24 June 2020

DIY biotech: something else to worry about

Biotech: DIY disaster zone...

...reads the header to an article in today's Financial Times (image at bottom of this page). It's a short article, but a frightening one:
Biotech is now within the grasp of hobbyists who can experiment with home-brewed opiates, DIY biohacks and even a mail order gene-editing kit to double the size of a tree frog. ...Modified microbes could damage ecoystems or trigger antimicrobial resistance.... A 'genetic engineering home lab kit' is marketed for just $1845. Lex, Financial Times (subscription), 24 June
How should we deal the disasters that this, or any other technology, known or unknown, could unleash? We can't anticipate exactly where disasters will come from; our tendency is to let government take the lead. But government has little incentive or capacity to get it right - as we are seeing right now. Perhaps it's too much to expect government, an inherently big, cumbersome organisation, to deal efficiently with unforseeable catastrophes. It doesn't appear to be doing a great job managing even those that we know about but that are happening in ways that do not make television news: things like the always-present potential for a nuclear exchange; or climate change.

Yet there are things that only government can do, and things it does well. Managing disasters that are already happening, and have a readily identifiable cause and effect is one such. Raising the revenue (or, as now, borrowing) on a large enough scale to mitigate disasters is another. But what government cannot, and has no incentive to, do well is deal with complex problems that require diverse, adaptive solutions. Lex says that reinsurer Swiss Re 'reckons there is scope for havoc' arising from amateur biotech, and its dangers appear in the company's annual round-up of emerging risks. Right, and you'd think it would be in insurance companies' interests to do something to forestall such havoc. Maybe it is, in the short term, but if they did too much what would happen to insurance premiums and their revenue? Perhaps quelling brewing calamities wouldn't fit their business model. I don't really know.

But I can offer what I think is a less speculative solution: Disaster Prevention Bonds. These could be backed by government and swelled by contributions from philanthropists, NGOs and the public, and made redeemable only when no major disaster befalls human beings over a period of a decade or more. The type of disaster doesn't have to be foreseen or foreseeable. Backed by sufficiently large funds, the bonds would encourage investors to do whatever is possible to avert major disasters, including being alert to embryonic threats, such as those posed by DIY biotech. Incentives are important. Some people today benefit by doing things that reduce the likelihood of certain, specified disasters. But only specified disasters and, besides, there aren't that many such people, that's partly because the rewards on offer do not correlate with a successful, sustained, disaster-free outcome. That's where Disaster Prevention Bonds could help.

I am grateful to Lex, not only for giving me something to blog about, and all of us something else to worry about, but also for this quote from Eliezer Yudokovsky:
Every eighteen months, the minimum IQ necessary to destroy the world drops by one point.

18 June 2020

Sociopathic metrics

It still amazes me how badly metrics are thought out and used. I have railed for years against Mickey Mouse micro-objectives. The problem is that the metrics our governments use are invariably too narrow and short term. It seems that they are chosen because:
  • they sound good,
  • they are easy to collect,
  • they take, as given, current ways of doing things, and
  • they take, as given, current institutional structures and responsibilities.
The result though, is even more concisely stated:
  • they are useless, or worse.
Useless, in the sense that they do not target outcomes that are meaningful to ordinary people. Worse in that...well, let US writer Matt Taibbi give examples from policing:
In the same way our army in Vietnam got in trouble when it started searching for ways to quantify the success of its occupation, choosing sociopathic metrics like “body counts” and “truck kills,” modern big-​city policing has been corrupted by its lust for summonses, stops, and arrests. It’s made monsters where none needed to exist.Where did policing go wrong?, Matt Taibbi, 2 June
There's no coherence about the construction of such metrics because I suspect, little thought goes into them. Government has become adept at obscuring the policymaking process so that even its stated goals don't work, and its unstated goals go unexamined and unexaminable by anybody other than wealthy interests or the people they employ to follow and influence the process on their behalf.

Social Policy Bonds might not seem the obvious solution to the serious problems this policymaking process has created: a widening gap between government and ordinary citizens, growing levels of inequality and growing cynicism. But, as I have said more fully here, they would impose one discipline that is as essential as it's currently evaded, and that is to agree on broad, long-term, social and environmental goals. We are seeing the result of sociopathic metrics and the arcane policymaking process that has led to their creation; not just in riots and mayhem, but in heightened levels of cynicism and despair. Politics and policymaking have become the ultimate closed shop, closed to ordinary people because we just don't understand it. It's time to open it up and the first step is to ask, not tell, all of us what are our policy priorities?

14 June 2020

Who really cares?

The problem with the worldwide protests is simple to state, difficult to solve: giving power to the people who say they'll help groups X and Y doesn't actually help people in groups X and Y. This is one of the few constants of history.

