Great Expectations: The Truth About Big Data

As Crawford and Jason Schultz, a professor at New York University Law School, wrote in their paper: "When these data sets are cross-referenced with traditional health information, as big data is designed to do, it is possible to generate a detailed picture about a person's health, including information a person may never have disclosed to a health provider."

What does Big Data have to do with health, and with the truths we cling to?  

If we were to be totally honest - to our medical professionals, to ourselves, to our politicians and our pollsters - well, we're not, are we?  There is the life that we feel expected to lead - perfect parent, perfect employee, getting enough hours in at the gym, drinking in moderation and offering meaningful contributions to civic society.  Projects have to be done perfectly, and on time; kids need help with their homework, plus healthy meals; individuals need breathing space.

Those expectations and what's actually possible don't mesh.  Something has to give, but as there are social consequences to not being a superhero, we lie about it - as much to ourselves as anyone else.  Instead of facing and addressing the structural issues that lie around us, we have a fourth cup of coffee, or take an Advil, or maybe we see the doc and get something stronger.  Whatever it takes to fit in and keep going.  

Then, there's how we look at the world around us - kids that show attitude to their parents are problem children; the example the parents themselves set isn't relevant any more than the behaviour of a Mayor is in stetting the tone for their City.  Crack addicts have something wrong with them, as people.  Criminals are animals.  The "I" at the centre of the universe, however, is fine just as is - only busy. 

A lie is a misrepresentation of the truth and can take many forms.  Saying "sure, boss, that report will be done just as you wanted" when you know it isn't feasible is a lie; you probably know the boss isn't going to read the whole thing anyway, you have a scapegoat in mind or if you're a workaholic, you know that you'll go above and beyond the accepted parameters of work to do it.

Telling the kids "just finish your homework/clean up/stay out of my way and I'll (insert bribe here)" when you have no intention of following through sets false expectations, the first of many your child will meet in life.  Your rationale, self-serving as it is, probably has a hint of self-preservation to it, too - maybe you need that extra time to finish that report your boss is demanding be done, tomorrow, and be perfect.

Rushing in to work, telling your kids you can't be late - then spending a half-hour at the water cooler or checking Facebook, when you get there is a faleshood, too.  Maybe, because home has become a place to release tension from work, you look forward to getting out; maybe your professional relationships have become your family ones and you feel more relaxed in their company than with your family.

If you're that employer, and the report-writing directions you gave your employee were nebulous because you don't really know what you want and the timelines arbitrary, because time pressure's really the only motivational tool in your box, you've been dishonest to both yourself and your employee.  You know that business hasn't been as robust as it was, that the market's changing but uncertain of what comes next and afraid to look anything less than confident, you're downloading responsibility for setting expectations to your employee.

What you end up with is lack-lustre results, stressed-out employees who will photocopy their kids' homework on the company machine and then go home and snap at those kids saying "don't say I never do anything for you."  Nobody wins.

Telling the world that you had no idea bad deeds were being committed by your team, on your watch, fits the same bill.

We all live in fractured, confabulated realities; we're all living unsustainable lies.  Why?  Because we want to believe that we are independent and consequence-free.  We tell ourselves we live in separate worlds of work, home, friends, groups, etc.; nobody is making any effort to connect the dots between them, or between us and them.  At the middle of all this push and pull, however, are individuals caught up in a system that isn't designed to recognize them as systems unto themselves.

This is where Big Data comes in.

We should rightly be frightened of the information Big Data will reveal about our selves.  It was ages ago that Target, a retail chain, was able to use the data they'd accumulated to determine a teen-aged girl was pregnant before her father knew.  Political microtargeting is completely changing the way politicians develop their policy wares and market them to nice audiences, to the detriment of social democracy.

Forget the NSA or the CSEC - Political Parties and corporate giants are mapping out your every purchase, your every keystroke to find out what makes you tick, where your interests lie and how to manipulate them.  The reverse is also coming true - with Wikileaks, Anonymous and the odd Edwards Snowden, the Big Data Mandardins are finding their own choices increasingly laid bare.

