(Image courtesy the American Laundry News)
“Hard day in Afghanistan yesterday. We lost a special forces helicopter carrying our amazing Navy SEALS. They are the best of us all. Everyone’s thoughts and prayers go to their families.” – Admiral James Stavridis on his Facebook page Sunday morning
I was deeply saddened about the loss of the Chinook helicopter in the Tangi Valley this weekend. I thought, of course, about the men of Naval Special Warfare Development Group and their families, and the Afghans, and the translator, and the dog.
One of the first things to come to mind were the words from the ancient Roman lyrical poet Horace, who said it was “sweet and fitting to die for one’s country.” Then, I thought of the take that the WW I trench poet Wilfred Owen had on those words in one of his last works, written the week before he was shot dead on the Western Front.
“My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.”
I am uneasy about the level of sacrifice we expect from our warriors, and that discomfort ran to several levels which I managed to dampen by thinking about other things. One of them was about a connection of this sad news to the fanciful extended narrative of the mission that SEAL Team SIX ran in May to finally rid the world of that scumbag bin Laden.
I was tempted to link the shoot-down to the story in the New Yorker by Nicholas Schmidle, who inserted thoughts and quotes into the soon-to-be a big screen narrative of audacious courage. It turned out he had talked to none of the participants, and his account was more akin to a press release than anything else.
Had a traitor on the base fingered the Team? Had all the publicity contributed to a specific plot against the SEALS? Was it an example of the al Qaida in Mesopotamia tactic of setting a bomb to draw in the First Responders, and then hit them as the high-value targets?
I don’t know, and I won’t go down that road. The investigation is still in progress, not that it will change anything. They are fighting a war the experts told us would have a different outcome than the one that the Soviets fought so brutally. I don’t question the military judgment. I am just sad about the loss of so many fine young Americans, and am thinking of the kids in my son’s class who will be going to support special ops.
It is quite remarkable how having my son in the game has intensified my unease about the whole enterprise. I have a pal whose daughter did a dozen deployments in our wars, and I don’t know how he stood it.
Anyway, between that and the downgrade of the credit-worthiness of the US Treasury, I was pretty shook up all weekend. I put my energy into puttering at Refuge Farm, where things make sense. The experts don’t know what to make of it.
Paul Krugman this morning lambasted the offending rating agency Standard and Poors this morning for its appalling track record in rating the mortgage-backed securities- something anyone with a rudimentary understanding of what was in them should have known.
Of course, Krugman is a committed Keynesian about this, and arrived at the conclusion that all this was much ado about nothing. His view is that if we simply do the impossible we will be fine. He is a credentialed expert, of course, having been recognized by the Nobel Memorial Prize in 2008 for his work in New Trade Theory and New Economic Geography. He explained the concentration of wealth, they tell me, “by examining the impact of economies of scale and consumer preferences for diverse goods and services.”
Of course, Mr. Krugman was not the point man for reeling in the ratings agencies or the sub-prime mess, but I digress. The Nobel experts awarded the President the Peace Prize after precisely nine months in office, so there is room for skepticism about experts in general.
A guy named David Freedman published a marvelous book last year called “Wrong: Why the experts keep failing us—and how to know when not to trust them.” He starts out kicking the medical trade, which has brought us the most expensive health care system in the world, and the one that has so richly brought us to the brink of ruin. Freedman points out that roughly 2/3rds of the peer-reviewed findings published in the professional medical journals are refuted within a few years.
He claims some of the best-educated people in the world- physicians- are wrong in their medical knowledge most of the time. In fact, Freedman claims that there is better than a one in ten chance that a doctor’s diagnosis will be so egregiously incorrect that it will cause significant harm to the patient.
That just happened to a pal of mine, so I am inclined to accept Freedman’s contention. Anyone who has been through a long illness with a loved one eventually winds up being a better expert than the medical people. And that goes for the law as well, if you have had a divorce or any encounter with what we call our system of justice.
Professionally prepared tax returns are more likely to contain significant errors than self-prepared returns, according to Freedman. Half of all newspaper articles contain at least one factual error, not that we did not know that already. Economists have found that all studies published in economics journals are likely to be wrong.
We evolved as a species with the competitive cognitive capacity to make rapid decisions based on short-term experience. This agility has the capacity to adapt on the fly to a complex world, but it also deceives us that the short-cut of relying on experts to sort complex problems and make snap decisions.
A UC-Berkley professor named Philip Tetlock explored the matter in Political Science, Economics, history and journalism in a double-blind survey in 2005 that challenged nearly three hundred experts in their fields to make predictions about the future. In his book Expert Political Judgment, he reported the results of over eighty thousand predicts about the future events. His conclusion was that the expert judgments were “little better than (those of) a dart-throwing chimpanzee.”
I am not going to swear off listening to smart people. That would be stupid. But I think we have got a long way down the road to hell by listening to confident people who are just flat-ass wrong.
This morning, I turned on the computer to see the latest. There was more on the loss of the SEALS, of course, and word that now Italy, the third-largest economy in the euro-zone, needs a quick infusion of $1.4 trillion to avoid default. Tottering Spain requires $700 billion. I assume that is in Euros, to boot, which are trading at a rate of 1 euro = 1.4270 greenbacks.
It seems like it is time to sit down and apply some common sense to a very esoteric problem. Some expert advocates have given us a tax code and a health system that do not work. It is way beyond time to sit down and reform both.
I would not mind paying a bit more in taxes if I had the confidence that everyone was doing the same, and that some hedge fund manager was not laundering his income through capital gains. I would not mind sharing the same crappy health care I get from the government if I had a suspicion that the for-profit insurance experts were not stacking the deck.
I know. What we need is an expert panel to sort it out for us. I bet we can get one, too.
Copyright 2011 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com