On Ignorance

Okay, time for a rant. First, read this (this is around 5 web pages long and will therefore take a fair bit of time, props to Janet for pointing this story out to me). Now, read what I have to say about the article.

The article makes me angry. It makes me angry in a way that is cumulative of the many injustices and inefficiencies that I see in the world today that I have found that I am unable to effect any meaningful change. I will try to categorise the facets that have raised my ire in the upcoming text. I've said this before (see the footer of this page), but I will make it explicit here once more: all that I say are my views limited within the context of the time in which it was written, and is in no way the ``final word'' that I have on things. With that, let's soldier on.

The chief problem that the article demonstrates, at least in the early stages, is the common problem of local versus global optimisation. The governor involved in the decision making process that saw the withdrawal of certain forms of aids and subsidies was well-known to be making decisions through assiduous study of large amounts of data, these days known by the pop-term of ``big data''. On paper, it makes a lot of sense---you literally have data that can back up your decision to show that overall, there is an improvement of lives with the reduction in the use of resources such as money or housing. It sounds great, doesn't it? In fact, it probably makes a good newspaper headline, simply because the effect can be compactly represented as a catchy sound bite, a modern media darling. But ``big data'' hides a thousand evils. Decision making with ``big data'' often involves a type of utility function, and sad enough to say, most of the time the utility function is designed to measure something akin to the average case of something, and thus the best decision as defined under the utility function is the one that raises the average case. Ordinarily, by the Mean Value Theorem, we can safely assume that if the average value of a smooth function is improved, then almost all of the image given the range of the function will also be improved, put in more economical terms, a type of Pareto improvement (everyone wins) is achieved.

Except that in many cases, such utility functions are by no means smooth. Worse yet, policy makers are not mathematicians nor are they operational researchers, and therefore their utility functions tend to not pay close attention to the details, or in this case, humane concepts like ``what happens to the lowest percentile of a population given the new decision?''. And that is a major failing that plagues the modern technocrat. This is by no means a new problem, really, it occurs in every human endeavour that involves having to decide boundaries and how to shift them. Remember the times that you have to ask if your puny score for an exam is an `A'-grade or a `B'-grade? You face the exact problem. ``Big data'' analysis methods do not account for boundaries, and using such methods to solve human problems will have the same issues. The effect may be well at the global scale, but for various subsets of locality, we find that the decision taken is ludicrous. I used to think that given a strong scientific method of analysis, we can make the rationally best decision out of all possible decisions in the decision space, but now, I am no longer that firm in that thought. It does not contradict the idealism; it highlights the weakness of the simplified models that are used to aid in the decision making process. After all, isn't it the case that the output of a model is only as good as the input and the model's expressitivity itself?

But back to the article. The previous rant is sort of expected coming from me; the case of local optima (rules of thumbs) and global optima (unified/integrated model) is a cornerstone of making machine learning effective and accurate and was something that I had visited time and time again while I was still working on my PhD. This next part of the rant, however, is something that I have refrained from saying for quite a while because I didn't really have the thought process worked out till now. Allow me to summarise the next part with this one line:

Adults rarely, if ever, change their ways, for good or for bad.

The main thrust of the article is to use the anecdote of a promising girl (Dasani) and her life issues to illustrate the problems relating to the poverty cycle, especially in a land of opportunity such as the US. One theme that keeps coming back in the article, whether or not the author intended so, is the notion of education or at the very least, the conquering of ignorance. On the one hand, you have a promising child, Dasani, bright, street smart, and on the other hand you have her parents, ignorant, foolish, and at times, actively attempting to jeopardise Dasani's future. And then of course you have adults who know better who are trying to help Dasani escape the whole mess by providing all forms of support.

The poverty cycle is vicious. Yes, aid provided may be insufficient, sometimes deliberately so to prevent an over-reliance on the state, as seen by the policy changes highlighted in the article. But aid is always insufficient by very definition---if aid were always sufficient, it is not an aid but a form of livelihood. One cannot expect the glorious state to provide for all of her citizens' needs; it is a model that has been repeatedly demonstrated in history as being unsustainable. Aid is meant to help one tide over some rough times, provide a safety net that cushions off the hardest of the falls. Does one come out uninjured? No, but one is not dead, and that's what aid is supposed to help.