The Information Age, in fits and spurts, is painting a photo mosaic of how the different parts of our lives connect and impact each other - work stress, home burn-out and the resulting hospital visit can be mapped out in infographics, clearly demonstrating the relationships between them.  Of course, the people on the outside will look for the pieces that they see as relevant to them; the salesfolk want to know what and how to sell you; politicians, same.  Employers primarily want to know how you're spending your time and if you present any risks to them from your online activities.

There's another trend emerging in tandem with micro-targeting, though; that's service systems theory.  Service providers are beginning to glean the truth; that the feudal approach they have been taking to service delivery is unsustainable.  They can't afford to ignore the forest any more.  As such, governments and agencies are looking laterally, accumulating more information and seeing how the pieces fit together.

Nowhere is this more clear than in healthcare.  Call it the social butterfly effect; all the ripples in individual lives brush up against each other with by now, expected consequences.  The spaces we live in impact the direction of those ripples, too.

As we learn more and more about individual behaviours and how those behaviours interact both positively and negatively, we can more accurately forecast outcomes (and understand the results we have now).  The stressed-out employee who spends too little time with their family, no time exercising but a disproportionate amount of time at the doctors is seen not as an individual failure but a social consequence.

There are those out there who want to use your data for their financial benefit, but there are also those who want to use everyone's data to create a more sustainable system.  No one person can be at the centre of each individual, though - a body needs a brain, but every cell needs a nucleus.

If every individual had awareness, training and tools to map their own lives, they could take ownership of their own data and how their own pieces fit into the bigger puzzle of society.  If Service Providers stopped functioning like silos and began to recognize themselves as players on a team, they could better coordinate their efforts, creating both efficiencies and superior results.  

We're stronger together, but only when we make the conscious efforts to internalize that no person is an island.

And that's the truth of it.

I'm here to say enough is enough with this Mayor who thinks he can get away with anything by twisting the truth, saying just some of the truth or not telling it straight at all.

Rape Culture and Manufactured Consent: Hustling Success vs The Public Good

 

Contradictions do not exist. Whenever you think you are facing a contradiction, check your premises. You will find that one of them is wrong.

   - Ayn Rand

Being alone in a crowd, for instance.  Surely, that's an impossibility.

The rape and death of Rehtaeh Parsons has horrified and angered a nation.  Yet the reactive horror and anger is coming long after the fatal blow was struck.  There are calls for justice for the family, which is necessary - but where were these voices before justice was necessary?  The boys that raped and re-victimized Rehtaeh must face justice, but unless we plan to kill them off or merely just rape them back, that justice must be of the restorative variety.

While we focus on response to the tragedy, there's a bigger question that needs to be addressed.  How is it that these boys came to act in such an inhumane fashion in the first place?  While the RCMP is rightfully being criticized for their failure to act and the school is being chastised for a failure to recognize the problem earlier, no one else was there earlier, either.  Is justice something we consume from providers only, or something we are supposed to embody in our own daily behaviour?

And what are we doing to understand how this happened - and how similar tragedies can be avoided?

If we're serious about addressing this question, we have to get past bullet-point explanations and starfish-throwing solutions.  We need to wrap our heads around content, context and consequence of everyone's behaviour by engaging in a lot of talkfests with evidence-based experts whose opinions might rub us the wrong way and whose research might need more funding for sufficient bandwidth. 

To start, though, we have to admit to ourselves that we're coming at the big problem from the wrong angle.  Rape culture is just that - a pervasive culture that enables and forgives individuals who push the limits of what is acceptable.  Cultural problems aren't individual - they belong to all of us.  Of course, nobody teaches courses about how to rape effectively; that would be criminal.  What we do do, however, is encourage people to look out for number one and to be willing to hustle to get what they want.  The emphasis is on efficiency, not ethics.  That's not about rape - that's about free market capitalism.

What does this have to do with Ayn Rand?

While Karl Marx and Communism have gotten plenty of attention, there's been less public dialogue about Rand and her philosophy of Objectivism.  This is a shame, because a great deal of Western political thought, particularly in the US and more recently in Canada relies on the concepts of Rand's philosophy.

