy.” Much of the focus of medical schools and physician education is on memorizing facts about specific disease states, treatments, and how a healthy body should look. What is not focused on, in Gigerenzer’s 2014 argument, is how physicians understand the statistical results from empirical studies, how physicians interpret risk given a specific biological marker, and how physicians can communicate risk to patients in a way that adequately inform their healthcare decisions.

 

Our health is complex. We all have different genes, different family histories, different exposures to environmental hazards, and different lifestyles. These factors interact in many complex ways, and our health is often a downstream consequence of many fixed factors (like genetics) and many social determinants of health (like whether we have a safe park that we can walk, or whether we grew up in a house infested with mold). Understanding how all these factors interact and shape our current health is not easy.

 

Adding new technology to the mix can help us improve our treatments, our diagnoses, and our lifestyle or environment. However, simply layering new technology onto existing complexity is not enough to really improve our health. Medical progress requires better ways to use and understand the technology that we introduce, otherwise we are adding layers to the existing complexity. If physicians cannot understand, cannot communicate, and cannot help people make reasonable decisions based on technology and the data that feeds into it, then we won’t see the medical progress we all hope for. It is important that physicians be able to understand the complexity, the risk, and the statistics involved so that patients can learn how to actually improve their behaviors and lifestyles and so that societies can address social determinants of health to better everyone’s lives.