And that is even with the assumption that the leaders or spokespeople for these groups actually mean what they say, and care about the people they purport to represent. I have my doubts about the leaders of the current protests but, even if we assume their good intentions, the probability that they, or the people who shove them aside once their bid for power succeeds, can or will do anything to help their constituency is low. This is not a party political view: just a statement of fact. From the current US President's base to the idealists who fomented revolution in France or Russia...the gap between hopes and reality is wide and deep. There is very little correlation between the stated goals of people wanting power and the post-election or post-revolutionary facts.

Social Policy Bonds, at first sight, might seem a wacky solution to the problems we are all facing. I mean not only such global problems as climate change and threats of nuclear catastrophe, but also problems such as the systemic, self-reinforcing inequalities, between and within countries that should be unacceptable in their own right, as well as posing a threat to democratic political and economic systems that are the least worst in human history, when it comes to maximising the chances of a decent life for the largest number of people.

Social Policy Bonds? A new financial instrument? As if there aren't already enough ways in which the financial sector has invented new ways of obscuring the ways in which it syphons off resources - including some of the world's best mathematical brains - from the rest of society, for its own selfish purposes.

But Social Policy Bonds would be different. Yes, they would use the market's incentives and efficiencies, but they would be doing so to achieve society's goals. Their use of markets is secondary to their first essential element: that of clarifying and targeting our social and environmental goals.A Social Policy Bond regime doesn't need to take an opinion on the more controversial and divisive aspects of policy: how our goals shall be achieved or who shall achieve them. That would be left to investors in the bonds who would be rewarded exactly according to how successful they are in achieving our goals. Under a Social Policy Bond regime, politicians wouldn't be able to obscure the workings of government by making arcane, protracted,self-serving decisions about regulation, or institutional structures and funding—procedures that, you might think, are specifically designed to deter anyone other than powerful interests and their paid agents from following. On the contrary, Social Policy Bonds would target outcomes that are meaningful to ordinary people. On the national level these would include improved health, reduced crime rates, universal literacy. On the global level, the bonds could target nuclear peace, the prevention and mitigation of all kinds of disaster including adverse climatic events or, again universal literacy. The point is that these would be society's goals. Goals that are comprehensible and meaningful; goals that all can help in formulating and prioritising.

It is this aspect of Social Policy Bonds—the articulation and prioritising of our social and environmental goals—that needs to be emphasised if they are going to become acceptable, just as much as their use of markets which, rightly in many cases, have been discredited by their manipulation and subversion to the benefit of the already powerful. After thirty-plus years of advocating Social Policy Bonds, I remain hopeful. Well, put it this way: I certainly can't be hopeful about any of the other policymaking systems currently on offer.
anising society currently on offer.

12 June 2020

Crime and alternatives to Punishment

The Economist writes:
Although the general call for "defunding" risks a backlash, the details of redirecting part of the police budget to arms of local government, such as housing or mental health, may make sense. The power of protest and the legacy of George Floyd, the 'Economist' dated 13 June
Right. The best way of dealing with crime, is not necessarily to give more money to the police, or to imprison more people, or to impose more drastic punishments. By 'to deal with crime' I mean: to reduce the crime rate. That is a goal that, I think, most of us can agree on. Other supposed goals are nothing more than surrogate indicators, or the product of sorrow, or anger, or revenge psychology. But if we accept that our goal is to reduce the crime rate, and admit the truth: that we don't have a clue how best to do so...well that is a good starting point.

We don't have a clue because the causes of crime vary from place to place, from person to person, from time to time. The best way of reducing crime in some small town might be to subsidise small businesses - which might be a lot cheaper and less divisive than beefing up the local police force. In another area, at a different time, the most efficient way of reducing crime might be to install surveillance cameras, or lay on free taxis for youths leaving nightclubs, or provide talking therapies rather than antipsychotic medication.... The problem we have is not only that the causes of crime are too complex and dynamic for any single organisation to address. It's that there is no incentive for anybody to take such a broad approach. Everybody—politicians, the police, psychiatrists—has their own agenda. Well meaning, hard working these people may be, but they are not rewarded for their success in dealing with a major social problem. It's far too complicated for any single organisation to deal with. We need diverse, adaptive approaches.

My suggestion is that we apply the Social Policy Bond concept to crime. A short essay on how to do this appears here. The paradigm fits other social and environmental problems. The first task is to clarify and articulate exactly what outcome we are looking to achieve. Because we are not concerned with how our goals shall be achieved, nor with who shall achieve them, we can target long-term goals that have eluded past efforts at achieving them, such as world peace or universal literacy or, indeed, reduced crime rates. The role of government would be to articulate society's goals and raise the revenue to achieve them. But the actual achievement of complex social goals should be done by a coalition of people who are motivated to find the most efficient solution, regardless of how many vested interests they have to undermine to do so. And that is where Social Policy Bonds enter the picture.

To read more, please go to the Social Policy Bonds site. All my papers and book chapters are available there and can be downloaded for no charge.