In Rand's Objectivist world view, "achievement of your happiness is the only moral purpose of your life, and that happiness, not the pain or mindless self-indulgence, is the proof of your moral integrity, since it is the proof and the result of your loyalty to the achievement of your values."

Rand built this system of thought on Nietzsche's contempt for systems; in her world, society is a false concept imposed on moral individuals by immoral ones.  Selfish pursuit is the way to get ahead - greed is good.  In a non-system where individual actors pursue the fulfilment of their own greed to attain happiness, balance is achieved (though balance would seem to imply middle ground - and Rand was convinced there are only two sides to every issue - one right and one wrong - and the middle was invariably evil).

So there are no such things as contradictions, middle-ground doesn't exist and pursuing one's own happiness is the only moral purpose in life. So how do we achieve happiness, according to Rand?

"The question isn't who is going to let me; it's who is going to stop me."

One would surmise from this that individual actors acting in their own interests to achieve their full market share of happiness will express their morality by letting nobody stop them from getting what they want - and that's all you need to know.

Ironically enough, Rand's most famous work, Atlas Shrugged, was published in 1957 - the same year Leon Festinger's A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance hit bookshelves.

 

The assumption of Objectivism (and for that matter, the free market) is that when buyers and sellers are able to transact freely, they'll come to a mutually agreeable trade value - the market price.  The problem is, not everyone wants to buy what's being sold or sell what's being sought. 

Rand was a believer in laissez-faire capitalism, but she also expressed the belief that you should go out and get what you want.  The art of "closing the deal" is anything but laissez-faire; anyone who works in sales can relate to the need to aggressively nudge a potential buyer into signing on the line which is dotted. 

Now, there are many ways you can push for the deal to be closed - you can follow the aggressive advice of Alec Baldwin; you can employ neuropsychology; you can even design products which produce uncontrolled behaviours in a potential client.  The point is, if people aren't willingly playing along in giving you what you want, don't let that stop you - there are other ways to seal the deal.  Playing the push-game works; through aggressive sales, Apple increased its sales in India by 400 per cent.  As I hear all the time, people don't care about process, so long as the end result is great.  The implication is that they don't care what else you do in life with that aggressive, go-get-'em attitude so long as their piece is delivered, cleanly.

The concept of your happiness coming as a result of harm to someone else doesn't come in to Rand's world, because she refused to recognize the notion of society.  Laissez-faire capitalism is the exact opposite of going out and aggressively getting what you want, but Rand didn't deal with that, either; instead, she positioned herself to be able to say "I'm right and you're wrong", thereby refusing to accept the contradictions of her own position.  By refusing to accept this cognitive dissonance, she was confabulating (making up a self-validating story to paper over the conflict) excuses to avoid addressing the problem.

If you're still with me, it means you're willing to accept there are such things as contradictions and that the devil is in the details.  If you were Ayn Rand (or Rob Ford, for that matter), by now you'd be upset, feel reading this was a stupid waste of time and that I'm unnecessarily complicating a simple issue of good-guy/bad-guy and the state as evil.

But you are with me, so here's where the background starts to pay off.

“A lot of people had kinda seen it coming, but didn’t actually think that it would happen,” said Scott Thomson, 16, who for years had gone to the same school as Parsons before she transferred schools to escape bullying.

To put it in a slightly different way: All it takes for evil to succeed is for a few good people to do nothing.

We know this, but do nothing anyway - we're too busy, it's not really our thing, etc.  Someone else should get to that.

At least, that's what we tell ourselves.

AGGRESSIVE SUCCESS

ie - gunning the engine to catch the light

 

Success is seen as a road to happiness.  Success comes through hustling - nobody's going to hand you fistfuls of money, you have to go out and take it.  The success stories we admire are anything but laissez-faire.  We admire people like Steve Jobs or Stephen Harper who had the persistence and "moral toughness" to get what they wanted at any cost.  They may have had to step on a few heads to get there, but you know what they say about eggs and omelets.

By and large, we feel that it's socially acceptable to nudge people in favour of our own interests.  In fact, that's what sales is all about. We can convince ourselves we're just trying to help people obtain something they want, but the very implication of that sentiment is that vendors know what's best for the buyer. I can try to guilt you into buying a product, threaten you into buying a product or trick you into buying a product, but at the end of the day, I'm gonna make that sale. Success, after all, is what makes me happy.