But how does one make effective use of aid? One needs to figure out how to stand on one's two feet, and that means, crudely put, a need to shed ignorance and to act responsibly. From the anecdotes in the article, one can easily see that the parents of Dasani are ignorant. Money that comes in goes as fast, with little to no plans beyond the short term. That is the continuation of the poverty cycle, since they are now poor, and they lament about being poor instead of trying to step out of the cycle by taking control of their lives.

You would think that education can help beat ignorance. Yes it can---all the responsible adults in the article are trying to do that for Dasani, to teach her, to make her learn, to make her think and realise just how ridiculous a situation she is in, to show her that there is a way out through education. Some of them also tried to get her parents to learn, but somehow that didn't work out.

Old habits die hard. The parents acknowledge it themselves in the article. Yet we don't see them actually trying to change. This is, in fact, a very troubling trend that I keep observing in the US, and perhaps even in Singapore. Acknowledging that a problem exists is a good first step, but if nothing else is done about it, then it is as good as not trying to solve the problem. Most of the time, we find that adults are the ones who are in that weird situation; children are more likely to be creative and figure out ways to get out of problems that are highlighted to them, unless of course if they are acting under direct supervision of adults, then they are more likely to take on whatever the adult that is supervising them say.

Ignorance is the true enemy of humans. Ideological extremism, be it political or religious, is based on ignorance. The solution to ignorance is education, but that is where the crux of the problem lies: how can we educate an ignorant person if the said person ignores his/her ignorance? An emerging example of this is the ``debate'' between evolution and creationism. I thought we had put that to rest with the open letter that was written to the Kansas School Board back in 2005; it is 2014 now, and we have a ``live'' debate between a science advocate and a creationism advocate. All I hear from the ignorant is ``no, you are not fit to educate me because I educated thankyouverymuch and I think that what you want to educate me with is baloney given what I believe in''. The ignorant don't even acknowledge that they have a problem, and that is in itself a major problem.

It would have ended there if they kept to themselves, but to raise their ignorance to the level of legitimacy of scientific knowledge is taking things too far. And I digress from the article, of course.

Coming back once more to the article, we find that ignorance becomes hard to stamp out when one reaches adulthood. The ways are set, and of course, the ignorant may not even acknowledge their ignorance, which makes rehabilitation hard to impossible. All hope then lies in the education of the young, and therefore the reliance on the next generation as a way of breaking out of the poverty cycle.

I could tie that analogy to how governance systems and political parties work, but I think I may be stretching it and will reserve that rant for another time.

If ignorance is the reason why the poverty cycle is not broken, why then doesn't the government attempt to break it through legislation? This is something that has interesting consequences. Sure, the cost will be great---we are talking about re-educating (which includes teaching, guidance and enforcement) these poverty-stricken ignorant adults to be more prudent in their finances, and to learn how to make an honest living for themselves and their families and finally break the poverty cycle, never to return---but it is not exactly unbearable. All the money, time and effort spent on dishing out aid (which is short term) can be pushed towards education (which is long term). No problems there.

So why aren't we doing it?

A couple of reasons come to mind. One is specific to the US---personal liberty. The government is supposed to, as far as the US constitution goes, run the country with as light a touch as possible. This means that didactic steps that appear autocratic are implicitly forbidden. Forcing anyone who is ``in a poverty cycle'' to undergo an education process that may appear to be draconian (for effect perhaps) can be seen as a form of discrimination and violating personal liberties. In fact, under a dictatorship, such forced [re-]education processes are the norm, except under most dictatorships, the [re-]education process is more often for the regime than for true altruistic reasons.

The second reason is a little more conspiratorial. There is a vested interest in a voted government to keep the voting bloc as ignorant as possible. Ignorant voters tend to ask less critical questions and are more likely to take what is said at face value, which makes propaganda effective, and therefore remove one level of uncertainty when parties are out campaigning. In many democratic countries, the majority vote is the one that counts, and therefore the ignorant voter who is easily swayed is a very precious commodity for each party to win over to their side. Less ignorant voters are more likely to ferret out the bullshit from the parties, and can make the campaigning process hard, and make the incumbent expend more effort in keeping their power, something that is not really welcomed by any rational party---why would anyone want more work at winning when spending less on education and diverting the funds to propaganda will work even better?

I'll end this rant on a slightly more optimistic note: we as adults are more or less ``finished'' when it comes to issues on ignorance and poverty. Our minds have already been fixed into the final form in some sense. We have little left in our future by way of variation, for good or for bad. But our young are literally the future. Our selfishness for the status quo should never be allowed to interfere in the preparation of our young to be better than we are, if we still want a human world to exist long into the future.