Socially, we reward the hustlers with jobs, fortune, privilege and power - yet somehow don't expect that behaviour to spill over outside their field of work.  A-type personalities dominate executive positions, yet we still express shock when they get caught behaving in vile ways.  We decry bullying but in politics, sports and business, we admire and respect bullies for their success.

Stephen Harper is a bully. Steve Jobs was a bully. Michael Bay is a bully, but we don't care - if his movies make us happy. 

PASSIVE SUCCESS

 

ie - not breaking when you see the light turn yellow.

 

Just as it is seen as socially acceptable to push people to get the results we want, it's also acceptable to be passive about things that benefit our own interests.  This is as true of ignoring where our eggs come from as not caring how cheap foreign imports end up on our shelves or what labour goes in to the success of our companies.  So long as you get a solid return on your investment, who cares?  Process matters less than results - the ends justify the means.  Wading into the details is something you do only when there's clearly a problem to be addressed.

There's a corollary to this, though - just like the aggressive salesfolk, there are trade offs in our own wins.  Cheap, abusive labour might be behind our imports.  The folk managing our investment portfolios might not be so scrupulous about their efforts.  The same could be could be true of other service providers.

Arthur Porter was successful, until he got caught. Adam Carroll was pretty pleased with himself, until he got caught. Chris Mazza was totally going out and taking what he wanted, until he got caught. Some aggressive ladder-climbers have behaved badly and been caught. But not all of them.

Each of these entrepreneurial folks was hustling, making money, buying goods, contributing to the economy, living happy. In short, they were doing exactly what society asks them to.  There was some benefit in what they did for those they sold their services, too - so long as the accumulated risks could be ignored.  That laissez-faire approach led to massive losses, public humiliation and the cracking of investor confidence. 

These aggressive, individually successful individuals were left to their own devices, resulting in steep and avoidable costs to the whole.

PASSIVE AVOIDANCE

 

ie - tisking someone who runs a light, but nothing more; after all, it doesn't impact you.

 

"The opposite of love is not hate, it's indifference. The opposite of beauty is not ugliness, it's indifference. The opposite of faith is not heresy, it's indifference. And the opposite of life is not death, but indifference between life and death."

     - Elie Wiesel

Ayn Rand believed there was no such thing as a social system; that individual self-interest was the primary mover of success and that the world was black-and-white.

Here's what she missed - when you split the world up into "right" and "wrong" you invariably end up with an unspoken third category - irrelevant.

Horrific tragedies in faraway countries?  Not our issue, unless we're threatened.  Terrible plights of people in remote First Nations communities in our own country?  Until we're shamed, we remain unresponsive and even then, our attention is fleeting.  Homelessness?  Poverty? Mental health?  The best social program is a job - and it's the job of the individual to get out there, hustle their stuff and make employment happen.  Individuals are their own best advocates; they just need to get up and advocate.  It'll be nice to see it when it happens, but it's not our place to nudge anyone into protecting their self-interests.

Passive avoidance works the same way passive success does - through inaction.  We don't act in someone else's favour and find reasons to justify why.  If, for instance, a passive person is on the receiving end of someone else's aggression, they probably have it coming.  It's certainly got nothing to do with us.

We definitely find it hard to act when a negative to someone else results in a positive for us - at least, if we don't fear the consequences of that negative behaviour coming home to roost.

What about when the risk we face of ignoring the bad behaviour of a provider is recognizable, but not enough to make us feel threatened - or lands so close to home we're sure to be impacted?

AGGRESSIVE AVOIDANCE

 

ie - hammering the horn when someone runs a light and nearly hits your car; or giving the finger to someone who beeps at you after you've run the light.

 

Despite the fact that he killed his girlfriend, Oscar Pistorius still has legions of fans.  People who like him as a performer or admire his embodiment of competitive success will protect him by blaming his girlfriend for her own death.

You'll see the exact same things in politics; Ford Nation will attack anyone who criticizes the Mayor and, oddly enough, will say that the only thing that matters is the results the Mayor achieves.  Pierre Penashue is using this same "the ends justify the means" approach with his constituents - so long as you get the goods, what do you care about what else I do with my time?

Offense is the best defense, even in those incidents where something you have done is the thing most offensive.

Of course, aggressive hustlers are looking to defend themselves, too, at the exact same time they're viewing others as marks.  For all the aggressive posturing and ego you get from Wall Street suits, you also get this:

"They have big egos and are big babies. If I made any sign that they weren't the best lover, or that their d**k wasn't the biggest d**k I'd ever seen, they started asking all these questions and putting me down like: "Oh, well you've just seen more c**k than a normal, nice girl would."

But this girl, clearly, is a paid whore.  You can't take what she says seriously.  She's probably pissed that she didn't get tipped well, but that says more about her than it does about the client - right?

REHTAEH PARSONS

Let's apply all of this to the death of Rehtaeh Parsons.  The boys who raped her would probably have never faced justice were it not for the picture they took.  After all, sex is a transaction between two parties; if one's complaining after the fact, it must mean they weren't happy with the deal they got, right?  That's how transactions work.  It's why we have a social habit of blaming the victim. 

 

This leaning towards whatever stance lets us be passive is made worse by the urge to protect our own self-interests; when it becomes clear a wrong was committed, we're more likely to double-down on our positions and absolve ourselves of anything resembling responsibility.  If it gets so bad that the consequences can't be ignored - like the suicide of a 17 year-old - we will recognize fault only as long as its fashionable (unless you empathize with the victim, maybe because you've got a teenage daughter yourself) and assuredly not point the finger of blame at the mirror.

The rapists themselves were probably pleased with their actions, at first - they hustled, seized an opportunity and took what they wanted, with maybe a bit of risk of getting caught.  They see this behaviour all the time, in different contexts, so even if they knew it wasn't right they wouldn't be dwelling on the risk of repercussion.  This is a crime we will see repeated; maybe the boys were wear masks next time, but that will only feed into the power-trip of the crime.

If Rehtaeh had been physically brutalized, then people would have taken action - but as it was, the wounds were internal and easy to avoid.

Which is what peers did.  They kinda knew about it or definitively knew all about it but easier than taking on the boys who came out on top was piling on the girl at the bottom.  It happens all the time.

My grandfather tells stories of Buchenwald Concentration Camp; inmates would become so numb, so mentally walled off that if someone fell over dead on the grounds from disease or starvation, you'd simply go check them for useful gear and then move on.  The ones who got the shoes or the bread were the toughest and they did so at the expense of the weak.  There was no mental space to grieve death.  

 

The RCMP and school triaged the rape case by focusing on why it wouldn't be relevant to them, not the reverse.  That's how business works, right?  Empathy has no place in rational decision making, it's a bad motivator.  Passively or aggressively, you want to avoid expenditures of any kind.  If an issue is severe enough, the process will make that clear all on its own.

 

And that's indeed what happened; the police and system did their triage, let things go and the system course-corrected.  I'm sure I'm not alone in thinking it shouldn't take social uproar to get the wheels of justice turning.

 

And there's the ultimate contradiction.  Justice isn't being done; we're throwing the starfish back in the ocean, one at a time and ignoring the structural challenges that really need addressed.  By addressing the wrong problems and ignoring the very real connections between process and outcome, we're not recognizing that social challenges take social solutions.

 

L'etat, c'est nous.  If we really want a world where things like the rape of Rethaeh don't happen, it's not isolated individuals who need to change - it's all of us.

 

Here's a place to start:

9. Teach children that their behaviors affect others.

You can do this in simple ways, anywhere. Ask them to observe how people respond when other people make noise or litter. Ask them what they think will happen as a result. Will someone else have to clean up the litter? Will someone be scared? Explain to kids how the choices they make affect others and talk about when are good times to be loud, and what are good spaces to be messy.

10. Teach kids to look for opportunities to help.

Can they pick up the litter? Can they be more quiet so as not to interrupt someone’s reading on the bus? Can they offer to help carry something or hold a door open? All of this teaches kids that they have a role to play in helping ease both proverbial and literal loads.

http://elitedaily.com/elite/2012/goldmantop10/